No, Kids nowadays have it way harder than I had. Sure, we had to work more, walk more and had to wait for that telephone dial to turn back to dial the next number...

These damn zeros and nines!!!

What our kids have in Convenience they get double in challenges.

They will have to fight a war. Not a literal war, but an inner one. You can think of a Steven Pressfield Art of war War with a Burger eating David Hasselhoff kind of twist.

Think about it: Our Kids have a drug machine in their hands. And everywhere they are going is pleasure. Within reach and with no effort available.

With just a push of a button, they can get a dopamine boost and become addicted to this feeling very quickly and easily.

In our childhood, addictions were associated to grown up drugs like cocaine, heroin, and alcohol. Which were inherently hard to come by for a boy at the age of 11 who spent all of his 32 cents on pink candy called cheese talers (these baby drugs were 2cents each, which I had to either wait or work for).

But today, a smartphone, for example, is a digital drug machine that out Kids have access to as early as age 10 (at our home). This constant stream pre-wires the brain for this behavior and can and probably will lead to problems later in life.

It will get worse until it gets better

And things will be more difficult. Right now we have a clunky interface that is a a blinking rectangle in our hand. Zoom. This will be much more immersive and real through AR and VR.

The solution is simple, but hard to do.

The Challenge will be, simply put, to avoid that. To not get Addicted, not get a skewed ideal on life or beauty because everyone is doing so much better. Not to get buried into the easy and comfortable coffin of feeling wonderful, through cheap dopamine boosts, just to have your Psyche and body very slowly rot away until is is way harder to get out of that death trap.

I got carried away a little here, but the challenges are there for our kids. Not to speak from the things that are going to change

Self Awareness will be the determining factor

This will be a very tricky problem to solve for our kids. Especially now when we are in a kind of a transition phase. Once shit has hit the fan, there will be solutions and products out there to address all of this, and life will be easier. But we are not there yet. Unfortunately.

For now and even then, the skill that will make the most difference is self awareness.

When your kid realizes early enough what is happening to him or her, it has the best chance to address it. The earlier it happens the easier it will be for that little rascal.

Sometimes, it is the Job of Someone else to point that out, but how likely is it that a teenager listens to someone else?

If you can teach your kid how to be self-aware. Along with all the technical aspects of what it does, and what the challenge looks like.

But, how do you teach kids anything?

Honestly, I have no fucking idea.

My usual strategies probably don't work, because they suck. There is a quote from a guy I really like.

Kinder kann man nicht erziehen, sie machen einen eh alles nach.
You can't educate children, they imitate you anyway.

Carl Valentin

Unfortunately for us parents, I found this to be true.

So I try this: I do the work and have them help me.

We have a ritual in our family, where we are sitting together in the evening, and just make a list of things that we liked that day. This is fairly consistent and right now I am integrating a new thing into this ritual.

Currently I am doing a dopamine fast. (I did beak it just today, though) and my kids are filling out questionnaires about my mood. The measured things are patience, general mood and "niceness". The good thing is that the original is pretty much the last thing we do, so the kids have the whole picture. If you escalates in our home, that usually does it in the evening.

This is a 30 day exercise and my hope is that my kids will remember this and maybe trade for themselves. And also, I plan on force these bastards to do this also. In a nice way of course.

If you liked reading or watching this, feel free to let me know. It is much appreciated. If you have any topics, let me know and if you have ideas how to do that please comment down below.

May the singularity be with you.

Gunnar (LazerDad)

The Hard Truth

Let's face it, we are old. And we have no fucking idea what our kids are going to be confronted with, or are confronted with, and how to cope with that.

This reminds me of an interaction I had with my mother about 20 years ago. While we were already pros, using logic to produce music, editing videos, etc, she was a half year in, in using computers at work. She made a big announcement at the dinner table. It went something like this:

Mom: "Tomorrow, I'm going to do it!"
We: "What are you going to do?"
Mom: "I've been meaning to do it for over a month now, but tomorrow I will do it."
We: staring at her with big expectations
Mom: "I am going to create a folder on Windows."

The simple task was such an unbearable thing to do that she put it off for a month. We laughed and had fun about that at the time.

The uncomfortable realization

Unfortunately, I will be the guy that is trying to create that folder. The folder, being all the new social media sites, streaming, Web3, and all of that.

Don't get me wrong, I am decent in all of this. I know how crypto works what an NFT is, have a YouTube channel and instagram account (that I don't use, really) and all that stuff but still, I have to work hard to push my boundaries and understand all the new stuff that comes up.

Our kids don't have this problem they learn this from the start and it is crazy how easy they adapt all of this.

Here is the problem:

How should I be a even decent guide or somewhat good at accompanying my kids with something I don't have any idea how it works and why it is cool to them?

This problem existed before. Every generation has to deal with that but the difference IMO is that the speed of development it's so fast that the difference in knowledge and technology and necessary experiences is too big to apply with the old Waze.

Or put differently: if we don't find a way to formulate and adapt our experiences in a way that it is beneficial or understandable for our kids, then it is, how do they say it nowadays, ...moot.

It is hard enough to get your kids to listen to you by itself. But when they know that our help is useless to begin with, they won't even bother thinking about asking for it. And they know very well when you are clueless about something they deal with on a daily basis.

We need to know when how and where to apply our experiences in this new environment in which our kids live.

What we want

Is that our kids are prepared, protected and equipped to thrive in this new world. But again we fucking have no idea what this world is going to look like. And all we can do is to be there when they need us. And be prepared to be able help them when they need it.

By the way I think the future is bright and awesome and it brings a lot of possibilities. That bring the humanity forward with every technology there is drawbacks, challenges and outright bad shit happening.

There are countless ways for bad actors to game the system, and use any technology in a bad way. I still have a positive outlook on everything because I choose to.

But I'm also not ignoring things that are already working against our kids and our selves. The best we can do is to prepare our kids and educate ourselves too. Know the negatives and then realize the full positive potential of these new technologies.

It is our job to be educated enough to be able to help them. The occasions they ask for our help is getting less and less anyway.

Thank you for being here and I would love to have you on my side on this wonderful and exciting journey.

Stay nonfungible.

Gunnar (Lazerdad)