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Teenagers doing the wrong thing
Over the past few weeks, I have started noticing that my fellow classmates have a troubling lack of morals, or are just misguided. A few examples would probably help clear up what I mean, so here they go. One of my friends who I have been friends with for about three years started asking me about programming languages, and which one was the best. After explaining to him that the best one depends one what you are doing, I got curious and asked him what he was planning on doing. His answer completely shocked me. He answered, "To make a computer virus." After he said that, I asked him why he wold want to make a computer virus, and he told me it was for protection. He wanted to make a virus that, "Would destroy the hard drive of anybody trying to 'hack' his computer." This was slightly disturbing to me, partly because I never expected him to say/think of something like that, but also because his moral compass seems well aligned. Granted, he doesn't have a large amount of computer knowledge (he told me the week before to use Linux instead of Ubuntu), but you don't need to have a lot of computer knowledge to know that making a virus that destroys hard drives is a bad idea.
Another example is somebody in my Chemistry class I just met the other day (well, it obviously wasn't the first time I met him, but it was the first time I had an extended conversation with him). I started talking to him, and it turned out that he was into computers and stuff, and so I thought I'd scope him out as a potential friend. While we were talking, I started drawing on a sheet of paper we had been given earlier that day. It was a sheet with an e-mail address on it, where you could send submissions to our schools yearbook. He saw this, and said that I should go to 4chan and post it so the yearbook staff would be flooded with photos from 4chan. That pretty much killed any hope of a potential friendship between he and I, but he continued to talk about his various computer adventures. They included using a method of creating an anonymous link on our school computers, and using it to try do download viruses onto our schools system. Now, I had actually known about how to do this, and had made a link on one school computer detailing how to make links. The difference in what we had done with the knowledge made me almost jump with joy when the bell rang and I could stop talking to this kid.
Yet another example of teenagers having a lack of an idea of how to be good and moral (or even polite) is this. Yesterday, me and my best friend went to see Where the Wild Things Are (Good movie, actually). When we were watching the movie, the row in front of us (which was filled with 8-9th graders) took out there cellphones about 5 minutes into the movie and started texting. The entire row did this, not just one person. They kept this up the ENTIRE movie, with only one person bothering to turn down their brightness.
What I'm trying to get at is that I don't know if this is an isolated trend, or if it is widespread. Are the teenagers of today all like this, and I've missed something, or are these people just abnormalities? If this is normal, have teenagers always been so clueless (I'm assuming their/our behavior is out of ignorance, not malice {except for the person in my second example})?
Sorry for the rant. :-)
Another example is somebody in my Chemistry class I just met the other day (well, it obviously wasn't the first time I met him, but it was the first time I had an extended conversation with him). I started talking to him, and it turned out that he was into computers and stuff, and so I thought I'd scope him out as a potential friend. While we were talking, I started drawing on a sheet of paper we had been given earlier that day. It was a sheet with an e-mail address on it, where you could send submissions to our schools yearbook. He saw this, and said that I should go to 4chan and post it so the yearbook staff would be flooded with photos from 4chan. That pretty much killed any hope of a potential friendship between he and I, but he continued to talk about his various computer adventures. They included using a method of creating an anonymous link on our school computers, and using it to try do download viruses onto our schools system. Now, I had actually known about how to do this, and had made a link on one school computer detailing how to make links. The difference in what we had done with the knowledge made me almost jump with joy when the bell rang and I could stop talking to this kid.
Yet another example of teenagers having a lack of an idea of how to be good and moral (or even polite) is this. Yesterday, me and my best friend went to see Where the Wild Things Are (Good movie, actually). When we were watching the movie, the row in front of us (which was filled with 8-9th graders) took out there cellphones about 5 minutes into the movie and started texting. The entire row did this, not just one person. They kept this up the ENTIRE movie, with only one person bothering to turn down their brightness.
What I'm trying to get at is that I don't know if this is an isolated trend, or if it is widespread. Are the teenagers of today all like this, and I've missed something, or are these people just abnormalities? If this is normal, have teenagers always been so clueless (I'm assuming their/our behavior is out of ignorance, not malice {except for the person in my second example})?
Sorry for the rant. :-)
Comments
I think teens have always been this way.
THEY'RE ALL JUST PUNK KIDS!
As for the other paragraph that's a person you should avoid. As Axel said there always have been angsty teens doing this kind of stuff.
Oh and.. GET OFF MY LAWN YOU TROLLOPS!
EDIT: Also, I taught myself to build model rockets after having played with Estes rockets for most of my childhood and learning about redox reactions in HS chem. I melted a hole an inch deep in my driveway with rocket candy and later built the most terrific smoke device the block had ever seen with almost a kilo of leftover propellant. Dumb teenage shenanigans? Yeah, but I'll be damned if I didn't learn something from all that work!
One of the dumbest things I remember a friend doing is setting his driveway on fire. Thought it would be a great idea to dumb a line of gas to a pile of fireworks. Singed his hair off his arms and had to explain the black streak on the driveway and road to his parents.
I totally agree with Alan. I had a very similar High School experience, and it taught me a lot. Nobody got hurt, everyone had a good laugh, and we learned our way around windows.
They are immature, and as such, lack adult morals. But are they truly bad? Your curious friend who wants to write a virus is misguided, but if he actually learned about programming than maybe he would mature a little bit and use that knowledge for good. I'll tell you another thing: My nerdy computer friend who taught us all the windows hacks and came up with most of our pranks? He now works for banks doing computer security: All that hacking helped him learn how to keep hackers out. His dream is to work for the government and he takes his job very seriously. Who knows? After they tired themselves out being asshats, maybe they will become like him.
example: i watched the Simpsons when i was a kid but i haven't seen it in a long time. when the other day i saw it on tv i said to my bro, sonic-kun, "how the hell did we survive our childhood watching stuff like this?" noting the amount of violence of the show.
"we are a product of our environment."
This is why I try not to pick on some of the younger forum members about things that are just typical immaturity. They're gonna figure it out pretty soon anyway. I really don't think so. I do, however, think that every generation thinks this.
Whenever I hear people start in on "the good old days", I point out that until fairly recently those "good old days" included a culture that allowed and encouraged spousal abuse, racism, and sexism and didn't include many of the modern conveniences that allow a middle class to live with enough leisure to have time to sit and reminisce.
It really, really wasn't.
I remember years ago, a friend of mine pointed out something like "I'm 23, and I've already traveled farther and lived a life of greater luxury than most kings in history."
As for it being so great to be a white dude, it may not have been so great if you cared about women and people of other races... or personal hygiene.
As for the "good old days," whenever that phrase comes up, I always go back to grandpa Bjarne and great-uncle Edwin and their very sage advice. They always reminded me that the "good old days" were a load of crap, that the good days were right now, and that we should worry about making sure that the next generation's days will be even better than ours.
It would suck to live before indoor plumbing, though it did make for interesting stories like the one below:
My Great Grandfather was the principal at the school in Joliet, IL. He had an outhouse that a bunch of punk-kids would nock over every Halloween. One Halloween he moved the outhouse a few feet back and only shallowly covered the waste hole. When the punk-kids went to knock it over in the dark, they fell into the wast hole. My Great Grandfather was waiting for them with some clean clothes, wash buckets, and a grin when they crawled out.