The Facebook Generation

--> Note: I wrote this a few weeks ago but wasn't sure if I wanted to post it or not. Hopefully you guys like it:

Today in class, a group gave a presentation about a company, analyzing the company and offering recommendations and ways to implement those recommendations. After the presentation, our professor asked one of the other groups (the class is split into eight groups) to respond to the recommendations provided by the presenting group. Now, as a prelude to this story, I should mention that our professor has made the fatal mistake of allowing students to use laptops in class. As they had not listened to a word of the presentation, the second group offered up a series of vague, business-school-sounding responses that made me cringe, and that in no way related to anything the presenting group had discussed. It was like watching this woman talk about Obama being a communist. Yep. “Just study it out”.

            Anyway, apart from making me feel pretty uncomfortable for a few minutes (My life is so hard), it made me think about our Facebook and iPhone culture, and how much it affects everything we do.

            Since I have been at college, it has been common in most classes to find the majority of my peers staring at a laptop screen for the entirety of each class, playing around on Facebook, Twitter, Sporkle, sending out carefully thought-out e-mails to sorority sisters, or pretty much anything the internet has to offer. There was a kid in my calc class freshman year that would play online poker…while watching several youtube videos (at the same time) of other people playing poker (!). It’s hard not to see the irony in millions of kids (or their parents) paying thousands a year in tuition so that they can ignore almost every word of each of their professors’ lectures. I understand that it’s very much just about getting the grade and the degree, and that a lot of what we learn doesn’t have a bearing on our future, but it’s still a world-class education taking a backseat to “angry birds”. And I’m guilty of it too. True, I don’t bring my computer to class, and the coolest thing my cell phone can do is tell me what time it is in Chicago, but that hasn’t stopped me from spending several 85-minute lectures daydreaming about food or girls or whatever else has been on my mind during the past four years.

            The thing is, this lack of focus doesn’t only pertain to school. It’s everywhere in the technology age. We watch T.V. while doing our homework. We surf the internet while watching T.V. We play video games while surfing the internet while streaming T.V. shows. That last one is a little extreme but trust me, I’ve seen it. I had a professor who said that our generation loves to multitask, meaning that we do a half-assed job of several activities at once. It’s hard to resist with so much technology at our disposal, but it tends to be rewarding when we do ignore it, focusing only on one activity and being in the moment.

            I remember when I bought “Tea for the Tillerman” by Cat Stevens, my mom told me how she and her siblings would gather around her brother’s record player and listen to the album nonstop when it originally came out. I asked her if they would do anything else while the record played. She replied with a no- they just sat and listened. That stuck with me, especially as I often lose sight of how entertaining music can be on its own, if we just give it proper attention. Treating music as its own activity feels great and allows us as listeners to get so much more out of an album. Ok, maybe “Skinny Jeanz and a Mic” doesn’t quite merit the Cat Stevens treatment, but you get what I’m saying.

            I guess all of this is just pretty disheartening. It’s not fun to have a “conversation” with someone as they text/Facebook while you’re talking. It’s not fun to share something important with someone else only to have him or her treat it as background noise. I’m afraid that if/when I have kids, they will be little monsters raised by the internet, incapable of looking away from screens, never stopping to notice the beauty in the little things in the world around them. I know that I am guilty of some of the things I’ve mentioned above, and I can only try to get better every day. I hope this post didn’t come off as preachy; I really just wanted to share some thoughts. Well, until next time, here’s some Cat Stevens:

Pesach 2013

At the request of Matthew McGraw I am writing this second post in two weeks:

Tonight my sister invited me to her apartment for a Passover Seder. I hadn’t celebrated Passover the past few years since I have been away at school, and to be honest, I didn’t think much about missing the holiday. Celebrating tonight brought me back to another time, and let me forget about the stresses of being in my last semester of college for a few hours.

I am not a very religious person, as y’all may or may not already know. I don’t really put any stock in a God figure, but I still try to live as a good person, with the vague feeling that some force in the universe is monitoring my life. Despite this lack of faith, I still feel a strong cultural attachment to Judaism. It’s nice to have something to identify with, because lord knows it’s hard out here for a Caucasian-American male. But really, it is special to feel part of a group, and to also honor my ancestors, who suffered more than I can imagine in the name of their religion. In keeping Jewish traditions alive, I feel closer to my ancestors, many of whom I never met as they died at the hands of the Nazis.  

In the spring of my senior year of high school, my parents told my sister and me that they were getting divorced after nearly thirty years of marriage. When Passover came around a few weeks later, both of my parents opted to abandon me like baby Moses on the river get out of town and spend the holiday with their respective families, leaving me home alone. Luckily, I was invited to celebrate Passover by my friend Stephanie and her family. They welcomed me into their home (in the true spirit of Passover) and treated me as family. I don’t know if they realized it, but this meant so much to me at that point in my life. As I was struggling with losing the sense of having a “family unit”, I was able to spend the holiday with a loving family, enjoying the holiday without any fighting or tension. Four years later, about to begin yet another chapter in life, I had another great Passover experience to remind me of the positives of religion, and of celebrating life. As great as the college environment can be, there is a certain void where the warmth of family would usually be. For me, this void makes it that much more special when I do get the chance to spend time with family, or in this case, my sister and her friends.  

It can be hard to know how to feel about religion. I grew up accepting it without much questioning, until I eventually had a moment that I referred to as “seeing the darkness”. This left me with an empty feeling, failing to see any merits of religion. Since then, I have learned to see both the positives and negatives that come with religion. For me, if religion makes someone more compassionate towards his or her fellow humans, then I completely support it. Who wouldn’t? I am glad to take away something positive from my Judaism, and to find some comfort in a time of so much uncertainty in my life.

That’s all for tonight. Until next time, here is a video of Drake dancing at his Bar Mitzvah. (YOLO)

 

Two years later: An Update

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It’s been a while since I have written in this blog, which makes sense as it was only ever intended to be about to my experiences studying and living abroad. Tonight I felt like writing, so here I am.

            In all honesty, I am not a huge fan of many college-student blogs. A lot of times the writing seems very self-impressed, with big words thrown in to assure the reader of the author’s superior vocabulary and intelligence. Having said that, here is a blog post in which I will probably commit the above-mentioned offenses:

            Tonight a group on campus screened the film “The Invisible War”, a documentary about the issue of sexual assault and rape in the military. The victims’ testimonies were heartbreaking, and the injustice of their stories made me feel ashamed as a human. The existence of a system that punishes rape victims, while condoning the actions of their violators is disheartening, and makes me feel sick to my stomach.

            My point in writing this tonight is not to give my opinion on “The Invisible War”, because it documents a subject that I am not familiar with, and about which I don’t pretend to be an expert after watching one two-hour documentary. The point, rather, is the importance in recognizing and discussing real problems, and my own personal struggle with doing so.

            For the first year and a half of college, I became passionate about many issues, most of which I had not been aware of before starting school. While this type of change is somewhat predictable among college students and can be easily mocked as a phase that we all go through, it is also important to the process of maturation and finding one’s place in the world. As I started to learn more about cooking through my work experiences, I found myself curious to learn about everything associated with food, from the ground to the plate. I had been lucky enough to work in a restaurant (Nectar) that not only purchased vegetables and proteins from local farms, but also had its own garden with herbs, vegetables, and fruit to be used in the restaurant.

            Wondering the importance of locally sourced and sustainable food (Why do chefs care? Why should I care?), I started reading books and watching films about agriculture in the U.S. and the rest of the world. I was fascinated by the intricacies of sustainable farming, and horrified by the practices of many industrial-farming operations. This served as a catalyst for me to realize and consider the vast and substantial environmental problems facing our world, and the overwhelming nature of these problems.

            Constantly dwelling on these environmental issues, in addition to the various issues of civil injustice (and essentially everything negative in the world), I found myself in a bad mental state. The problems of the world seemed so large, and I so small, and I could feel the weight of each problem on my shoulders, my burden to bear. This feeling started to subside during my semester in Spain, as I learned to carry less stress and focus only on matters that I could control.  I felt liberated, and I could feel the air and sunlight coming back into my life.

            This trip to Spain, coupled with my experiences upon returning home, changed my manner of being, or “manera de ser” as I would have said at the time. While this change was mostly positive, I found myself avoiding many of the realities of the world in which I was living. So afraid of the overwhelming worry and stress that I had felt, I chose to ignore all of the problems about which I had worried in the past. I stopped following the news, afraid of what new horrors or injustices were being reported and discussed. While my justification for doing this was to preserve my newfound mental peace, I was also actively making a decision to be uninformed and to pretend that everything was OK.

            Just recently I have starting trying to find a balance between these two extremes. Letting the major problems of the world control one’s emotions on a daily basis is an unhealthy way to live, and it took a serious toll on my well-being. However, like any problem, avoidance is only ever a temporary solution. After all, being apathetic towards the world’s issues is a large perceived fault of Americans, something that I was undoubtedly harping on about while I was initially writing this blog two years ago, as I was taking siestas, shoving bocadillos in my mouth, and going on about all the ways in which “Americans just have so much to learn about life, man”.

            So in the midst of all of this rambling, I think I am finding myself. Maybe writing this was more for myself than for any real lesson or benefit to the reader (sorry, bro). The point for me is that I’m glad that I recognized and eliminated a void that I had created in my life, and that it feels productive to face my fears and not be intimidated by life. Maybe I will post again soon with something a little more relevant. Until then: