This Generation is becoming more intelligent and less wise

 

This Generation is becoming more intelligent and less wise

The smartphone in your hand enables you to record a video, edit it and send it around the world. With your phone, you can navigate in cities, buy a car, track your vital signs and accomplish thousands of other tasks. Each of those activities used to demand learning specific skills and acquiring the necessary resources to do them.

A study in young adults aged 19–32 years revealed that people with higher social media use were more than three times as likely to feel socially isolated than those who did not use social media as often. Studies have shown that increased use of devices leads to reduced quality time among family members, and increased parent-child conflicts. 

People are probably better at figuring out complex cell phones and other technological innovations than they would have been at the turn of the 20th Century. But in terms of our behaviour as a society, higher IQs have not brought with them solutions to any of the worlds or the country’s major problems – rising income disparities, widespread poverty, climate change, pollution, violence or deaths by opioid poisoning.

Intelligence should certainly help us be more creative, but we do not see a rise in some measures of individual creative thinking over time. While a higher IQ correlates with skills such as numeracy, which is essential to understanding probabilities and weighing up risks, there are still many elements of rational thinking that can not be accounted for by a lack of intelligence.

Highly intelligent people are also not much better at tests of “temporal discounting”, which require you to forgo short-term gains for greater long-term benefits. That’s essential, if you want to ensure your comfort for the future. Given these looser correlations, it would make sense that the rise in IQs has not been accompanied by a similarly miraculous improvement in all kinds of decision making.

Wisdom comes with experiences. It comes with failures and pain. Wisdom doesn't come by spending hours on internet researching about various things. It doesn't come by living on social media, and having fake friends and fake experiences.

In today's generation, people do a million things to show others how cool they are, and are continuously burdened by having to impress people and have more followers on social media. People are so caught up in earning money to up their socio-economic status, that everyone is engaged in their own world.

Parents don't have time to read stories or play with children. Children are left at the mercy of care takers in various centres, who will definitely not give the love and attention that the children deserve. These are crucial to impart wisdom to the next generation. Parents need to be mindful of their own device habits, as well as the amount of time they allow their children, in order to support healthy social development.

We still remember all the stories that fathers, and grandfathers used to tell the children.  Family time used to be generous, vacations used to be with extended families and social interactions with different families. Got to see the pleasures and pains of their life. But today, all kids are busy with tabs and smart phones. They know science tricks that we never knew as a child growing up, but they don't know the pleasure of rolling in mud with friends out in the open air, those petty fights and reconciliations. Their knowledge is definitely commendable, but I am not sure if they will be able to make wise choices for themselves in life.

Earlier, schools used to be fun places that groomed the overall personality. Students were not raised as race horses to crack exams and get a well-paid job. Kids were raised with lot of love and discipline, and with family culture and rituals. Today, a child goes to school as early as possible, juggling between tuitions and classes, cracks difficult exams, gets into an MNC, and that child is praised beyond measure. So the child believes that there is nothing more to life than these mechanised achievements. There is no room for experimentation, no room for failure, no room for creativity and hence, no room to grow wiser 

Individually, we depend more on our technologies than ever before – and we can do more than ever before. Collectively, technology has made us smarter, more capable and more productive. What technology has not done is make us wiser.

By

Dr. Mona Shah

Occupational Therapist, Clinical Psychologist