Author: Vito Michienzi

I was born at a very particular time that had me right in the transition of the technological boom. Raised in the 80s and high school in the 90s, it was just as the Internet was making its way to the public.

This puts me at a time when a new idea permeated our culture: the shortcut to everything.

Prior to this, like any young person, there was an idealistic view that things are going to work out great and the challenges elders tell you about won’t apply to you. You’re always the exception.

But that’s the joy of being young.

However, unlike the con artist artists of antiquity or the scam ads in newspapers and magazines, there was always an understanding of a road ahead. The rebellious nature of youth was to not travel that road, or find a different one that society expects.

The dawn of mass communication shifted the horizon. You could instantly download music, chat with dozens of people at once, and let me tell you, discovering Google and SparkNotes before teachers knew it existed—it was like sneaking a calculator into a mental math competition.

But something happened, culturally.

There was now an expectation that you could find a shortcut to anything. The idea of having to even travel on the road made little sense when there was a possibility of being transported to the end.

Why work hard for something when there was another way if you just knew what to search?

Social media amplified this problem to the stratosphere and I have to shake my head at the number of kids today who think they can get rich investing in crypto (especially when they only have a few hundred dollars to start), or they’re going to buy houses and apartment buildings to rent out (commercial mortgages for everyone!).

While I highlight these particular examples, there are endless more.

Unless one recognizes these for what they are, or accept it’ll take a lot more work than expected, it sets off years of dread as these people wake up in their mid 20s, or 30s… or 40s… and wonder why they aren’t further ahead. When expectation is out of line with reality, we have a cultural issue fuelled by anger, bitterness and dismay. The solution, of course, is to look for even more shortcuts.

This isn’t to take away from how much the world has changed and how difficult it is to meet those benchmarks people desire (e.g. owning a home). It’s simply getting people to ask:

Do I want a shortcut to nowhere or the long road to somewhere?

“The world isn’t driven by greed, but by envy.”

Charlie Munger

I remember my grandmother telling me how she grew up in a small village where people didn’t have much, but everyone was so much happier.

I also recall the many people who say they had no idea they were poor growing up.

This all makes perfect sense because when your world is just what’s around you, there’s nothing to compare yourself to that would make you feel inferior.

People who lament about the golden age of the 50s & 60s in North America are pointing to a time when houses were modest, salaries stretched far and the disparity between classes wasn’t so wide. People were growing up in neighbourhoods where people had the same stuff and everyone accepted that camping, hiking, or the beach was considered vacation time.

What caused envy then?

Intelligence, social connections, recipes, athletic ability—those subjective factors. But hey, grab a glove and head to the sandlot for a game with friends and we’ll forget all about it.

Let’s not paint a completely rosy picture because there were many issues that we made a lot of progress on since then. In addition, we’ve also developed some pretty enviable things:

• central air
• ibuprofen (e.g. Advil)
• being able to video chat with anybody on the planet with a device that is affordable to most and fits in your pocket

Oh, we also have access to such a variety and abundance of food that would make monarchs of that time jealous.

Yet, here we are; miserable with our lack, driven by envy from the constant stream of global comparison through the media.

Even billionaires, who literally have more money than could possibly be used in several hundred lifetimes, get envious of each other.

My proposal: find a way to ensure people’s basic needs are met, motivate them for a desire to do better in their own lives and teach them to envy who that future person will be.

Most importantly, make supporting your neighbour on that journey the highest value to achieve.

“Let it Be” plays in the background. 

My kids are at the table molding things out of clay while I write. I just finished a 5km run in 25 minutes. My wife is knitting a sweater.

The bills are paid, my investments are growing and we’ll soon be meal planning for the week.

While this sounds like a stream of ‘flexing’ (as the kids say today), it should be known:

• an elementary teacher I had said there was no point in challenging our class because we wouldn’t amount to anything more than construction workers or housewives
• I destroyed my knees at sixteen and could never run on them without injury
• a high school teacher I respected told me to stick to computers because writing wasn’t my forte
• a specialist told me that when it came to having kids, I was a hopeless cause

but

• the reason I wanted to write is my grade six teacher, who said he loved reading my stories and hoped I would keep writing them
• one of my high school teachers told me I should teach because I was a natural at it
• my circle of friends have been incredible cheerleaders in my pursuits
• my family has always been in my corner

I’ve ignored one of these groups and listened to the other, however, some days I wish both groups could see me now…

writing away while my kids play with clay.

There’s a time to stress out and there’s a time when all the stress in the world won’t change the outcome.

As long as we stay focused on what we can do, and we give it everything we have, then there’s nothing left to worry about afterwards. 

Life hits you with so many bombs and you either defuse them, or don’t allow them to be your problem anymore. The real trick is not being around other people when their bombs go off.

In the 90s that the Internet would be the great democratized landscape, evening the playing field for all who have access.

It would exist without gatekeepers and its ubiquity and scope would be too much for any one company to own. It would be an escape from the limited media as our source of information, which we knew had a bias to it, but accepted as there were no alternatives. 

It could give you the world and suddenly, it didn’t matter where you lived because you could connect with anyone. 

Best of all, the content was free. 

How naive we were. 

Yet, what I find most baffling, are those who saw what we did, saw what happened and are now giving the same hope to AI. 

And they say religious adherents were ignorant of their misguided hope.

I hear this expression pop up in conversation people have about their workplace or social groups. It points to this 70s-early 2000s motif that people have these super cliques and cast out or ignore those they don’t want a part of them. 

However, my observations in a high school over the past fifteen years show something different. 

High school, and the adolescent mind, has shifted a lot. Yes, some things will never change (and I don’t think we’d want them to), but the high school clique experience peaked around the time Mean Girls was released in theatres. 

Yes, students still have their groups and there’s still bullying, but the number of students who feel close to their parents, or consider them a role model, would make the 70s adage of not trusting anyone over 30 a laughable ideal. Then there’s the athletes who show up to Math club, the packed classrooms of Dungeons & Dragons games and the group chats for all graduates to participate in. 

On that note, the biggest drama that consistently happens revolve around prom dresses. Well, that and relationships. 

High school is a much different experience and if we’re still feeling our current situations reminds us of our own experience, it’s probably pointing to the stunted maturity of the people involved.

If you really want to be insulting, you might want to tell those people to grow up and act like kids today. Either that or wear the same outfit as one of them. 

A high school friend of mine once told me about a survival week he completed with air cadets. Equipped with nothing but a pocket knife and two matches, he had to survive in the wilderness for a week with the understanding he could give up at any time. 

Although impressive in its own right, what struck me was his reflection on what made the ordeal difficult:

“It wasn’t that you were hungry, or thirsty, or tired. It was boredom.”

He then went on to describe his ordeals, including giving names to sticks and having full fledged conversations with them. It should be noted that “Cast Away” with Tom Hanks hadn’t been released yet, so that movie made perfect sense to me when it came out. 

I find this to be a pertinent point often missed in survival groups or post-apocalyptic motifs. Sure, you can engineer a shelter, equipment and find sustenance, but so few people are mentally equipped to deal with isolation for extended periods of time. 

This presents a few options:

Learn to be bored, without the aid of any communication, mediums of entertainment or movement through populated areas

or

Strive to build solid communities with an interdependence on each other, recognizing survival isn’t possible without them. 

Unless we do more of the latter now, we will be forced to do more of the former.