In my first blog on Walden I would like to talk about the passage within chapter 1 "economy". The passage that I'm choosing to write about really resonated with me and as I discussed with my partner in class we believe it touches not only our generation but the generations before us too.
"Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in the wet and cold."
Thoreau says "again" to highlight the multiplicity of births happening every minute on earth, a sort of innocence being birthed again and again and again. I personally remember as a child spending hours on end playing in the snow outside during freezing temperatures, or when I was at the beach playing in the cold ocean just because it was something I didn't experience everyday, and my imaginative young self loved it. Thoreau describes that it isn't until we age and mature, we are molded by society, and then and only then do we stop playing in the wet and cold for enjoyment. This comes into direct play with the themes we talked about in class where the only constant in this world is change. I am starting to believe my generation was the last generation to truly experience real childhood.
As always things are ever-changing, kids are now given technology at a very young age, I would argue too young. Kids are now maturing much faster then previously and not spending as much time outdoors playing and finding appreciation within the environment. This has shown a correlation to depression and instant gratification. This is an issue, when a young non-developed mind is constantly stimulated with no regulation, the child won't know or understand that without a phone to produce that instant seritonin and gratification they will feel unhappy. You can see through data that suicide rates in young teenage girls specifically have gone up estatically due to the invention of social media and fake realities.
Kids these days are getting too caught up in social media and apps, whose only goal are to get people to spend as much time on their app as possible to drive in as much money as possible. To social media companies the consumers are the product, they then sell what the consumers do on or within the app to ad agencies or data farming companies. These social media companies are manipulating not only our youth but all of us through advanced and complex algorithms that have surpassed human emotion. Their main goal is addiction, with people addicted to their app, they spend more time on their app, this is the only way these apps profit, and if they have to manipulate us to addict us then so be it. Now I don't believe that Thoreau was referring to this problem nowadays with this technology when writing this passage because he's not from the future, but now more than ever I believe it is imperitive to limit the use of technology as much as possible, and go outside, play, experience nature and the environment. As we've already seen it is diminishing by the day. Technology was a huge advancement but with it comes a price if not used correctly, there are major fallbacks and consequences to becoming addicted, you can get sucked into a world that doesn't really exist as many of us have day by day.
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