Generation of the Lost Potential

I am in the Generation of the Lost Potential. I admit it.

I am part of the generation which parasites on the opportunities it is blessed at birth and could do better as a whole. Should do better as a whole. But does not.

Upon birth, a child opens eyes to a world presenting it with a plethora of possibilities; let’s call them doors, to go through in life. As life progresses, doors inevitably close. While they do, new ones open. The choices we make, a little bit of luck, and our determination is what determines which doors will be open for us. I learned this from my parents a long time ago when I was at a pivoting point in my life trying to decide my future.

Unlike them, I am in the Generation of the Lost Potential.

Luck aside, the doors open or close depending on our directed effort or the luck of such. How much time do we invest in self-development? In self-development which would give us the most opportunities? The maximum of this time is the maximum of our potential.

Then why are people around me wasting so much of that time?? Why do I? Where does it go?

I will abbreviate it to Youtubook. There are many distractions, this is just a particular synthesis of the two very common ones.

The side-effect of the otherwise great and quintessential technological development. Oh, so many minutes are spent on it! Even this blog post has been interrupted a number of times. I am actually not as bad about controlling myself here as some others. However, those hours on Youtubook are taken from somewhere else. From hobbies. From yourself. From becoming someone better than what you are right now. From pursuing new interests.

My generation won’t be as successful. Won’t be as skillful. Won’t be as knowledgeable, because each one of us wastes an enormous amount of time on doing…well nothing. I give cheers to those who do not waste their time on these websites in excess. You guys are some of the few.

I do not have a decadence image in my head and I do believe many of us will succeed. Yet, for many Youtubook will stand in the way of success. For many, they could have done better without it.

Doing this blog post got me thinking. As a challenge for myself I will stop using Facebook and YouTube for two weeks. See what happens.

UPDATE [Feb. 07; 2011]: It has been much easier than I thought. At the end of two weeks I learned that letting go of these distractions is simply a matter of firmly deciding to let go. Nevertheless, so many things are now dependent on Facebook that I could not keep it up for the full two weeks. As project teams used Facebook to communicate and as different events from organizations I belong to were updated on Facebook, it was impossible for me to stay away completely or I'd miss important information. Seems like Facebook has integrated itself firmly into the fabric of communications in our society as a whole.

UPDATE [Apr. 26; 2011]: Discussed the notion of this post with my mother and found out that every generation can be in a way labelled as one that loses potential. Things get achieved but we do not judge on how much was achieved - we judge on how much could have been achieved without certain negative factors, a number unknown but greater that what the reality was. The difference now is that technology brought a. more distractions and b. more useless distractions (as in comparison to books, a distraction with great use).