Idontcaratitis
I keep hearing “I don’t care” from the kids. It’s usually followed by some variant of exhalation ranging from the anachronistic “harrumph” to the recently ascendant “Napoleon Dynamite”. Both responses are meant to convey frustration. Why, they wonder, do I care so much about their caring so little about anything. I’ve heard this so many times that now my mind immediately begins obsessing over how these young people are totally oblivious to the fact that their mannerisms so closely approximate those of a fictional and ridiculously satirical portrayal of a young person.
This is primarily an affliction of young men. Not the unconscious Napoleon Dynamite impersonation, though that is an amusing symptom. No, what I’m referring to is the increased incidence of “Idontcaratitis. Among the other symptoms of this ailment of the mind are: intentionally poor grades, lack of ambition, lethargy which rivals that of an iceberg, and a visceral bitterness and hostility towards those who make demands of them or even express concern. Most concerning, however, is a total lack of shame regarding the complete abandonment of human potential. Drug abuse is common among the afflicted but not essential to a diagnosis of Idontcaratitis”. Sufferers often unwittingly reveal themselves with repeated utterances of phrases such as: “It’s stupid!”, “It’s annoying!”, “Leave me alone!”, and “GHAAAAAAW!”
Here we can see the disorder at work as it robs the sufferers of the ability to alter the grammar or vocabulary of these statements. No, so smothered by their condition are these young people that they cannot even enjoy the delicious irony that their favored form of entertainment is a game entitled “Call of Duty”. One wonders if these young men believe the object of the game to be the metaphorical murder of all those who daily attempt in vain to call them to duty.
Interestingly, and perhaps tragically, these young people are rendered utterly blind to their own sickness. Instead, they view those that would guide, heal or educate as suffering from sickness themselves. They simply can’t understand why people just won’t leave them alone. “Why,” they must wonder to themselves, between episodes of Family Guy, “do all these people have nothing better to do with their time other than to incessantly interfere and meddle in the lives of others?”
They are totally unafraid of their future, because they simply do not consider it.
Of course, this personality type isn’t a disorder. (That was me amusing myself) It is, however, a cultural phenomenon. Young men are avoiding effort. They are abandoning ambition. They are going to college at lower rates than women for the first time in history. They certainly complete college at lower rates than women, and of those who do finish, are earning graduate degrees at lower rates than women. This is not in and of itself a problem, but it does beg the question: What happened to these young men? How did it come to be that so many have opted to rage (sluggishly) against achievement? How did this all happen so quickly?
One new theory, which has been mine for some time, but which I can now express because actual smart people have advanced it is that changes in adolescent female behavior have inspired uninspiring changes in adolescent male behavior. And believe me, as the counselor for many wonderful young girls, and as a licensed respector of women, I find these developments tragic and cringe-worthy.
Young men’s needs and motivations are biologically inevitable and therefore predictable. What was not predicted, but should’ve been, is that when those needs began to find themselves fulfilled with increasingly reduced effort, effort in many other arenas diminished. In short, boys/men behave only as well as girls/women demand. Should we be better than that? Yes. Are we? Well, no. Not really, it seems.
The result, the theory suggests, is that many young men see that they can have the things they want without trying very hard, and so they don’t. Even the poor souls left out in the cold are influenced as this behavioral dynamic is played out in front of them at school and in the media, which is also, of course, complicit. So boys stay boys for as long as their exploits don’t bore or shame them and the girls become women with many regrets surrounded by man-boys who are still playing Call of Duty and who still fail to grasp the irony.
Quinton is a Licensed Professional Counselor at Edmond Family Counseling and can be reached at 405-341-3554.
