Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Coach This, Beeyatch!

One of the uniquely 21st-Century American euphemisms that I totally cringe at whenever I hear it is "life coach". I'm sorry, but that's gotta be one of the biggest bullshit jobs (and money-making rackets) to come along since tarot cards and palm reading. What the hell is a "life coach", anyway? Basically, they're someone that disorganized saps pay an assload of money to tell them how to get their shit together ... something that friends or family would do for free, and probably in a nicer way. So evidently, anyone who would hire a "life coach" has more money than they have friends.

This is one of the more recent symptoms of a troubling trend. Something I've noticed in my job, working with and around the younger generations, is that for the most part they've stopped looking for answers themselves and turned to the much easier practice of just asking someone else (even when there's a sign just feet away that gives them the very answer they ask me). It's perhaps an inevitable side-effect of the Internet Age -- they're basically Googling the information, just from a person instead of a web browser. Today's high-school and college age kids would be completely lost if they had to take it upon themselves to look for answers, like I had to 20 years ago. I shudder to think how many of them have never even laid eyes on a good old fashioned multi-volume encyclopedia like World Book or Encyclopaedia Britannica.

I'd better stop here, 'cause this could very easily go on into a mile-long tirade on how dumbed-down and helpless this nation's population has started to become. Independent thought has gone out of fashion, and people have all but stopped trusting their instinct to get themselves on the right track. How else do you explain people relying solely on their GPS and then getting their truck jammed under an overpass that's a foot or two too low?

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