Por Eline Kullock
I recently attended a lecture by Mario Sergio Cortella, Philosopher and Educator. Mario reveals some harsh truths in his lecture, but also empowers us to take action in regards to our relationship with the world. He makes us think about the world we want to leave behind for our children.
I’ve written about the concept of velocity, which is very different for this generation, compared to other generations. For instance, when I tell this generation about living in London as a teenager, I speak about the extremely high costs of local phone calls, and tell them about constantly using calling cards. This never fails to provoke lots of laughter.
Similarly, when I talk about how if I wanted news from Brazil, I had to write home. The letter would take about 20 days to reach Brazil and another 20 days to get back to me. Today, this seems absurd. What if I had wanted to know about a party? It would take at least 40 days for me to get a response, and by that time, the party wouldn’t matter anymore. When I explain this in my lectures, Gen Y looks puzzled. They can’t begin to understand how we survived in that “era.”
I always talk about the way businesses insist that we need to “resolve this quickly.” That sentence can be interpreted in so many different ways, depending on the mindset of each person. For young people, velocity is something totally different. Just like conceptions of close and far, and high and low, adjectives are interpreted, based on one’s life experiences.
But in Cortella’s lecture, one thing really caught my attention. He spoke about his experience, as a man born in rural Paraná (Brazil state). He talked about the activities families would partake in when he was growing up. Families would get together to prepare a typical brazilian food prepared with corn, named “Pamonha”.
Many of us can relate to organizing the family around an activity like “preparing pamonha”. All the people I spoke with who had these family activities growing up, described a chaotic scenario, which involved the entire family, and often took up the entire day. However, they recalled these experiences with tenderness and affection, their words were now sweet and nostalgic. Personally, since I was born in a big city like Rio, I didn’t have the chance to experience this sort of family bonding.
Cortella believes that generation Y isn’t familiar with these sorts of family activities. Specifically, they don’t understand what it is to cook. Food is bought in the drive-thru, or at the pizza place. It’s on the table in ten minutes or less, and that’s the end of the story. Perhaps the most shocking part of the story is that even pamonha is available in drive-thru version now.
Cortella spoke of his niece who came to live in Sao Paulo and proudly told him:
“Uncle, I already know how to cook.” He said, “Wow! That’s great, what do you know how to make?” She replied, “instant noodles!”
For young people, who are growing up, as the world gets faster and faster, they start to believe that things get resolved in a matter of minutes. Explaining that the earth needs to be cultivated with enough time for things to grow, provokes a great deal of anxiety.
This reminds me of the time when a German relative came to have lunch at my house, and loved the mashed potatoes.
He immediately asked, “What brand of mashed potatoes is this?”
I replied, “I don’t understand the question.”
He said, “It’s simple, when you go to the supermarket, what brand of mashed potatoes do you choose?”
Only then did I understand what he was talking about! And to convince him that those mashed potatoes were freshly mashed together, took quite a lot of effort! Back then we didn’t even have instant mashed potatoes in Brazil. Now with their emergence, younger generations have trouble understanding the natural processes that came before them.
Today, everything is instant. Everything is like a drive-thru.
Once, in a lecture, a young employee complained that he wanted to leave his new job. He wasn’t doing anything interesting, after working at the company for an entire three months!
To build a family, a team, a business, or a building we need time. Is Gen Y being prepared in businesses and in their everyday lives to understand the significance of the ancient concept called “time?”
I hope that after making speedy decisions, drive-thru style, we don’t end up relating to Millor Fernandes who said: “We call quickly making decisions, our capacity to quickly make mistakes.”
