Something amazing has happened in my first few weeks back on campus: I seem to be the only person, in almost every one of my classes, who pays to attend my university. Shocking, I know! No matter the size of the class or energy of the lecturer, it would seem as if most of my peers don’t have much skin in the game. Or that’s how it comes off in class. The indifference that so many have embraced is immediately projected to those behind them. Their eyes are lifeless—their heads buried in their screens—as a professor who has often studied a subject for decades lectures to a class of lifeless mannequins. For the past two weeks—and for much longer before this—I have watched this exact cycle play out again and again.
Of course, I am not the only person at the University of Kansas paying to attend. My attempt at sarcasm is to highlight the absurd and pathetic apathy that the modern young American seemingly has become inured to. In life, love, and school, young people have become not only okay with, but actively defensive of, their sedentary consciousness. There’s a sort of vitriolic fervor to some young people—a belief that the reason they can’t seem to care or do anything is because of society. There is, too, a worrying lack of consideration for the future. A future in which an entire generation of people loses the ability to be normal.
I’ve already written about how performance obsession and the expansion of college enrollment have become hindrances—not helpers—to a happier generation. Instead of repeating that, I want to take this piece in a more personal direction and appeal not to a sense of civic duty but to a basic human-to-human perception. I think that apathy is unattractive. I think that if you bury your head in class, or scroll on Shein during a lecture, it signals something rotten inside your sense of self. If those words sound harsh, it’s because they need to be. If it sounds urgent, see my last sentence.
The Poison of Modern Cynicism
This feels like a particularly transitionary time in American culture. The zombified remnants of the pre-COVID world still walk amongst the living, for now. Cultural entropy has infused itself into existing institutions, transforming them from within like a parasite. This has resulted in a demand for more disorder, more randomness, and more unscripted e…
I believe that this conversation deserves such tough love because our other pathways have so miserably failed. Apathy is, at its core, a lack of motivation or urgency for anything. This means that accommodating apathy—like letting students use digital devices in the classroom—has only fanned the flames of what could have been a much smaller fire. A tremendous amount of agency has been given to a tremendous number of young people who cannot handle it, no matter how much they claim the opposite. This meritocratic belief in motivation may have been justified when affordable MacBooks first flooded our schools, but the results are clearly not working.
Matching our imagined future with our actual reality is going to be increasingly important as we realize how much structural damage machine-learning algorithms have done to the legitimacy of a college degree. The amount of GPT-speak in my own academic life is nauseating—probably close to half of all written submissions—with no signs of slowing down. I’ve even watched a peer read a question that ChatGPT created to meet participation-point credit. In a class last semester, a peer would raise her hand almost every class, only to repeat what ChatGPT told her to say.
What I don’t get—and what I most likely never will—is how you can live like that. It seems tiring, honestly. It seems tiring to be a vessel for nothing additive or creative. It seems tiring to rack up student debt only to sit there for a word processor to dictate your next sentence. The amount of mental work that has to go into such an action—to prevent your interest in learning from ever emerging—seems like it would take up most of my day. The path of least resistance may be the fastest, but its lack of friction also makes it the most short-lived. Apathy is like any hard drug—winnowing down the euphoria of not caring each time the user takes a hit—until the presence of the drug becomes about survival more than recreation.
That’s why upholding a higher, fairer standard for each other is the most important step to reaching a healthier, more resilient society. I don’t believe that avoiding confrontation or judgment is a healthy way for societies to operate. The fact that so many spaces have given up on our young people and have focused more on absorbing—and not transforming—their challenges is almost as detrimental as it is lazy. This is where, in the case of universities, those who claim to be leaders—and who get paid like it—must respond to their duties. I don’t expect this from someone like Chancellor Doug Girod, who has failed miserably in his job for Kansans, faculty, and the university. Chancellor Girod is not a leader, because he is too afraid of rocking the boat—even if that very boat is sinking under his direction. Geniality is only an admirable quality if paired with enmity for those who willfully let their own potential down. If faculty are reporting that students are zoning out and giving up, your response can only be to listen and address their concerns. Feckless leadership is just another nasty and pathetic form of apathy.
Not all will realize the path that this generation is on, and a collection of bright, talented, and motivated young Americans will continue to ascend to leadership. I’m more concerned with the average twenty-something who has found themselves unable to activate their agency over the despotic rule of apathy. Their worth is not inherently less than those who innovate and create, and they deserve a meaningful and happy life. It stands to reason that if a generation of young people finds themselves unable to care, such a feeling would likely inhibit their ability to lead neither a happy nor a meaningful life.
Maybe I’m wrong, and the environments I encounter are, by and large, the same as they have always been. In that case, I will look quite silly in two decades when looking at a society much the same as it is today. If I’m right, though, the consequences will be catastrophic and long-lasting. If you live a life free of care, you will subsequently live a life free of creation. That has real effects on the tangible and intangible aspects of our society, and it strains—to the point of breakage—our towns, neighborhoods, and families. In that event, there are clearly no words strong enough or actions harsh enough to stamp out the virus of apathy before it stamps us out.
