How I’ve Learned to Talk Kids Through Their Brain-Rotting Hot Takes
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My children have taught me about so many of my limitations. One example is that I can be too quick to jump to conclusions about someone’s motivations or beliefs, based on something I hear (or, more likely, see) them say. If you’re a fellow millennial, you might be compelled to defend me: But speech matters! You can’t just say any old thing and expect to get away with it! Look at Trump! He says whatever he wants because he thinks words don’t matter! Words do matter! A lot!
To which my children, and many of the Gen-Z college students I teach, might reply: Isn’t it possible that you’re being reductive, or that you’re making a bad-faith assessment for reasons of your own, possibly as a comforting bulwark against the chaos of the current political climate? (They don’t really say it like that, though. It’s more like: Stop crashing out.)
Last week, Ezra Klein wrote a hasty op-ed about how Charlie Kirk was “doing politics the right way,” for which he was widely criticized. Most of this criticism was produced by the millennial orientation, of which I am often guilty, of making the strictest possible reading of someone’s words so as to come to the most absolute, definitive possible conclusion about their beliefs. I’ve been thinking a lot about this orientation in the past week, as I’ve spoken to my kids and my students, most of whom are around 18, about Kirk’s murder and its fallout. It is not an orientation that they tend to share, and I’ve been wondering why that is.
I’ve found that most of their relationships to facts and ideologies are much looser, much less focused on strict definitions, than my peers’. At my reactionary worst, I might conclude that this means they’re under the influence of a nihilistic post-truth media environment in which nothing really matters. That this is exactly the laissez-faire relationship to reality that allows populations to be blindly led into authoritarianism. But a more generous read would suggest that younger people have a more intuitive grasp of something that millennials have to constantly remind ourselves of, like an extremely obvious mantra we somehow can never seem to internalize: “Two things can be true.”
Indeed, two things are always true. When Kirk died, I had never heard audio of his content before, but I found in the days following that virtually all of my students — as diverse a group as you’d expect to find in a public, urban school — had. They belonged to his audience. What many of them were drawn to wasn’t the message but the spirit in which it seemed to be presented, through the edits and the cuts that they were served on TikTok.
This is hard to square with the way I’ve learned to relate to information. It can feel as though in response to having come of age along with social media, millennials have very rapidly acquired a distinctive set of cognitive biases. Maybe we developed mental shorthands that sorted people into categories, as a way of coping with these new tools as they were being tested on us. Maybe this rigid, categorical way of thinking — which is part of what many people find frustrating about, among other people, Democrats — was simply a way that we learned to make sense of the information environment of early Facebook and Instagram on our first- and second-gen smartphones.
In the meantime, I’ve been trying to better understand my students. The day after Kirk’s murder, the atmosphere on the campus where I teach was agitated and loud. (You might wonder why people in Canada would care. They definitely do; the politics of speech and identity are borderless.) I overheard students frantically parroting takes they’d heard 15 minutes prior, getting into convoluted and spurious arguments. TikTok had sprung to life and was animating the hallways. No one seemed to know what they really thought about anything. By the time I arrived at my afternoon class, a first-year course on media literacy, I sensed very strongly that my students’ brains had been frothed into something like the green foam atop a matcha.
The classroom, contrary to what Kirk often argued, can be a place of sanctuary and relief. That was what I was hoping to conjure, anyway, perhaps by marshaling some of my generational need for ideological consistency in the service of helping them. I wanted to give my students a chance to figure out what they truly, independently thought about Kirk’s assassination — not in the form of an answer, but in guidance on how to get there. They hadn’t really had time to ask themselves that — they hadn’t even thought to in the midst of the take-churn on their phones.
This churn has become, for millions of young people who get virtually all their information about the world from social media, something approaching a form of knowledge, an epistemology. This ever-shifting landscape of takes is what constitutes reality, and it all changes so quickly that it can be hard to formulate an opinion that feels fixed and important. This is the downside of Gen Z’s innate understanding of the reality that “two things can be true.” Unlike older people, who live an uncomfortable double life straddling the affective hellscape of social media and the world IRL, younger people live with hijacked brains, absorbing opinions and facts as ephemera. This is also true for my sons, who are younger, and don’t use TikTok but relate to information as it trickles down to them from older kids who do.
Insisting that my students’ perspectives matter is part of my job as their teacher, and part of my job as a parent, but it’s very hard to convince young people of this. (Don’t crash out.) In the news, we hear about student protestors at the Ivy Leagues who are raised to believe that they matter. They represent a minuscule but loud minority. Most young people, like the ones I teach, are not trained for the podium and would never seek it out. Part of Kirk’s appeal to them was that he appeared to take them seriously in public, at least briefly.
I started the class by dialing it all the way back, so we could all agree on some basic shared beliefs. One of the lessons I’ve learned from conversations I’ve had with my sons over the last few years is that curiosity goes a very long way. Many parents feel creeping dread about the mental landscape of children, and that is very unhelpful when it comes time to actually talk with them. The more online a parent is, the more flambéed their own brains have become about what is ostensibly going on with the kids; if this is you (and it’s definitely me), I urge you to account for your own biases before trying to parse theirs. When in doubt, I’ve found that pretending I know nothing, like I was born yesterday, can be a generative starting point.
If there’s one lesson millennials can offer to our kids, it’s that slowing down and thinking through their beliefs is the best defense against being manipulated by ideologues. They need to be able to rise above the churn. And we, for our part, need to be able to drop the obsession with staking our claim of the hallowed ground of the Correctest Possible Take. This is not how shared understanding is built across divides of age and opinion.
Our class that day felt like a shaky attempt at a ritual, one that could be repeated as often as one might want, for restoring the ground for meaning. This restoration happens through the awareness of the consciousness of other people. It occurred to me that this sort of ritual should be an important part not just of how we teach, but of how we raise our kids, as they grow up learning to think alongside social media and chatbots. It’s a feeling out of shared ideals — not a debate where the goal is to verbally vanquish an opponent or to categorize and label each other as ally or enemy.
In the days after Kirk was shot, it was common to see centrist and right-wing people posting a reminder on social media to squeeze your kids, to hug your loved ones extra tight. Nowadays, this sentiment comes back around whenever a tragedy hits. This veil of sentimentality seems to surround every tragedy in American life, blurring the details into something hard for many people to pin down or know how to think about or understand. But in the midst of this crisis, what we need to give young people is not just an extra-warm hug. They also need precision. They need an invitation to clarify their thoughts, to sharpen their opinions, not in twisted morality pageants or in stark, condemnatory terms, but with our encouragement and faith that they know as well as we do the difference between right and wrong.