I hope I am as enlightened and put together as you when I’m 50. Cheers.
But I do have one answer for you:
I lost hope for this nation when Trump was elected this last time. I couldn’t understand how people could not see the obvious.
Facebook.
My ‘moment of clarity’ was when I saw a local news station running clips of college girls’ enthusiasm for Trump, just after the election. The sentiment was along the lines of “He’s so strong!” or “I really feel like he gets us, you know?” and almost directly quoting some meme’s I’d seen.
And seeing die hard libertarians I know swallow Trump’s accumulation of executive power, via their perception of events, drove it home.
…Walk the street, and look around. I’m using ‘Facebook’ as a catch-all here: algorithmic feeds and influencers are warping reality for smart folks, both ways. Every generation is caught up in it, but I feel the age extremes (Boomers and Z) are most vulnerable here.
The ease with which echo chambers are created and weaponized is unreal.
Watching my late father-in-law, also a Navy Vet, say John McCain was a traitor, was just … unreal. And he was on Medicare.
Don’t give up on your EE dreams. I went to school when I was younger, dug a huge GPA hole, and almost never went back.
I had to go to school part time because I had to work and was the main stay-at-home parent. Took me 7 years. (Also had undiagnosed ADHD. If I had then, the medication I have now, it probably would have been a different story 🤣).
But the real journey is finding what we love. Adversity and struggle suck, but it teaches you to fight.
Good luck, internet stranger, I hope you find the journey you need.
Pasty faced millennial here.
Also EE dropout (working on that).
I hope I am as enlightened and put together as you when I’m 50. Cheers.
But I do have one answer for you:
Facebook.
My ‘moment of clarity’ was when I saw a local news station running clips of college girls’ enthusiasm for Trump, just after the election. The sentiment was along the lines of “He’s so strong!” or “I really feel like he gets us, you know?” and almost directly quoting some meme’s I’d seen.
And seeing die hard libertarians I know swallow Trump’s accumulation of executive power, via their perception of events, drove it home.
…Walk the street, and look around. I’m using ‘Facebook’ as a catch-all here: algorithmic feeds and influencers are warping reality for smart folks, both ways. Every generation is caught up in it, but I feel the age extremes (Boomers and Z) are most vulnerable here.
The ease with which echo chambers are created and weaponized is unreal.
Watching my late father-in-law, also a Navy Vet, say John McCain was a traitor, was just … unreal. And he was on Medicare.
Don’t give up on your EE dreams. I went to school when I was younger, dug a huge GPA hole, and almost never went back.
I had to go to school part time because I had to work and was the main stay-at-home parent. Took me 7 years. (Also had undiagnosed ADHD. If I had then, the medication I have now, it probably would have been a different story 🤣).
But the real journey is finding what we love. Adversity and struggle suck, but it teaches you to fight.
Good luck, internet stranger, I hope you find the journey you need.