"To defend the truth, to articulate it with humility and conviction, and to bear witness to it in life are therefore exacting and indispensable forms of charity."

H. H. Benedict XVI. Caritas in Veritate Encyclical. June 29, 2009

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Generation F: how common life will be in 2050

The problem:
Sexual maturity arrives at, say, 15 years old, but productive maturity arrives only after college graduation at, say, 25 (I'm thinking of post-degree). Those 10 years are years in which people want to have sex but feel that cannot afford to form a family. The  consequence is that by the time productive maturity arrives anti-family practices and then values have been consolidated. Plus, this enforces hedonism which in advance calls for selfish fun after productive maturity by renouncing to form a family, and to see having a wife and children as a sacrifice rather than an achievement.

The consequence of the problem:This will pressure to a more and more selfish, superficial life, to more vice, crime and degradation (particularly sexual degradation), to a dystopia, to general unhappiness.

The solution:
A scheme through which companies will hire people since 15 (sexual maturity) and technical education will be an in-house or at least very specific, long-term process. Education companies will sell to the companies, not to the students. Worker-students will learn in their job time, making a fuller use of new informatics technologies, professors will go to the company, university campus as we know them today will either disappear altogether or transform themselves into research companies. Study subjects will be very different for different people. It will be the end of one-fits-all curricula. Education will be paid by companies on condition of employee loyalty. Technical study will be more of a life-time slow process. Humanities or moral or religious education will be a private weekend activity. Work time will be short, maybe six or seven hours for men and even less for women (at least during pregnancy or lactation).

The consequence of the solution:
Since productivity will continue to be higher and higher, people will be able to afford big families, a lot of children will be the most conspicuous mark of status. Since families will become the most important life project again, companies will have to adapt to this. Companies will have their own day care for children and maybe the old. Maybe both husbands working for the same company or nearby companies will be very common. Companies will have their own schools and high schools, and will try to engage those young people into the next generation of worker-students. Companies will be less and less about producing a determined good and more and more about satisfying needs with the ultimate goods whatsoever in which the have some competitive advantage.

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