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Oh, but we do cower. Behind masks and “vaccines.” But, this week i was driving my teens home from school, and we saw their friends in another car. There was a teen girl cramped sideways into the hatchback, presumably no seatbelt. The teen driver headbanged for a frenetic moment reminding me that he has some kind of attention deficit and hyperactivity, always noticeable when in his presence. I worried about my ethical concerns: whether the girl in the “trunk” has parents who would wish to be told of the manner in which she is traveling home; whether it’s my place to tell the driver’s parents that he had an overcrowded car, and was changing lanes needlessly and copiously to speed through traffic. I asked my own teens about the dilemma, to which they instructed me: there are some things that are stupid risks to take, and some people are more prone to take them because they perceive it as fun. I realized that maybe people who don’t learn which real thrills are worth taking calculated risks are prone to taking crappy thrills for unknown and unmitigated risk. Is this what we mean when we say “Go outside”? Can the younger generation and all future generations encode a new understanding that we need a slower drip on dopamine than what screens can offer? That we must do the calculations in order to take real risks, mitigated, so that we can truly live, rather than crappy risks that incur low payouts in joy, abandon, expansion, succor, oneness, belonging, worship?

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deletedAug 14, 2021Liked by Cole Noble
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