I Want To Write My Random Thoughts And Feelings

I think the root of this issue is more that adults provide — often knowingly — very wrongheaded expectations about reality, in what are actually self-serving efforts to create and and preserve "innocence" in the young (whatever the hell that is even supposed to be; the notion in anything like its present conception does not appear to predate Christianity).

While it is not necessarily a consciously planned one, there is in practice a grand conspiracy in which a good half of all adults, including most involved in formal education, now participate, to deny children and adolescents adequate preparation for the horrors that will be visited upon most people's lives sooner or later. Often enough, young people who go relatively unaffected by this conditioning are even held in cool regard by adults.

Despite this, we all know that selective inattention is being paid to the image of the world imparted to children, and that they will have to "grow up" someday, which means among other things abandoning half of what was taught to them by their purported mentors. We are basically playing an elaborate joke on them that takes twenty to thirty years to get to the punchline.

But: more pernicious in this regard than all of that is perhaps the effect of fictional stories on young minds. Electronic entertainment has done some positive things for the potential in elaborate world-building and innovations in form for storytelling, but fiction has taken a major hit in psychological complexity lately. Stories of taken-for-granted happy endings and obvious "good" and "bad" factions were rare before 1900. People's worldviews are more rooted in analogies to known "mythology" (in the largest sense of that word that is basically synonymous with "stories") than in reasoning by far, and all the more so the less conscious of that fact they are.