Joining A Cause To Make Friends Won’t Provide Real Connection To Others | Clips | Dad Saves America

0:01 - I'm gonna put myself in the shoes, of a typical American kid, not my kid, but any kid. And my teacher tells me, that, we are at risk of extinction because of the climate. And then I go, and I Google and I find huge movements, talking about how in 12 years we're all gonna die. And that's scary. So I'm sort of, my like fight or flights happening.

0:35 How does my son, or anyone's son or daughter, navigate that? Because like, when we talk about this revolt of the public, one of the things that attracts me to try and just grapple with it as a parent is, I don't want my kid to go running out in the street, burning Starbucks, because of a desire to have a transcendental experience. Like that's not a productive thing to do, I don't think.

1:05 But it's clearly really alluring to a lot of kids, to a lot of young people. They feel this draw, that there's something wrong. And I think some of it goes back to some of these things, these crises that they're presented from a lot of different angles, climate change being one of the big ones right now. So help me. - I think actually I would put cause and effect to be completely the opposite. - Oh, okay. - I think these people are, Greta Thunberg, perfect example.

1:38 She wrote, she clearly is somebody who had certain, personality, I dunno what to call that, I forget the word she used, but clearly, she was somebody who had no friends, didn't feel like she had a purpose in life. And then she started the school strike movement against global warming. That is, to me, something that somebody who has something missing inside of them, that they want to latch onto a catastrophe, the whole world is just like me, you know, we're all gonna blow up in 12 years.

2:09 I think anybody who has a strong sense of themselves, would do the normal thing which is say, okay, how is that gonna happen? Don't just tell me, it's the end of the world, tell me, what are the stages to get there? Who has been predicting it for how long? How true has it been from then? And where do I fit in that? And you may become a climate change activist but you're not gonna become Greta Thunberg because you have a sense of, you didn't have a need to fill, to begin with that those crazy ideas, those extreme ideas placing what may be, you know, geophysical phenomenon, global warming, into an apocalyptic model, right, Of the end of the world.

2:49 You're not going to fall for that, you're going to see it as what it is. It's something that's happening on the earth, How do we deal with it? What's the rational way to look at it? I think, meaning can be had in many different ways, and I am not an expert in that so I'm not gonna talk about it. But I think the family is a great producer of meaning because, there's a lot of affirmation, right?

3:09 There's a lot of affirmation, and so You have to affirm the things you disagree with sometimes, and sometimes the things you wish you could force them towards. But in the end, to the extent that the family can be a source of affirmation and meaning to a young person, I think that person's gonna confront all of that in a very different model from the Greta Thunberg is like I'm missing something in my life therefore, hooray, there's gotta be an end of the world and I'm gonna be the Joan of Arc of the end of the world.