The Fast Food Mentality. What Happened to Patience?

An interesting video popped up on my LinkedIn feed recently. I actually clicked it and watched the entire thing, which is rare for me these days.

It said Gen Z is the first generation where intelligence has gone backwards, after about a hundred years of it going up. Screens got the blame. Phones, digital distraction, too much tech in schools.

Shocking, but not shocking.

Then I did the thing I now do with everything. I went and checked it.

So I went and checked

It’s half right, and the half it got wrong matters.

There is a real decline in IQ scores, and it has been measured properly in several European countries. Norway has the best of it, hundreds of thousands of young men tested over decades. Scores climbed for most of the last century, peaked in the mid seventies, and have been sliding ever since.

The mid seventies. I was born in 1982, seven years the wrong side of that peak, which puts me in the sliding half of it. Not the kids. Me. Gen Z weren’t even born yet.

So whatever this is, I’m already in it, and pointing at teenagers is a bit rich coming from me.

It’s not everywhere either. Some countries are still climbing.

Here’s the best bit, and nobody ever quotes it. The researchers found the drop happening within families. Younger brothers scoring below older brothers. Same parents, same house, same dinner table. That kills the genetics argument stone dead. Whatever is doing this, we are doing it to ourselves.

And then those same researchers wrote, in plain English, that they cannot say what.

Not screens. Not phones. They said they don’t know. The screens line got bolted on afterwards by people summarising the paper who wanted a headline.

Which I found oddly reassuring, because that’s exactly where I am. I can see the effects everywhere. I genuinely don’t know the cause.

What I see in the schools

Ask teachers in England whether behaviour is wrecking their lessons and it used to be under half of them saying yes. It’s about two thirds now. It jumped after the pandemic and it stayed jumped.

Suspensions are up sharply, closing in on a million in a single year, and the biggest reason recorded is simply persistent disruption. One in five children is now persistently absent. Roughly double what it was before covid.

I’ve always said teachers have had their powers stripped. I checked that too, and I was wrong on the law. Corporal punishment went in the eighties, fair enough, but everything since has handed power back. They can confiscate, they can search, they can give a same day detention.

On paper they have more than they did.

In the room, different story. Around four in ten teachers say abuse from pupils gets treated as part of the job. About the same number say they’re made to feel like the problem. Fewer than one in five think anything real happens when they report it. And when a teacher rings home, most parents aren’t properly behind them.

That’s not a law problem. That’s a backing problem. The tools are in the drawer and nobody will let them open it.

Then someone took my phone

Someone on an e-bike took my phone and was gone.

I chased. A full mile down the road, sprinting flat out, and I could not keep up. You do not outrun an e-bike on foot, I can confirm that personally now. I filed the report online and it was closed immediately. Not investigated. Closed. So I’m just another metric.

Phone theft went through the roof these last few years, the worst since they started counting it this way. One police operation on its own traced tens of thousands of stolen London phones being shipped off to China inside a year. Something like four in every ten stolen in the city.

And here’s how it gets staffed, according to the police and a parliamentary committee. Organised gangs recruiting kids, some as young as fourteen, over Snapchat. A few hundred quid a handset.

Think about what’s actually being sold to that kid. Quick money, today, no skill required. Somebody older takes the real cut and the fourteen year old carries the risk.

That’s the fast food mentality with a criminal record.

(Fair’s fair, the numbers have come down since as the crackdowns landed. And nobody publishes the ages of phone thieves, so that recruitment bit is what police told Parliament, not a statistic.)

It was never the screen

Teenagers are online about six hours a day. Most kids have a phone before they’ve left primary school, and nearly all of them are on apps they’re technically too young for.

I could stop there and shout about screens. Plenty do. But the evidence doesn’t back it, and I’m not going to pretend it does.

The biggest study on teenagers and technology found screen time barely moved the needle on their wellbeing. Wearing glasses came out worse, which genuinely made me laugh. Bullying, fighting, drinking, not sleeping. Those are the real ones, and it isn’t close.

Then the international schools data finished the argument for me. Kids using devices to learn at school do better. Kids using them to mess about at school do worse. Same device. Opposite result.

So it was never the screen. It’s what’s on it, and what it’s quietly teaching them to expect.

Where screens genuinely do bite is reading. Comprehension really is worse on a screen than on paper, and only for the dense stuff you actually have to work at, not for stories. And that gap has been getting wider, not narrower, which nobody saw coming.

Same word, new slop

I’ve used the word slop for years, and it amuses me that AI is what finally made it famous.

It’s old. Mud, then pig feed, and by the 1800s it already meant rubbish, a thing of no value. There’s a book review from 1897 moaning about people “reading slop”. 1897! Then AI came along and the poor word got a second wind.

Same word. Same meaning. New rubbish.

And the marketing is always the tell. Master AI in 7 days, just copy my prompts. One trade strategy that will make you rich. Learn to dance in a weekend. Build an app in a day. Drop two dress sizes by Christmas.

You getting the pattern?

The promise itself tells me exactly how bad the substance is going to be. There’s no value in any of it, because nothing they teach is sustainable, other than the next course that fixes the problem the last one created. Give a man a fish and he’s back tomorrow. Which, if you’re selling courses, is the whole business model.

The influencer thing

Somewhere along the way, becoming an idol with millions of followers turned into a career path.

Some of it I genuinely get. If someone has a real skill and they’re passing it on properly, brilliant. That’s just teaching with a much bigger room, and good luck to them.

But a lot of it I don’t get at all. You get people presenting themselves as AI engineers who have no foundation in engineering of any kind. None. And they’ll teach you anyway, confidently, to an audience of thousands.

Here’s what I think people need to understand about influencers. Most of them, not all, are simply chasing the click. They are not there to solve your problem. They’re closer to vultures, circling your insecurities and whatever mess you happen to be in at the time, because that’s exactly where the money is. Your problem is the product.

That’s the lot that drives me nuts.

And look, I’m not having a go at anyone who bites. When people are desperate they do stupid things. I’ve done it myself, so I’m not sitting up here judging anybody.

What I don’t understand is why there are no rules around any of it.

And before anyone jumps in, yes, I know about age. What children can be shown, what material can be put in front of them, all of that is heavily regulated, and rightly so. That is not the bit I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the fact that there is nothing out there to stop a charlatan selling you a service, a product, or plain slop dressed up as fact. Nothing at all. It’s the wild west.

To me that is false advertising, plain and simple, and it should sit under the same law as everything else does. Put a claim like that on a product and you would be in trouble. Put it on a video and it’s absolutely fine.

The platforms allow it because it’s their traffic. And the way it works right now, the burden lands on us. Something goes wrong, off you go and sue somebody, after the damage is already done. That’s a cure, not prevention.

I do get it, honestly. People post things, it isn’t advice, take it or leave it. And accountability and responsibility online is a genuinely messy problem. I’m not pretending I have the answer to it.

But man, I hate that people can get away with it this easily, knowing full well nobody is ever going to hold them accountable for any of it.

Nothing stops a bloke with a ring light telling a million people they can master a skill in ten days. Nothing ever will. That one’s on us.

Same problem wherever I look

In the dance community, I see it. It’s why I say most dance teachers aren’t qualified, and I’ve been saying it since 2014. Not because they can’t dance. Because they don’t understand foundation, why it matters, or how to teach it. Foundation is hard to teach and slow to sell.

In the trading community, same thing. Everyone wants the one indicator.

In AI now, same again. I wrote a whole post about closing clickbait inside 60 seconds. I built my own harness precisely because there was no shortcut to make the thing behave, and trust me, I went looking for one first.

Three completely different worlds. Identical disease.

Foundation is slow. That is the point

The problem with foundation is the time it takes to lay it, and then the time it needs to set before you put anything on top of it.

At my own pace, every new skill I’ve picked up has taken a minimum of three years. That’s just to learn the fundamentals and understand how the thing actually works. The rest of my life is building on top.

Three years is mine, not a law. I went looking for a proper number and there isn’t one. That famous ten thousand hours line was never what people think it was, and the researcher behind it spent years telling everyone it had been mangled. The honest answer is it depends enormously on what you’re learning.

No number exists. Which is exactly why anyone selling you one in days is selling you nothing.

The fast food mentality

Quick relationships. Quick friendships. Quick money. Quick success. Quick food, quick delivery, quick results. Quick quick quick, I want it now.

And here comes the next gold rush, where the only people winning are the ones selling the shovels. Which has probably been true for centuries, if not millennia. lol.

Impatient.

That’s what I call the fast food mentality, and I think it’s the thing sitting underneath all of it. Not the phone. Not the generation. Just the expectation that everything worth having turns up hot, in a bag, in under five minutes.

Am I sure that’s the cause? No. Honestly, no. I can see the effects everywhere I look, in the schools, on the street, and in three communities I’ve spent years inside. But I’m struggling to piece any of it together. It all just seems like noise to me, with no real correlation between any of it. If you’ve got a better answer than mine I’d genuinely like to hear it.

What I do know is what works, because it’s the only thing that ever has for me. I’m quite the country boy in that respect. Learning is a lifetime of chasing truth and knowledge, and I’m nowhere near done. Still a student. Always will be.

The good news? Patience is still available. Nobody has regulated it, nobody can sell it to you in ten days, and it works exactly as well as it always did.

Back to basics. Lay the foundation. Let it set.