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Robert Tamayo

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Dementia in Kids These Days

Father Time comes for us all, eventually. If he doesn't kill you outright, he'll leave you each day a little more impaired than the last; you'll first be without sense, and then you'll be senseless.

But it seems that Time is now catching up to Father Time himself, as he is no longer assigning dementia to just the elderly as usual, but to kids as well!

These days, the kids have dementia too.


You see, a common test for signs of dementia in a patient is to ask them to draw a clock. If they can draw a normal-looking clock, then they win the game and they don't have dementia. If they something more complicated and convoluted than a clock, then they lose are stuck with dementia.

But kids these days are much worse than that - they can't even read a clock! Forget asking them to draw one.

What this means is that - in practice - kids these days have dementia. They don't literally have dementia, but to everyone else around them, they are as vacant as though they did.

I'm not making fun of dementia here. I'm not making light of it, either - I have family members who were lost to dementia, and it's a painful process for everyone involved. I don't wish that fate on anyone.

I am, however, making fun of the kids these days.

Kids these days have many of the practical signs of suffering from dementia:


  • Like dementia, they can't draw a clock. 
  • Like dementia, they get lost in their own neighborhood, having outsourced their sense of direction to handheld computers. 
  • Like dementia, they have short term memory issues.

Unlike people actually suffering from real dementia, these kids have done this mental damage to themselves. It remains to be seen if this is reversible. 

People from my generation are fortunate to have spent our critical childhood development years before the time of the Internet and smart phone. Those things came later, in our teen years, but by then we had gotten a lot of brain development done. 

We have some work to do to guard against the damage that can still be done, but fortunately, we still know how to draw a clock.
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