We are forever being told, mostly by people that want a photo opportunity and a shot at redemption, that the newest generation is doomed. About as doomed as the newer generation says the old one is. They point out any number of things to support this. Like how everything being easier to produce and consume means that there’s no incentive to make it better. Or that Computers have replaced critical thought. But the least realistic of all (Since there’s a case to be made for the previous two), is that “Kids Today”™ don’t want to be great things like astronauts, but instead their ambitions are limited to being content creators.
And I wonder how many of the ones that say this really wanted to be an Astronaut.
Comparing the difficulties of being a successful content creator and the ones of being an astronaut is a bit like comparing Edgar Allan Poe and Madame Curie. Really the only thing in common is how unlikely their success was. But both of them involve hardships. NASA helpfully has a nifty little page telling us what their requirements are for Astronauts. It’s unsurprisingly complex and requires at least a master’s degree and 1,000 hours of flight. So that’s about a decade of your life and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Admittedly, the barriers to entry for content creation are much lower (look at me, creating content right now), but that just means a literal planet’s worth of people all vying for eyeballs. So what you miss for in barriers to entry, you pay for in competition. Only so many people can see what you want them to see. Irrelevant if you just do it as a hobby, nerve-wracking if those important to you are getting rather tired of “It’s lucrative, I swear.”
And yet, there they go, thinking that it is certain to be lucrative. For some it will be, others will be sorely disappointed and forced to evaluate their life choices if they went all-in. But they don’t see that. They see themselves headlining the conventions where they once were part of the audience. They see the Lambo wrapped in some incredibly gaudy skin for the princely sum of the company who did it adding a very large sticker with their Instagram handle on it. For the creator that is already looking how much the illuminated star logo will run them on their new Mercedes before they upload video #1, it’s all just a couple of incredibly funny jokes away.
Call me crazy but isn’t this what a lot of these historically accurate complainers thought being an astronaut is?
They didn’t see the training or the illustrious military career or the constant brushes with actual death (as opposed to career suicide for the content creators) that comes from strapping someone to the top of what will be a hopefully controlled bomb. They saw the ticker tape parades, and the free Corvettes, and the medals, and the interviews, and meeting the president and having him listen to you about what you’ve done.
The old-gen complainers didn’t want to be astronauts, they wanted a publicity tour.
