Leaving The Nest

Once of the toughest challenges some parents face is the pont of letting go of their child or children...
who have officially become adults.
When the kids leave home, some adults have "empty nest syndrome"  because the couple's relationship,
or the single parent's world, was carefully constructed with the kids as nucleus.
Take out the nucleus and you've got an empty hole.
An empty nest.

In other cases, some adults celebrate and salute their kid's independence...
as I do....
because I think a parent's job is to give their kids wings and instructions to fly on their own.
As Kahlil Gibran said, "Children do not come to us, they come through us."
If they fall, as we did throughout life...
we can only hope they learn, as we did, from their mistakes.

It seems, however, at this time... in this space...in human history,
more and more young people are focused not on the outside world...
rather the cyber world.
Texting has replaced talking.
Skyping is seeing.
And Facebook is believing what is, more often than not, untrue,

Video games have replaced board games.
And video game addiction -- just like a gambling addiction -- is causing more and more young people with enormous potential to blow it all...
to not educate themselves..
to not pursue a career at all...
to feed off  others, like the the young man in the story below, in order to pursue the game.
For video game addicts,  life IS the game. All else is a distraction.

And why not?
Addiction sells.
Gaming is a huge multi billion dollar industry. Like tobacco was once.
The greater the desire, the greater the demand, the greater the sales.
And for some people, the games trigger an adiction that cause some people to give up everything for them.
Most specifically, a  real life in real time.
For an addicted video game player,  the cyber game IS life and everything else is a distraction.

When  heard the story I wrote this blog post preface for...
I needed to confirm its truth.
Once I did that, I decided to post it here.
Because if it blows me away, it's likely to do the the same to someone else.

It's the story of one dad in China, who could not get his adult son to grow up and step away from the game.

While the story doesn't say whether dad's technique worked, I suspect... and have since confirmed...
it failed.
Cyber cattle prods aren't real.

Bottom line....
the story reflects the frustration of so many parents...
and so many young people in today's terrible economic and political environment.
The world is broke, contentious and has turned on its axis.

For the older ones expecting to retire securely...
and the younger ones planning to graduate from school and land a job...
it's not going to happen without a whole lot more effort than we ever anticipated.

And for those currently drowning in the sea of unemployment, reaching for any buoy they can...
that buoy is not in cyberspace.
It's not on Facebook. Not Twitter. Not Texting. Not World of War Craft. Not Video Games.
These are what we call  HOBBIES.
It is WORK that pays the bills.

I think that's what the dad in the article you are about to read... was trying to say.
He just didn't say it well.
And in the end...
the ultimate irony.
His son got trained by paid highly trained assassins to become a better cyber fighter.
So who really was the winner here?

Here are a couple of links to the story. The one is the most detailed.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/340753
This one has some real interesting comments at the end.
http://www.businessinsider.com/father-hires-assassins-to-kill-sons-wow-avatar-2013-1
Curious what you think...