So, I was listening to Adema’s “Everyone”, and one line in particular stood out to me:

“Why am I so angry inside my head?”

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/adema/everyone.html

A classic question that people have been asking themselves for generations, and one of the questions that we’ve been trying to answer for the next generation I imagine for as long as we’ve been trying to answer things. (It also seems to be consistent fertile ground for many genres of music…)

Every generation brings new people, angry about new things (or the same thing, again and again).

Do we have more anger in our youth than usual?

Kondratiev wave theory would suggest yes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave

At least in North America, there’s been a squeeze going on for probably 20 years (a whole slew of other topics, out of scope). Add that to they standard “Is that all there is?” as you approach adulthood, and that’s fodder for whole genres of music.

But really, the original question, about trying to control the non-grey matter portions of your brain…

When I was doing safety training, I used to say that I could deal with no sleep, or crappy food, but not both at the same time, or I would get cranky.

And how do you teach the next generation to control their brain? Do you want to?

How do you educate them to control the ‘proper’ parts of themselves, while still expressing their creative and exploratory sides?