THE DEVIL'S PLAN TO RUIN THE NEXT GENERATION
You really must read the article by the title in my headline! The author asked ChatGPT: "If you were the devil, how would you destroy America’s youth?" Its answers were unsettling and too familiar.
The article consists of these subheadings:
1. Erode Attention and Presence,
2. Confuse Identity and Purpose,
3. Flood Them with Information, Starve Them of Wisdom,
4. Replace Real Relationships with Simulacra,
5. Normalize Hedonism, Pathologize Discipline,
6. Undermine Trust Across Generations,
7. Make Everything a Marketplace, and
Conclusion: Learning from the Red Team.
It details so vividly the way in which our consciousness has been manipulated and altered over the past 3.5 decades, first with the advent of the World-Wide Web, then the mass introduction of smartphones about 20 years ago. Most "Gen Z" young people (not quite as many older people) have succumbed to "brain rot" – they experience "difficulty thinking or concentrating," their attention span is reduced to hardly more than 30 seconds (the time required to watch a Facebook short reel), they continually seek "external approval (likes, followers)," they "feel life is meaningless," and they've grown up without a "binding moral matrix" due to the deliberate absence of positive moral values portrayed in social media posts and short video reels.
One of the most telling paragraphs is as follows –
"A child who constructs an adult identity while drawing from a stable and time-tested set of values, beliefs, and stories, given to her by trusted adults within a religious or philosophical tradition, will fare far better than a child who attempts to construct an adult identity by herself while drawing from a billion pieces of short and ephemeral content, produced mostly by young people and bots, which cannot be assembled into a coherent worldview."
ChatGPT ended with this summary:
"In short: if I were the devil, I'd destroy the next generation not by terror or violence, but by distraction, disconnection, and slow erosion of meaning. They wouldn't even notice, because it would feel like freedom and entertainment."
How many times every day to you see how people, when standing in a line, sitting in a waiting room, or standing at a bus stop, pull out their phones and stick their noses onto it, ignoring everyone around them? For many folks, the last thing they do before going to sleep at night and the first thing they do as they wake up in the morning is – "gotta check my phone"? Instead of our phone being a useful tool or a servant, we have become its slaves. We have become addicted to our phones for those tiny jolts of dopamine stimuli.
What must be done? Put that phone in your pocket or purse! Don't keep it in your hand or on your desk or counter. Don't glance at it every 5 or 10 minutes "so you won't miss anything" – by constantly checking it, you're missing the most important things of life: spending time with real people. Don't look at it just before bedtime or until at least 10 minutes after you get out of bed! Give your body time to go through the natural rhythm of winding down and starting up. And schedule time every day to read at least several pages from a real, tangible, printed book; not on an e-book reader on your phone or tablet. Most important, spend some time talking with God and interacting face-to-face with real, living human beings, not with ChatGPT.
You can read our whole newsletter at https://agape-restoration-society.org/ARC-News/a-n_2026-10-24.htm, and share it!
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