What’s with young people and values nowadays?

It’s now 1 week to the end of semester and this is when all the project presentations are taking place. This is also when I can’t help but wonder where exactly have the young people of Singapore misplaced their values. I’m sure after going through 12 years of formal education they must have been taught some fundamental values to being a good person in society – punctuality and respect for others. Coming late to class while other groups are presenting just so you can prepare your presentation material doesn’t exactly resonate what our civics teachers have been trying to instill in us.

You should know by now how much I abhor latecomers. Be it for class, for gatherings, for anything. It isn’t nearly as simple as bad time management, you know? If it happens once or twice due to unforeseen circumstances, that’s all right. I’m not a saint either. For the past 5 semesters in NUS I’ve been late for class say, twice, both for 5 minutes due to bad weather (and hence the need for all vehicles to choke up streets). However when people are late consistently, and beyond the understandable 5 minutes, you begin to wonder if they are really worth the wait, or rather, whether you are worthy enough for them to make an effort to be on time.

That aside, if one person is late, so be it. She doesn’t care to be a good person. Yet what seems to be happening nowadays is that everyone is unpunctual. Simply because friend X knows that friend Y will definitely be late so she decided to take her time as well and let friend Z wait. And I happen to be friend Z all the time. That day I was discussing this strange phenomenon with a friend, and he said it’s really just people conforming to the norm. Presumably the norm of a collective loss of morals.

You know what? I think it’s all the fault of the mobile phone. Because of it, people are getting more unpunctual because they know that they can always text each other to change the meeting venue, the meeting time at the last minute. To me that’s just transmuting what was meant to be a fault of the latercomer to be the burden of the earlycomer – that she has to entertain herself while waiting. Bullshit I’d say. To me, each time a person I’m supposed to meet is late, with good reason or not, her likeability index goes down a notch. And the fact is, some people didn’t even start off high enough, so by the time I’ve had a few encounters with them (see classmates), I can’t think of one redeeming attribute about them that would make me like them. So there. I might be stubborn with my beliefs, but at least I have a set of unchanging consistent beliefs.