van Oudenhoven N., van Oudenhoven R.J. Paying it forward
This work is licensed under a Сreative Commons Atribiution - NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Abstract
The relevance of the article. The problem of ‘Paying It Forward’, or the notion that people, children and young persons, carry out acts of kindness to strangers without expecting a return or ‘being paid’ back, is so important that, without exaggeration, the future of mankind depends on it. ‘Pay it Forward’ is not a new way of behaving; as else, people would have ceased to exist a long time ago. The term “Paying it Forward“ is tentatively described as ‘the process of somebody doing something good for another without having the intention to have the favour returned or being “paid back”, but instead with the expectation that the recipients pass it on to another person’.
Description of the research progress. After a brief elaboration on the notion of ‘paying it back’, the first part seeks to explore the phenomenon of ‘living in the now’ and how this affects this ‘paying it forward’, as it can be assumed that their concern about the wellbeing of those who may live in the future may be affected by a limited feeling of being connected with times to come. The trend that pushes children to increasingly living in the now is fed by numerous processes, the most important being that spending time at their leisure is becoming rarer, and the other that they expect near immediate responses to their needs.
Conclusions. If people get tired of communicating with the present, they have no energy left for the future. Will children and young people to think about the wellbeing and well becoming of prospective generations? Where and how could they possibly muster the motivation, energy, and above all the time, to ‘pay it forward’? What future lies in waiting for the young generations and for those who come after them? This question gives rise to daunting scenarios, whose consequences could only be approximated, if at all. An effort to this effect will be attempted in the future studies.
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