Just before beginning as education director of a small, suburban church, I taught college freshmen for five years at three different public institutions. At Northern Arizona University, I carried the heaviest teaching load of any of my colleagues in relation to the sheer number of students I taught. In one class alone, I taught more than 300 students.

In all, in just five years, I taught about forty sections of college-level courses that were mainly populated by 18- and 19-year-olds. I worked with students across various economic, educational, ethnic, and cultural boundaries in Los Angeles, California and Flagstaff, Arizona. I guess I’d claim to have some wisdom and insight into the 18-year-old mind.

The most noticeable positive trait I can report about young adults, from my experience and perspective, is their skepticism. Skepticism is not often celebrated. Related to it are ideas that skeptics are stubborn and immovable, that they’re jaded and uninspired. Worse, the skeptic can be cast as the villain—the one who never takes urgent action because she’s never convinced of any truth of any kind.

I have a healthy respect for skeptics. They refuse to be sold on empty sentiments and rather hold out for proven results. They stand their ground when others flip-flop to align with the latest trending blather. They question until satisfied by a sound and reasonable answer.

On the flip, the most noticeable stumbling-block I can report is an erosive lack of curiosity. The majority of students in my classes brought little to the table related to ideas they wanted to explore. College level instructors will tell you they do all the talking in class, these days. I hear my colleagues complain that not only do students have no questions, they also have no inner resources from which questions or ideas may spring.

“Inner resources” are made of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual realities that arise from direct experience with the world. You build inner resources by being in real relationship with others, and by being shaped by the joy and heartbreak of real living. How can a person have curiosities when they have no experience—no inner life—that presses on them to be curious in the first place. In other words, how can one wonder “What else?”, “What other?”, “What more?”, when there is no baseline “what” for comparison.

You might ask, “When or why did it happen that the content of our ‘real living’ begin to shrink?” There is no one source. Cars keep us from being in real contact in ways walking and taking the subway do not; television and the internet and devices detract from real contact; delivering knowledge in the classroom instead of engendering its growth through lived experience diminishes real contact; automation diminishes real contact… In essence, what we celebrate as “modernity” has, in part, meant the growing extinction of community and the ever-growing prevalence of “remote” contact. The latter is a neutral spin on what I prefer to call estrangement—a state where we’re no longer affected by the lives of others and the conditions of our surrounding world. Indeed, we lose a salient human trait—our vulnerability—when we choose the remote over the intimate.

Skepticism without curiosity only deepens your estrangement—your “remote contact” (an oxymoron) with others and the world. When skepticism says, “I don’t accept that,” curiosity asks, “What’s the alternative?” Curiosity animates skepticism. Can you imagine just reading a Rick and Morty episode? How dark and destructive and unreadable would that be? When animated, however, pessimistic words on a page are brought to life, and the stories become adventurous and open-ended. Or, put another way, can you imagine the awfulness of Rick without Morty? A hard-boiled skeptic with no curious side-kick? Unwatchable.

Instead of offering platitudes about a bright future and the world being at their feet, I’m urging young people to just live. When you show up early to a class or a meeting or work, open your mouth instead of an app. Talk to one another. Look at one another. Be attracted to one another. Be angry, intrigued, hurt, bored, delighted in the company of other live humans. Be in harmony, be in conflict, be, be, be. Continue to build inner resources out of real, lived experience and not just through passive, “remote connectivity.”

In the words of my teenage hero, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” If parents and their newly minted adult children want to commune before new lives begin away from home, gather and watch the movie I’m quoting here. And if you can’t place the quote, Google it. (I’m not a technophobe.)

Finally, if we trust our religious beliefs and traditions, then being in relationship with one another is to live the life God intended for us. Christ did not rule, he taught. And Christ taught not just with words but also by how he related to others—in curious conversation; by healing and feeding others; by sharing, celebrating, and grieving with others; and in prayer and worship with others. Christians believe Christ showed us an image of “God with us” – emmanuel. So, if we are made in God’s image, we are called to be with one another—not estranged from one another. Go out, and be with the wide world.