I’m 37 and sometimes I just look at young people like what are you all doing or thinking? I know some of them are just acting their age and I probably did the same but social media has definitely had a huge factor. Like the amount of phone use, pulling out their cameras, needing to film and capture everything, and thinking social media is so important.
I don’t know if I’m simply just getting older or if I recognize a problem that most people would see regardless of age. The social media thing seems to not just be an age thing but maybe I notice it more with younger people. I’m leaning towards I’m just becoming grumpy and I don’t relate to kids these days.
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Always have, always will.
There was no social media when I was a kid (thank god!), so I think we’re all thinking that seeing kids glued to their phones instead of being present is a shame and that they don’t know what they’re missing. When they get older, it’ll be the norm, so it won’t be as jarring to them as it is to those of us who lived a completely different life where computers were for work, cell phones were for emergencies and almost no one had a camera when we were out having fun (again, thank god!).
No, not necessarily, but due to social media it’s the ones that do it that amplify it. I do however groan when some try to claim a hack is their idea and I’m thinking geez my gran used to do that, my mum did that, and I did that.
I think the kids are alright. You can’t fuck up worse than we did. Hopefully, you’ll be our salvation. We’ve blown any opportunity to save ourselves.
Your generation was my generation’s idiot kids.
Yeah, this has been going on for all of recorded history. And probably before that too.
No, I don’t. Partly because I remember being young, and the way some older people treated me. Yeah, when we’re young, most of us do some thing we don’t do later due to experience. But the young people today are great, and I admire a lot of what they do. They use phones a lot, but I see plenty of old people using phones — I look around in clinic or hospital waiting rooms, filled with old folks, and almost all of them have their phones out (including me, at least part of the time.) Social media has been useful in so many ways, and I use it often, as do many of my friends.
Nothing changes but the jargon, the clothes, the trinkets, and the music.
It’s fundamentally different for younger generations because of the advent of the digital age. They have instant access to an overwhelming amount of information. But if they are met with more than an instant of strong emotion, interpersonal tension or physical sensation, they are overwhelmed because they haven’t developed the capacity to cope. They expect immediate answers and immediate relief, and are distressed when those aren’t forthcoming. Coupled to this is a lack of curiosity or interest in discovering their own solutions to problems; their default strategy is searching for answers that someone has come up with.
I’m active on several knitting subs, and see this all the time. Posters ask questions, like, “Did I drop a stitch here?” and will add, “I just need to know what you guys think because I’m so upset that I have made a mistake that it’s given me a migraine and I can’t stand it! Please help!” They ask the question seemingly before they have even taken a good look at their knitting, because the answer is so strikingly obvious. Then, if they get nine affirmative replies and one contrary, they are thrown into a tizzy because there’s no consensus.
It’s ridiculous and tragic, simultaneously. Younger folks are really suffering.
https://historyhustle.com/2500-years-of-people-complaining-about-the-younger-generation/
LMAO. Welcome to the generational divide. It happens with every generation.
I was young and dumb. There just wasn’t any social media to record me, thank God.
One of my “top ten signs you are getting old” is there are more young punks driving than old farts.
If we don’t have an inflated opinion of our abilities when we’re young and we wait until we realize just how little we actually know, we might be too scared to ever try to fly.
Everyone gets their time to be be one of the hip young things. If they don’t take it, that’s on them, but everyone except the tragically unfortunate gets to have that time in their life. As long as they’re not hurting others, smile and let them revel in their perceived coolness and wisdom. They’ll get older just like we did, and realize how dumb they really were.
A coworker once told me that her mother would observe the overconfidence of the younger generations, smile to herself, and murmur, “Just keep living.” She wished them no ill, but also knew that one day they’d realize how little they had known after all. Some lessons can only be learned through experience, and that’s okay because it’s how even the oldest among us learned, back when we were the coolest kids on the block and thought we knew everything.
If I had known back then how ignorant I truly was, I’d still be living in my childhood bedroom at 58, perhaps making Lego models for entertainment. Youthful ignorance is a blessing from God/the gods/Nature because it gives us the confidence to go out there and try. So offer the young’uns a patient smile, OP. Let them have their day. After all, ignorance is far more forgivable at 20 than at 50, so they need to work it out of their systems.
Part of growing up is pushing against boundaries and limits. So there will always be some tension between the generations. I’m 77 yo and don’t pretend to understand today’s youth — attitudes towards work, politics, music (ours was the best), etc. But when I was in my 20’s the country was really split by the Viet Nam war and a generational cultural divide. And my generation thought we knew everything better than any other. So I live and let live, and don’t judge people any more.
I’ve never figured out the perfect way of saying this.
But when you are young, you cannot have experienced what it is like to be old.
But when you are old, you know what it is like both to have been young and to be old.
I don’t look at today’s generation and shake my head.
I do sometimes look at young people and shake my head.
Because I look at things I “knew for sure, and the old people just don’t get it,” when I was young, and shake my head at how stupid and falsely confident I was.
U are maturing
Aristotle an Plato have been quoted taking shit about younger generations. It’s tradition.
Aristotle: Young people are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances. … They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it
Plato: “What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets, inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?”
They even found ancient text of parents complaining about the kids at the time!
You are just getting older. They seem not much worse than millennials seemed. I am worried about how they’ll react to living in a country where their rights are evaporating and their government doesn’t give a shit about them. Millennials might be the last generation to know stability.
Our older generation looked at us the same way.
It is the way. Every younger generation thinks older people don’t know what they are talking about and every older generation thinks young people are doing everything wrong. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.
This is pretty much how things go between generations. There is an old quote attributed to Plato or Socretes that kids were no good anymore; it’s actually from a study in 1907 on the attitudes of the ancients toward their children (source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/).
So some of it is just normal inter-generational bias.
Yes. Story old as time. Younger generations are lazy punks. Older generations are stale and out of touch. My generation is just right.
Every generation is the same old shit.
Kids!
Featuring the wonderful Paul Lynde
I’m the parent of 2 millennials who are at opposite ends of the age spectrum of the generation (generation is birth years 81-96).
It was actually video games that first ruined absolutely everything. My oldest (who has a disability that includes behavioral issues) was terribly addicted to them so we had to take them completely away. So, my youngest couldn’t partake, because we just couldn’t have them in the house. I felt guilty! But, that meant that she had to do other things. And other things, she did! She skateboarded. She made music. She played OUTSIDE (God help her!!!!). But then she would come home sad because her friends just HAD TO go inside to play Call of Duty and she didn’t want to play video games.
Life has been so rough for millennials. So many obstacles. So many tragedies. 9/11. Columbine (we live in Colorado). COVID. Financial challenges. COL. It goes on.
But then there’s Gen Z (97-12). Social media is their everything. I am so very glad there wasn’t social media when I was a teenager. Or cell phones, even. We could just “go” and our parents couldn’t reach us. It was heaven! All we needed was a dime (later a quarter) to phone home if we were in trouble. (Trust me, we hardly ever used that dime or quarter!). Instead, we hung out together, in person! I didn’t have to “tell god and everyone” what I was doing in that moment…because they were all with me!
I love young people so much. I see their challenges. I am grateful for the generation I am in. We were the last ones to have true freedom, I feel.
It used to be that you had no choice but to learn and read about both sides of an issue. Now, good luck with that. With social media everyone lives each day in an echo chamber.
I’m 55 . I don’t.
it’s a habit that can and should be broken. grow!
Do you really not look back, and realize how stupid you were at that age: whatever age it was?
I sure do!
I think it is natural to a degree. But I think it has become exacerbated by the silly labels we now apply to generations. The generational boundaries we attach to people born within a set of arbitrarily chosen range of years is fairly new and often harmful.
Instead of looking at individuals and their own actions, we make these broad generalizations that all ‘Boomers’ do X. Or all “Millennials” do Y. When that simply isn’t true. And is a gross disservice.
The complaints you raise about phone use, photographing everything and social media use are the exact same complaints people my age routinely make about people your age. Yet I know lots of people my age who spend hours every day staring at their phone. And if demographics don’t lie, it is people over 50 that overwhelmingly keep the mother of all social media sites – Facebook – alive.
So, try and avoid broad generalizations, if for no other reason than it definitely ages you, to a minimum and focus on the individual, not their age.
Two things can be true.
I have never, not once, wondered what the hell the generations younger than I are thinking. I know they grew up with different rules, technology, expectations, dreams, everything, than my GenX/late Boomer self did. I know this because I saw these things unfold. 9/11, Covid, the rise of social media, the shift to online shopping, the easy isolation of the keyboard, the increase in understanding of autism, food allergies, social anxiety…
I don’t know if any generation has it harder or easier than any other, but I do know that we all have different fears and concerns, but the universal desire to love and be loved.
We’re very different from different childhoods. if everyone had a camera in their pocket during the last century more people would know what jail felt like.
Even Socrates complained about the younger generation. It’s inevitable.
as a solid gen joneser I would say, based on living long enough, that every generation rolls their eyes at the ancients ahead and the whippersnappers behind.
Yes, disdain for the younger generation is a timeless part of the human condition.
Having said that, the number of young people walking in public with their heads stuck in their phones, just amazes me. On a safety level this is extremely stupid, and a great way to get run over. On a public nuisance level it’s very high, but no one in those younger generations seems to mind when other people do it. When a young person comes walking straight at me with their face in their phone. I just stand my ground and they usually swerve around me at the very last second. I shouldn’t have to do this. They should be more responsible as fellow humans to be aware of their surroundings.
Always. They also always bitch that the kids don’t want to work anymore.
You’re a millennial, you really don’t remember when everyone made fun of us?! (Some of them still are lol)
It started with cave men.
Yes
While some things are constants throughout time for how older and younger generations view each other, there are some differences now that just weren’t there before.
The widespread lack of communication skills and emotional maturity which is stunted due to much less face to face communication. The way anonymity takes away so many consequences for how people communicate. Without those consequences, many lessons aren’t learned.
Since most communication is online or text, there’s a hyperfocus on words and an attempt to reduce each one to one definition and a great removal of nuance and context which used to be naturally understood.
The way people abhor any kind of conflict or discomfort and instead of working things out, they dismiss or ghost others so they don’t have to deal with it.
Without these skills, younger folks are going to have a much harder time dealing with the major problems we’re all facing now. They’re used to instant solutions and those don’t exist for these things. They’re fundamentally lacking in core coping skills for so many things.
Even simple life things like doing the dishes are referred to as “adulting”. There’s a self-induced infantilization and fragility that is widespread and it’s crippling them socially and reducing their capability to deal with life.
If the internet went down and cell phones all stopped working they’d have no clue how to get by or do most things that older generations take for granted.
These kinds of things just weren’t the reality a couple of generations ago. It’s not merely generational, it’s social and technological. It includes changes that are far more stark and vast than the days when the difference went from riding a horse drawn carriage to a motorized vehicle.
The social agreements that kept things working from generation to generation are no longer in place, and now people are living side by side while existing in utterly different realities.
The past is largely seen as obsolete and while many older people will disparage younger people, many also want to help and are turned away with a snotty “ok, boomer”. There are things the younger folks desperately need to learn in order to make it in these times and I fear they will stick to arguing online and think that if they only post hard enough, they’ll change things and they couldn’t be more wrong about that.
What we’re all facing now is going to take a lot of effort and personal sacrifice an will require the aforementioned skills plus many others that are largely lost. Honestly, I think we’re fucked, and I don’t even think it’s the younger folks fault for how they ended up.
Many have crazy ideas about socialism and if they take over, they are going to bring our country to financial disaster.
We are $36 trillion dollars in debt right now, and all they want to do is take everyone’s money through impossibly high taxation and throw even more money at every social problem they can find.
We will end up bankrupt, powerless in the world, and ultimately ruined.
I must be hanging around with different young people. They’re far kinder and considerate than I remember being, and I was considered to be a good kid. I see a lot more full-grown adults having dummy spits than teenagers.
I remember when torn jeans came into fashion, was a hell of a time convincing my parents to buy me a pair of trousers that was torn and more expensive than non-torn trousers
I just asked my buddy the other day, Were we that stupid? when we watched young guy nearly blow himself up with a gas grill. We all did dumb things when younger. If you survive you get smarter. Usually…..
What people forget of this generation of young people is that they were raised from Preschool practicing to hide from a school shooter. They have had to either manage intense anxiety or become numb. They were taught that the adults may not be able to protect them.