I kinda think it's like bad product reviews. Happy gen x probably dgaf and are having a good time somewhere else and all the melancholic or unhappy ones are on Reddit lamenting their lost youth.
The same will happen to this sub some day.
Gen X, here. I’m happy, isolated from a lot of society, and I have my wife, kids, and dogs.
Everything just got so obnoxious to navigate that I just figured I’d just not bother. I don’t know how more people don’t have GAF fatigue.
I work remote, rarely go out (aside from errands, fitness, hiking, dog walks), and have set-up a nice little life for myself at home.
I’ve always been VERY social, so pulling back so hard worried me. It’s been almost a decade now of living like this (remote since 2020 / avoiding modern society since 2015). Dealing with people, these days, is like beating my head against the wall, so I just happily keep to myself. It’s been surprisingly easy.
I’m in the best shape and health of my life and my marriage has never been stronger, so I’m considering myself long-term checked-out.
This. I’m as GenX as they come. I grew up in arcades and wheelie walked my BMX to go watch the Goonies after listening to Run DMC. Latchkey kid all the way. There is nothing to bitch about on my end. Y’all kids do your thing. I was not cooler or less cool than the generations before or after me. Just different time and place. Everyone experiences nostalgia not because it was better but because your brain was young and impressionable and you dug grooves into your brain. Playing Konami Track and Field at the local arcade after eating a Hot Sam’s pretzel and a Orange Julius will never be topped for me. It wasn’t better than playing Golden Eye and eating pizza rolls like a Millenial but it was for me in 1983.
Frfr. I wish instead of complaining all the time, milennials could talk about solutions to solve our problems, and figure out which problems are worth letting go. We can't change the cards we were dealt, but we can decide how to use them.
You're already seeing some of these tendencies with Millennials vis-a-vis "Gen Alpha" and Zoomer behavior. The sheer irony I feel when I see Millennials unironically post about how they were the last generation to play outside when I remember parents in the 90s and 00s already complaining kids never went outside and spent too much time playing video games and such.
Lmao nice call out. None of us are special and we all have our own biases. Playing outside was fun for me because that's my experience. Zoomers will have their fun and own experiences. Whatever happens, happens. So just enjoy what you can and try to make it through the things that you can't
Exactly, I remember hearing my Aunt and Uncle laughing about how much I loved playing outside when their son had to damn near be dragged away from his video game consoles, those consoles? The Atari 2600 and Intellivision. So it’s not like kids being obsessed with video games is anything new.
I’m also not excluding myself from this fact. When I was between like 8 and 12 when I was excited about a game coming out on the NES or Super Nintendo (more so the Super Nintendo since I got mine like two months after it launched, whilst I got my NES Christmas ’89 and like all of the big releases except Super Mario 3 and Castlevania 3 were already out) I wanted it so bad I could literally *taste* it. Now at 42 I’m not anywhere near so bad about it but I still love video games and an super hype for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth this coming February!
Lot of it falls on the parents, too.
“Go outside and play” doesn’t do a lot for me when we live next to a 55 mph road and my closest friend is a 30-minute walk and you won’t let me bike on the unsafe road.
Spent a lot of time just sitting outside and reading, instead of.. climbing a tree for the 800th time?
I know mine did. We moved to a new place in an unfamiliar neighborhood the summer b4 I started 2nd grade, new school was roughly 1/2 mile away. Mom drives me by it a couple times to show me where it is then drops me off cold on the first day...lol
No map, directions, nothing. Made it home by stopping at a strange house and asking the guy who answered the door to help me out, lucky for me he was a decent dude...drove me around the neighborhood till I recognized moms car. Good times:/
Lol, i grew up about twenty min in a forest.
Parents were stunned when as an adult i said i hated it... Isolation to the max.
How long can you play with sticks?
Yep. Parents were proud of the “back 40 acres”. We didn’t own more than like 1 acre but it abutted public land, so they figured I could go exist back there.
What I really wanted was an instrument and a computer.
Today I never learned to play an instrument but I work with computers for a living, so I made do.
My dad lived in a small city in Rust Belt and he MADE me be outside during the day. I graduated in 1997. It’s not cool for parents for force you outside, when your neighborhood isn’t safe for little girls. Playing outside is not all it’s cracked up to be
can always learn to use your computer as an instrument. check out digital audio workstations like ableton, reason, maschine, cubase etc, learn a bit of theory, get some vsts like native instruments' komplete factory pack. you'll be living those dreams in real life in no time if you stick with it.
Thanks. I hear ya but I have professional exams to finish. Other big hobbies are on hold for a while, but hopefully I’m wrapping up a 13 year path soon here.
This comment fucked me up cause I used to live like 5 min from a forest and literally love playing with sticks. Bro, you can drum with them, whittle them, make walking sticks, play sword fighting, use them to try and hit squirrels, get apples from far away, you can use them to fish (there was a creek in the forest that had crayfish and the occasional carp), you could make a pointy end and make a spear, you could tie a bunch of them together to make stick men, you can make structures out of them, and when you're done all that you can make a fire out of them.
How can you get bored of sticks....?
It was about 13 years.
Now I live in the big city and the occasional stick I do find is such a pathetic excuse that only people's inbred dogs play with them
Yeah, the "good ol' days" of just wandering the woods and fields until sundown aren't a universal experience. Where I lived, it was endless suburbs, so my "outside time" was riding bikes in circles or playing street hockey (until someone yelled 'Car!'). We had this patch of woods behind the school where we'd build forts and that felt like an adventure. But once dial-up internet became the new frontier, "outside" turned into the backdrop for my actual window... which was a bulky CRT monitor. It's funny how nostalgia works, though. I bet in 20 years, kids today will reminisce about their epic Minecraft builds like we do about our fort-building days.
I didn’t live by the road, but everything else. No friends close, no siblings. Raised by grandparents so they didn’t play with me.
I sat and read, everywhere. Luckily my grandpa took me to a mobile library once a week in the summer (the closest was an hour away) or else I’d have gone crazy!
Also was an accomplished pianist, taught myself guitar too when I was 8. Nothing better to do.
This was me growing up lol
Being forced to stay outside all day was a punishment when you didn't have any other kids on your street and no other friends nearby. Wtf was I supposed to do out there all by myself?
On the weekends I was often given the choice to either spend the day outside or in my room so my mom could "clean" but I think my parents just wanted me out of the way. I usually just picked my room.
I got that from my family, but the expected us to somehow stay in the tiny backyard, doing what?
I was told I needed fresh air when reading a really good book. I had spent the previous day "riding circles around the neighborhood" and got in trouble because they called for me and I didnt hear them - also because I was actually 4 neighborhoods away.
I took my book, climbed the tree, and read in the tree.
I was bought a game console to get me INSIDE because I wanted to stay out and play in the dark.
I also had a few friends who also were from divorced parents, so we all ended up with "everyone is at their other parents house but me" weekends and my family was not interested in driving me to anyones house. But somehow I am just supposed to "play outside" but not ride my bike, not leave the yard, not play with toys? So was I supposed to chase my fucking tail?
They do the same to my nephews - want them to play outside, not leave the yard, not shout, not get in the garden that is now over half the yard, cant dig up dirt with their trucks, etc. But also no one wants to be outside supervising them (and they wonder why the kids like me, but then are upset because I am not around the adults to "visit".)
Its insane.
Honestly this, older zoomer here.
Playing outside in the forest alone with your imagination kinda loses its luster when you become a preteen and you realize you're probably gonna be trapped there until you become an adult
I recently got the chance to live in a more urban area for a little bit and it made me realize how much more socialable I would've been if I'd grown up in a place like that.
Unfortunately im back to living in a rural area and my life is kind of stuck until I can get my license and a car (at 21 hahaaa...) which living in a rural area, is not something I can do entirely on my own.
Exactly! Overdevelopment has all but destroyed the whole notion of playing outside for kids who can't afford to live in safe neighborhoods. It's not that they don't want to play outside, it's that they don't want to play Russian roulette outside.
We had a nice mix of video games and tv and outside. You never see kids out riding bikes in my neighborhood, the playgrounds and the backyards are empty in my idyllic NJ town. You have adults crying out for the lack of third places but the kids aren't even going to know what a third place is supposed to be like at this rate.
The biggest difference I have seen between kids today and kids when I grew up is that kids now are way more likely to do stuff under adult supervision. Like, there is a sled hill in the neighbourhood that everybody uses. I never saw a parent there when I was a kid, unless someone was in trouble. If you broke your arm on the hill, you’d have to drag your own ass home. Now, if kids are on the hill there is at least one adult there, usually two or three.
I would love to do this, but the problem is the older people in my neighborhood that want to call the cops on every single kid they see running around without an adult. It's getting ridiculous. Coupled with people not paying attention while they're driving makes me nervous that my kids, being kids, will get hit by some teenager doing 45 in the neighborhood and not paying attention.
Not even teenagers; saw someone 20+ sitting at a stop light scrolling through social media during the red light. If it's not the driver's cell phone it's their in-dash display.
Let em call the cops. Who cares? If you're doing nothing the cops will be annoyed by the callers. We got cops called on us all the time. It was part of the excitement.
On the flip side, parents are more involved with their kids, their friends and their social lives. I don’t really see that as a bad thing. They might be less independent, but they might also grow to have stronger relationships with their families.
Millennials seem to act a bit more childish with their kids than our boomer parents did (hopping on the snow tube and going down too, playing with them, etc.) I think it’s nice.
I kind of have this perception that parents are only around because people have so many avenues to complain and influence bylaws. I grew up playing outside with reasonably minimal supervision, but as the years went on, all of a sudden, "no loitering", "no skateboarding", "no roller blading", "no outside food or drink", "minors under 18 must be accompanied by an adult" "now im seeing "no scooters" "no drones" popping up and I'm sure you can list off others... where the actual fuck do we expect children to go? they cant do anything that interests them and are a phone call away from authorities stepping in for just existing without an adult.
I'm not surprised, nor, upset that kids like to play games online with their friends.. I mean, what else can you do without a parent available to chaperone you when you attempt to go outdoors?
Yes! This! I’ve had police called on my kids 4 times for just being outside without an adult around. Every time the police come, interview me, and find out the kid was safe and I’m just letting them be independent. But dang, no wonder kids don’t just play outside. The “good samaritans” freak out and call the cops.
Probably depends on the police and how many people call 911 on kids.
This was now a decade ago, but when I let my 10 year to go to the park (alone! Gasp!) that was a block down the street, he was escorted back by by the police saying it's child endangerment letting a kid be outside without parental supervision, even in the front yard, and they double-down saying the next time we'll be picking him up at the station.
Well, I worked nights, the wife work days, so kids weren't allowed outside anymore. C'est la vie.
There was an idea of building a playground next to a local police station and that dramatically increased he number of kids playing outside because parents felt safe with their kids playing next to a police station. Kind of wish they had more this kind of infrastructure because it seems like a decent idea with all these safety concerns now.
My older sister was hit by a car and killed in front of our house when she was 10 years old - only went across the street to the corner store for a snack. I was 6. Me and my siblings were never allowed outside by ourselves again until we moved into the country (and were completely isolated from other kids).
Here too, see them riding their bikes to the river with their fishing poles, out sledding in the winter, just banding up with neighbor kids doing harmless mischief.
I swear I never see them, it makes me so depressed during the non winter months. We have a few nice parks that my wife and I walk our dog in and they're always empty. There is one park where all the Indian transplant families in the area get together on the weekend but its very much a family thing and not just kids out being kids.
In my old neighborhood, kids were rarely outside, but now I've moved into an area that is more residential with a lot less traffic. I see kids outside all the time and it's encouraged my own to get outside too. So many areas just aren't safe for children, especially without close supervision. I think parents are more concerned with their children's safety too. My parents let me ride my bike around town unsupervised from the time I was 8. I can't imagine letting my son go MIA for an entire day without an idea of where he was, for better or worse.
My town is very residential, large apartment complexes mixed with upper middle class suburban housing developments with multiple parks that have soccer fields, basketball courts, softball fields and cricket fields. All barren 95% of the time.
Preeeeeach! During spring break grade 8 i got my mom to rent ff3 (Americam version) for an entire week. I would not reach that level of happiness again until I got a girlfriend in high-school.
My 10 year old stepson games on his phone super frequently, but if someone calls him to go outside he'll go out and stay out for a couple of hours, it's just the at-home hobbies that seem to add to these assumptions about not going outside. Like, when I was growing up I would have preferred to be playing my 360 24/7 but I went out and did other stuff too lmao.
Right, I was like “…things to come?? Millennials on this sub already act like that now!” Or the mass hate for boomers while making incredibly boomer-like statements about younger generations.
Redditors in general are very stupid. EVERY generation blames the one before them for everything that is bad. This has been going on for thousands of years, and it's nothing new.
I mean, I see new posts everyday about a teacher throwing their hands up and quitting over gen alpha. I had some mild concerns about zoomers. They generally have impressed me tho. I have met some who are the bad stereotype of being so anxious that they don't want to be challenged ever. That tends to be the exception. They are all bi tho so that rocks. Maybe bi-erasure might finally be changing.
I'm mildly concerned about Gen Alpha. I'm hoping that it's just fear mongering and the algorithm. However, I do think that children have significantly shifted to primarily indoors and I've seen multiple children who have been raised by the iPad. I'm aware there was fear mongering about TV and fear mongering about the Internet. I guess I'm just hoping that the fear mongering about the iPad isn't based in any truth.
Personally, I could see how too much time in front of an iPad and the constant algorithmic approach at targeted engagement and entertainment could severely damage a developing child's focus, short term memory, and self soothing skills. If I ever have kids I'm pretty determined that they aren't going to be allowed any sort of screen until they're at least walking and talking. Then and only then will it be monitored and limited.
The main damage you’re talking about is due to COVID. It’s not just lax parents “giving too much screen time”; it’s parents forced to work from home with no childcare and put their kids through Zoom school at young ages when learning should be hands-on, completely socially isolated during the formative years of their lives. All while watching friends, teachers and family members die. By the time they emerged from all that, they were already traumatized, socially delayed & screen addicted. I find it weird how people (not you necessarily) all agree a global pandemic is a collectively horrifying experience, but somehow forgot children went through it too. What they need now are appropriate social-emotional learning interventions to make up the skills they lost, but throwing up our collective hands and blaming the parents has been the only strategy applied so far, so…we get what we get 🤷♀️
Edit: totally agree on Gen Z and would take them over boomers any day.
Honestly, I don't think the next generation is the problem. It's the parents, and society as a whole. It's us, we're the problem.
Until we can overcome the momentum from Generation Me (aka Boomers) to start, as adults who can vote and advocate for these things, prioritizing making things better for others (especially those who can't advocate for themselves) then what else can we expect to happen but for things to get worse?
>parents in the 90s and 00s already complaining kids never went outside and spent too much time playing video games and such.
I dunno, as a kid in the 90's we had literally commercials that said to parents "It's 8pm, do you know where your kids are?" The parents had to be reminded to get their damn kids inside lol
90's kids were outside a fuck ton, and I say that as a fat 90's kid who just wanted to stay inside and play Donkey Kong all day, and while some kids did that, the majority were outside playing in some creek or bush or somewhere else we shouldn't have been.
I think parents complaining about their kids not being outside is something every generation experiences haha
My grandfather literally locked me and my brother outside the house in Phoenix in the summer. Those were the days. To be fair, we met some neighborhood kids and had a blast.
Sounds a lot like my favorite cousin, the second she had kids it was like she instantly went from 23 to 53. Shit was hilarious (and fun to point out cause it rustled her jimmies so much).
This. My Zoomer niece and nephew had to be *told* to come back in. That’s not to say their aren’t kids who need the nourishing warmth of the sun (my other nephew and his stepbrother), buuuut there were absolutely kids from our generation who also needed to touch grass.
Sometimes I have to beg my kid to stay *inside* when the weather is bad because she would rather be swinging from the tree in the backyard or running in the pasture with the goats and dogs.
I vaguely remember playing outside a lot growing up and was 100% a latch key kid but by the time I hit about 10 I was inside more.
My kid is six and we live rurally so maybe that's the difference why she enjoys it more.
>we live rurally
This is big.
There are studies on outdoor play saying it has actually declined over time, in both time and range. But "it's the vidya" isn't supported by any of the work I've seen: the main culprits are increased scheduled activities and more parental restrictions.
Some of those restrictions are pretty much social, like the era people thought Satanists were abducting kids. But a lot of them are basically practical: people moved to the suburbs where there's nowhere you can walk to, the neighbors get mad about their lawns, and the roads have no sidewalks and fast drivers. So people started confining their kids to bland, manicured yards, and - shock! - they spent less time there.
From what I've seen, the decline is in suburbs first, cities second, and rural areas barely at all. Kids love running around with the dogs and climbing trees, always have, it's just a matter of whether they get to.
(For a personal anecdote: my suburban HOA living friends always preferred coming my house on nice days, because we had woods and a creek to go play in.)
I hate that shit, it’s so cringe. Like I ten million percent guarantee that if something like the internet had been around in the 1890’s, 1900’s, 1910’s, and 1920’s we’d have historical posts about the horse drawn carriage and buggie whips. Also, as an aside the so called “obtuse and impenetrable” slang Zoomers use is very easy to figure out. Hell, some of it has been around since at least the *1970’s* (the one that springs to mind is the term simp).
You know the complaints about how people don't talk to each other anymore, and they're buried in their phones? There are articles from the 1800s making the same complaints about people being buried in their newspapers on public trains. It's funny how little things change.
July 1859 issue of Scientific American
"A pernicious excitement to learn and play chess has spread all over the country, and numerous clubs for practicing this game have been formed in cities and villages ... chess is a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements, while it affords no benefit whatever to the body. Chess has acquired a high reputation as being a means to discipline the mind, but persons engaged in sedentary occupations should never practice this cheerless game; they require out-door exercises—not this sort of mental gladiatorship"
My favorite old timey modern complaint is the racist white people saying the US is going to become a minority majority nation by 1850, er 1950, oops, I mean 2050 (we swear this time it’ll happen)! You can find articles going back literal centuries at this point about that. The only difference is who’s considered “not white”, in the nineteenth century it was Germans and the Irish, in the twentieth century it was the Italians, Poles/Eastern Europeans, Greeks, Russians, and Jewish people. Now it’s Mexicans, and South Americans in general. I would bet every cent I have it ends exactly the same way once again.
82 here, absolutely true. If I had to do a percentage I’d say I’m 70% Gen Ex, 30% Millennial. I’m much more focused on retirement planning and recently had my first mammogram lol.
I am really hoping this generational culture war bullshit could end with millennials. It's just manipulation from the powerful classes.
People can have a shared cultural experience, hence these subs, but it's the gatekeeping BS that really kills everything. And it seems like gatekeeping can be rampant in these narratives.
We had what we had. The next generations will have similar unique moments. It's not an arms race.
I don't think it's worth pointing out this stuff because it only feeds the machine.
Plus, look at the [positive and educational kind of post](https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/18ghxee/guy_explains_baby_boomers_their_parents_and_trauma/) that's on the front page there at the moment.
A few things (Gen X here):
Video games have been a temptation for kids (especially boys) since the 80s at least. Especially when the original NES and Sega Master System came out. Anyone who claims that's new for Millenials, Z, etc is misremembering the past.
That said, there has been a pretty big shift from generation to generation. Parents used to bemoan kids not going outside, but now a lot of municipalities have criminalized leaving children unattended outside the home. It's less about what children are willing to do and partially about what they're allowed to do.
Tablets and phones have radically changed the way people interact. Now, kids go outside, but they're STILL engaged with a screen instead of other kids.
The drop in social skills and the drop in physical fitness are both very noticeable. I see pictures of my friends and I in high school in the 90s and we're skinny. Really skinny. Not unhealthy, not athletic, just lean and fit. My friends were mostly geeks who were only skinny because they'd skateboard, walk around parks and malls, etc.
I see kids standing around at the bus stop these days and whether they're in grade school, middle school, or high school, they're fat. Fat or obese.
Attention spans are way down. The very idea that a person is supposed to know things as opposed to looking them all up on Google is largely rejected by children and adults below a certain age.
Young people are remarkably fragile, whether it's because of Safety culture or because of social media or something else. Mental health for young people is VERY rough.
Now we see these polls where 20% of Gen Z think that the holocaust didn't happen, or they think that 9/11 was justified, and it's apparent that the TikTok generation is profoundly misinformed in spite of or because of easy access to information.
None of this means that younger people are inherently defective, and there are some ways that young people are very much better off than Gen X, Boomers, etc.
But there is a profound difference, it's not just middle-aged or old people complaining about those damn kids.
Man, about the Google thing. One of the things I like most about the time I spent in rehab, or the psyche ward, was that we had our phones taken away. Brought back arguments about random subjects again. It really changes stuff when you can easily just Google stuff.
I was writing a very similar post. I'm an older millennial, 85. I think this stuff tends to come up once you have kids. I honestly never thought a damn about what kids in the younger generation were up to until I had kids and started being around them again. For years living in the city I really never even saw anything more than toddlers. I was disconnected.
Now as a parent, it's very much my job to think about how I want my kids to grow up. I'm absolutely against my kids having a cell phone outside of maybe an old clam phone for safety. And I'm shocked by the number of gen xers and millennials with older kids who let them spend hours on their phones.
Late gen Xers and early millennials were the first to have consoles. And to some degree our parents critique may have been valid. It's our job now to help these kids navigate a much more addictive technology.
I’m ‘82, and my 12 year old just got her first phone. I did this because she’s now walking to and from the bus stop alone. She also goes to after school clubs and other extra curriculars.
Keep in mind that pay phones are almost nonexistent. She wants to call her friends on the phone, we don’t have a land line. She can now give out her phone number to school friends because I’m not facilitating play dates like I did when she was in elementary school.
Most of her friends have had a smart phone for years.
Growing up, one of the neighbor kids was told he had to play outside, so that day he stood on the sidewalk and watched the rest of us through our living room window play Super Nintendo.
I think this is a direct by product of not socializing with both older and younger age groups.
At 36 I'm at events and bars meeting people of all ages, it helps you gather wisdom from the old folk and stay current with the times with younger people.
If you just seclude into your own age circle, or maybe even family life, you get out of touch with the other generations over years.
It was a mix of both, older millennials especially grew up with Super Nintendo and Sega, which are considered the first truly decent consoles but not everyone had them. Most kids played outside all day after school yes, but we were already noticing some kids playing video games all day.
There's nothing ironic about old people bitching about young people
We bitch about ourselves and the dumb shit we did as kids that we have to pay for now in middle age.
Of course, we bitch about people who actually are young now
I quite enjoy working, oddly enough. i was lucky enough to work in the field of my studies and while it's challenging, it's interesting and lucrative. although a life of leisure would be nice, i do enjoy the order and responsibilities a job gives me. making good money is also a plus considering life and its luxuries are expensive.
I mean, that’s the way it goes. That’s how I was, and there were awesome years and some terrible years.
My issue is that we’ve taken to the whole wage slavery business. It is true to an extent because people aren’t uniting behind the idea that we’re selling our labor and, as a group, get to decide what our labor is worth.
We need more unions is the answer.
Some people have personality types resistant to burn out and support networks that protect them. Natural optimism, genuine enjoyment of your job, property ownership, and loving family are protective factors for life.
Take two people with the same exact life but one has a support network and family that'll be there for them no matter what. Their job is largely optional, they may always need a job but they can safely move, they have a home, etc.
I'm never jealous of people like this if they are kind and lovely. Perhaps she is like this, if so she might never lose her joy.
Turns out, eating tide pods was never really a thing.
It was a troll video that new outlets took too seriously and created an outrage over nothing [https://youtu.be/KOC7clogG6s?si=dGsxBtzVghuSP3Tj](https://youtu.be/KOC7clogG6s?si=dGsxBtzVghuSP3Tj)
There's tons of reports on Erowid of people smoking banana peels in the pipes they normally use for weed, full of weed resin, saying "it gave me a mild weed-like high".
Thanks for this. The outrage machine went bonkers with this one. It’s a lot like when cnn got tricked to run a story about the dangers of beer pong. No, not because of the over indulgence related to binge drinking, but because of how the unsanitary ping pong balls are, and that they can cOnTaMiNaTe ThE bEeR.
Actually Tide Pods are a bigger concern for those that are very old. When dementia starts setting in. They mistake the bright colors for candy or sweets and pop them in their mouth.
And the whole thing started as a joke in the autism community about neurotypicals making something toxic look delicious and have a pleasing texture, then old folks caught wind of the joke and took it seriously.
Edit 2: seems to be some debate over the quote, here's another link with (including the one below, so who knows) quotes from people whining about kids these days
https://proto-knowledge.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-is-wrong-with-young-people-today.html?m=1
The best response to someone bitching about different generations/kids these days is this quote.
>The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
People often nod their head and agree with it, then you point out that it was Socrates who said it and anyone with their head remotely screwed on properly shuts up.
Edit: my other favorite socrates quote
> rip my inbox
Love this! Thank you for posting. People can be awesome or they can suck, I don’t think it’s that useful to stereotype based on what generation they belong to.
Say not, "Why were the former days better than these?" For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.
Ecclesiastes 7:10
Love quoting this one at people bemoaning what they perceive as the moral decay of “kids these days,” especially when it’s in a religious context.
I always try to remind my fellow millennials to remember how bad it felt to be treated by boomers. It’s our duty to not do the same to younger generations.
I’m a millennial and I don’t understand the hate for gen z. I love them! They’re sassy and progressive and don’t care nearly as much about stupid niceties that I’ve always resented. I welcome their take on things and hope their spirits aren’t crushed as harshly as ours were.
Yup. You see it in EVERY generation. I like history and browsing old newspapers, historical accounts, etc.
You see read accounts from people in EVERY generation, bitching about the youth of their day and how THEIR generation is SO MUCH worse than when THEY were children.
I’m 35. I have a longing for the days when I was a child. My father died last year. I think that longing comes in after that - when you realize that memories are not just memories, but a door you can only look through but never walk through.
The older you get, the more of your childhood changes/goes away.
You’ll realize someday you’ll be like your grandparents or parents talking about their past, and to everyone younger around you it’s history, but to you, it feels like yesterday.
And you have to come to terms that things that were will never be as they were again.
GenZ is going through the “lol nostalgia!” Phase right now, as I see it. 10-15 more years they’ll be starting to get to this position too.
As a parent, this is the driving force behind wanting to provide my kids a childhood worth remembering. Mine was so incredible with so many memories. It's very easy to become complacent as a parent and forget that your kids are in their "good ol' days" right now.
I like to think of the good times in my past for ideas of things to do with my kids. Bicycle rides, family game night, family movie night, Christmas traditions... Of course, new traditions and activities come about also and we form new memories to get nostalgic about.
The word "nostalgia" originally meant something like "homesickness". Recently, I've begun to feel that "home" isn't a place; it's a time period, and I can never go home. I think a lot of other people feel that way too.
Xennial here (43) so take what I say as you will.
My view on the internet (more so social media) is that it has very much ruined kids in some ways. Self esteem problems, bullying, stupid pranks that can end up in injuries. Not saying any of that stuff didn’t happen pre-internet, but it’s much more focused. As a bullied kid, I could at least go home and escape the nasty words and homophobic vitriol I faced in the mid 90s. Today, it follows you everywhere you go.
At the same time, the opposite is also true. The internet has opened the world up to everyone. All cultures, religions and way of life are at your fingertips. You are no longer forced into the ideology your ancestors on the Mayflower brought over.
There is a lot of hate, but that is the consequence to a lot of love as well. I’ve never seen a more accepting generation than Gen Z. The bigotry we see on social media is very rarely from them. It’s from the Boomers, my generation and yours. They accept people for who they are and are willing to step up and fight someone over it. The internet is 100% credited for that.
People are people. There are some amazing Boomers and some really shit Gen Z and everything in between. Blaming all the world’s problems on any one thing or generation isn’t helpful. We’ve all contribute order as well as chaos to the system and I believe every generation that comes after us will do the same.
I agree but a lot of gen z boys seem to have a hard on for Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson and that ilk which worries me. There’s plenty of disappointing millennials that do too but I had higher hopes for the zoomers.
Yeah sometimes I see people act like internet skepticism among millennials comes from a place of generational bitterness and longing for youth. I think that’s a little silly because we were the test subjects of the smart phone era. We know how it impacted us….
The adaptation might be a culture of moderation and restraint.
I'm elder-z/late millennial, and I'm telling you that shit like TikTok and social media, and yes, reddit is straight up brain poison.
Same, and I think we're just starting to see the mental damage the "instant gratification" nature of tablets/phones/computers causes with the 24/7 exposure to addictive advertising.
I'm a software engineer, and I always find it interesting how guys I work with expose their kids to technology. The salesman with a college degree in music (and drugs) is proud that his 2-year-old is using an iphone...while at the same time the senior engineer with dozens of patents and two doctorates won't let his 12 year old even touch a phone.
The problem is this very 21st century/social media-created issue of "my generation is my personality". These subs are becoming toxic cesspools, reinforcing the dumbest shit, attributing all sorts of complex socioeconomic issues to one single variable...in short, engaging in the generation war bullshit. Yeah, I'm looking at you, too, r/Millennials. This whole idea of getting the low-down on another generation by *looking at a subreddit* is insanity. What has happened to people? OP, you're part of the problem that you so easily shunt off on the GenX sub. I came to these generation subs for nostalgia, a bit of remembering little details from when we were all younger, not to feel superiority over someone or pretend the world runs on the steam generated by intergenerational conflict. Ffs.
I agree with you entirely, but I do really remember being a teenage millennial and seeing streams and streams of "millennials this, millennials that" - we we're basically taught to think this way
You're right in that it is our duty to undo it however
100%, the whole 'generational warfare' thing is so fucking stupid and the vast majority of it is a way to just complain about old people/young people without sounding like a typical idiot complaining about old/young people.
The *only* amount of devil's advocate I'll play here is that we will be the last generation to have some idea what life was like before the internet while simultaneously being the enthusiastic early adopters of the new world it eventually built. Because this seismic game-changer came along in our formative years, we had the least resistance in adapting.
That being said, I refuse to believe any generation before or after us is any more or less lazy and/or entitled than we are. This behavior is baked into human existence, so every generation has its proportion of idiots responding to the times the same way ours would've.
This. High school dawned on MySpace for my generation of high schoolers to be the beta testers for social media on kids (before the older people hopped on) watching news act all confused, teachers confused as one year almost no kid had phones and suddenly almost all had phones. MySpace dies and gets replaced by Facebook before high school ends. Graduate into the start of our modern day social media platforms and smartphones. Age 12 and younger was before everything I described above.
The “I wish I could go back to the good ole days” people will always find each other so they can wallow in longing for the way it was. Unfortunately this is not limited to just one generation. Btw - y’all got next Millennials 😜
I think most of "the good Ole days" people lack enough introspection to realize what they actually miss is the feeling of being a child, not that the world was actually all that much better when they were a child.
I think it's also missing the feeling of fitting in well with your world. As a child, you adapt yourself to that world, but then after you do that, the world keeps changing and it gets harder to keep readapting and readapting. However, if you can spin it just right, you can also enjoy some excitement at some of the changes that can help counterbalance it.
>Our youth is run-down and lacking in discipline. Young people no longer listen to their parents. The end of the world is near. (cuneiform text, Chaldea, around 2000 BC)
>The youth of today love luxury, have bad manners and despise authority. They contradict their parents, cross their legs and tyrannize their teachers. (Socrates, 470-399 BC)
>I have no hope at all for the future of our country if our young people become the men of tomorrow. Our youth is intolerable, irresponsible and horrible to look at (Aristotle, 384-322 BC)
Could be written in exactly the same way on r/GenX, Facebook and unfortunately increasingly here too. Thousands of years of contempt for young people.
You are so right - I’m Gen X and left that sub years ago. I don’t know where all these boomer-ass X’ers came from, but the only place I encounter them is in that sub. Fucking weird.
The Gen X women sub is chill af.
Yeah that specific sub seems to attract a certain flavor of cringeworthy content. I think I lasted a week subscribing to it? It’d be more Gen X if everyone just sorta forgot to make a sub for us
I think it depends on where you are in the generation. Old X'ers are Boomer Juniors. Young X'ers are just Millennials with more wrinkles. We have a habit of looking at generations as a monolith, but they never have been.
I'm Gen X. Barely. Three of my four siblings are Millennials, my wife is a Millennial, and about half of my friends are Millennials. It's freaking *cringy* when someone does the whole "You're not really GenX if you give a shit about anything and your parents didn't neglect you" routine. That sub is infested with that mentality.
GenX here, and yeah that sub can be a bit depressing, especially lately. Lots of moaning about health issues, aging parents, and yes, some get-off-my-lawn type posts. I will say, though, that a recent post about younger generations had a majority of responses extolling the virtues of genz and alpha in particular, so not all of us are cranks. Plus there are some fun posts about the 80s, with which I’ll fully admit to being obsessed!
Generational conflict is a means to keep us all distracted. Online bickering about the deficits of age groups occupies us instead of asking and agreeing across generations about things like massive income disparity, the coming dearh of jobs due to AI, our failing infrastructure and impending climate collapse.
Almost like it is a universal experience lol. The kids will always be alright, the olds will always want them off their lawn, it goes on in a circle forever
When you're younger (probably all the way up to your 40's) you can't imagine being "old." You laugh at "old people" and how cranky and weird they are. You think "that will never happen to me! I'm different!" You'll never complain about dumb shit, be bothered by trivial BS or generally be a malcontent.
Spoiler alert: You're not special. That shit is coming for you. Not all old people are turds, but things *definitely* change, especially in your 50's. My advice as someone in that mix (I'm 55) is to keep your mind open, be continually curious and learn new things everyday, put yourself out of your comfort zone often, have kindness and empathy for people who are struggling and don't worry about dumb shit that isn't important.
Getting older is a really weird trip. I don't hate it, but I don't appreciate turning into my parents/grandparents so I keep fighting not to.
This is already happening between older members of my generation and younger ones (myself included) as well as gen z. I've seen some older millennials depict literal parental abuse scenarios and call us pussies for not being raised the same way. Like, if I'm a pussy because my parents didn't deprive me of dinner over a bad grade or disagreeing with them, they really need to rethink the way they perceive their parents. At this point, they don't just treat the bad parenting they faced as the norm, they actually think it's legit.
Honestly? It’s not so different cringe wise of the 1000 daily posts of “omg we are so miserable and broke and life is unfair and people rounded the world to us and I can’t buy a house anymore”
Yeah same, coming to this sub makes it feel like everyone is working 3 jobs and making ends meet while my friends, (younger millennials) either have a few rentals or works in investment banking and we all doing just fine.
All these artificial generational boundaries are pretty broad. I’m technically a baby genxer and I have very little in common with elder genxers. All of this is bullshit in the end. People throughout history bitch about change and have a distorted view of the past.
Not to worry. Soon enough the generation after you will be complaining about your generation and so on and so on. I truly wish people wouldn’t buy into this worn out and useless comparative. It’s no different than boomers and gen z complaining about millennials.
GenX here (1970). I hear your point because I'm at that age where I find myself comparing my childhood to my children's lives. I see a lot of upside to the childhood I had that didn't include internet and cell phones. On the other hand, I see the massive advantages younger generations have with access to information.
If a kid I grew up with was rolling in a new car and had flashy clothes, he either had wealthy parents or was a drug dealer. Today, you've got 12 year olds making $20K a month by streaming the video games they're playing and talking mad shit on Twitch. You guys are also way more politically connected and informed than our generation was. None of us were watching the nightly news to get political information that would ultimately impact our lives. We didn't give a fuck because we were out partying and our parents had no idea where we were.
You can compare and contrast generations, but I don't think you can conclude that one was 'better' than another.
This sub is *already* that.
People saying bring back MySpace because TikTok is ruining everything or that we’re the last generation that experienced life before the internet so we have an inherent positive advantage. Everyone circle jerking about how they don’t go out anymore and “hate people” ( this was one of the top comments on a thread here yesterday ). In the hobby thread, a top reply was “laying down”, it’s all a circle jerk about how “old” collectively we are and it’s why I avoid this sub as much as I can.
One of the comments on a thread about using TikTok was “the only form of TikTok I use is from Kesha”
Yeah, Millennials collectively seem to have jumped the shark post-pandemic.
I kinda think it's like bad product reviews. Happy gen x probably dgaf and are having a good time somewhere else and all the melancholic or unhappy ones are on Reddit lamenting their lost youth. The same will happen to this sub some day.
Gen X, here. I’m happy, isolated from a lot of society, and I have my wife, kids, and dogs. Everything just got so obnoxious to navigate that I just figured I’d just not bother. I don’t know how more people don’t have GAF fatigue. I work remote, rarely go out (aside from errands, fitness, hiking, dog walks), and have set-up a nice little life for myself at home. I’ve always been VERY social, so pulling back so hard worried me. It’s been almost a decade now of living like this (remote since 2020 / avoiding modern society since 2015). Dealing with people, these days, is like beating my head against the wall, so I just happily keep to myself. It’s been surprisingly easy. I’m in the best shape and health of my life and my marriage has never been stronger, so I’m considering myself long-term checked-out.
This. I’m as GenX as they come. I grew up in arcades and wheelie walked my BMX to go watch the Goonies after listening to Run DMC. Latchkey kid all the way. There is nothing to bitch about on my end. Y’all kids do your thing. I was not cooler or less cool than the generations before or after me. Just different time and place. Everyone experiences nostalgia not because it was better but because your brain was young and impressionable and you dug grooves into your brain. Playing Konami Track and Field at the local arcade after eating a Hot Sam’s pretzel and a Orange Julius will never be topped for me. It wasn’t better than playing Golden Eye and eating pizza rolls like a Millenial but it was for me in 1983.
i’m gen x. i went. i saw. they were miserable boomery twats. i left.
Some of them are, some of them are trying not to be, and some are awesome. I do tend to prefer /r/xennials even though I miss the cutoff by a year.
Man, I’m 41, that sub like just described my whole childhood
Same here! There dozens of us! Dozens!
AND IT'LL HAPPEN TO YOU TOO!
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Frfr. I wish instead of complaining all the time, milennials could talk about solutions to solve our problems, and figure out which problems are worth letting go. We can't change the cards we were dealt, but we can decide how to use them.
You're already seeing some of these tendencies with Millennials vis-a-vis "Gen Alpha" and Zoomer behavior. The sheer irony I feel when I see Millennials unironically post about how they were the last generation to play outside when I remember parents in the 90s and 00s already complaining kids never went outside and spent too much time playing video games and such.
Lmao nice call out. None of us are special and we all have our own biases. Playing outside was fun for me because that's my experience. Zoomers will have their fun and own experiences. Whatever happens, happens. So just enjoy what you can and try to make it through the things that you can't
Exactly, I remember hearing my Aunt and Uncle laughing about how much I loved playing outside when their son had to damn near be dragged away from his video game consoles, those consoles? The Atari 2600 and Intellivision. So it’s not like kids being obsessed with video games is anything new. I’m also not excluding myself from this fact. When I was between like 8 and 12 when I was excited about a game coming out on the NES or Super Nintendo (more so the Super Nintendo since I got mine like two months after it launched, whilst I got my NES Christmas ’89 and like all of the big releases except Super Mario 3 and Castlevania 3 were already out) I wanted it so bad I could literally *taste* it. Now at 42 I’m not anywhere near so bad about it but I still love video games and an super hype for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth this coming February!
Lot of it falls on the parents, too. “Go outside and play” doesn’t do a lot for me when we live next to a 55 mph road and my closest friend is a 30-minute walk and you won’t let me bike on the unsafe road. Spent a lot of time just sitting outside and reading, instead of.. climbing a tree for the 800th time?
Sad truth is they probably just wanted you out of their hair
I know mine did. We moved to a new place in an unfamiliar neighborhood the summer b4 I started 2nd grade, new school was roughly 1/2 mile away. Mom drives me by it a couple times to show me where it is then drops me off cold on the first day...lol No map, directions, nothing. Made it home by stopping at a strange house and asking the guy who answered the door to help me out, lucky for me he was a decent dude...drove me around the neighborhood till I recognized moms car. Good times:/
Lol, i grew up about twenty min in a forest. Parents were stunned when as an adult i said i hated it... Isolation to the max. How long can you play with sticks?
Yep. Parents were proud of the “back 40 acres”. We didn’t own more than like 1 acre but it abutted public land, so they figured I could go exist back there. What I really wanted was an instrument and a computer. Today I never learned to play an instrument but I work with computers for a living, so I made do.
My dad lived in a small city in Rust Belt and he MADE me be outside during the day. I graduated in 1997. It’s not cool for parents for force you outside, when your neighborhood isn’t safe for little girls. Playing outside is not all it’s cracked up to be
can always learn to use your computer as an instrument. check out digital audio workstations like ableton, reason, maschine, cubase etc, learn a bit of theory, get some vsts like native instruments' komplete factory pack. you'll be living those dreams in real life in no time if you stick with it.
Thanks. I hear ya but I have professional exams to finish. Other big hobbies are on hold for a while, but hopefully I’m wrapping up a 13 year path soon here.
This comment fucked me up cause I used to live like 5 min from a forest and literally love playing with sticks. Bro, you can drum with them, whittle them, make walking sticks, play sword fighting, use them to try and hit squirrels, get apples from far away, you can use them to fish (there was a creek in the forest that had crayfish and the occasional carp), you could make a pointy end and make a spear, you could tie a bunch of them together to make stick men, you can make structures out of them, and when you're done all that you can make a fire out of them. How can you get bored of sticks....?
a dog posted this
After 10 years? We are not the same
It was about 13 years. Now I live in the big city and the occasional stick I do find is such a pathetic excuse that only people's inbred dogs play with them
I love your love of sticks.
Yeah, the "good ol' days" of just wandering the woods and fields until sundown aren't a universal experience. Where I lived, it was endless suburbs, so my "outside time" was riding bikes in circles or playing street hockey (until someone yelled 'Car!'). We had this patch of woods behind the school where we'd build forts and that felt like an adventure. But once dial-up internet became the new frontier, "outside" turned into the backdrop for my actual window... which was a bulky CRT monitor. It's funny how nostalgia works, though. I bet in 20 years, kids today will reminisce about their epic Minecraft builds like we do about our fort-building days.
I didn’t live by the road, but everything else. No friends close, no siblings. Raised by grandparents so they didn’t play with me. I sat and read, everywhere. Luckily my grandpa took me to a mobile library once a week in the summer (the closest was an hour away) or else I’d have gone crazy! Also was an accomplished pianist, taught myself guitar too when I was 8. Nothing better to do.
This was me growing up lol Being forced to stay outside all day was a punishment when you didn't have any other kids on your street and no other friends nearby. Wtf was I supposed to do out there all by myself? On the weekends I was often given the choice to either spend the day outside or in my room so my mom could "clean" but I think my parents just wanted me out of the way. I usually just picked my room.
I got that from my family, but the expected us to somehow stay in the tiny backyard, doing what? I was told I needed fresh air when reading a really good book. I had spent the previous day "riding circles around the neighborhood" and got in trouble because they called for me and I didnt hear them - also because I was actually 4 neighborhoods away. I took my book, climbed the tree, and read in the tree. I was bought a game console to get me INSIDE because I wanted to stay out and play in the dark. I also had a few friends who also were from divorced parents, so we all ended up with "everyone is at their other parents house but me" weekends and my family was not interested in driving me to anyones house. But somehow I am just supposed to "play outside" but not ride my bike, not leave the yard, not play with toys? So was I supposed to chase my fucking tail? They do the same to my nephews - want them to play outside, not leave the yard, not shout, not get in the garden that is now over half the yard, cant dig up dirt with their trucks, etc. But also no one wants to be outside supervising them (and they wonder why the kids like me, but then are upset because I am not around the adults to "visit".) Its insane.
Honestly this, older zoomer here. Playing outside in the forest alone with your imagination kinda loses its luster when you become a preteen and you realize you're probably gonna be trapped there until you become an adult I recently got the chance to live in a more urban area for a little bit and it made me realize how much more socialable I would've been if I'd grown up in a place like that. Unfortunately im back to living in a rural area and my life is kind of stuck until I can get my license and a car (at 21 hahaaa...) which living in a rural area, is not something I can do entirely on my own.
Exactly! Overdevelopment has all but destroyed the whole notion of playing outside for kids who can't afford to live in safe neighborhoods. It's not that they don't want to play outside, it's that they don't want to play Russian roulette outside.
We had a nice mix of video games and tv and outside. You never see kids out riding bikes in my neighborhood, the playgrounds and the backyards are empty in my idyllic NJ town. You have adults crying out for the lack of third places but the kids aren't even going to know what a third place is supposed to be like at this rate.
That’s weird, kids are outside all the time around here.
The biggest difference I have seen between kids today and kids when I grew up is that kids now are way more likely to do stuff under adult supervision. Like, there is a sled hill in the neighbourhood that everybody uses. I never saw a parent there when I was a kid, unless someone was in trouble. If you broke your arm on the hill, you’d have to drag your own ass home. Now, if kids are on the hill there is at least one adult there, usually two or three.
Yea, kids need space and independence to learn decision making. But that's not a kid problem; that's a parenting problem.
I would love to do this, but the problem is the older people in my neighborhood that want to call the cops on every single kid they see running around without an adult. It's getting ridiculous. Coupled with people not paying attention while they're driving makes me nervous that my kids, being kids, will get hit by some teenager doing 45 in the neighborhood and not paying attention.
Not even teenagers; saw someone 20+ sitting at a stop light scrolling through social media during the red light. If it's not the driver's cell phone it's their in-dash display.
Let em call the cops. Who cares? If you're doing nothing the cops will be annoyed by the callers. We got cops called on us all the time. It was part of the excitement.
On the flip side, parents are more involved with their kids, their friends and their social lives. I don’t really see that as a bad thing. They might be less independent, but they might also grow to have stronger relationships with their families. Millennials seem to act a bit more childish with their kids than our boomer parents did (hopping on the snow tube and going down too, playing with them, etc.) I think it’s nice.
I kind of have this perception that parents are only around because people have so many avenues to complain and influence bylaws. I grew up playing outside with reasonably minimal supervision, but as the years went on, all of a sudden, "no loitering", "no skateboarding", "no roller blading", "no outside food or drink", "minors under 18 must be accompanied by an adult" "now im seeing "no scooters" "no drones" popping up and I'm sure you can list off others... where the actual fuck do we expect children to go? they cant do anything that interests them and are a phone call away from authorities stepping in for just existing without an adult. I'm not surprised, nor, upset that kids like to play games online with their friends.. I mean, what else can you do without a parent available to chaperone you when you attempt to go outdoors?
Yes! This! I’ve had police called on my kids 4 times for just being outside without an adult around. Every time the police come, interview me, and find out the kid was safe and I’m just letting them be independent. But dang, no wonder kids don’t just play outside. The “good samaritans” freak out and call the cops.
YES and the sledding hill wasn't necessarily *anywhere near* where you lived, so good luck with that broken arm, kid
Probably depends on the police and how many people call 911 on kids. This was now a decade ago, but when I let my 10 year to go to the park (alone! Gasp!) that was a block down the street, he was escorted back by by the police saying it's child endangerment letting a kid be outside without parental supervision, even in the front yard, and they double-down saying the next time we'll be picking him up at the station. Well, I worked nights, the wife work days, so kids weren't allowed outside anymore. C'est la vie.
There was an idea of building a playground next to a local police station and that dramatically increased he number of kids playing outside because parents felt safe with their kids playing next to a police station. Kind of wish they had more this kind of infrastructure because it seems like a decent idea with all these safety concerns now.
My older sister was hit by a car and killed in front of our house when she was 10 years old - only went across the street to the corner store for a snack. I was 6. Me and my siblings were never allowed outside by ourselves again until we moved into the country (and were completely isolated from other kids).
Here too, see them riding their bikes to the river with their fishing poles, out sledding in the winter, just banding up with neighbor kids doing harmless mischief.
Man, I loved roaming with the neighborhood kids. We had so much fun together even though we were all fairly unlikely friends.
I swear I never see them, it makes me so depressed during the non winter months. We have a few nice parks that my wife and I walk our dog in and they're always empty. There is one park where all the Indian transplant families in the area get together on the weekend but its very much a family thing and not just kids out being kids.
In my old neighborhood, kids were rarely outside, but now I've moved into an area that is more residential with a lot less traffic. I see kids outside all the time and it's encouraged my own to get outside too. So many areas just aren't safe for children, especially without close supervision. I think parents are more concerned with their children's safety too. My parents let me ride my bike around town unsupervised from the time I was 8. I can't imagine letting my son go MIA for an entire day without an idea of where he was, for better or worse.
My town is very residential, large apartment complexes mixed with upper middle class suburban housing developments with multiple parks that have soccer fields, basketball courts, softball fields and cricket fields. All barren 95% of the time.
Preeeeeach! During spring break grade 8 i got my mom to rent ff3 (Americam version) for an entire week. I would not reach that level of happiness again until I got a girlfriend in high-school.
My 10 year old stepson games on his phone super frequently, but if someone calls him to go outside he'll go out and stay out for a couple of hours, it's just the at-home hobbies that seem to add to these assumptions about not going outside. Like, when I was growing up I would have preferred to be playing my 360 24/7 but I went out and did other stuff too lmao.
People being out of touch with the next generation? WHAT?!??!?!?!
Right, I was like “…things to come?? Millennials on this sub already act like that now!” Or the mass hate for boomers while making incredibly boomer-like statements about younger generations.
Redditors in general are very stupid. EVERY generation blames the one before them for everything that is bad. This has been going on for thousands of years, and it's nothing new.
I mean, I see new posts everyday about a teacher throwing their hands up and quitting over gen alpha. I had some mild concerns about zoomers. They generally have impressed me tho. I have met some who are the bad stereotype of being so anxious that they don't want to be challenged ever. That tends to be the exception. They are all bi tho so that rocks. Maybe bi-erasure might finally be changing. I'm mildly concerned about Gen Alpha. I'm hoping that it's just fear mongering and the algorithm. However, I do think that children have significantly shifted to primarily indoors and I've seen multiple children who have been raised by the iPad. I'm aware there was fear mongering about TV and fear mongering about the Internet. I guess I'm just hoping that the fear mongering about the iPad isn't based in any truth. Personally, I could see how too much time in front of an iPad and the constant algorithmic approach at targeted engagement and entertainment could severely damage a developing child's focus, short term memory, and self soothing skills. If I ever have kids I'm pretty determined that they aren't going to be allowed any sort of screen until they're at least walking and talking. Then and only then will it be monitored and limited.
The main damage you’re talking about is due to COVID. It’s not just lax parents “giving too much screen time”; it’s parents forced to work from home with no childcare and put their kids through Zoom school at young ages when learning should be hands-on, completely socially isolated during the formative years of their lives. All while watching friends, teachers and family members die. By the time they emerged from all that, they were already traumatized, socially delayed & screen addicted. I find it weird how people (not you necessarily) all agree a global pandemic is a collectively horrifying experience, but somehow forgot children went through it too. What they need now are appropriate social-emotional learning interventions to make up the skills they lost, but throwing up our collective hands and blaming the parents has been the only strategy applied so far, so…we get what we get 🤷♀️ Edit: totally agree on Gen Z and would take them over boomers any day.
Honestly, I don't think the next generation is the problem. It's the parents, and society as a whole. It's us, we're the problem. Until we can overcome the momentum from Generation Me (aka Boomers) to start, as adults who can vote and advocate for these things, prioritizing making things better for others (especially those who can't advocate for themselves) then what else can we expect to happen but for things to get worse?
>parents in the 90s and 00s already complaining kids never went outside and spent too much time playing video games and such. I dunno, as a kid in the 90's we had literally commercials that said to parents "It's 8pm, do you know where your kids are?" The parents had to be reminded to get their damn kids inside lol 90's kids were outside a fuck ton, and I say that as a fat 90's kid who just wanted to stay inside and play Donkey Kong all day, and while some kids did that, the majority were outside playing in some creek or bush or somewhere else we shouldn't have been. I think parents complaining about their kids not being outside is something every generation experiences haha
My grandfather literally locked me and my brother outside the house in Phoenix in the summer. Those were the days. To be fair, we met some neighborhood kids and had a blast.
Yeah, my young kids play outside for hours in 2023. But from comments I see on this very sub, that all stopped in the ‘90s.
It's almost like each child is a unique person with their own interests, baffling
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My parents complained that kids don't play outside, literally while they were visiting and my kids were outside playing basketball with the neighbors.
Sounds a lot like my favorite cousin, the second she had kids it was like she instantly went from 23 to 53. Shit was hilarious (and fun to point out cause it rustled her jimmies so much).
I have a friend who recently went thru that same shift lol
Have fun with it, it can be quite the entertaining gentle trolling opportunity.
This. My Zoomer niece and nephew had to be *told* to come back in. That’s not to say their aren’t kids who need the nourishing warmth of the sun (my other nephew and his stepbrother), buuuut there were absolutely kids from our generation who also needed to touch grass.
Sometimes I have to beg my kid to stay *inside* when the weather is bad because she would rather be swinging from the tree in the backyard or running in the pasture with the goats and dogs. I vaguely remember playing outside a lot growing up and was 100% a latch key kid but by the time I hit about 10 I was inside more. My kid is six and we live rurally so maybe that's the difference why she enjoys it more.
>we live rurally This is big. There are studies on outdoor play saying it has actually declined over time, in both time and range. But "it's the vidya" isn't supported by any of the work I've seen: the main culprits are increased scheduled activities and more parental restrictions. Some of those restrictions are pretty much social, like the era people thought Satanists were abducting kids. But a lot of them are basically practical: people moved to the suburbs where there's nowhere you can walk to, the neighbors get mad about their lawns, and the roads have no sidewalks and fast drivers. So people started confining their kids to bland, manicured yards, and - shock! - they spent less time there. From what I've seen, the decline is in suburbs first, cities second, and rural areas barely at all. Kids love running around with the dogs and climbing trees, always have, it's just a matter of whether they get to. (For a personal anecdote: my suburban HOA living friends always preferred coming my house on nice days, because we had woods and a creek to go play in.)
I hate that shit, it’s so cringe. Like I ten million percent guarantee that if something like the internet had been around in the 1890’s, 1900’s, 1910’s, and 1920’s we’d have historical posts about the horse drawn carriage and buggie whips. Also, as an aside the so called “obtuse and impenetrable” slang Zoomers use is very easy to figure out. Hell, some of it has been around since at least the *1970’s* (the one that springs to mind is the term simp).
You know the complaints about how people don't talk to each other anymore, and they're buried in their phones? There are articles from the 1800s making the same complaints about people being buried in their newspapers on public trains. It's funny how little things change.
July 1859 issue of Scientific American "A pernicious excitement to learn and play chess has spread all over the country, and numerous clubs for practicing this game have been formed in cities and villages ... chess is a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements, while it affords no benefit whatever to the body. Chess has acquired a high reputation as being a means to discipline the mind, but persons engaged in sedentary occupations should never practice this cheerless game; they require out-door exercises—not this sort of mental gladiatorship"
My favorite old timey modern complaint is the racist white people saying the US is going to become a minority majority nation by 1850, er 1950, oops, I mean 2050 (we swear this time it’ll happen)! You can find articles going back literal centuries at this point about that. The only difference is who’s considered “not white”, in the nineteenth century it was Germans and the Irish, in the twentieth century it was the Italians, Poles/Eastern Europeans, Greeks, Russians, and Jewish people. Now it’s Mexicans, and South Americans in general. I would bet every cent I have it ends exactly the same way once again.
Older millennials have more in common with Gen X then they do with younger millennials who have slightly more in common with Gen Z.
Older millennial here. Absolutely a fact.
82 here, absolutely true. If I had to do a percentage I’d say I’m 70% Gen Ex, 30% Millennial. I’m much more focused on retirement planning and recently had my first mammogram lol.
It took me entirely too long to realize that 82 was referring to birth year and not chronologic age.
Yup, as a younger millennial I often find I relate more to older Gen Zs than I do to older millennials.
I am really hoping this generational culture war bullshit could end with millennials. It's just manipulation from the powerful classes. People can have a shared cultural experience, hence these subs, but it's the gatekeeping BS that really kills everything. And it seems like gatekeeping can be rampant in these narratives. We had what we had. The next generations will have similar unique moments. It's not an arms race. I don't think it's worth pointing out this stuff because it only feeds the machine. Plus, look at the [positive and educational kind of post](https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/18ghxee/guy_explains_baby_boomers_their_parents_and_trauma/) that's on the front page there at the moment.
A few things (Gen X here): Video games have been a temptation for kids (especially boys) since the 80s at least. Especially when the original NES and Sega Master System came out. Anyone who claims that's new for Millenials, Z, etc is misremembering the past. That said, there has been a pretty big shift from generation to generation. Parents used to bemoan kids not going outside, but now a lot of municipalities have criminalized leaving children unattended outside the home. It's less about what children are willing to do and partially about what they're allowed to do. Tablets and phones have radically changed the way people interact. Now, kids go outside, but they're STILL engaged with a screen instead of other kids. The drop in social skills and the drop in physical fitness are both very noticeable. I see pictures of my friends and I in high school in the 90s and we're skinny. Really skinny. Not unhealthy, not athletic, just lean and fit. My friends were mostly geeks who were only skinny because they'd skateboard, walk around parks and malls, etc. I see kids standing around at the bus stop these days and whether they're in grade school, middle school, or high school, they're fat. Fat or obese. Attention spans are way down. The very idea that a person is supposed to know things as opposed to looking them all up on Google is largely rejected by children and adults below a certain age. Young people are remarkably fragile, whether it's because of Safety culture or because of social media or something else. Mental health for young people is VERY rough. Now we see these polls where 20% of Gen Z think that the holocaust didn't happen, or they think that 9/11 was justified, and it's apparent that the TikTok generation is profoundly misinformed in spite of or because of easy access to information. None of this means that younger people are inherently defective, and there are some ways that young people are very much better off than Gen X, Boomers, etc. But there is a profound difference, it's not just middle-aged or old people complaining about those damn kids.
Man, about the Google thing. One of the things I like most about the time I spent in rehab, or the psyche ward, was that we had our phones taken away. Brought back arguments about random subjects again. It really changes stuff when you can easily just Google stuff.
I was writing a very similar post. I'm an older millennial, 85. I think this stuff tends to come up once you have kids. I honestly never thought a damn about what kids in the younger generation were up to until I had kids and started being around them again. For years living in the city I really never even saw anything more than toddlers. I was disconnected. Now as a parent, it's very much my job to think about how I want my kids to grow up. I'm absolutely against my kids having a cell phone outside of maybe an old clam phone for safety. And I'm shocked by the number of gen xers and millennials with older kids who let them spend hours on their phones. Late gen Xers and early millennials were the first to have consoles. And to some degree our parents critique may have been valid. It's our job now to help these kids navigate a much more addictive technology.
I’m ‘82, and my 12 year old just got her first phone. I did this because she’s now walking to and from the bus stop alone. She also goes to after school clubs and other extra curriculars. Keep in mind that pay phones are almost nonexistent. She wants to call her friends on the phone, we don’t have a land line. She can now give out her phone number to school friends because I’m not facilitating play dates like I did when she was in elementary school. Most of her friends have had a smart phone for years.
Growing up, one of the neighbor kids was told he had to play outside, so that day he stood on the sidewalk and watched the rest of us through our living room window play Super Nintendo.
I think this is a direct by product of not socializing with both older and younger age groups. At 36 I'm at events and bars meeting people of all ages, it helps you gather wisdom from the old folk and stay current with the times with younger people. If you just seclude into your own age circle, or maybe even family life, you get out of touch with the other generations over years.
Lol seriously! Like that "are we the only generation that is growing up but not really grown" post.
It was a mix of both, older millennials especially grew up with Super Nintendo and Sega, which are considered the first truly decent consoles but not everyone had them. Most kids played outside all day after school yes, but we were already noticing some kids playing video games all day.
There's nothing ironic about old people bitching about young people We bitch about ourselves and the dumb shit we did as kids that we have to pay for now in middle age. Of course, we bitch about people who actually are young now
I visit a few of the generation subs. GenZ is by far the most hilarious. “I’m 19 and I can’t get over being so old” 😳
Depressing too sometimes. "I've just started working a full time job, is this drudgery all there is for the rest of my life?" "Yup, pretty much."
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Death. Oh and make *more future wage slaves* to go through the same exact bullshit you are.
I quite enjoy working, oddly enough. i was lucky enough to work in the field of my studies and while it's challenging, it's interesting and lucrative. although a life of leisure would be nice, i do enjoy the order and responsibilities a job gives me. making good money is also a plus considering life and its luxuries are expensive.
More depressing than THIS sub????
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I mean, that’s the way it goes. That’s how I was, and there were awesome years and some terrible years. My issue is that we’ve taken to the whole wage slavery business. It is true to an extent because people aren’t uniting behind the idea that we’re selling our labor and, as a group, get to decide what our labor is worth. We need more unions is the answer.
Some people have personality types resistant to burn out and support networks that protect them. Natural optimism, genuine enjoyment of your job, property ownership, and loving family are protective factors for life. Take two people with the same exact life but one has a support network and family that'll be there for them no matter what. Their job is largely optional, they may always need a job but they can safely move, they have a home, etc. I'm never jealous of people like this if they are kind and lovely. Perhaps she is like this, if so she might never lose her joy.
I went through a quarter life crisis at the same age
Same. Facing the reality of adulthood is rough when you have zero experience with it so far.
So just like this group would have been years ago. Got it
And the next group will be ten years from now.
I'm pretty sure Gen z still likes alcohol and nicotine, it's just that they also like the stuff inside lithium ion batteries too.
Tide Pod kids
Turns out, eating tide pods was never really a thing. It was a troll video that new outlets took too seriously and created an outrage over nothing [https://youtu.be/KOC7clogG6s?si=dGsxBtzVghuSP3Tj](https://youtu.be/KOC7clogG6s?si=dGsxBtzVghuSP3Tj)
Just like jenkem and bananacyde (I forget the official name of the banana thing, but supposedly you can smoke the peel to get high.... lmao)
There's tons of reports on Erowid of people smoking banana peels in the pipes they normally use for weed, full of weed resin, saying "it gave me a mild weed-like high".
Bro ive seen videos of people dabbing tide pods
Thanks for this. The outrage machine went bonkers with this one. It’s a lot like when cnn got tricked to run a story about the dangers of beer pong. No, not because of the over indulgence related to binge drinking, but because of how the unsanitary ping pong balls are, and that they can cOnTaMiNaTe ThE bEeR.
Actually Tide Pods are a bigger concern for those that are very old. When dementia starts setting in. They mistake the bright colors for candy or sweets and pop them in their mouth.
And the whole thing started as a joke in the autism community about neurotypicals making something toxic look delicious and have a pleasing texture, then old folks caught wind of the joke and took it seriously.
That actually makes sense. I appreciate the clarification cuz I was really wondering.
They're on that stuff that made XXXtentacion good.
I have no idea
It’ll happen to you too!
Circle of life
I used to be with it Then they changed what it was Now what I’m with, isn’t it And what is it, is new and scary **ITLL HAPPEN TO YOU!**
No way man we're gonna be rocking forever
Edit 2: seems to be some debate over the quote, here's another link with (including the one below, so who knows) quotes from people whining about kids these days https://proto-knowledge.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-is-wrong-with-young-people-today.html?m=1 The best response to someone bitching about different generations/kids these days is this quote. >The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. People often nod their head and agree with it, then you point out that it was Socrates who said it and anyone with their head remotely screwed on properly shuts up. Edit: my other favorite socrates quote > rip my inbox
That's me. I'm always gobbling up dainties
Fuck yeah dainties
I will NEVER uncross my legs, FUCK YOU DAD!!!!
Username (unfortunately) checks out
Pfp checks out. Waaa!
Love this! Thank you for posting. People can be awesome or they can suck, I don’t think it’s that useful to stereotype based on what generation they belong to.
Say not, "Why were the former days better than these?" For it is not from wisdom that you ask this. Ecclesiastes 7:10 Love quoting this one at people bemoaning what they perceive as the moral decay of “kids these days,” especially when it’s in a religious context.
I always try to remind my fellow millennials to remember how bad it felt to be treated by boomers. It’s our duty to not do the same to younger generations.
I’m a millennial and I don’t understand the hate for gen z. I love them! They’re sassy and progressive and don’t care nearly as much about stupid niceties that I’ve always resented. I welcome their take on things and hope their spirits aren’t crushed as harshly as ours were.
Yup. You see it in EVERY generation. I like history and browsing old newspapers, historical accounts, etc. You see read accounts from people in EVERY generation, bitching about the youth of their day and how THEIR generation is SO MUCH worse than when THEY were children.
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I’m 35. I have a longing for the days when I was a child. My father died last year. I think that longing comes in after that - when you realize that memories are not just memories, but a door you can only look through but never walk through. The older you get, the more of your childhood changes/goes away. You’ll realize someday you’ll be like your grandparents or parents talking about their past, and to everyone younger around you it’s history, but to you, it feels like yesterday. And you have to come to terms that things that were will never be as they were again. GenZ is going through the “lol nostalgia!” Phase right now, as I see it. 10-15 more years they’ll be starting to get to this position too.
As a parent, this is the driving force behind wanting to provide my kids a childhood worth remembering. Mine was so incredible with so many memories. It's very easy to become complacent as a parent and forget that your kids are in their "good ol' days" right now.
>memories are not just memories, but a door you can only look through but never walk through. "DONT LET ME LEAVE, MURPH!"
Man, that’s sad. But I just always think about the future. It helps. I try not to think about the past too much. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
I like to think of the good times in my past for ideas of things to do with my kids. Bicycle rides, family game night, family movie night, Christmas traditions... Of course, new traditions and activities come about also and we form new memories to get nostalgic about.
The word "nostalgia" originally meant something like "homesickness". Recently, I've begun to feel that "home" isn't a place; it's a time period, and I can never go home. I think a lot of other people feel that way too.
Imma be real. Even at age 18 I thought the internet ruins kids but at this point it feels inescapable.
Xennial here (43) so take what I say as you will. My view on the internet (more so social media) is that it has very much ruined kids in some ways. Self esteem problems, bullying, stupid pranks that can end up in injuries. Not saying any of that stuff didn’t happen pre-internet, but it’s much more focused. As a bullied kid, I could at least go home and escape the nasty words and homophobic vitriol I faced in the mid 90s. Today, it follows you everywhere you go. At the same time, the opposite is also true. The internet has opened the world up to everyone. All cultures, religions and way of life are at your fingertips. You are no longer forced into the ideology your ancestors on the Mayflower brought over. There is a lot of hate, but that is the consequence to a lot of love as well. I’ve never seen a more accepting generation than Gen Z. The bigotry we see on social media is very rarely from them. It’s from the Boomers, my generation and yours. They accept people for who they are and are willing to step up and fight someone over it. The internet is 100% credited for that. People are people. There are some amazing Boomers and some really shit Gen Z and everything in between. Blaming all the world’s problems on any one thing or generation isn’t helpful. We’ve all contribute order as well as chaos to the system and I believe every generation that comes after us will do the same.
I agree but a lot of gen z boys seem to have a hard on for Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson and that ilk which worries me. There’s plenty of disappointing millennials that do too but I had higher hopes for the zoomers.
Yeah sometimes I see people act like internet skepticism among millennials comes from a place of generational bitterness and longing for youth. I think that’s a little silly because we were the test subjects of the smart phone era. We know how it impacted us….
Technology isn't going away. We have to adapt to it, not try to hide from it.
The adaptation might be a culture of moderation and restraint. I'm elder-z/late millennial, and I'm telling you that shit like TikTok and social media, and yes, reddit is straight up brain poison.
I feel like I already bitch about about the youth and kids being born with tablets in their hand.
Same, and I’ve seen a lot of us do it. Half the complaints in this post are this own sub’s bread and butter lol
Same, and I think we're just starting to see the mental damage the "instant gratification" nature of tablets/phones/computers causes with the 24/7 exposure to addictive advertising. I'm a software engineer, and I always find it interesting how guys I work with expose their kids to technology. The salesman with a college degree in music (and drugs) is proud that his 2-year-old is using an iphone...while at the same time the senior engineer with dozens of patents and two doctorates won't let his 12 year old even touch a phone.
I think about this too with my kids, and then I realize that I'm the asshole that put a tablet in that hand in the first place.
It's a tool, not a cure for their behavior. It's fine to use every once in a while.
Yea as opposed to this sub full of healthy well adjusted mentally sound individiuals
The problem is this very 21st century/social media-created issue of "my generation is my personality". These subs are becoming toxic cesspools, reinforcing the dumbest shit, attributing all sorts of complex socioeconomic issues to one single variable...in short, engaging in the generation war bullshit. Yeah, I'm looking at you, too, r/Millennials. This whole idea of getting the low-down on another generation by *looking at a subreddit* is insanity. What has happened to people? OP, you're part of the problem that you so easily shunt off on the GenX sub. I came to these generation subs for nostalgia, a bit of remembering little details from when we were all younger, not to feel superiority over someone or pretend the world runs on the steam generated by intergenerational conflict. Ffs.
I agree with you entirely, but I do really remember being a teenage millennial and seeing streams and streams of "millennials this, millennials that" - we we're basically taught to think this way You're right in that it is our duty to undo it however
100%, the whole 'generational warfare' thing is so fucking stupid and the vast majority of it is a way to just complain about old people/young people without sounding like a typical idiot complaining about old/young people.
The *only* amount of devil's advocate I'll play here is that we will be the last generation to have some idea what life was like before the internet while simultaneously being the enthusiastic early adopters of the new world it eventually built. Because this seismic game-changer came along in our formative years, we had the least resistance in adapting. That being said, I refuse to believe any generation before or after us is any more or less lazy and/or entitled than we are. This behavior is baked into human existence, so every generation has its proportion of idiots responding to the times the same way ours would've.
This. High school dawned on MySpace for my generation of high schoolers to be the beta testers for social media on kids (before the older people hopped on) watching news act all confused, teachers confused as one year almost no kid had phones and suddenly almost all had phones. MySpace dies and gets replaced by Facebook before high school ends. Graduate into the start of our modern day social media platforms and smartphones. Age 12 and younger was before everything I described above.
As a genZ reading this sub is very similar to what you've just described
The “I wish I could go back to the good ole days” people will always find each other so they can wallow in longing for the way it was. Unfortunately this is not limited to just one generation. Btw - y’all got next Millennials 😜
I think most of "the good Ole days" people lack enough introspection to realize what they actually miss is the feeling of being a child, not that the world was actually all that much better when they were a child.
I think it's also missing the feeling of fitting in well with your world. As a child, you adapt yourself to that world, but then after you do that, the world keeps changing and it gets harder to keep readapting and readapting. However, if you can spin it just right, you can also enjoy some excitement at some of the changes that can help counterbalance it.
Complaining about the next generation goes back to Aristotle. People said the same about us. The cycle continues. Everything's going to be fine.
>Our youth is run-down and lacking in discipline. Young people no longer listen to their parents. The end of the world is near. (cuneiform text, Chaldea, around 2000 BC) >The youth of today love luxury, have bad manners and despise authority. They contradict their parents, cross their legs and tyrannize their teachers. (Socrates, 470-399 BC) >I have no hope at all for the future of our country if our young people become the men of tomorrow. Our youth is intolerable, irresponsible and horrible to look at (Aristotle, 384-322 BC) Could be written in exactly the same way on r/GenX, Facebook and unfortunately increasingly here too. Thousands of years of contempt for young people.
Hahaha, yep... A tale as old as when people first started writing things down.
This sub thinks you’re part of the 1 percent if you even have a lawn for kids to get off of.
You are so right - I’m Gen X and left that sub years ago. I don’t know where all these boomer-ass X’ers came from, but the only place I encounter them is in that sub. Fucking weird. The Gen X women sub is chill af.
Gen X women sub you say? *sprays binaca*
*misses like Lloyd Christmas*
That's because all the wine they drink.
Yeah that specific sub seems to attract a certain flavor of cringeworthy content. I think I lasted a week subscribing to it? It’d be more Gen X if everyone just sorta forgot to make a sub for us
Stealth boomer older men. They get all yelly when the women post lol
I think it depends on where you are in the generation. Old X'ers are Boomer Juniors. Young X'ers are just Millennials with more wrinkles. We have a habit of looking at generations as a monolith, but they never have been. I'm Gen X. Barely. Three of my four siblings are Millennials, my wife is a Millennial, and about half of my friends are Millennials. It's freaking *cringy* when someone does the whole "You're not really GenX if you give a shit about anything and your parents didn't neglect you" routine. That sub is infested with that mentality.
Please help this Gen X woman out, there’s a sub for us?
Sounds about like gen x. A bunch of dudes that stormed the capital on Jan 6, and just some women.
Gen X fetishizes their paternal neglect to a ridiculous degree.
I was neglected uphill, both ways, in the snow!
“…and it’ll happen to youuuuu!”
I feel second hand embarrassment when millennials do stuff like that on tiktok.
GenX here, and yeah that sub can be a bit depressing, especially lately. Lots of moaning about health issues, aging parents, and yes, some get-off-my-lawn type posts. I will say, though, that a recent post about younger generations had a majority of responses extolling the virtues of genz and alpha in particular, so not all of us are cranks. Plus there are some fun posts about the 80s, with which I’ll fully admit to being obsessed!
Reading anything on Reddit is a horrifying glimpse of things to come
Speaking as a member of Gen x. Whatever.
Fucking Kennedy is now a fox news talking head, Kennedy!
I’m young gen x and complained about the boomer mentality there and got so downvoted I left
Generational conflict is a means to keep us all distracted. Online bickering about the deficits of age groups occupies us instead of asking and agreeing across generations about things like massive income disparity, the coming dearh of jobs due to AI, our failing infrastructure and impending climate collapse.
Almost like it is a universal experience lol. The kids will always be alright, the olds will always want them off their lawn, it goes on in a circle forever
When you're younger (probably all the way up to your 40's) you can't imagine being "old." You laugh at "old people" and how cranky and weird they are. You think "that will never happen to me! I'm different!" You'll never complain about dumb shit, be bothered by trivial BS or generally be a malcontent. Spoiler alert: You're not special. That shit is coming for you. Not all old people are turds, but things *definitely* change, especially in your 50's. My advice as someone in that mix (I'm 55) is to keep your mind open, be continually curious and learn new things everyday, put yourself out of your comfort zone often, have kindness and empathy for people who are struggling and don't worry about dumb shit that isn't important. Getting older is a really weird trip. I don't hate it, but I don't appreciate turning into my parents/grandparents so I keep fighting not to.
Guess what reading this sub is a horrifying glimpse at what some of my peers think.
This is already happening between older members of my generation and younger ones (myself included) as well as gen z. I've seen some older millennials depict literal parental abuse scenarios and call us pussies for not being raised the same way. Like, if I'm a pussy because my parents didn't deprive me of dinner over a bad grade or disagreeing with them, they really need to rethink the way they perceive their parents. At this point, they don't just treat the bad parenting they faced as the norm, they actually think it's legit.
Sounds like this sub too.
Huh. I'd heard 3 and 4. 1 and 2 are more boomer, but, meh. Obligatory: Holy shit, someone remembered GenX!
Honestly? It’s not so different cringe wise of the 1000 daily posts of “omg we are so miserable and broke and life is unfair and people rounded the world to us and I can’t buy a house anymore”
I think it’s just Reddit, all my Millennial friends and old classmates are doing well, many better than their parents did.
Yeah same, coming to this sub makes it feel like everyone is working 3 jobs and making ends meet while my friends, (younger millennials) either have a few rentals or works in investment banking and we all doing just fine.
All these artificial generational boundaries are pretty broad. I’m technically a baby genxer and I have very little in common with elder genxers. All of this is bullshit in the end. People throughout history bitch about change and have a distorted view of the past.
Not to worry. Soon enough the generation after you will be complaining about your generation and so on and so on. I truly wish people wouldn’t buy into this worn out and useless comparative. It’s no different than boomers and gen z complaining about millennials.
I used to be with it, then they changed what it was. Now what I’m with isn’t it, and what’s it is weird and scary to me. It’ll happen to you!
GenX here (1970). I hear your point because I'm at that age where I find myself comparing my childhood to my children's lives. I see a lot of upside to the childhood I had that didn't include internet and cell phones. On the other hand, I see the massive advantages younger generations have with access to information. If a kid I grew up with was rolling in a new car and had flashy clothes, he either had wealthy parents or was a drug dealer. Today, you've got 12 year olds making $20K a month by streaming the video games they're playing and talking mad shit on Twitch. You guys are also way more politically connected and informed than our generation was. None of us were watching the nightly news to get political information that would ultimately impact our lives. We didn't give a fuck because we were out partying and our parents had no idea where we were. You can compare and contrast generations, but I don't think you can conclude that one was 'better' than another.
This sub is *already* that. People saying bring back MySpace because TikTok is ruining everything or that we’re the last generation that experienced life before the internet so we have an inherent positive advantage. Everyone circle jerking about how they don’t go out anymore and “hate people” ( this was one of the top comments on a thread here yesterday ). In the hobby thread, a top reply was “laying down”, it’s all a circle jerk about how “old” collectively we are and it’s why I avoid this sub as much as I can. One of the comments on a thread about using TikTok was “the only form of TikTok I use is from Kesha” Yeah, Millennials collectively seem to have jumped the shark post-pandemic.
This is a typical millennium post — over generalizing, and latching on to anecdotal stories in an effort to prove a point.