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Comment by cam0 | Hacker News Reader

I'm slightly older than you, so we're both millenials, and I've noticed a lot of my friends sort of struggling with the fact that we're no longer the "young and cool" crowd. The Gen Y/Z TikTok crowd are the cool ones now, and speaking anecdotally the people I know in their late teens and early twenties are quite a bit more sheltered and childish than my friends and I were at that age. We were using fake IDs to get into bars and shows, and my younger cousins are literally spending Friday/Saturday nights inside on social media (pre-Covid).

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>I'm slightly older than you, so we're both millenials, and I've noticed a lot of my friends sort of struggling with the fact that we're no longer the "young and cool" crowd. The Gen Y/Z TikTok crowd are the cool ones now

The funny thing about that, much like when we were that age, those platforms and things the young folks think are cool were made by people who are the age of millenials or older for the most part.

I dunno, when I was younger a lot of the music and stuff I thought was cool was being made by people who were around the same age I am now.

Not too sure what my point is really, your comment just made me think of this. People around that age start lamenting their lack of cool, but are responsible for many of the things people younger than them find cool...something like that I suppose.

  > Now the sound of music comes in silver pills
  > Engineered to suit you, building cheaper thrills  
  > The music of rebellion makes you wanna rage  
  > But it's made by millionaires who are nearly twice your age

from The Sound Of Muzak by Porcupine Tree.

Respectfully, I think the younger generations are “up to” the exact same stuff. I should write a post about college campus ID culture. It’s always fun to break out a pseudonym.

My understanding is that going out, (binge-)drinking has actually significantly gone down in the last decade.

I can't vouch for these specific stats, but I've come across multiple articles over the years that support this. Here's at least some data I found:

https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/binge-drinking

Anecdotally, tons of clubs have closed in since the 90's with no replacement where I lived (Toronto and North Netherlands). Everything at least in my circles suggests that drugs, drinking, partying is all happening less now compared to the previous generations.

Ymmv depending on where you are from though.

I randomly landed and browsed through Courtney Loves Twitter today and she posts lots of pictures of partying in the early 90s with other celebs. It’s the antithesis of what is cool today. Just looks like a train wreck really.

Er, Courtney Love was widely perceived as a trainwreck in the 90s, so her Twitter being full of now-seen-as-trainwreck stuff from the 1990s probably isn’t a good measure of change from the 1990s to now.

But her scene and the train wrecking was seen as “cool” by kids. I don’t think that is the case anymore. Kids look up to Elon Musk and YouTubers want to do startups and content instead.

> But her scene and the train wrecking was seen as “cool” by kids

Not very broadly, even among “the kids” (who, then and now, are far from monolithic.) She was more seen as a trainwreck that was in cool circles, not as a cool trainwreck.

> Kids look up to Elon Musk

Yeah, kids looked up to successful business and tech figures in the 1990s, and there are trainwreck entertainment industry celebs today, too.

It's not the case that Musk is idolized by a similar segment of the youth as would have idolized Love in the 1990s.

Regarding the sheltering: I dunno. The next generation probably isn’t telling you the shit they’re getting into.

Besides that, I spent plenty of Friday evenings staying up until 4 AM playing The Sims (the original game). It’s not like high school kids really have a choice on what they’re doing a lot of times - they don’t have complete freedom of movement.

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