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Comment by Max-q | Hacker News Reader

> To be fair, I don't blame them.

I think it’s fair to say that the blame is on us, the current parents generation. We have formed todays youth differently than our parents formed us.

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That's a cop out, and only reinforces their internalized belief that literally nothing is their own fault.

Find a Gen Z person who is fully accountable for their own actions and you will have located a unicorn. It's uncanny how in-sync that entire generation is with the idea that they are not only owed the world, but have no fault. They are crippled by the actions of "others" (whoever the others are doesn't matter - boomers, the rich, Trump, old people on scooters in Walmart...the who doesn't matter as long as they can point to someone else at fault for everything that hurts their feelings.

I don't know how you grow out of a collective psychosis like that. It's cult-like.

That's the same tired stuff people said about Millennials and Gen Xers before them. The younger generations are vastly more open, honest, kind and generous than older generations. They just have significantly less tolerance for hateful people and "punching down". That rubs older generations the wrong way because they tend to hate (or fear) a lot of things and think it's funny/acceptable to punch down.

Boomers are a generation of narcissists. That’s just a fact that any non-narcissist that talks to one can instantly pick up on. My personal favorite boomer quote is “how can you be so selfish, think about me!” And of course if you make the mistake of telling a boomer narcissist about any challenge you face they’ll immediately go off about how they picked themselves up by their bootstraps and worked their way through college. Note that getting disowned used to be a real threat, but now it’s not because boomer parents aren’t planning to leave their kids or grandkids anything other than a reverse mortgage they’ll never be able to pay off anyhow.

That rubs older generations the wrong way because they tend to hate (or fear) a lot of things

Apparently this casual ageism is "punching up" and therefore fine.

I've always considered the "generations" thing to be more of a state of mind than strictly age-based. Plenty of younger people have a similar fear-based, tradition-bound outlook as actual Boomers.

Also, punching up/down is about status and older people do not automatically receive a higher status, so it's really not an example of "punching up".

No, they're too emotionally delicate to even function as adults. And it's a problem.

Do you have citations that genz are less functional than millennials at the same age? Genz don’t strike me as more emotionally delicate than I’d expect the average young adult. The millennials did the whole occupy Wall Street during the Great Recession, after all. Genz can have their moment too.

This is the kind of critical analysis I'd expect from someone who is too emotionally delicate to function as an adult.

Imagine thinking parents being responsible for how their children turn out is a cop out

You think 15 years old are capable of being responsible for the level of responsibility they developed? Guess they should have made better decisions for their development when they were 10

The age-old shitting on new generations is also an age-old acknowledgement of one's own failures

I wonder how much of this is just what we're seeing online. As we all know, a relatively small number of people post anything publicly.

I work with mostly gen Z. They are great but the definitely don't like working like grandpa. Ie stupid suits and ties, memos, pointless meetings, butts in chairs. If you let them be results driven, they fuckin show up.

You’re mixing up “your responsibility to solve” with “you created this problem in the first place”

You don't see it as disrespectful to pretend Gen Z has no agency, no ability to actually solve their own self-induced problems?

Everything is someone else's fault? Is there anything they have brought about upon themselves that they can solve themselves, or are they helpless?

Why do you insist on missing the point? I never said they have no agency to solve their problems, only that they did not create the lion’s share of the problems.

The problems are mostly self-inflicted. Nobody is forcing them to all move to the same 5 cities and then wonder why houses are so expensive there. Nobody is forcing them to spend their lives on social media despite every study showing the negative impact it has on their mental health. Nobody is forcing them to self-isolate into echo chambers and remove key support from friends/family etc. due to misaligned beliefs or whatever excuse.

These are solved problems, so not fixing it is their own fault. But if you talk to them you'll see they don't want to solve problems, they want to be victims so they can do nothing and blame others for their own shortcomings.

I feel bad for the young people in that generation who aren't wired this way because their own peers are driving them to embrace negativity and toxicity and wear it as a badge. We used to tell people like that to fuck off, now they're embraced - it's creepy.

Fair points, especially on the “same five cities”. That’s what sorting job markets by raw salary combined with wanting “culture” gets. Compare relative salary to CoL instead. That and restrictive zoning to keep property values up so the geriatrics don’t retire in poverty.

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