I'm just not optimistic about the future at all.
The quirks and preferences of the next generation that are different from my quirks and preferences are just different, not necessarily better or worse.
People have been complaining about the terrible thing the new generation does since there has been people. It's a bug / feature of our relatively short lifespan - on one hand our souls calcify a bit as we age and we start to see new as scary at the same time we are getting more powerful in society. On the other hand the reaction to the calcification of the soul that the newer generation has helps to push things into new and different directions, but at a time when those people are not very powerful in society.
It's an interesting balance, and its fun to think about how culture and society would change if that balance was tipped one way or the other.
Do you think this wasn't true among previous generations?
It was (whether the generation was self aware or not) mostly acceptably for people in America in the 1950s to be mildly racist towards black people (it's just, how they grew up, it was the status quo). That's not a get-off-my-lawn observation of that demographic. This was not a simple generational "quirk", it was a notable flaw.
Socially, I think somethings a little up with whatever is going on now days. But that's just me and history will sort this. Things are very hard to sort out as it's actually happening.
https://www.statista.com/chart/16100/total-number-of-hate-cr...
Reported hate crimes passed onto and recorded by the FBI.
These details matter in Understanding Data 101 .. consult your history for lynchings made public on newspaper front pages and sold as postcards yet not reported as hate crimes.
Go on thinking we’ve eliminated racism. You’re factually incorrect.
1) I don't think "we" 've eliminated racism (who's 'we' here?)
2) It is factually correct that an increase in reporting of hate crime doesn't logically correlate with an increase (or decrease) in actual hate crime numbers.
In recent decades in the US it is a sign that hate crime is being taken more seriously and being reported more often by local LEO's to the central FBI stats page.
As you yourself acknowledge the US has known past issues with the reporting of hate crime and there's good reason to suspect that a high proportion of past sch crimes have gone unreported, to either local LEO's or to federal tally sheets.
Note that from a crime stats PoV the US FBI database is barely adequate compared to crime logging in other G20 countries, it's riddled with issues and the FBI meta commentary acknowledges the shortcomings.
People have also been saying “it’s going to get colder” every summer as long as there have been people out of the tropics.
I know that is extreme but I hate the attitude that the quirks and preferences are neither better nor worse. Some quirks could be worse if it becomes society-disrupting.
Somehow, when you look at those "younguns are bad" rants from 50 or 100 years ago, pretty much every time it's over some issue that can only elicit laughter today. Especially when it comes to predictions.
However, this is not an example of that.
But who am I to label a vast swath of the 2023 global population pathologically fucked going forward. How far would I get explaining to people in the 1950s that they might be immoral racists?
I hope I'm wrong, but from what I'm seeing, things ain't slowing down.
I'd rather live in a world where people can be complete fucking weirdos without any consequence, except when their weirdness directly harms other people.
I wouldn't really care if they did it by themselves. For one thing I just don't want to be identified in the background of what is essentially softcore erotica and for another I don't want to be identifiable by Chinese AI or have some sort of weird profile set up that matches my features on their end (or anywhere).
These are real actual harms in my opinion and not just gripes about the next generation.
Their clothes are also extremely well made and have outlasted similar Puma, Nike, Adidas pairs.
Nobody comes home after a hard day and puts on lululemon to go to bed, or sit on the couch and watch movies. Baggy sweats are the opposite of lululemon; cheap, loose fitting, comfortable.
Women want to look good. There’s nothing wrong with that. Men do too. It’s ok to admit it.
I drop by the store for a protein bar before heading home and suddenly I'm the alpha in the room, dousing these poor shoppers in my manly musk and showing off how active I am, flirting a little with the cashier maybe, brain swimming in adrenaline. And then it's actually building confidence moment by moment instead of tearing it down.
Food for thought for anyone like me who loathes the gym and still is looking for good exercise.
One is completely within the realm of normal everyday interactions, and the other can come off as creepy in those situations.
Everyday interactions can feel flirty if you're high from adrenaline and the person happens to be attract(ive|ed) to you. The key is not to try, just be yourself, and interpret it as real flirting that could lead anywhere; they have a lot of these interactions on a daily basis so they usually forget them within a few days.
But the fact that's these interactions are so ephemeral doesn't mean you can't derive a little confidence from it. Small moments like this can make a substantial difference over time, just like even short regular walks with little to no incline have been proven to make a substantial difference to health, even if it won't turn you into an athlete.
Not unlike filming in a church, and capturing in the background normal people going in for confession.
If you haven’t said something to the management, you should. I can’t imagine they’d be thrilled: they should be scared of people wielding cameras within their walls for many reasons.
And I know at the more serious/smaller gym that we train at, since covid, quite a lot of people do remote training with a coach. This seems to be especially common among the powerlifting and olympic lifting sports. Remote coaching means the coach designs programs, and if you want to pay for more than the programming, you buy a tripod, and send the coach videos so that they can critique and correct your form.
That being said, I'm sure it's probably obvious when someone is doing what I'm describing, versus what you are seeing.
The group we are talking about, mostly kids, is beeing targeted by the industriy to consume. They are targeted by ads and even whole campagnes where a lifestyle is sold.
So with that in mind maybe the kids where never allright and we have to be suspect of some trends today. Personaly as someone who grew up in the dawn of social media, I am very against this trend of making everything to content.
It cant be good for the brain to be focused that hard on what other people are thinking
Most normie kids don't make any content.. they just don't.. you can still live a super-normal life and that is what most people do.
Another way of looking at it is that there have always been profit or power seeking activities that cause massive harm to entire generations, until the culture finally learns how to rise up and counteract it.
Usually the pattern is that something genuinely new comes along that we don't have a plan for, millions of people are terribly harmed, and then we sort of figure it out.
Industrialization brought great progress, but it blackened lungs and enslaved children until the progressive labor movement restored some balance. Mechanized warfare and the desire to dominate Europe laid waste to two entire generations, globally, before modern international cooperation brought it somewhat to heel. We poured toxic waste into all the rivers, we applied different laws to people who had different colored skin, we incinerated people who were unlucky enough to be born above oil deposits, all to make a few bucks.
And we've let tech media companies relentlessly commercialize and sexualize us, drive us to anger in search of "engagement" and disassociate us from each other and from our work and things that give us meaning, for at least two generations.
Hopefully we'll figure out how to move past this era too.
It's not a "kids are alright" kind of moment, it's just one of generations of examples of greed leading to people getting harmed.
When I grew up it was rude to call people at dinner time. If you called someone while they were eating it was either ignored, sent to answering machine, or it was answered with a curt "we're eating" before hanging up. This was the 1990s.
When I got my first cellphone, I made a point of excusing myself and leaving a room if it rang because that's how I was raised.
These days boomers seem to have forgotten this etiquette they impressed upon Gen X and Millennials. They answer their phones on speakerphone whenever without excusing themselves and and are completely unapologetic.
People in general today have no concern for walking around in public while having a phone call and get offended if you mistake their conversation and acknowledge them. As rude as it might seem to keep Airpods in all of the time, they have at least saved us from having to listen to other people carrying on and give a visual queue to ignore someone speaking around you.
Speaking of annoying quirks.
Couldn't you have made this comment in any generation though? I could imagine someone making it while listening to a news story about Woodstock on the radio.
Almost every single citizen is now equipped with a surveillance device at all hours of their life, and they have incentive to use them and share the data they collect. This is little to no recourse for you if you don't want to be recorded. At least in the 60s it was a handful of news casters with huge equipment you could steer clear of.
I've edited the comment in an attempt to clarify.
Cameras weren't ubiquitous then but it was a major enough event that a lot of cameras were there.
The magic it Facebook, TikTok, et. al is that they figured out how to generate revenue from content that is just fractionally better than nothing at all. The algorithms can monetize content with a value that is just fractions of a cent less than zero and they do all this without having to pay real money for most of it.
An entire generation now aspires to make a living creating what is effectively content spam. Filler. Junk for the algorithm to promote. And what’s incredible is that they aren’t wrong. You can make a living doing this. The payouts and sponsorships are insane.
It won’t last forever though. Eventually we’ll just have AI created content. You’ll have an infinite stream of “Sick car, what do you do for a living” videos at no cost.
The TikTok of tomorrow is one where you just type in a few words about your interests and it generates an infinite stream of fake videos.
A lot of content that wouldn't have flown in the mainstream during the traditional radio era because it didn't capture the median demographic that the players were competing for can fly online because it captures the long tail and satisfies enough the interests or desires of a single content creator or small team to justify their efforts (where a studio organization can't survive without the kind of advertising revenue you get by being median popular).
A combination of lower costs and wider reach (allowing you to find more of the long tail) changes the mathematics on what is worth someone's time to publish.
And that's without getting off in the US-specific weeds regarding the fact that there was content that categorically could not be on the radio because the otherwise -assumed First Amendment right to freedom of speech / the press was curtailed in the United States by the FCC acting as arbiter on parceling up a finite national resource (whereas the internet is not considered such a resource and therefore there's no central US governing authority telling you what you can and cannot put online in the same way).
Every generation has had their asshole exhibitionists. Technology has just been pushing said assholes towards making TikTube content lately.
Boomers did the radio shock-jockey routine, X did deeply weird television and lately podcasts, Y did 1st gen/text+photo social media, and Z is doing 2nd gen/video+photo social media.
This isn't Gen Y/Z being somehow inferior, "we" (the readers of this community) did this.
The music, games and movies are very much similar from times of old (you might like it, you might not, you might just be getting old, that's the part that never changes or causes alarm). It's social behavior that's peculiar - in a bad way.
Then again, I wasn't around in 1970, so I can only judge that difference based on how it was recorded.