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Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

Repeat after me and breathe deeply:

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.

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I see people filming themselves at the gym a lot for tiktok videos I assume. Both men and women alike. I've seen them set up tripods or have camera assistants who circle around them filming. It makes me extremely uncomfortable being in the background of a sexualized gym video. Let's not kid ourselves, that's what a lot of these videos are, give me a break. They aren't just filming their abs or biceps or squat video from behind just purely for fitness' sake and they are well aware that their followers are not just really into fitness.

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.

I see this as well, but in my gym it doesn’t seem to be sexual in any way, so I think it depends on the gym and the type of patrons that attend it. Or maybe I’m just naive and didn’t think of it in that way. I will admit it makes me a bit irritated because I never know if I’m accidentally gonna end up in someone’s shot.

A dude doing deadlifts is cool. A woman it’s pretty much always sexual. That’s why they get so many viewers. It’s pervos on YouTube or TikTok wanting to see their spandex clad fannies doing squats. There’s no other reason for lululemon than flagrant sexual exhibitionism. It’s easier to work out with loose fitting clothes.

Athleisure clothes are absolutely comfortable. It is insane to say that entire brand is only for sexual exhibitionism. Lol

Their clothes are also extremely well made and have outlasted similar Puma, Nike, Adidas pairs.

Women I’ve known and talked to have told me that baggy sweats and flannel pajamas bottoms are “comfy.”

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’ve seen women who could deadlift impressive amounts of weight (more than I was able to when I first started), and it definitely wasn’t sexual. But they had professional trainers that were actually giving them correct advice on how to properly lift without hurting themselves. As I mentioned in my original comment, it really depends on the gym and the type of patrons it attracts. In my experience, an LA Fitness (or something like it) might attract that hookup/tiktok/softporn crowd, but a private gym with a dedicated purpose wouldn’t tolerate that kind of thing.

I stopped going to the gym for exercise after I realised it was just making me more depressed. Why? Because the gym would be filled with scantily clad, disgustingly beautiful, sweaty women and men, and I suddenly feel like I'm watching a mainstream porno being fed unrealistic body ideals and that turns to more self loathing. So I started restricting all my exercise to nature trails, preferly with lots of incline and decline in alternation for an interval effect, and preferably an uneven path filled with roots, to get sort of a parkour thing going. Nature is so peaceful and soothing in contrast to suburbia, and it's fantastic exercise.

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.

Please don't flirt with the cashier mister alpha man. She's being paid to be polite to you.

There's flirting and then there's flirting. There's a smile and some harmless smalltalk/jokes in an interaction that lasts under a minute, then there's making compliments out of left field, suggestive jokes and innuendo.

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.

You're worried about fake profiles being setup in your name or being in the background of someone else's videos? That's last generarion's concerns. Facebook was opened to the world in 2006. You gotta keep up. Today's fears are deepfake videos from "you".

ya, the kids are into being tracked with facial recognition AI by various intelligence agencies and giant, amoral corporations these days so that psychological "profiles" can be set up about them. Also being in the background of videos that countless simps view who obsessively analyze every detail of to defend m'lady's honor and sometimes the video ends up on third party porn sites is really cool these days.

It’s annoying that this is something you even have to worry about. Gyms are kind of a sacred/vulnerable space, in that they are somewhere you go to better yourself … so someone filming in them and capturing people feels especially perverse.

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.

That sounds really frustrating. What I’ve found is that kind of behavior really depends on what gym you go to — in my experience, a gym is kinda like a bar in that you have to like the mood or else it’s time to move on, and sometimes the mood can shift from under you. It sucks to be dislodged from your routine, but it’s a thing you can recognize and adapt to.

you are completely right about this.

I hate this. I'm sitting on a bench in the gym and some girl is taking snapshots of her ass for Instagram or something and I'm in the background. Who knows what is going to be said about me on her page. It's the gym I just want to work out I don't want to be on guard about getting filmed.

I'll film my wife sometimes so that she can spot check her form. She's a better/more trained lifter than me, so I can't exactly offer corrections myself.

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.

Yeah, honestly, even as an old, I think the kids are generally amazing. I am very optimistic. I have my grumbles, but the amount of old bullshit they are rejecting outright is heartening. Better new mistakes than old ones.

It's not as generational as you think (and I realize this makes my previous post hypocritical, but whatever). I can tell you many Gen Z and Millenials notice something is a little off with the trends even amongst ourselves. We're turning weird, and not in a healthy way. Maybe others closer to these trends can chime in.

> I can tell you many Gen Z and Millenials notice something is a little off with the trends even amongst ourselves.

Do you think this wasn't true among previous generations?

This is a rabbit hole if we go back and forth. Yes, there was always a get-off-my-lawn element in previous generations. But I am trying to hone in on certain critiques that are valid for certain generations. I'll give in you an example:

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.

We’re more racist than ever, we just don’t see it now.

You are in a bubble. We have problems today but we don't have separate water fountains for races enforced by law.

Hate crimes in 2021 were at the highest level in over a decade.

https://www.statista.com/chart/16100/total-number-of-hate-cr...

Strictly speaking that's

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.

Would we have even known about George Floyd without the video?

Go on thinking we’ve eliminated racism. You’re factually incorrect.

You're not making any sense here.

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.

That's one frame of reference.

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.

Here my 2 cents.

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

It is funny that I kinda see it exactly the other way.. we live in a world that is much less about the local community so these people are both /choosing/ to care what other people think and /choosing/ what they present to those other people.

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.

I guess if the next generation decides to all become homicidal maniacs and kill every previous generation then that's not better or worse?

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.

Did the next generation decide that? Has there ever been an example of such a thing?

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.

Some generations are worst behaved then others. Some commit more crimes then others.

However, this is not an example of that.

Dude, I could care less about the newer generations quirks. I'm concerned about aggregate behavior altering sensibilities in society. This stuff is happening at scale and globally. It's not "oh western people do this", it's everyone and it's not even limited to the youth age group. It has permeated into the adult lives of millinials/gen x. They do the same shit, so the age range is literally from 7 years old (when do these little shitheads get phones now days?) all the way to fucking 50+.

What exactly are you so deeply concerned with? People being weird in public sometimes?

Like I said man, it's a rabbit hole. The need for attention, coupled with virtualized existences on display for status/adulation at a constant rate, all lead to implications of vanity issues at best, and at worse, pathological personality disorders (narcissism). And they are starting young, and there is very limited feedback from their peer group that it's not the best thing to be going down that slope.

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 can see where you're coming from. Try coming from the opposite perspective, from the viewpoint of the countless millions who have had to hide themselves away from the world because society was so needlessly rigid, and too much deviation from the norm got them beat up or fired or otherwise ostracized. And then we get the fallout from that ostracization: anti-social behavior, drug abuse, suicide.

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 would never argue for curtailing self expression. A drug analogy might actually work here. I would say, it's fine, smoke the weed. But be careful little ones, because lately I've been seeing you smoking weed and alcohol together and the latter will take a hold of you. I hope that makes sense, and it's the best middle ground I can find in this exchange.

Correct. The current thing is just a thing after all. Let's try to stop judging people who don't hold the same values we do, just let them do them. (Obviously if they are killing people, such other people might be mildly inconvenienced, not sure what to do about that. One problem at a time?)

"Repeat after me and breathe deeply:"

Speaking of annoying quirks.

> People have been complaining about the terrible thing the new generation does since there has been people.

People have also been saying “it’s going to get colder” every summer as long as there have been people out of the tropics.

It's not even a generational thing. Boomers have some of the worst etiquette.

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.

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