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Comment by siltcakes | Hacker News Reader

Are they also drinking tons of soda? I can’t believe how much I used to drink. I don’t touch any drink with sugar (other than lactose/latte) nowadays. It’s so disgusting, don’t know how I ever did it in the first place.

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God my teeth wish i had just stopped drinking soda a decade ago. It wasnt even that hard to kick

How much of that was soda, and how much was it access to preventative care?

If you're drinking soda daily, your teeth are coated in acidic liquid for hours a day. This is incredibly damaging to your enamel.

I would posit there’s an overlap between those who drink cola daily and limited access to healthcare.

Dental care is cheap and insurace is usually sub $100/month (at least in the US)

Broad brushstrokes incoming and pure speculation but I wrote it out anyway…

Today’s youth are more proactive with their identities these days than we were. We were and remain reactive with our identities. That preference influences what triggers the dopamine hits needed for life.

The drugs of a reactive identity culture are sugar, alcohol, narcotics, work, anything that’s a trope in movies made by boomers. These drugs have consequences that shape the user’s identity. For example: weight gain or burnout.

But the drugs of a proactive identity culture are those that drive the person’s perception of their identity. The live ahead of the consequences. Things like digital social networks, status symbols like shoes, colleges, or jobs, and anything that drives success in those status symbols. Example: Adderall helps the user study, which helps the user get better grades, which opens the door to a better college, which allows the user to flaunt that college association as part of their identity. That doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences to those drugs but those consequences aren’t tropes of modern life just yet because we’re still normalizing their outcomes.

All of this to say: sodas aren’t their thing because soda is “unhealthy” and that drags on their identity.

> Today’s youth are more proactive with their identities these days than we were.

I wanted to echo this and say that I believe younger people create a "symphony" with their identity; picking and choosing from various sub-cultures to create a unique combination. Flexible, morphing.

A very interesting observation. I wonder though if the difference is genuinely a different kind of self-understanding between the generations, or more a question of the prevalence of these two approaches to identity. I think in my generation there were also plenty of people that at least tried to be 'proactive' about their identity building (and greatly valued status symbols etc), but I believe it was not as common, because this meme of 'seeing yourself as your own brand and wanting/needing to market yourself' was not as prominent. Maybe there even were, relatively speaking, more people back then that actively tried to avoid the 'status games', because they were still easier to escape then -- but that's just speculation, and certainly influenced by my own aversion to these games and hence my own youth.

What a brilliant observation.

Has anything else been written online about proactive vs. reactive identities, and particularly - how this has changed historically. Could it have been the case that prior to television, generations (for example "The Greatest Generation") grew up with a proactive identity culture, due to having a more proactively social culture?

"Our youth now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders, and they love to chatter instead of exercise. Children are now tyrants not servants of their household. They no longer rise when elders enter the room."

— Socrates

This is a famous misattribution typically used to state generational views have always been the same. Unfortunately its not Socrates, but actually Kenneth Freeman, Cambridge, 1907.

Gen Z uses a lot more steroids which tracks with your analysis.

But also I think you're falling for sample bias. The ones who don't have a billion followers are overweight and generally less healthy than previous generations.

And more depressed since massive quick/instant success is seemingly everywhere, apart from their own hands. Cancer if social media at its best, spreading depression like chemtrails.

This breeds greed for status & perceived success and 0 patience to get there. You see it here on HN all the time when talking economy and real estate - young people complaining how they they cant own some well located nice house right now, how everything is shit and their future stolen, despite stats saying exactly the opposite. Where the fuck is at least a bit of decency to wait a decade of hard effort for such a success? Thats shit for losers, nobody got time for that.

How I feel sorry for them, all the added value of technology is nothing compared to what they 'lost' or more like never experienced. At least many of them, the vocal majority, the rest goes on just like we did

Ok but housing is legit screwed up.

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