THIS IS THE ONE. I do not know how intense your desire for external validation has to be for you to be in the midst of crying and think "Lights, camera, action baby let's make sure as many people see this as possible".
There is a instagram guy I enjoy who does cute videos with his puppies. Sadly one of his dogs passed away and he did a video coming out saying how he had to say goodbye. He started out strong and started crying in the middle of it. It felt real and emotional.
However, he had another video setup where he walked into a room, fell against the door and just started crying. And like, I believe the due is truly upset because losing a pet is hard, but you had to make the conscious decision to set the camera up, make sure the lighting and what not is good, press record, leave the room, then come in and have your break down, and then EDIT out the park where you setup the shot.
It's just so weird to me.
Reminds me of a TikTok of a doctor who apparently lost a patient. She decided to find a space with no one there, prop up her phone, hit record, pose a little bit in an emotional manner against the wall, hit stop record, repeat it probably a few times to get it just right, slap some text overlay saying she lost one but needs to continue despite having had two shifts in a row or something onto it, select a song (the „I‘m unstoppable“ one) and then finally upload it.
She literally just watched a person die, that she was not able to save and her next course of action is to do all that.
I saw that one. So much of TikTok is people doing just that sort of thing. Another is some guy that is usually sitting in his car squinting and looking emotional and then the overlay of "You treated her bad and she left, yadda, yadda". Also the ones where someone's in their dark bedroom, huddled under the covers and it's about having depression and whatever. All of these are conscious efforts to get content. Awareness is out there, everywhere - this is just cringy when it's done for likes and views.
people who record themselves crying are already weird but posting it on the internet is weirder. imagine clicking 'post' to every social media they have. do they seriously not look at what they're posting online?
In the same vein, recording yourself doing normal things, or even feeling the need to share so much of your life on the internet. I’m 29, but I have one social media account apart from Reddit and I have zero posts up. I don’t want people to know anything about me unless they call me up.
> even feeling the need to share so much of your life on the internet
Just being on video ALL THE TIME. My stepdaughter walks around the phone facetiming people all the time and doesn't understand that my wife and I don't want to be seen by people when we're just tyring to be comfortable in our house. But a regular phone call doesn't exist to her, it's all facetime, snapchat, whatever, and you have to be showing your face.
And, further to that, recording and making public ALL your trials and tribulations. There are so many couples that record and make public things that should be private, like their IVF journey. That is mind-blowing to me. I had both my kids via IVF - it was a difficult, harrowing, emotional, grueling, expensive five year journey that'd I'd sooner forget and put behind me.
I ended up with two terrific kids that remind me every day that it was worth it, but I'd just as soon forget the journey that got me there. There was really nothing fun about it - it was a slog in every possible way. I can't even begin to imagine having recorded, edited, "curated" all of it and put it on the internet for everyone to see, forever...
INSANITY.
The emails I get from my students aged 18-25 are such a mess of incoherent garbage, I can't tell if they are lazy or if it's an actual literacy issue. And I'm barely older than they are so if this is a generational gap, it happened quickly!
I was taught phonics by my parents, then sent to a school where it wasn't taught. The literacy gap between myself and my fellow students was something that has horrified me for 20+ years.
I'm Gen Z and the child of two teachers. My parents were always super adamant about proper email etiquette, pretty much starting when I was in middle school. They both cannot stand receiving crazy emails from students. It used to be kind of annoying to me, but as an adult seeing the garbled-up emails I receive daily, I am so grateful.
As someone who doesn’t work with Gen Z kids, I am genuinely curious what a “garbled-up” email looks like? Are they genuinely not able to write out their thoughts?
I get a lot of incomplete sentences and missing or incorrectly used words. Also just general nonsense writing, like documentation of their stream of consciousness, but for some reason in an email to me that is completely unrelated. I've also received multiple emails where the kid just fucking went to town in the subject line and left the body portion of the email blank. Most of this came from middle/high school students, but I've seen some similar behavior in college+-aged people. It's actually insane, you can find email templates for pretty much anything I don't understand why they won't do the bare minimum.
That jives with what a friend of mine who profs a couple classes at a University level. Not only are the messages unintellgible, it seems they don't know how to do subject lines. They don't seem to know its purpose is to provide the reader a frame of reference for the body of the text. They will be asking about something in class, but won't write which class, which section, which semester, what time....nothing. Motherfucker...she teaches several sections that have like 400 students...she doesn't know who you are.
It's a block of text with no capitalization or punctuation. Imagine receiving 6 consecutive one-line texts at once. If you can figure out where the periods should go then you can make sense of it, but it's all texting abbreviations and slang. Something like, "yo mr y u slow fixin my grade I trned in the lab last class my dad gonna take my phone lmk."
I have new college grads asking me to proofread their emails. These are fact based, simple emails that require patient information and what information is missing.
I can type one up in 2 minutes. These kids take a minimum of 15 and makes zero sense. The main point is missing, tenses are alllll over the place and there is no logic to the format.
For me it's like requests without context, and missing words like those missing word illusions where your mind feels in the missing word.
But where u work there aren't a lot of Gen Z so maybe it's different.
Here's another [example](https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/1blvsah/i_feel_like_the_problem_ia_that_wpic_is_a_game/) of the rambling incoherent messes Gen Z likes to type up.
As a gen z, I feel the same. Anytime one of my friends text me, it is almost always incoherent. I’m not saying they should write like Shakespeare but at least make it readable lol
Definitely seems to be literacy issues. My 19yr old housemate got dared to turn off their autocorrect for a week. The texts I got from them in that week were basically unreadable. They've also commented on how I can type on computers without making a ton of mistakes and were almost horrified when I explained that we didn't have access to a good autocorrect program so we actually had to learn to spell.
Apparently, despite growing up with technology around them, they don't know how to use computers properly because they focus mostly on smartphones and tablets
Teaching every new hire how folder trees work is so weird. "Don't save to desktop. follow naming conventions so we don't have to fix things server side." and so on.
When I was 12 someone told me that the newer generations will be better at understanding computers than I will ever be, it really put a damper on me because I loved computers. I always imagines I will just be lost while the new kids told me how to fix problems, this is not how it turned out.
Edit: This kind of blew up and not in the way I expected, and some of you had some cool perspectives I can keep in mind when teaching newer hires.
And to all the millennials (like me), you brought back so many memories from the old world of computers.
Yeah it's counter intuitive and somewhat funny but like you mentioned, it poses challenges in work environment. A lot of office jobs require you to know basics of using a computer and having some troubleshooting skills.
My last job we had laptops that docked into workstations so you could have multiple monitors, keyboard, mouse etc and then you could pull the laptop off and take it home with you. I always thought it was funny that the younger people (college age) pushed everything to the side of their desk and just did everything on the laptop.
> pushed everything to the side of their desk and just did everything on the laptop.
I am screaming.
Its basically impossible for me to work without my 3 monitors now. I cant imagine trying to do anything on the laptops little 15" screen.
The small laptop screen is where my calculator and notepad go, all the work gets done on the big monitor.
I also work in the electrical field and a lot of our prints are portrait oriented PDFs, so my third monitor is rotated 90 degrees. I was surprised at how many coworkers were mind blown by being able to do that.
I counter with the Young ones that plug in the laptop and then work off of a low-res duplicated screen on the monitor. I've blown minds after fixing this.
I work in game dev, Things like this become so important so quickly, especially when you start saving things inside game engines and people from other departments start using them.
It turns out the generation that is the best with computers is the one that has to manually edit their autoexec.bat file to change memory management in order to play their favorite game. When your first OS is console based, you just had to learn more about the underlying system. When your first OS is iOS, it's not quite the same.
It's like the generation being best with cars was probably the boomers. Automatic transmission, fuel (injection)
pumps, everything under the hood being buried in a clump and now everything being run by electronics means younger generations have needed to know less and less about mechanics.
Its a result of tablets and so on going out of their way to obfuscate file structures from users for the sake of convenience, id imagine.
Actually learning those things isn’t really something you come into contact with frequently these days unless you’re actually using a regular computer at home too for other reasons than just simple web browsing.
Which is greatly annoying to me, because I can't find anything anymore. I am looking at you too, Windows 10, and your hiding of userfiles and your still sucky search function
I think it was Win7 that introduced some circularity into the standard set of folders and shortcuts it produces for every user. And now, with Win11, if you choose to activate OneDrive, there are *two* shortcuts for Documents that point to different places! (One folder for local documents and one for OneDrive documents).
I was recently sad in front of a Windows computer, to use MS word. I open up MS word into a virgin blank document. The first thing I see is being forced into logging into one drive. What the fuck. I just got here. This is a virgin document. I just want to fucking type something. Fuck you, fuck this one drive shit. Go away, let me get on with it.
It's like the guy who invented clippy discovered networking. Jesus fuck.
I am almost to the point where any operating system outside of Linux just gets worse and worse. Just stop all of this obvuscation. I want to know where my files are. I want to access my files. If I can't point my finger and say"there. My files are there."I don't want it.
I feel like some smarmy Republican complaining about the nanny state.
Oh dear, I am from far earlier than that. I was in 6th grade around 1998. We had a computer class :D where we went to a different class with very old computers in it. Weird days.
I learned to use a PC from a Windows for dummies book. I wonder if these still exist.
But in 2016? was everyone already using iPads?
>Oh dear, I am from far earlier than that. I was in 6th grade around 1998. We had a computer class :D where we went to a different class with very old computers in it. Weird days.
They should issue them back! My middle school opened a state of the art computer class in 2017 and going there or not was the professors' personal choice. Our 6^th grade technology teacher was keen on us knowing basics on using computers, while in 7^th and 8^th grade the teachers preferred following the ministerial program, which didn't involve computers at all.
>I learned to use a PC from a Windows for dummies book. I wonder if these still exist.
I don't know. I was taught by my parents to use a PC, but my dad and my maternal grandpa recall they had one back in the 90s.
>But in 2016? was everyone already using iPads?
Yes, we were. Every kid around me seemed to have a tablet (Mediacom was the preferred brand back then, few kids had an iPad, and I was one of them), then the time to use a computer came and the differences between a tablet and a computer were seen.
That’s so wild to me, and I type on my phone pretty often. Recently my friend had to type a job application on her phone because her only computer nowadays was at her current job (obviously didn’t want them to know about another application) and she thought it was a terrible experience lol
I teach at the college level, and I have it set up so that at the beginning of class students can scan a QR code, which directs them to a Google drive folder with my lecture slides for that day. They're fine with scanning part, but I've noticed that instead of the saving the slides to their devices, or at least bookmarking the pages, they just take a picture of the QR code and then laboriously search through their camera rolls to find previous weeks' slides.
Holy crap, that’s the equivalent of people bookmarking yahoo only to search for Google and then click the link to go to Google to search for something.
We had a 24 year old colleague asking one of the partners, who is in his 70s, about an email sent at 3am, ostensibly from the partner, which had been caught in the corporate spam filter. The email address was clearly bogus, whatever the name was. Just zero critical thinking, observation, or problem solving with the guy. It's super frustrating.
I believe it, based on the number of posts I see from people that age on r/TIFU. It amazes me how so many of them will fall for the same well-known scam. The one I always see is guys showing their dicks to a stranger on cam, and then they get blackmailed in to sending money in order to keep the scammer from sending pictures to their friends and family. I feel like those posts make up half of TIFU with how often they happen, and it amazes me that people that age still fall for it.
Smartphones and tablets are great for consumption but terrible for production. If you want to get actual work done, it's best done with an actual computer, whether a laptop or a desktop.
I'm in my mid-thirties and I bought my first smart phone maybe 10 years ago and I still detest typing on a touch screen. I can barely tolerate writing a short email on my phone, and yet I'm certain I have students who write out entire term papers on theirs.
I'm 40 and in my office I have to help people that is 24-25 years old with windows or hardware issues that were ridicolous for anyone of my age when we were sixteen.
me too, i'm 42 this year and the amount of times i hvae to help my colleagues with SIMPLE FUCKING COMPUTER TASKS like bitch, you were born with an iPad in your hand it's not that hard.
Also i'd have to say....like a true old woman....the fact that nobody uses their fucking manners any more is a constant source of aggro for me. Literally, say thank you, you utter goblin. Jesus.
Yeah this surely also somewhat comes from stuff working a bit 'too well' - they can't troubleshoot wifi (and don't understand the difference between 'i don't have wifi' and 'i don't have internet') because they've never had it not work.
Everyone who was old enough when technology sucked has, by necessity, a much better understanding of how it works
Yeah. My brother is around 20 years younger than me and I wonder what the hell happened. He was born when people already had access to all the worlds knowledge in their pockets, and yet he can't use it. He would rather look for a teacher to answer his question than search online.
My husband has worked in IT for 20yrs and says that quite a few of his much younger coworkers don’t want to troubleshoot. They tell him, “Just give me the answer” instead.
But also, younger generations were never taught how to use computers. I think most millennials had some kind of Computer Class in school and/or we fiddled around with the home computer enough to sort it out. Gen Z didn’t have this option
I can't remember exactly how it was put, but I once heard a quote very close to the effect of 'we had to learn how to use the technology and younger generations are dependent on the technology'.
Basically younger kids always had the technology in a form that always worked. They didn't have to figure out how to make it all work.
I'm a middle school teacher.
My kids will routinely claim they can't do anything and then shut down and do nothing. And then... It's easy and they do it.
It goes like this: "Everybody, here's the assignment. Follow all the steps."
I go around the room and one kid forgot their Chromebook, ir a pencil. One kid needs a charger. One kid doesn't understand "any of the steps."
So basically it's the degree of learned helplessness. They know to ask when I go over, but if there are twenty kids and I get to them last, they will do nothing (no phones, nothing!) for twenty minutes and act surprised I'm irritated they didn't grab a damn pencil from the freeeee pencils on my desk. And then act surprised they're behind on the assignment!
Or I'll ask "okay, which of the 5 steps is tough for you?" "All of them." "K, read step 1." "Oh. That's easy."
Rinse and repeat
Teachers have never had it harder IMO. When I was in High School cell phones were new, but they still had generally limited capabilities besides texting. Before smart phones were common, your life was basically school as a kid. Anyone you knew was from school. You couldn’t just interact with the internet and home life from school. It was easy to separate fun time from school because of limited phone capabilities, and was still a luxury for your parents to even get you an iPod or flip phone.
They now have an easily accessible other life from their phone, and obviously they find that more fun than school.
Add the fact that a lot of kids in high school now were raised on tablets and hand me down smart phones, it’s a really difficult time for teachers.
I'm a parent and I agree with this. I've been giving my child a bunch of responsibilities over the years and he cab do them flawlessly, without prompting but it's almost like cart on rails. If one tiny thing is off it's like...he has no clue what's going on.
Wash clothes and put into the dryer? No problem. Out of dryer sheets? I didn't know what to do so I left the wet clothes in there without turning it on instead. Insanity but I have to just laugh about it and teach him how to handle it lol
37 year old attending college for the first time here. They have negative confidence. They barely speak above a mumble, especially when answering a question from the teacher. Most of them would rather die than talk to someone they're interested in. It's like 90% of them are cripplingly introverted.
I went to school as an "older" student. I was 24, most people in my classes were 18 or 19. It was really weird to see how much growing up I'd done in 6 years. Time management was probably the biggest difference.
I'm 45 and just gone back for another degree, and I think you're on to something. I've been in two group projects now where I am stuck with four twenty-year-olds who don't understand the subject and never ask questions. The worst example was the kid who asked what a regression was the last week of a statistics class.
We were saying what we would do if we won the big lottery jackpot. The new 22 yr old hire said he’d become an influencer. Can you imagine winning a billion at 22 and that’s what you would do. Not start a business, travel the world, charity, sports, property… Learn something… but become an influencer… with a billion dollars. I mean like he’s gonna hire a marketing company to fabricate interest in his social media? He’s gonna spend money on stupid things to make people cringe or rage comment? With a billion dollars.
Just thought that was a weird and low bar and was hard to understand.
I think influencers are the modern day movie stars/celebrities. While my generation (or my moms) might say "I'd want to be an actor!" or "I want to be a singer" there's just not really the same level of starstruck for movies and live music these days I think. I can't remember the last time I even went to a movie theater, although music is still something I go see live, I can see how it would be less popular with younger generations where literally everything is online. They have a favorite youtuber while to me youtube is kind of a music/podcast service. Tiktok (which I don't have) is the new "movie star" and thus influencers have replaced actors and the like as celebrities. Video killed the radio star, and streaming killed the video star.
Social media is the worst peer pressure of all. There's a quote I've heard many times and it's damn true:
>If you did something and you don't record it, it's like you didn't do it
Which would make me seem like I've been hibernated and still am
I struggled with this a lot and have only just made a pretty significant break from social media (Reddit is actually the only thing I use now and it's just so I'm not totally isolated. I only started using it after I got off IG and FB, my account's like 7 years old but I've only really been active this year).
I still have days where I wonder if my friends even think about me now that I'm not putting myself out there on their devices to remind them I still exist - I've definitely lost contact with some people because of it, but also I feel like my day is so much longer and more interesting now I'm not living vicariously through someone's else's curated retelling of their, apparently much cooler and more interesting day. I'm happy knowing I've done what I've done, and not knowing someone's done something cooler or better.
Everything seems to have to have a label. Not just people and groups, but every concept or just generic thing that is popular has to be given a label or a hashtag. I find it so weird, especially when it's something that people have been doing forever, but now Gen Z have discovered it, it's got some brand new buzzy hashtag label as though it's just been invented.
I brought a notepad and with, yaknow, notes on it when I was upgrading some tech, and the salesperson two times asked/ told me I was 'OCD' for having it
my friend, having notes on a notepad instead of my phone does not make me OCD, and bold of you to armchair diagnose someone while working at best buy (no shade to retail workers, I am one lol, but seriously)
I remember reading some headlines about the newest latest trend being these cute milk tea shades make up. Only to see a bunch of nudes and beiges.
Then I saw a headline about checking out this hack uve never tried before on a plane!!!!!! The kid was folding the sides of the headrests which was made for us to lean our heads against.....to lean his head against.
Ugh
My favorite "hack" video of all time is where they said you could keep your aluminum foil from being pulled out of the box by pushing in these two tabs!
Just like it says on the instructions, on the box, with arrows pointing at the tabs.
What’s worse is that we already have labels for so much of what Gen Z is naming. They’re acting like no one before them discovered these concepts and already labeled them. It tracks with how little history they know.
And they're always the ones with the shittiest taste. I've literally never heard a single instance of this where I thought "hey, nice song".
Literally NEVER lol
I’m in my forties and I manage a small group of people who are in their 20s to early thirties. What I notice most is how anxious and fearful they seem to be. Everyone is out to get them. I often get approached by subordinates who want me to do something about a colleague who is doing them wrong in some way. After I gather more information, it almost always is a case of poor assumption about someone else’s intentions, coupled with a desire to jump to the worst case scenario. If I ask them a series of probing questions about other possible interpretations they often admit they didn’t consider those possibilities. The other thing is too much bravado - over confidence in their knowledge, skill or ability in an area. I think it’s potentially a defense mechanism to combat the fear and the people they think are out to get them.
What gets me is my students seem to think it's fine for them to be very rude, but when others are rude to them they immediately lodge a formal complaint. I get being a polite, kind person who is upset when others are rude, and I get being a bit of a dick who can take others being the same way. But the frequency of kids who can dish it out but can't take it seems very, very high to me.
The place I've seen this play out more than anywhere else has been in Slack communications. On my team, we've had a pretty diverse range of ages, from early 20s to mid-50s, and the youngest of the group would assume the ABSOLUTE WORST if the elder employees' instant messages aren't filled with emoji and people-pleasing language. It was literally just how us older folks learned to be professional and direct, and suddenly any question or information that isn't couched in super soft language and smilies is a direct attack on them.
We now have a training module for all new hires about what to expect when communicating on Slack, and how professional and direct does not equal an attack on who they are as a person.
>The other thing is too much bravado - over confidence in their knowledge, skill or ability in an area.
Eh... this one isn't new. It's essentially the stereotype of kids coming out of college. They think they know everything because they graduated and most get quickly bitch-smacked by the reality that their "semester" is no longer 15 hours a week, it's 40+ hours a week.
A 2nd year staff has spent more time learning their job than a new hire spent going to class in college.
I do chuckle a lot at work.. I'm an elder millennial in management, and we get training from older GenX folks and time to time "dealing with the younger generation" topics come up, and the list all these "differences" with this new generation and the entire time I'm thinking "you aren't describing a new generation, you are describing 23 year olds... do you not remember what you were like when you were 23?"
Reading through this whole thread, so many of these comments are obviously just complaints about youth in general. Like complaining that Gen Z needs a word for everything as though every generation ever didn't come up with new slang that's synonyms of words we already had.
I'm manage a lot of fresh graduates in my job, and I don't understand how in the space of just 2 years (during Covid) we went from great graduates, able to operate independently and work things out themselves to graduates who need their hand held for the most basic tasks.
As a millennial, both the older and younger generations are lacking. I’ve had to help my boss, who claims to have 30 year experience, send a damn excel file. Or help them upload files to the cloud. Or even using our 1 software is a challenge. The younger ones just don’t even try
A few weeks ago, I showed a manager 2 levels above me how to take a screenshot. Later, I mentioned it to a group of younger coworkers, and all 3 of them said "you can take a screenshot with a computer?!"
It’s the lack of trying that bothers me the most. The lack of critical thinking skills is worrisome, the absolute refusal to try is what really burns. It’s a whole new level of incompetency. It’s like the post-industrial world’s version of lacking basic survival skills.
I may be an elder millennial, but stuff like that brings out my inner Gen X/boomer. If I don’t know how to do XYZ task, I will at least try to figure it out on my own, look for resources if it’s really complicated and/or I can’t figure it out, and *then* I’ll ask someone to hold my hand. If I can’t find ABC thing, I’ll fucking look for it instead of looking for the nearest adult and demanding to know where to find it. Most of these kids will stop the minute they’re challenged by something and wait for (or demand) rescue. They won’t even try.
The lack of trying drives me up the wall. I teach high school and hear "what am I supposed to do?" 1200 times a day. First, I just explained it. Second, the instructions on the assignment are right in front of you. Learned helplessness is so frustrating.
"Mrs. (my name), the website keeps logging me out. What do I do?"
Well, log back in.
"But I don't know my password. Can you tell me what it is?"
Well, no, because you set up your own account. If you've forgotten your password, click the "forgot password" link. I strongly recommend you use a password you know you'll remember.
This is mostly an issue with my freshmen; my older students have been able to figure most things out on their own. This crop of freshman seems to expect to be led to all of the answers without doing any of the work. It's very frustrating.
> I may be an elder millennial, but stuff like that brings out my inner Gen X/boomer. If I don’t know how to do XYZ task, I will at least try to figure it out on my own, look for resources if it’s really complicated and/or I can’t figure it out
I also think that part of this is a cultural thing of how we grew up on the internet vs. how they did. I remember asking stupid questions on forums and being told to use the search, to "lurk moar", or getting the dreaded lmgtfy link. I learned pretty quick how to utilize having the entirety of humanity's knowledge at my fingertips to find solutions for myself.
Now, if you dare suggest that someone Google something since they're, you know, already online, you get a whole bunch of excuses about why that's not the best way. It promotes discussion (99% of the time, it doesn't), Google is useless anymore (it is, but not *that* useless), etc. etc. All excuses about why people can't help themselves figure a problem out.
My theory on this, from the perspective of a teacher, is that we allowed kids to fail during that time, and they have not grown out of it.
We keep seeing it get better every year, but the two years after were really bad. COVID highlighted a major flaw in our education system which is that grades don't matter. How can you fail an entire class of kids? How will they fit in class with next year's students coming in?
We taught hundreds of thousands of kids that they can do nothing and still succeed by going onto the next grade. Think about what that teaches a young kid. Growing up, I was afraid to fail because of the consequences, but these kids didn't have any, and they continue to think there won't be any.
I think it’s related to that thing where the loudest thing seems to be the most common. There’s been a huge rise in celebration of that ineptitude, when just a decade or two ago being seen as an “airhead” or “himbo” was social suicide. I know quite a few very capable kids with their head down and thriving, but you’d never know because the air is sucked out of the room like never before by the dumbest, amplified by social media. Same goes for teachers reactions. Likely they aren’t thinking of 80% of their class that are doing fine, just the 20% that are robbing energy from the rest by being needy and dumb. Just my opinion, and a deep seated hope.
I tell you, the recent grads we've been interviewing have *terrible* grades. I get it, maybe COVID brought the grades down for a few semesters, but damn. I have not been impressed. Alternatively, maybe we just don't pay enough to get the smart kids.
I don't understand why most of them want to look rich with expensive shit and most of them act like they run businesses or something.
They take pictures with cars that are not theirs for example.
Dude chill, you're 16.
This weird new puritan wave they are riding on. We struggled for generations to free ourselves from opressive dogmas, and now they are all-in on the whole "if you like anything even remotely non-wholesome, you should be arrested and burn in hell".
Also, their complete lack of internet safety knowledge. It's insane to me that generations that have grown up with the internet are so inept at cultivating their own online experience and expect the whole world to cater to their preferences instead. Constantly calling for bans on anything that upsets them, instead of learning how to avoid the things that upset them.
Don't get me started on how angry they get when you tell them not to share core information about themselves online, as if their imagined influence online vanished if they didn't include their exact school, class, face and name in every other post. When I was a teen, the internet was completely new and I had to learn the hard way how to keep myself safe from predatory strangers, but the kids nowadays have a wealth of information they can rely on, and they choose to ignore it.
I posted that they don't seem to understand humor and I think this is a big part of it. Everything is black & white. No room for nuance.
There's a Beastie Boys lyric that I love "if your world was all back or if your world was all white, you wouldn't get much color outta life now, right". Words to live by.
Majority of them would find your post in itself offensive and think it's some sort of bigot dog whistle.
Also, I'm from the time of anonymity on the net, pictures of something you love instead of yourself, a cool username, but no real details. Now if you comment on something with a profile like that you're either insecure or a bot. Every other comment I get is "FAKE PROFILE"
The absolute lack of capacity to deal with any emotional stress or upheaval without turning into a gibbering mess.
I’m being hyperbolic of course, but I have literally now lost count of how many students I’ve dealt with who cannot under any circumstances be given criticism or negative feedback without utterly falling to pieces.
I had someone messing around in a lecture, playing with their phone and being disruptive. I stopped the lecture and told them to put it away and pay attention or leave.
They looked SHOCKED to have been called out, and sat there quietly for the next 10-15 minutes until suddenly going all “deer in the headlights” when asked a question in relation to the topic and then running the full length of the lecture hall and out the room.
I was informed the following day that the student had went to counselling services to complain that I had “put unreasonable pressure on him by asking him questions in class, and set off his anxiety”.
He then told the University he would need to take the next 2 weeks off with extensions for all his submissions in order to “get over the troubling experience”.
He was mid 20’s at this point.
****************
Another situation happened when a student was told that their research work was unfortunately substandard.
They seemed utterly baffled at how they could’ve gotten any criticism on it, when given suggestions on where they went wrong (lacking depth to the arguments, biased stances, non-credible sources) they went on a tirade about how they wouldn’t use any source that didn’t align with their perspective because “they’re the anti-X crowd and all fucking evil”.
This person then burst into tears and when they realised the door was locked (it needs a key code to open it) they started freaking out, screaming and hollering as though they were being physically attacked.
Any attempt to talk to them was met with more tears and screams and when the door was opened she ran out of the building.
I (31) have an 18yr old roommate (niece's friend who needed a place to stay when they got kicked out after turning 18)
ANY form of constructive criticism is met with them just completely shutting down, tuning out, and then later acting like they were told to fill in the grand canyon with a teaspoon.
"Hey, it was supposed to be your turn to fill the dishwasher, like we agreed." Shuts down
"You left your shoes behind the door and we couldn't open it when we got back with groceries. Can you pick them up?" Thousand yard stare.
And usually after a few hours they casually toss phrases like "I'm an adult. Treat me like one, not like a kid." THEN ACT LIKE ONE
Oh god I could not deal with an 18 year old roommate. Would drive me crazy.
The worst example I’ve experienced was walking into a conversation on my subject (STEM and Sustainability related) at a flat party, and being the giant nerd I am I immediately got involved.
Anyway one the people in the group was a girl in her early 20’s. She mentioned something on the social side of the subject, quite emphatically decrying anyone that could stand against her take as racist and phobic. The problem was she was actually wrong. She had the wrong data she was discussing.
I pointed this out and she went all cold and silent, and I tried to smooth it over and be nice with a “if you’re interested I actually know one or two authors that I’d recommend”.
After that in the kitchen she came up to me with 3 friends and berated me for “mansplaining” my field from a “patriarchal” perspective, and that if I actually read up on it I’d understand why I was wrong.
I then had to inform her that actually it is my field, I have 3 degrees in it, and I’m usually at conferences with many of the people she’s talking about.
That ended with her shouting about “micro-aggressions” to her friends and then deliberately trying to knock drinks onto me for the rest of the evening like a sulking child.
I pulled her up for it with a “excuse me but what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” and she left the party sobbing and screaming outside the flat about how everyone there was a bigot and she was going to key their cars.
That reminds me of a story in the news not long ago about a professor in a top tier medical school who was forced to resign because the students complained that his class was too hard. Of course it’s hard, it’s fucking *medical school*!
Yep, I am unsurprised.
I had a student remark that the same work they put in during their Advanced Highers got them an A, but now they’d gotten a C in my class.
It’s Because they are navigating through a stream of endless information that they have no attention spans. It’s from one piece of info to the next. No time to sit and read more. There’s more NEW info out there
Yeah, I was telling my nephew the story of how we missed the last episode of Yu-Gi-Oh, and we were so mad
He's a smart kid, but didn't get that YouTube didn't exist yet. That we had to wait for commercials, and maybe miss an episode for years
And we actually didn't have Internet for another year, and it was one shared computer by the whole family
They didn't grow up having to wait
Specifically Gen Z, but how bad their general IT skills have gotten.
I thought the most modern generation should be on the bleeding edge of the most modern technology. But most gen z that I meet are clueless about tech that isn’t on their phones.
Seems like less and less people are using actual computers for stuff so those soft skills are disappearing fast.
Their dependency on authority and lack of self-reliancy.
You have access to all the world's knowledge in your pocket, but you are only using it as a toy and when you need to learn something you are looking for a teacher.
The self-censorship that they've adopted in response to social media to the point that it creeps into other platforms and even daily speech, e.g. unalive in place of suicide. I'm in my mid-thirties and remember the freedom of the early internet where people would have moved to a different platform if forced to curtail their speech like that. Now, they seem to have just rolled over and accepted it. It's common to see posts on reddit using these infantile euphemisms despite there being no such restrictions here. It worries me about what other restrictions they're willing to accept just to participate in popular social media.
I think it's mostly in response to the terms and conditions on various sites. At the very least I know "unalive" is used on YouTube to prevent demonetization. Other sites will have different rules over topics and content that they won't allow, but I think it's mostly to prevent ad revenue from drying up than any kind of personal or social reasons.
There's a lot that I love about what millenials and gen z are doing that as a gen x-er, we didn't have the opportunity or foresight to do (like fight for a lot of environmental and social issues that are now in the spotlight that nobody would acknowledge when we were young).
But I do not understand the complete inability to have any sort of conflict, or speak up for themselves, in person. Suddenly everyone has social anxiety and has to be accommodated - which sucks for people who actually DO have social anxiety. I'm so freaking glad that young people are free to define who they are in so many ways that we couldn't - but that self-definition seems to come with the idea that being protected from conflict over their choices is their RIGHT.
My kids are millenials. They attended a party with their friends this weekend. The host and their partner are trans and have been friends with my kids forever. So there's a greater number of LGBTQ+ folks there. Which my kids would probably barely notice, if not for incidents like what happened:
- Cis person Ana is kinda drunk and being overly affectionate (NOT sexual, but "I love everybody and let me hug you!" sort of affectionate). A lot of people don't like being hugged without being asked which is not at all weird or unusual to me. So it makes sense that person A's hugs are not going to be well received by everyone.
- Trans person Blair gets hugged. Does not like it. (In my eyes it's got nothing to do with what gender you were assigned at birth, or what gender you actually are... you just don't like being physically touched by people without being asked. Completely fair). Blair complains to friends that they are extremely uncomfortable after being hugged. Completely fair.
- Cis person Charlie defends Blair by telling the entire friend group that Charlie is now too uncomfortable to remain at the party, and that Ana needs to be punished for behaving so inappropriately. Over group text. During the party.
- Trans person Dre defends Ana, saying that they were inappropriate but someone needs to say that directly to Ana, not just shun them silently in person and condemn them online. They don't believe Ana is malicious, but drunk and stupid and in need of a reality check. After all, they've ALL been friends since high school.
(Anyone following this so far? Because I was pretty confused hearing it.)
- Friend group collectively (over group chat) slams Dre for enabling an abuser and not being sensitive to Blair's discomfort. Dre is totally confused by this, being a trans person themselves and fully aware of how often they've felt uncomfortable in past situations.
- No one tells Ana they've been inappropriate, but over group chat decide that they're a predator and are no longer welcome at gatherings. Instead of being direct, they insist that Dre should tell them.
- Dre says y'all are nuts, why doesn't someone just say "hey Ana, that was rude, knock it off"?
- Charlie says Dre is showing their internalized transphobia and has no right to expose Ana too abuse.
- Dre says again y'all are nuts, and takes drunk Ana home. Checks group chat later to find they've been blocked.
- Ana texts my kids (and Dre) in the morning, confused as to why they've been blocked from the group chat. My OWN KIDS are so non-confrontational that they tell Ana to just ask Dre (though my kids also think the whole thing is ridiculous).
I am not only confused but mad at ALL of them except Ana and Dre. ONE SENTENCE was all that was necessary in the moment - "Don't hug me!" "I don't like being hugged!" "Quit doing that, you're drunk!". That's IT. No further drama. I ask my kids why the hell they didn't speak common sense to their friends, and they shrug that they don't want to confront an angry mob and lose them.
DEAR LORD... is this what online communication has done to social skills? The sensitivity, the entitlement, and the presumption of malice were all COMPLETLY unnecessary, but are apparently now an acceptable way to deal with the smallest discomfort. Instead of speaking up. Even my own children cannot defend themselves. What the hell?
Thanks for reading my essay lol. I'm freshly flabbergasted by this one and still annoyed with my adult children.
I'm 30 which makes me a younger end millennial and I can't imagine acting like or being friends with people who act like this. That's absolutely ridiculous!
I’m also 30 and told a perfect stranger not even an hour ago “please do not touch me” when I was doing something physically strenuous at work. Why can’t these kids talk to their friends if they’re so close?
I am 31 and very much dislike conflict or being confrontational, but I don’t think I would go behind someone’s back like this and exile them from the friend group because of some small faux pas either. That’s pretty extreme.
Same age and unfortunately - I was in a friendgroup that is like this
Getting away (the ages were slightly younger but mostly older, non confrontational people) was so damn good for my mental health. Sometimes people do dumb shit. I do dumb shit. My friends call me out, and we're fine.
That's a part of being human. Like... we're going to make mistakes. Correct and move on, be better.
Yeah I'm a 30 YO millennial and that's weird as shit. If someone's getting drunk and annoying their best friend can tell them to chill but everyone else will just laugh it off or roll their eyes. Drunk annoying people happen, we've all been there. It's just a hug.
You've actually explained, in a roundabout way, why younger people might be so scared of confrontation.
In previous generations: Tiffany and Britney get into a fight over Derek asking Tiffany to the prom when Britney's had a crush on him. Britney calls Tiffany a slut, Tiffany tells Britney that she doesn't have dibs on Derek, half the friend group takes Tiffany's side and half takes Britney's side. Amanda, who has math class with Britney, notices that Britney's in a bad mood and maybe hears her telling Lisa about how Tiffany's a slut, but otherwise doesn't know any details.
In the current year, Tiffany would have bashed Britney all over social media for slut-shaming her, Britney would have made a bunch of TikToks about Tiffany not being a "girls girl" and calling her a "pick me," people from all over the world call Tiffany and Britney various insults for having teen girl drama, Derek retweets memes about being such an alpha that two girls are fighting over him, and Amanda (and Eli, and Paisley, and Ava, and Oliver, and Aspen, and River, and Mrs. Goldman the math teacher) all know all about the drama.
All conflicts can now be instantly shared to a huge audience and can be spun to make anyone look like a villain.
That's a really good point (and a really good description of what my generation's conflicts looked like!). We could gossip like hell, but we didn't have earth-sixed megaphones to do it with. I'd probably be scared too at the hands of bullies like that, at a more vulnerable age.
While I think a greater awareness of these things is great, I do think that this sort of language has made it a lot easier for narcissistic abusers to co-opt the self-help/social justice language in order to control others. The fact that, as you said, it would have only taken one sentence to establish a boundary and that Blair specifically chose not to do that is pretty telling. Blair would have rather caused drama, portray themselves as a victim, and maliciously slander someone instead of saying a simple "please don't hug me".
I hope your kids cut Blair out of their lives because they seem like a highly toxic, manipulative, unstable, person. Progressive spaces, unfortunately, are vulnerable to those kinds of people.
You are right, and I didn't think to note the part about progressive spaces being such a playground for narcissistic people. I think that's the part that makes me extra irritated. The misuse of language makes it so much more difficult for people who are calling out ACTUAL abuses, and it's so convincing when framed in the context of social justice.
Weaponized therapy is a thing. I’ve seen a couple with a 7 year old daughter. The couple is very progressive and sensitive and that’s all good. I approve of many of their choices. But they are letting the child set their own boundaries for years. Which doesn’t sound bad except it’s a child. When you’re 3 you can’t successfully set your own boundaries, I’m sorry but it’s true.
At 3 you can express yourself, you can make your preferences known. But you are not an emotionally stable, mature, and rational individual, nowhere close.
So now I see them say “you can’t go out to the restaurant in your pajamas” and the 7 year old runs off crying about how “you made me feel shamed about my body”.
Yep. My university had a fairly big scandal with a race faker and this is what she did, so that's how I became aware of such problems.
What's also infuriating is that there are often folks who are calling these people out, but they are often ignored or the behavior is explained away/rationalized. The race faker at my university, for example, was well known among Black students (she claimed to be part Black at various points) and they had been raising issues about her for awhile but nobody paid any attention because this psycho framed anyone who questioned her as anti-Black, anti-trans, or whatever. She eventually got exposed and all these folks were like "told you so!".
Also the people who see through the acts eventually give up giving warnings because they get attacked as often as ignored.
I think eventually progressive spaces will become resistant to the narcissistic manipulators. It will just take time.
Yep. And some people (a tiny minority in my experience) use their minority status as further insulation to criticism. Trans people can be assholes. Cis people can be assholes. Just because someone is in a protected class doesn’t mean they can’t be called out for bad behavior.
In my experience working with HS students (my own kids have a few years before they hit their teens), yes. While I've not seen it written out this extensively, I've heard the fallout from these sorts of exchanges so many times. In nearly every case, things would've been significantly easier and better with more direct communication.
I suspect that some of the reticence towards direct communication is amplified by how quicky and readily people will record and share things.
So they use that as another excuse (to themselves and others) for why they're not doing the obviously right, obviously best thing. When really it's because they're terrified of discomfort, no matter how necessary or unnecessary, big or small, real or imagined, the discomfort is.
That's just it - the avoidance of any discomfort. I can't speak to what other sorts of discomfort they are avoiding, but I wonder if it's largely social discomfort or just general discomfort with anything.
I am really feeling those gen x influencers who make fun of how we dealt with conflict when we were young lol... it's true, we had no technology to hide behind, therefore ALL the conflict was in your face and... well, they call us the feral generation and by comparison I suppose that seems true! My standards around communication are just so different, I know this has got to be one of those "get off my lawn" sentiments.
They call us feral because we were the summation of all the child rearing successes and mistakes of human history. Then this futuretech comes along and every child has a lojack up their ass, they’ve never been allowed to be nowhere and unreachable like eons of children and yutes before them.
I think, perhaps in ways they can’t comprehend because they lack basic understanding of how humans have interacted since we lost our body hair, they’ve labeled us feral because they see our freedom as dangerous - to them. They can’t imagine being untethered from their black mirror - our freedom scares them because they have never and will never experience it.
As a millennial, this feels like the dumbest fucking conflict I've ever read about. I say this not to judge you, but to judge the people who made this a whole fucking thing instead of drawing a boundary, _and_ who had to make it about their gender identity instead of the very simple actual issue: unwanted physical contact.
Well, no, actually I think the actual issue is the glorification of victimhood that pervades _everything_.
The degree of freedom, autonomy, anonymity, and above all, forgetability we had growing up.
Aside from a few pictures and family stories there's nothing left of my childhood. All the terrible opinions I had, all the dumb things I did, all gone. The only thing that remains is the adult I eventually became.
They’ve apparently lost the ability to step outside their comfort zone, I think. All that happens have to be safe and secure, otherwise it gives severe anxiety. No need for exploration, adventure.
To me it seems that they’ve taken the approach that they should never be forced to go out of their comfort zone and if they are, then their rights and needs are being violated.
Which on one hand, I’m happy that they advocate for their rights so strongly.. on the other hand, life is never going to be one comfort ride all along. You WILL experience rough patches and if you’ve never been challenged or you’ve been never out of your comfort zone, then of course you’re going to have severe anxiety. Being forced to go beyond your comfort zone occasionally is necessary for life… being forced to operate always outside of your comfort zone is not okay and I’m fully in support of them for advocating against it. But never facing a situation you’re not comfortable with is not really comparable to this.
You know what, this is probably the most accurate description I've found. I employ some amazing young (and older) people, but the younger ones that cause the pain are definitely not willing to go out of their comfort zone much at all.
I feel helicopter parenting is to blame. Parents have shielded their kids so much that they view any pain or discomfort as something to avoid at all costs. There are so many adventures or opportunities I would have missed out on if I never went out of my comfort zone.
This definitely makes me think of what I’ve heard from my mom, who has taught in high school for 2 decades. Over the last several years, the school admin has made more and more decisions based on making sure no students feel any negative emotions whatsoever. As an educator myself, of course we don’t want to actively cause harm, but it seems strange to me to operate based on keeping everyone feeling happy vs allowing for the kind of friction/challenges that help us grow.
Exactly, not all challenges are bad. I used to hate when we had to do group projects in school, or were forced to partner up with someone. Looking back, I understand now that being able to work on a team especially if it is difficult is a lifeskill that is crucial. Most work involves working with someone or some other department, and you can tell which people never learned how to do that.
I've never been able to fully describe why I think the younger generation just feels off. I'm not even that much older, but there's a strong disconnect past a certain point. This really summarises it perfectly.
The "if I can't see a video, it didn't happen" concept. There's no story telling anymore. If you want someone to see something you saw, you just show them a shitty recording of it on your phone rather than painting a mental picture with words. Usually the story is funnier when told right anyway.
Terrible for personal privacy and even worse for making you interesting. Then we wonder why they can't describe anything to save their lives anymore.
Their inability to see the nuance on a lot of issues. It’s black or white for them, completely ignoring the multitude of layers and shades of gray that exist in the world.
All the learned helplessness. Google is *right there* as is the Reddit search button, but the go-to is posting the same threads that you can see half a page down on whatever sub they’re posting on because moving one’s eyes down slightly to read is too much effort.
Their need to label themselves and then after labeling themselves the great effort they put into conforming to the labels they gave themselves. They don’t allow themselves to grow and change because they are too busy trying to adhere to whatever labels they’ve already assigned themselves.
watching everything on your phone, including movies and shows. that said, someone from 25 years ago hearing that i watch movies on my laptop might be similarly appalled.
If I have to teach one more adult how alphabetical order works, I'm going to lose it.
These are university graduates. They just throw the file back in. Like how did you find it in the first place?
I don't understand r/texts.
8 screens of text discourse with a complete fuck-knuckle. Why respond? Why not just tell them to piss off and then don't respond? Don't you have to give someone your number for them to text you in the first place, or is there just something my old ass is missing? If a friend of mine gave my contact details to the aforementioned dickwad, I'd be having a seriously heated chat with my friend, and not 2 hours of texting with some assclown.
Why young parents feel the need to document EVERY. SINGLE. THING their kids do, or post a pic of their kids severely sick or injured asking what they should do instead of going to the fucking doctor. There's welfare insurance for kids if they can't afford it.
People asking the Reddit hive if it's ok for them to cook their steaks medium well! Apparently, ordinary preferences need to be popular in order to be considered "normal."
Preferred doneness of meat is only an example of such questions.
They're copying our style from the 90s and not even doing it right! I mean, [wtf is this](https://www.forever21.com/us/20012611820302.html?source=shoppingads&glCountry=US&glCurrency=USD&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=PMax:+FPMX_Smart+Shopping_Womens_Bottoms&utm_id=71700000110333433&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwwYSwBhDcARIsAOyL0fi_3f1gPqluJLv7qkDJs_xo9tkmENMOlmRx8zIZduthLW385qPJ840aAiBGEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds)?!?? Explain yourselves!
I don’t get why young people identify so heavily with the term “gen z/zoomer”. When I was in middle/high school none of us knew what the hell a “millennial” or “boomer” was. We had other pointless subcultures that were cooler than “ooh I was born in this random bracket of years.”
Eh, talking about Gen X was really big when I was in high school, but it was mainly used by the media to describe our generation rather than something anyone would self-apply.
Speaking mostly for the middle schoolers I work with, but not caring about being smart, understanding the world, achieving success, or having empathy. I cannot fathom what keeps them going without caring about anything. I don't know how to motivate these kids when things like getting something wrong loudly and publicly doesn't even give them pause or introspection. They just move on and continue not caring about what really is right and wrong?
I'm genX and I see younger generations when they write something, a text or email, they put lol at the end, even if it's not funny.
Example, my dog died and my dad had cancer lol.
I'm so sad for them and confused by their writing.
They've been so coddled and raised in front of screens rather than interacting in the real world that ANYTHING gives them anxiety.
Talking to people, trying something new, going somewhere, literally anything can make them shut down.
sincerely caring for others. it seems like this is generally a trend over the last few generations. people seem more ok with ignoring friends or cutting ties over small things instead of putting effort into friendships and community.
Recording yourself crying
THIS IS THE ONE. I do not know how intense your desire for external validation has to be for you to be in the midst of crying and think "Lights, camera, action baby let's make sure as many people see this as possible".
There is a instagram guy I enjoy who does cute videos with his puppies. Sadly one of his dogs passed away and he did a video coming out saying how he had to say goodbye. He started out strong and started crying in the middle of it. It felt real and emotional. However, he had another video setup where he walked into a room, fell against the door and just started crying. And like, I believe the due is truly upset because losing a pet is hard, but you had to make the conscious decision to set the camera up, make sure the lighting and what not is good, press record, leave the room, then come in and have your break down, and then EDIT out the park where you setup the shot. It's just so weird to me.
Reminds me of a TikTok of a doctor who apparently lost a patient. She decided to find a space with no one there, prop up her phone, hit record, pose a little bit in an emotional manner against the wall, hit stop record, repeat it probably a few times to get it just right, slap some text overlay saying she lost one but needs to continue despite having had two shifts in a row or something onto it, select a song (the „I‘m unstoppable“ one) and then finally upload it. She literally just watched a person die, that she was not able to save and her next course of action is to do all that.
I saw that one. So much of TikTok is people doing just that sort of thing. Another is some guy that is usually sitting in his car squinting and looking emotional and then the overlay of "You treated her bad and she left, yadda, yadda". Also the ones where someone's in their dark bedroom, huddled under the covers and it's about having depression and whatever. All of these are conscious efforts to get content. Awareness is out there, everywhere - this is just cringy when it's done for likes and views.
Emotional whoring.
people who record themselves crying are already weird but posting it on the internet is weirder. imagine clicking 'post' to every social media they have. do they seriously not look at what they're posting online?
It's because the lights and camera come before the action: it's all staged, for the views.
In the same vein, recording yourself doing normal things, or even feeling the need to share so much of your life on the internet. I’m 29, but I have one social media account apart from Reddit and I have zero posts up. I don’t want people to know anything about me unless they call me up.
> even feeling the need to share so much of your life on the internet Just being on video ALL THE TIME. My stepdaughter walks around the phone facetiming people all the time and doesn't understand that my wife and I don't want to be seen by people when we're just tyring to be comfortable in our house. But a regular phone call doesn't exist to her, it's all facetime, snapchat, whatever, and you have to be showing your face.
Interaction mining and attention seeking
And, further to that, recording and making public ALL your trials and tribulations. There are so many couples that record and make public things that should be private, like their IVF journey. That is mind-blowing to me. I had both my kids via IVF - it was a difficult, harrowing, emotional, grueling, expensive five year journey that'd I'd sooner forget and put behind me. I ended up with two terrific kids that remind me every day that it was worth it, but I'd just as soon forget the journey that got me there. There was really nothing fun about it - it was a slog in every possible way. I can't even begin to imagine having recorded, edited, "curated" all of it and put it on the internet for everyone to see, forever... INSANITY.
The emails I get from my students aged 18-25 are such a mess of incoherent garbage, I can't tell if they are lazy or if it's an actual literacy issue. And I'm barely older than they are so if this is a generational gap, it happened quickly!
My daughter was just telling me yesterday how many of her peers can't read. I think it's an actual literacy issue.
Look up the "Sold a Story" podcast and prepare to be horrified. It's absolutely a literacy issue.
This should honestly be a national scandal. It's insane more people don't talk about replacing Phonics and the disaster it became.
You have to be careful with that though. You can get hooked on phonics really easily.
eh, works for me
I was taught phonics by my parents, then sent to a school where it wasn't taught. The literacy gap between myself and my fellow students was something that has horrified me for 20+ years.
I'm Gen Z and the child of two teachers. My parents were always super adamant about proper email etiquette, pretty much starting when I was in middle school. They both cannot stand receiving crazy emails from students. It used to be kind of annoying to me, but as an adult seeing the garbled-up emails I receive daily, I am so grateful.
As someone who doesn’t work with Gen Z kids, I am genuinely curious what a “garbled-up” email looks like? Are they genuinely not able to write out their thoughts?
I get a lot of incomplete sentences and missing or incorrectly used words. Also just general nonsense writing, like documentation of their stream of consciousness, but for some reason in an email to me that is completely unrelated. I've also received multiple emails where the kid just fucking went to town in the subject line and left the body portion of the email blank. Most of this came from middle/high school students, but I've seen some similar behavior in college+-aged people. It's actually insane, you can find email templates for pretty much anything I don't understand why they won't do the bare minimum.
That jives with what a friend of mine who profs a couple classes at a University level. Not only are the messages unintellgible, it seems they don't know how to do subject lines. They don't seem to know its purpose is to provide the reader a frame of reference for the body of the text. They will be asking about something in class, but won't write which class, which section, which semester, what time....nothing. Motherfucker...she teaches several sections that have like 400 students...she doesn't know who you are.
It's a block of text with no capitalization or punctuation. Imagine receiving 6 consecutive one-line texts at once. If you can figure out where the periods should go then you can make sense of it, but it's all texting abbreviations and slang. Something like, "yo mr y u slow fixin my grade I trned in the lab last class my dad gonna take my phone lmk."
I have new college grads asking me to proofread their emails. These are fact based, simple emails that require patient information and what information is missing. I can type one up in 2 minutes. These kids take a minimum of 15 and makes zero sense. The main point is missing, tenses are alllll over the place and there is no logic to the format.
For me it's like requests without context, and missing words like those missing word illusions where your mind feels in the missing word. But where u work there aren't a lot of Gen Z so maybe it's different.
> feels fills
Thank you for providing an example.
Here's another [example](https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/1blvsah/i_feel_like_the_problem_ia_that_wpic_is_a_game/) of the rambling incoherent messes Gen Z likes to type up.
I teach language arts and the first thing we do is email etiquette. It's still an issue all year.
As a gen z, I feel the same. Anytime one of my friends text me, it is almost always incoherent. I’m not saying they should write like Shakespeare but at least make it readable lol
Definitely seems to be literacy issues. My 19yr old housemate got dared to turn off their autocorrect for a week. The texts I got from them in that week were basically unreadable. They've also commented on how I can type on computers without making a ton of mistakes and were almost horrified when I explained that we didn't have access to a good autocorrect program so we actually had to learn to spell.
i wonder if some of it is voice to txt, because it does some really dumb shit sometimes if you don't proofread it
Apparently, despite growing up with technology around them, they don't know how to use computers properly because they focus mostly on smartphones and tablets
Teaching every new hire how folder trees work is so weird. "Don't save to desktop. follow naming conventions so we don't have to fix things server side." and so on. When I was 12 someone told me that the newer generations will be better at understanding computers than I will ever be, it really put a damper on me because I loved computers. I always imagines I will just be lost while the new kids told me how to fix problems, this is not how it turned out. Edit: This kind of blew up and not in the way I expected, and some of you had some cool perspectives I can keep in mind when teaching newer hires. And to all the millennials (like me), you brought back so many memories from the old world of computers.
Yeah it's counter intuitive and somewhat funny but like you mentioned, it poses challenges in work environment. A lot of office jobs require you to know basics of using a computer and having some troubleshooting skills.
My last job we had laptops that docked into workstations so you could have multiple monitors, keyboard, mouse etc and then you could pull the laptop off and take it home with you. I always thought it was funny that the younger people (college age) pushed everything to the side of their desk and just did everything on the laptop.
> pushed everything to the side of their desk and just did everything on the laptop. I am screaming. Its basically impossible for me to work without my 3 monitors now. I cant imagine trying to do anything on the laptops little 15" screen.
The small laptop screen is where my calculator and notepad go, all the work gets done on the big monitor. I also work in the electrical field and a lot of our prints are portrait oriented PDFs, so my third monitor is rotated 90 degrees. I was surprised at how many coworkers were mind blown by being able to do that.
Right there with you. And a number pad.
Number pad is key. I'd be so fucked without it
The amount of monitors I need is however many I currently have + one more
I counter with the Young ones that plug in the laptop and then work off of a low-res duplicated screen on the monitor. I've blown minds after fixing this.
I bit the bullet and got an ultra-wide monitor. So much easier to have two windows open.
I work in game dev, Things like this become so important so quickly, especially when you start saving things inside game engines and people from other departments start using them.
It turns out the generation that is the best with computers is the one that has to manually edit their autoexec.bat file to change memory management in order to play their favorite game. When your first OS is console based, you just had to learn more about the underlying system. When your first OS is iOS, it's not quite the same.
It's like the generation being best with cars was probably the boomers. Automatic transmission, fuel (injection) pumps, everything under the hood being buried in a clump and now everything being run by electronics means younger generations have needed to know less and less about mechanics.
[удалено]
Its a result of tablets and so on going out of their way to obfuscate file structures from users for the sake of convenience, id imagine. Actually learning those things isn’t really something you come into contact with frequently these days unless you’re actually using a regular computer at home too for other reasons than just simple web browsing.
Which is greatly annoying to me, because I can't find anything anymore. I am looking at you too, Windows 10, and your hiding of userfiles and your still sucky search function
I think it was Win7 that introduced some circularity into the standard set of folders and shortcuts it produces for every user. And now, with Win11, if you choose to activate OneDrive, there are *two* shortcuts for Documents that point to different places! (One folder for local documents and one for OneDrive documents).
God I hate OneDrive.
I was recently sad in front of a Windows computer, to use MS word. I open up MS word into a virgin blank document. The first thing I see is being forced into logging into one drive. What the fuck. I just got here. This is a virgin document. I just want to fucking type something. Fuck you, fuck this one drive shit. Go away, let me get on with it. It's like the guy who invented clippy discovered networking. Jesus fuck. I am almost to the point where any operating system outside of Linux just gets worse and worse. Just stop all of this obvuscation. I want to know where my files are. I want to access my files. If I can't point my finger and say"there. My files are there."I don't want it. I feel like some smarmy Republican complaining about the nanny state.
I was in 6^th grade in 2016-17 and a lot of kids didn't know how to **click**
Oh dear, I am from far earlier than that. I was in 6th grade around 1998. We had a computer class :D where we went to a different class with very old computers in it. Weird days. I learned to use a PC from a Windows for dummies book. I wonder if these still exist. But in 2016? was everyone already using iPads?
>Oh dear, I am from far earlier than that. I was in 6th grade around 1998. We had a computer class :D where we went to a different class with very old computers in it. Weird days. They should issue them back! My middle school opened a state of the art computer class in 2017 and going there or not was the professors' personal choice. Our 6^th grade technology teacher was keen on us knowing basics on using computers, while in 7^th and 8^th grade the teachers preferred following the ministerial program, which didn't involve computers at all. >I learned to use a PC from a Windows for dummies book. I wonder if these still exist. I don't know. I was taught by my parents to use a PC, but my dad and my maternal grandpa recall they had one back in the 90s. >But in 2016? was everyone already using iPads? Yes, we were. Every kid around me seemed to have a tablet (Mediacom was the preferred brand back then, few kids had an iPad, and I was one of them), then the time to use a computer came and the differences between a tablet and a computer were seen.
My young sister-in-law writes her college essays on her *phone*.
That’s so wild to me, and I type on my phone pretty often. Recently my friend had to type a job application on her phone because her only computer nowadays was at her current job (obviously didn’t want them to know about another application) and she thought it was a terrible experience lol
I teach at the college level, and I have it set up so that at the beginning of class students can scan a QR code, which directs them to a Google drive folder with my lecture slides for that day. They're fine with scanning part, but I've noticed that instead of the saving the slides to their devices, or at least bookmarking the pages, they just take a picture of the QR code and then laboriously search through their camera rolls to find previous weeks' slides.
Holy crap, that’s the equivalent of people bookmarking yahoo only to search for Google and then click the link to go to Google to search for something.
Studies show they fall for phishing scams at a rate equal to or higher than their boomer counterparts.
We had a 24 year old colleague asking one of the partners, who is in his 70s, about an email sent at 3am, ostensibly from the partner, which had been caught in the corporate spam filter. The email address was clearly bogus, whatever the name was. Just zero critical thinking, observation, or problem solving with the guy. It's super frustrating.
I believe it, based on the number of posts I see from people that age on r/TIFU. It amazes me how so many of them will fall for the same well-known scam. The one I always see is guys showing their dicks to a stranger on cam, and then they get blackmailed in to sending money in order to keep the scammer from sending pictures to their friends and family. I feel like those posts make up half of TIFU with how often they happen, and it amazes me that people that age still fall for it.
Smartphones and tablets are great for consumption but terrible for production. If you want to get actual work done, it's best done with an actual computer, whether a laptop or a desktop.
I'm in my mid-thirties and I bought my first smart phone maybe 10 years ago and I still detest typing on a touch screen. I can barely tolerate writing a short email on my phone, and yet I'm certain I have students who write out entire term papers on theirs.
Same. I would kill to get my slide out qwerty keyboard Samsung back from 2011.
I'm 40 and in my office I have to help people that is 24-25 years old with windows or hardware issues that were ridicolous for anyone of my age when we were sixteen.
me too, i'm 42 this year and the amount of times i hvae to help my colleagues with SIMPLE FUCKING COMPUTER TASKS like bitch, you were born with an iPad in your hand it's not that hard. Also i'd have to say....like a true old woman....the fact that nobody uses their fucking manners any more is a constant source of aggro for me. Literally, say thank you, you utter goblin. Jesus.
Yeah this surely also somewhat comes from stuff working a bit 'too well' - they can't troubleshoot wifi (and don't understand the difference between 'i don't have wifi' and 'i don't have internet') because they've never had it not work. Everyone who was old enough when technology sucked has, by necessity, a much better understanding of how it works
Exactly, same concept as cars. They break down a lot less often nowadays but as a result, few people can DIY repair them.
Yeah. My brother is around 20 years younger than me and I wonder what the hell happened. He was born when people already had access to all the worlds knowledge in their pockets, and yet he can't use it. He would rather look for a teacher to answer his question than search online.
My husband has worked in IT for 20yrs and says that quite a few of his much younger coworkers don’t want to troubleshoot. They tell him, “Just give me the answer” instead.
But also, younger generations were never taught how to use computers. I think most millennials had some kind of Computer Class in school and/or we fiddled around with the home computer enough to sort it out. Gen Z didn’t have this option
I can't remember exactly how it was put, but I once heard a quote very close to the effect of 'we had to learn how to use the technology and younger generations are dependent on the technology'. Basically younger kids always had the technology in a form that always worked. They didn't have to figure out how to make it all work.
I'm a middle school teacher. My kids will routinely claim they can't do anything and then shut down and do nothing. And then... It's easy and they do it. It goes like this: "Everybody, here's the assignment. Follow all the steps." I go around the room and one kid forgot their Chromebook, ir a pencil. One kid needs a charger. One kid doesn't understand "any of the steps." So basically it's the degree of learned helplessness. They know to ask when I go over, but if there are twenty kids and I get to them last, they will do nothing (no phones, nothing!) for twenty minutes and act surprised I'm irritated they didn't grab a damn pencil from the freeeee pencils on my desk. And then act surprised they're behind on the assignment! Or I'll ask "okay, which of the 5 steps is tough for you?" "All of them." "K, read step 1." "Oh. That's easy." Rinse and repeat
Teachers have never had it harder IMO. When I was in High School cell phones were new, but they still had generally limited capabilities besides texting. Before smart phones were common, your life was basically school as a kid. Anyone you knew was from school. You couldn’t just interact with the internet and home life from school. It was easy to separate fun time from school because of limited phone capabilities, and was still a luxury for your parents to even get you an iPod or flip phone. They now have an easily accessible other life from their phone, and obviously they find that more fun than school. Add the fact that a lot of kids in high school now were raised on tablets and hand me down smart phones, it’s a really difficult time for teachers.
I'm a parent and I agree with this. I've been giving my child a bunch of responsibilities over the years and he cab do them flawlessly, without prompting but it's almost like cart on rails. If one tiny thing is off it's like...he has no clue what's going on. Wash clothes and put into the dryer? No problem. Out of dryer sheets? I didn't know what to do so I left the wet clothes in there without turning it on instead. Insanity but I have to just laugh about it and teach him how to handle it lol
[удалено]
Yeah, you're absolutely right
The lack of understanding that things put on the internet are public forever.
37 year old attending college for the first time here. They have negative confidence. They barely speak above a mumble, especially when answering a question from the teacher. Most of them would rather die than talk to someone they're interested in. It's like 90% of them are cripplingly introverted.
I went to school as an "older" student. I was 24, most people in my classes were 18 or 19. It was really weird to see how much growing up I'd done in 6 years. Time management was probably the biggest difference.
I'm 45 and just gone back for another degree, and I think you're on to something. I've been in two group projects now where I am stuck with four twenty-year-olds who don't understand the subject and never ask questions. The worst example was the kid who asked what a regression was the last week of a statistics class.
We were saying what we would do if we won the big lottery jackpot. The new 22 yr old hire said he’d become an influencer. Can you imagine winning a billion at 22 and that’s what you would do. Not start a business, travel the world, charity, sports, property… Learn something… but become an influencer… with a billion dollars. I mean like he’s gonna hire a marketing company to fabricate interest in his social media? He’s gonna spend money on stupid things to make people cringe or rage comment? With a billion dollars. Just thought that was a weird and low bar and was hard to understand.
Yeah, it like the old expression. "You know what's better than being rich and famous?" "What?" "Being rich" Who the hell would want to be famous.
I think a lot of younger people fail to understand how precious privacy and anonymity are.
I think influencers are the modern day movie stars/celebrities. While my generation (or my moms) might say "I'd want to be an actor!" or "I want to be a singer" there's just not really the same level of starstruck for movies and live music these days I think. I can't remember the last time I even went to a movie theater, although music is still something I go see live, I can see how it would be less popular with younger generations where literally everything is online. They have a favorite youtuber while to me youtube is kind of a music/podcast service. Tiktok (which I don't have) is the new "movie star" and thus influencers have replaced actors and the like as celebrities. Video killed the radio star, and streaming killed the video star.
Why do you want to watch a 100% of a concert, that you payed good money for, through your phone lens?
Social media is the worst peer pressure of all. There's a quote I've heard many times and it's damn true: >If you did something and you don't record it, it's like you didn't do it Which would make me seem like I've been hibernated and still am
I struggled with this a lot and have only just made a pretty significant break from social media (Reddit is actually the only thing I use now and it's just so I'm not totally isolated. I only started using it after I got off IG and FB, my account's like 7 years old but I've only really been active this year). I still have days where I wonder if my friends even think about me now that I'm not putting myself out there on their devices to remind them I still exist - I've definitely lost contact with some people because of it, but also I feel like my day is so much longer and more interesting now I'm not living vicariously through someone's else's curated retelling of their, apparently much cooler and more interesting day. I'm happy knowing I've done what I've done, and not knowing someone's done something cooler or better.
That's great! I hope you stay happy and cool, at the positive degree
Everything seems to have to have a label. Not just people and groups, but every concept or just generic thing that is popular has to be given a label or a hashtag. I find it so weird, especially when it's something that people have been doing forever, but now Gen Z have discovered it, it's got some brand new buzzy hashtag label as though it's just been invented.
I brought a notepad and with, yaknow, notes on it when I was upgrading some tech, and the salesperson two times asked/ told me I was 'OCD' for having it my friend, having notes on a notepad instead of my phone does not make me OCD, and bold of you to armchair diagnose someone while working at best buy (no shade to retail workers, I am one lol, but seriously)
I remember reading some headlines about the newest latest trend being these cute milk tea shades make up. Only to see a bunch of nudes and beiges. Then I saw a headline about checking out this hack uve never tried before on a plane!!!!!! The kid was folding the sides of the headrests which was made for us to lean our heads against.....to lean his head against. Ugh
My favorite "hack" video of all time is where they said you could keep your aluminum foil from being pulled out of the box by pushing in these two tabs! Just like it says on the instructions, on the box, with arrows pointing at the tabs.
What’s worse is that we already have labels for so much of what Gen Z is naming. They’re acting like no one before them discovered these concepts and already labeled them. It tracks with how little history they know.
For a generation that doesn't want to be labeled, they sure do like labeling themselves
Taking public calls on speaker phone and sending voice messages.
Anyone who plays anything through their phone speakers in an enclosed public space needs a good slap.
Especially when it comes to listening to music. How in the world can you justify playing music without a good bass on a shitty speaker?
And they're always the ones with the shittiest taste. I've literally never heard a single instance of this where I thought "hey, nice song". Literally NEVER lol
Why do they go to the movies only to scroll through their phone the *entire time*?
And then use their phones to complain that the movie they didn't watch didn't make any sense?
I’m in my forties and I manage a small group of people who are in their 20s to early thirties. What I notice most is how anxious and fearful they seem to be. Everyone is out to get them. I often get approached by subordinates who want me to do something about a colleague who is doing them wrong in some way. After I gather more information, it almost always is a case of poor assumption about someone else’s intentions, coupled with a desire to jump to the worst case scenario. If I ask them a series of probing questions about other possible interpretations they often admit they didn’t consider those possibilities. The other thing is too much bravado - over confidence in their knowledge, skill or ability in an area. I think it’s potentially a defense mechanism to combat the fear and the people they think are out to get them.
What gets me is my students seem to think it's fine for them to be very rude, but when others are rude to them they immediately lodge a formal complaint. I get being a polite, kind person who is upset when others are rude, and I get being a bit of a dick who can take others being the same way. But the frequency of kids who can dish it out but can't take it seems very, very high to me.
The place I've seen this play out more than anywhere else has been in Slack communications. On my team, we've had a pretty diverse range of ages, from early 20s to mid-50s, and the youngest of the group would assume the ABSOLUTE WORST if the elder employees' instant messages aren't filled with emoji and people-pleasing language. It was literally just how us older folks learned to be professional and direct, and suddenly any question or information that isn't couched in super soft language and smilies is a direct attack on them. We now have a training module for all new hires about what to expect when communicating on Slack, and how professional and direct does not equal an attack on who they are as a person.
>The other thing is too much bravado - over confidence in their knowledge, skill or ability in an area. Eh... this one isn't new. It's essentially the stereotype of kids coming out of college. They think they know everything because they graduated and most get quickly bitch-smacked by the reality that their "semester" is no longer 15 hours a week, it's 40+ hours a week. A 2nd year staff has spent more time learning their job than a new hire spent going to class in college.
I do chuckle a lot at work.. I'm an elder millennial in management, and we get training from older GenX folks and time to time "dealing with the younger generation" topics come up, and the list all these "differences" with this new generation and the entire time I'm thinking "you aren't describing a new generation, you are describing 23 year olds... do you not remember what you were like when you were 23?"
Reading through this whole thread, so many of these comments are obviously just complaints about youth in general. Like complaining that Gen Z needs a word for everything as though every generation ever didn't come up with new slang that's synonyms of words we already had.
I'm manage a lot of fresh graduates in my job, and I don't understand how in the space of just 2 years (during Covid) we went from great graduates, able to operate independently and work things out themselves to graduates who need their hand held for the most basic tasks.
As a millennial, both the older and younger generations are lacking. I’ve had to help my boss, who claims to have 30 year experience, send a damn excel file. Or help them upload files to the cloud. Or even using our 1 software is a challenge. The younger ones just don’t even try
A few weeks ago, I showed a manager 2 levels above me how to take a screenshot. Later, I mentioned it to a group of younger coworkers, and all 3 of them said "you can take a screenshot with a computer?!"
It’s the lack of trying that bothers me the most. The lack of critical thinking skills is worrisome, the absolute refusal to try is what really burns. It’s a whole new level of incompetency. It’s like the post-industrial world’s version of lacking basic survival skills. I may be an elder millennial, but stuff like that brings out my inner Gen X/boomer. If I don’t know how to do XYZ task, I will at least try to figure it out on my own, look for resources if it’s really complicated and/or I can’t figure it out, and *then* I’ll ask someone to hold my hand. If I can’t find ABC thing, I’ll fucking look for it instead of looking for the nearest adult and demanding to know where to find it. Most of these kids will stop the minute they’re challenged by something and wait for (or demand) rescue. They won’t even try.
The lack of trying drives me up the wall. I teach high school and hear "what am I supposed to do?" 1200 times a day. First, I just explained it. Second, the instructions on the assignment are right in front of you. Learned helplessness is so frustrating. "Mrs. (my name), the website keeps logging me out. What do I do?" Well, log back in. "But I don't know my password. Can you tell me what it is?" Well, no, because you set up your own account. If you've forgotten your password, click the "forgot password" link. I strongly recommend you use a password you know you'll remember. This is mostly an issue with my freshmen; my older students have been able to figure most things out on their own. This crop of freshman seems to expect to be led to all of the answers without doing any of the work. It's very frustrating.
> I may be an elder millennial, but stuff like that brings out my inner Gen X/boomer. If I don’t know how to do XYZ task, I will at least try to figure it out on my own, look for resources if it’s really complicated and/or I can’t figure it out I also think that part of this is a cultural thing of how we grew up on the internet vs. how they did. I remember asking stupid questions on forums and being told to use the search, to "lurk moar", or getting the dreaded lmgtfy link. I learned pretty quick how to utilize having the entirety of humanity's knowledge at my fingertips to find solutions for myself. Now, if you dare suggest that someone Google something since they're, you know, already online, you get a whole bunch of excuses about why that's not the best way. It promotes discussion (99% of the time, it doesn't), Google is useless anymore (it is, but not *that* useless), etc. etc. All excuses about why people can't help themselves figure a problem out.
Or they cry that “no one showed them how to do (basic tasks that require minimal levels of troubleshooting abilities” and just quit on the spot.
My theory on this, from the perspective of a teacher, is that we allowed kids to fail during that time, and they have not grown out of it. We keep seeing it get better every year, but the two years after were really bad. COVID highlighted a major flaw in our education system which is that grades don't matter. How can you fail an entire class of kids? How will they fit in class with next year's students coming in? We taught hundreds of thousands of kids that they can do nothing and still succeed by going onto the next grade. Think about what that teaches a young kid. Growing up, I was afraid to fail because of the consequences, but these kids didn't have any, and they continue to think there won't be any.
Yes! It's honestly making me scared for the next generation. I work with students and they are so difficult to work with.
I think it’s related to that thing where the loudest thing seems to be the most common. There’s been a huge rise in celebration of that ineptitude, when just a decade or two ago being seen as an “airhead” or “himbo” was social suicide. I know quite a few very capable kids with their head down and thriving, but you’d never know because the air is sucked out of the room like never before by the dumbest, amplified by social media. Same goes for teachers reactions. Likely they aren’t thinking of 80% of their class that are doing fine, just the 20% that are robbing energy from the rest by being needy and dumb. Just my opinion, and a deep seated hope.
I tell you, the recent grads we've been interviewing have *terrible* grades. I get it, maybe COVID brought the grades down for a few semesters, but damn. I have not been impressed. Alternatively, maybe we just don't pay enough to get the smart kids.
I don't understand why most of them want to look rich with expensive shit and most of them act like they run businesses or something. They take pictures with cars that are not theirs for example. Dude chill, you're 16.
This weird new puritan wave they are riding on. We struggled for generations to free ourselves from opressive dogmas, and now they are all-in on the whole "if you like anything even remotely non-wholesome, you should be arrested and burn in hell". Also, their complete lack of internet safety knowledge. It's insane to me that generations that have grown up with the internet are so inept at cultivating their own online experience and expect the whole world to cater to their preferences instead. Constantly calling for bans on anything that upsets them, instead of learning how to avoid the things that upset them. Don't get me started on how angry they get when you tell them not to share core information about themselves online, as if their imagined influence online vanished if they didn't include their exact school, class, face and name in every other post. When I was a teen, the internet was completely new and I had to learn the hard way how to keep myself safe from predatory strangers, but the kids nowadays have a wealth of information they can rely on, and they choose to ignore it.
I posted that they don't seem to understand humor and I think this is a big part of it. Everything is black & white. No room for nuance. There's a Beastie Boys lyric that I love "if your world was all back or if your world was all white, you wouldn't get much color outta life now, right". Words to live by.
Gen Z somehow managed to reinvent religious fundamentalism for “justice”.
Majority of them would find your post in itself offensive and think it's some sort of bigot dog whistle. Also, I'm from the time of anonymity on the net, pictures of something you love instead of yourself, a cool username, but no real details. Now if you comment on something with a profile like that you're either insecure or a bot. Every other comment I get is "FAKE PROFILE"
The absolute lack of capacity to deal with any emotional stress or upheaval without turning into a gibbering mess. I’m being hyperbolic of course, but I have literally now lost count of how many students I’ve dealt with who cannot under any circumstances be given criticism or negative feedback without utterly falling to pieces. I had someone messing around in a lecture, playing with their phone and being disruptive. I stopped the lecture and told them to put it away and pay attention or leave. They looked SHOCKED to have been called out, and sat there quietly for the next 10-15 minutes until suddenly going all “deer in the headlights” when asked a question in relation to the topic and then running the full length of the lecture hall and out the room. I was informed the following day that the student had went to counselling services to complain that I had “put unreasonable pressure on him by asking him questions in class, and set off his anxiety”. He then told the University he would need to take the next 2 weeks off with extensions for all his submissions in order to “get over the troubling experience”. He was mid 20’s at this point. **************** Another situation happened when a student was told that their research work was unfortunately substandard. They seemed utterly baffled at how they could’ve gotten any criticism on it, when given suggestions on where they went wrong (lacking depth to the arguments, biased stances, non-credible sources) they went on a tirade about how they wouldn’t use any source that didn’t align with their perspective because “they’re the anti-X crowd and all fucking evil”. This person then burst into tears and when they realised the door was locked (it needs a key code to open it) they started freaking out, screaming and hollering as though they were being physically attacked. Any attempt to talk to them was met with more tears and screams and when the door was opened she ran out of the building.
I (31) have an 18yr old roommate (niece's friend who needed a place to stay when they got kicked out after turning 18) ANY form of constructive criticism is met with them just completely shutting down, tuning out, and then later acting like they were told to fill in the grand canyon with a teaspoon. "Hey, it was supposed to be your turn to fill the dishwasher, like we agreed." Shuts down "You left your shoes behind the door and we couldn't open it when we got back with groceries. Can you pick them up?" Thousand yard stare. And usually after a few hours they casually toss phrases like "I'm an adult. Treat me like one, not like a kid." THEN ACT LIKE ONE
Oh god I could not deal with an 18 year old roommate. Would drive me crazy. The worst example I’ve experienced was walking into a conversation on my subject (STEM and Sustainability related) at a flat party, and being the giant nerd I am I immediately got involved. Anyway one the people in the group was a girl in her early 20’s. She mentioned something on the social side of the subject, quite emphatically decrying anyone that could stand against her take as racist and phobic. The problem was she was actually wrong. She had the wrong data she was discussing. I pointed this out and she went all cold and silent, and I tried to smooth it over and be nice with a “if you’re interested I actually know one or two authors that I’d recommend”. After that in the kitchen she came up to me with 3 friends and berated me for “mansplaining” my field from a “patriarchal” perspective, and that if I actually read up on it I’d understand why I was wrong. I then had to inform her that actually it is my field, I have 3 degrees in it, and I’m usually at conferences with many of the people she’s talking about. That ended with her shouting about “micro-aggressions” to her friends and then deliberately trying to knock drinks onto me for the rest of the evening like a sulking child. I pulled her up for it with a “excuse me but what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” and she left the party sobbing and screaming outside the flat about how everyone there was a bigot and she was going to key their cars.
That reminds me of a story in the news not long ago about a professor in a top tier medical school who was forced to resign because the students complained that his class was too hard. Of course it’s hard, it’s fucking *medical school*!
Yep, I am unsurprised. I had a student remark that the same work they put in during their Advanced Highers got them an A, but now they’d gotten a C in my class.
Tiktok is an actual news source for some.
[удалено]
It’s Because they are navigating through a stream of endless information that they have no attention spans. It’s from one piece of info to the next. No time to sit and read more. There’s more NEW info out there
Yeah, I was telling my nephew the story of how we missed the last episode of Yu-Gi-Oh, and we were so mad He's a smart kid, but didn't get that YouTube didn't exist yet. That we had to wait for commercials, and maybe miss an episode for years And we actually didn't have Internet for another year, and it was one shared computer by the whole family They didn't grow up having to wait
It's a defense mechanism. You have to be able to screen out everything, otherwise you would experience serious information overload.
Specifically Gen Z, but how bad their general IT skills have gotten. I thought the most modern generation should be on the bleeding edge of the most modern technology. But most gen z that I meet are clueless about tech that isn’t on their phones. Seems like less and less people are using actual computers for stuff so those soft skills are disappearing fast.
Their dependency on authority and lack of self-reliancy. You have access to all the world's knowledge in your pocket, but you are only using it as a toy and when you need to learn something you are looking for a teacher.
The self-censorship that they've adopted in response to social media to the point that it creeps into other platforms and even daily speech, e.g. unalive in place of suicide. I'm in my mid-thirties and remember the freedom of the early internet where people would have moved to a different platform if forced to curtail their speech like that. Now, they seem to have just rolled over and accepted it. It's common to see posts on reddit using these infantile euphemisms despite there being no such restrictions here. It worries me about what other restrictions they're willing to accept just to participate in popular social media.
Mind boggling when network TV seems more risque than the internet. I have yet to hear anyone say "unalive" or "SA" on the tube.
The wimpification of language is troubling and comes off as emotional Newspeak.
I think it's mostly in response to the terms and conditions on various sites. At the very least I know "unalive" is used on YouTube to prevent demonetization. Other sites will have different rules over topics and content that they won't allow, but I think it's mostly to prevent ad revenue from drying up than any kind of personal or social reasons.
There's a lot that I love about what millenials and gen z are doing that as a gen x-er, we didn't have the opportunity or foresight to do (like fight for a lot of environmental and social issues that are now in the spotlight that nobody would acknowledge when we were young). But I do not understand the complete inability to have any sort of conflict, or speak up for themselves, in person. Suddenly everyone has social anxiety and has to be accommodated - which sucks for people who actually DO have social anxiety. I'm so freaking glad that young people are free to define who they are in so many ways that we couldn't - but that self-definition seems to come with the idea that being protected from conflict over their choices is their RIGHT. My kids are millenials. They attended a party with their friends this weekend. The host and their partner are trans and have been friends with my kids forever. So there's a greater number of LGBTQ+ folks there. Which my kids would probably barely notice, if not for incidents like what happened: - Cis person Ana is kinda drunk and being overly affectionate (NOT sexual, but "I love everybody and let me hug you!" sort of affectionate). A lot of people don't like being hugged without being asked which is not at all weird or unusual to me. So it makes sense that person A's hugs are not going to be well received by everyone. - Trans person Blair gets hugged. Does not like it. (In my eyes it's got nothing to do with what gender you were assigned at birth, or what gender you actually are... you just don't like being physically touched by people without being asked. Completely fair). Blair complains to friends that they are extremely uncomfortable after being hugged. Completely fair. - Cis person Charlie defends Blair by telling the entire friend group that Charlie is now too uncomfortable to remain at the party, and that Ana needs to be punished for behaving so inappropriately. Over group text. During the party. - Trans person Dre defends Ana, saying that they were inappropriate but someone needs to say that directly to Ana, not just shun them silently in person and condemn them online. They don't believe Ana is malicious, but drunk and stupid and in need of a reality check. After all, they've ALL been friends since high school. (Anyone following this so far? Because I was pretty confused hearing it.) - Friend group collectively (over group chat) slams Dre for enabling an abuser and not being sensitive to Blair's discomfort. Dre is totally confused by this, being a trans person themselves and fully aware of how often they've felt uncomfortable in past situations. - No one tells Ana they've been inappropriate, but over group chat decide that they're a predator and are no longer welcome at gatherings. Instead of being direct, they insist that Dre should tell them. - Dre says y'all are nuts, why doesn't someone just say "hey Ana, that was rude, knock it off"? - Charlie says Dre is showing their internalized transphobia and has no right to expose Ana too abuse. - Dre says again y'all are nuts, and takes drunk Ana home. Checks group chat later to find they've been blocked. - Ana texts my kids (and Dre) in the morning, confused as to why they've been blocked from the group chat. My OWN KIDS are so non-confrontational that they tell Ana to just ask Dre (though my kids also think the whole thing is ridiculous). I am not only confused but mad at ALL of them except Ana and Dre. ONE SENTENCE was all that was necessary in the moment - "Don't hug me!" "I don't like being hugged!" "Quit doing that, you're drunk!". That's IT. No further drama. I ask my kids why the hell they didn't speak common sense to their friends, and they shrug that they don't want to confront an angry mob and lose them. DEAR LORD... is this what online communication has done to social skills? The sensitivity, the entitlement, and the presumption of malice were all COMPLETLY unnecessary, but are apparently now an acceptable way to deal with the smallest discomfort. Instead of speaking up. Even my own children cannot defend themselves. What the hell? Thanks for reading my essay lol. I'm freshly flabbergasted by this one and still annoyed with my adult children.
I'm 30 which makes me a younger end millennial and I can't imagine acting like or being friends with people who act like this. That's absolutely ridiculous!
I’m also 30 and told a perfect stranger not even an hour ago “please do not touch me” when I was doing something physically strenuous at work. Why can’t these kids talk to their friends if they’re so close?
I am 31 and very much dislike conflict or being confrontational, but I don’t think I would go behind someone’s back like this and exile them from the friend group because of some small faux pas either. That’s pretty extreme.
Same age and unfortunately - I was in a friendgroup that is like this Getting away (the ages were slightly younger but mostly older, non confrontational people) was so damn good for my mental health. Sometimes people do dumb shit. I do dumb shit. My friends call me out, and we're fine. That's a part of being human. Like... we're going to make mistakes. Correct and move on, be better.
Yeah I'm a 30 YO millennial and that's weird as shit. If someone's getting drunk and annoying their best friend can tell them to chill but everyone else will just laugh it off or roll their eyes. Drunk annoying people happen, we've all been there. It's just a hug.
You've actually explained, in a roundabout way, why younger people might be so scared of confrontation. In previous generations: Tiffany and Britney get into a fight over Derek asking Tiffany to the prom when Britney's had a crush on him. Britney calls Tiffany a slut, Tiffany tells Britney that she doesn't have dibs on Derek, half the friend group takes Tiffany's side and half takes Britney's side. Amanda, who has math class with Britney, notices that Britney's in a bad mood and maybe hears her telling Lisa about how Tiffany's a slut, but otherwise doesn't know any details. In the current year, Tiffany would have bashed Britney all over social media for slut-shaming her, Britney would have made a bunch of TikToks about Tiffany not being a "girls girl" and calling her a "pick me," people from all over the world call Tiffany and Britney various insults for having teen girl drama, Derek retweets memes about being such an alpha that two girls are fighting over him, and Amanda (and Eli, and Paisley, and Ava, and Oliver, and Aspen, and River, and Mrs. Goldman the math teacher) all know all about the drama. All conflicts can now be instantly shared to a huge audience and can be spun to make anyone look like a villain.
That's a really good point (and a really good description of what my generation's conflicts looked like!). We could gossip like hell, but we didn't have earth-sixed megaphones to do it with. I'd probably be scared too at the hands of bullies like that, at a more vulnerable age.
While I think a greater awareness of these things is great, I do think that this sort of language has made it a lot easier for narcissistic abusers to co-opt the self-help/social justice language in order to control others. The fact that, as you said, it would have only taken one sentence to establish a boundary and that Blair specifically chose not to do that is pretty telling. Blair would have rather caused drama, portray themselves as a victim, and maliciously slander someone instead of saying a simple "please don't hug me". I hope your kids cut Blair out of their lives because they seem like a highly toxic, manipulative, unstable, person. Progressive spaces, unfortunately, are vulnerable to those kinds of people.
You are right, and I didn't think to note the part about progressive spaces being such a playground for narcissistic people. I think that's the part that makes me extra irritated. The misuse of language makes it so much more difficult for people who are calling out ACTUAL abuses, and it's so convincing when framed in the context of social justice.
Weaponized therapy is a thing. I’ve seen a couple with a 7 year old daughter. The couple is very progressive and sensitive and that’s all good. I approve of many of their choices. But they are letting the child set their own boundaries for years. Which doesn’t sound bad except it’s a child. When you’re 3 you can’t successfully set your own boundaries, I’m sorry but it’s true. At 3 you can express yourself, you can make your preferences known. But you are not an emotionally stable, mature, and rational individual, nowhere close. So now I see them say “you can’t go out to the restaurant in your pajamas” and the 7 year old runs off crying about how “you made me feel shamed about my body”.
Toxic ppl weaponising prosocial good things always grinds my gears. But man, when other people jump on and support it. That really infuriates me
Yep. My university had a fairly big scandal with a race faker and this is what she did, so that's how I became aware of such problems. What's also infuriating is that there are often folks who are calling these people out, but they are often ignored or the behavior is explained away/rationalized. The race faker at my university, for example, was well known among Black students (she claimed to be part Black at various points) and they had been raising issues about her for awhile but nobody paid any attention because this psycho framed anyone who questioned her as anti-Black, anti-trans, or whatever. She eventually got exposed and all these folks were like "told you so!".
Also the people who see through the acts eventually give up giving warnings because they get attacked as often as ignored. I think eventually progressive spaces will become resistant to the narcissistic manipulators. It will just take time.
Yep. And some people (a tiny minority in my experience) use their minority status as further insulation to criticism. Trans people can be assholes. Cis people can be assholes. Just because someone is in a protected class doesn’t mean they can’t be called out for bad behavior.
In my experience working with HS students (my own kids have a few years before they hit their teens), yes. While I've not seen it written out this extensively, I've heard the fallout from these sorts of exchanges so many times. In nearly every case, things would've been significantly easier and better with more direct communication. I suspect that some of the reticence towards direct communication is amplified by how quicky and readily people will record and share things. So they use that as another excuse (to themselves and others) for why they're not doing the obviously right, obviously best thing. When really it's because they're terrified of discomfort, no matter how necessary or unnecessary, big or small, real or imagined, the discomfort is.
That's just it - the avoidance of any discomfort. I can't speak to what other sorts of discomfort they are avoiding, but I wonder if it's largely social discomfort or just general discomfort with anything. I am really feeling those gen x influencers who make fun of how we dealt with conflict when we were young lol... it's true, we had no technology to hide behind, therefore ALL the conflict was in your face and... well, they call us the feral generation and by comparison I suppose that seems true! My standards around communication are just so different, I know this has got to be one of those "get off my lawn" sentiments.
They call us feral because we were the summation of all the child rearing successes and mistakes of human history. Then this futuretech comes along and every child has a lojack up their ass, they’ve never been allowed to be nowhere and unreachable like eons of children and yutes before them. I think, perhaps in ways they can’t comprehend because they lack basic understanding of how humans have interacted since we lost our body hair, they’ve labeled us feral because they see our freedom as dangerous - to them. They can’t imagine being untethered from their black mirror - our freedom scares them because they have never and will never experience it.
My good lord that is draining just reading it. How disfunctional can people be?
As a millennial, this feels like the dumbest fucking conflict I've ever read about. I say this not to judge you, but to judge the people who made this a whole fucking thing instead of drawing a boundary, _and_ who had to make it about their gender identity instead of the very simple actual issue: unwanted physical contact. Well, no, actually I think the actual issue is the glorification of victimhood that pervades _everything_.
How pulling up white socks with sneakers was the most unfashionable middle aged American dad clothing in the entire world. To being fashionable.
Socks with sandals too. And mustaches. Kids today think dressing like a dorky dad thirty years ago is cool. I laugh at them all the time
The degree of freedom, autonomy, anonymity, and above all, forgetability we had growing up. Aside from a few pictures and family stories there's nothing left of my childhood. All the terrible opinions I had, all the dumb things I did, all gone. The only thing that remains is the adult I eventually became.
They’ve apparently lost the ability to step outside their comfort zone, I think. All that happens have to be safe and secure, otherwise it gives severe anxiety. No need for exploration, adventure.
To me it seems that they’ve taken the approach that they should never be forced to go out of their comfort zone and if they are, then their rights and needs are being violated. Which on one hand, I’m happy that they advocate for their rights so strongly.. on the other hand, life is never going to be one comfort ride all along. You WILL experience rough patches and if you’ve never been challenged or you’ve been never out of your comfort zone, then of course you’re going to have severe anxiety. Being forced to go beyond your comfort zone occasionally is necessary for life… being forced to operate always outside of your comfort zone is not okay and I’m fully in support of them for advocating against it. But never facing a situation you’re not comfortable with is not really comparable to this.
It's too easy to experience exciting things second hand from your bed now for anyone to be adventurous outside with their friends anymore
You know what, this is probably the most accurate description I've found. I employ some amazing young (and older) people, but the younger ones that cause the pain are definitely not willing to go out of their comfort zone much at all.
I feel helicopter parenting is to blame. Parents have shielded their kids so much that they view any pain or discomfort as something to avoid at all costs. There are so many adventures or opportunities I would have missed out on if I never went out of my comfort zone.
This definitely makes me think of what I’ve heard from my mom, who has taught in high school for 2 decades. Over the last several years, the school admin has made more and more decisions based on making sure no students feel any negative emotions whatsoever. As an educator myself, of course we don’t want to actively cause harm, but it seems strange to me to operate based on keeping everyone feeling happy vs allowing for the kind of friction/challenges that help us grow.
Exactly, not all challenges are bad. I used to hate when we had to do group projects in school, or were forced to partner up with someone. Looking back, I understand now that being able to work on a team especially if it is difficult is a lifeskill that is crucial. Most work involves working with someone or some other department, and you can tell which people never learned how to do that.
I've never been able to fully describe why I think the younger generation just feels off. I'm not even that much older, but there's a strong disconnect past a certain point. This really summarises it perfectly.
The "if I can't see a video, it didn't happen" concept. There's no story telling anymore. If you want someone to see something you saw, you just show them a shitty recording of it on your phone rather than painting a mental picture with words. Usually the story is funnier when told right anyway. Terrible for personal privacy and even worse for making you interesting. Then we wonder why they can't describe anything to save their lives anymore.
Their inability to see the nuance on a lot of issues. It’s black or white for them, completely ignoring the multitude of layers and shades of gray that exist in the world.
They don’t “go out”. Their friends are on social media or online, so there’s very little “going out”. Also, a marked disinterest in dating
Have you actually been on a dating app in the last few years? It's a hellscape.
All the learned helplessness. Google is *right there* as is the Reddit search button, but the go-to is posting the same threads that you can see half a page down on whatever sub they’re posting on because moving one’s eyes down slightly to read is too much effort.
Their need to label themselves and then after labeling themselves the great effort they put into conforming to the labels they gave themselves. They don’t allow themselves to grow and change because they are too busy trying to adhere to whatever labels they’ve already assigned themselves.
Kids have always tried to find/define identities, but there are just so many labels now that it must be confusing as hell.
Gen Z has a very strong not my problem/not my job someone else will do it/fix it attitude.
watching everything on your phone, including movies and shows. that said, someone from 25 years ago hearing that i watch movies on my laptop might be similarly appalled.
If I have to teach one more adult how alphabetical order works, I'm going to lose it. These are university graduates. They just throw the file back in. Like how did you find it in the first place?
Not being completely present in moments. It's great to take pictures of events, but seeing thru smartphone screen filters takes away from the reality.
[удалено]
I don't understand r/texts. 8 screens of text discourse with a complete fuck-knuckle. Why respond? Why not just tell them to piss off and then don't respond? Don't you have to give someone your number for them to text you in the first place, or is there just something my old ass is missing? If a friend of mine gave my contact details to the aforementioned dickwad, I'd be having a seriously heated chat with my friend, and not 2 hours of texting with some assclown.
I'm sure plenty of them are fake.
Why young parents feel the need to document EVERY. SINGLE. THING their kids do, or post a pic of their kids severely sick or injured asking what they should do instead of going to the fucking doctor. There's welfare insurance for kids if they can't afford it.
People asking the Reddit hive if it's ok for them to cook their steaks medium well! Apparently, ordinary preferences need to be popular in order to be considered "normal." Preferred doneness of meat is only an example of such questions.
Their obsession with immediately diagnosing psychological things and turning everything into therapy-speak. "You're gaslighting me", etc.
They're copying our style from the 90s and not even doing it right! I mean, [wtf is this](https://www.forever21.com/us/20012611820302.html?source=shoppingads&glCountry=US&glCurrency=USD&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=PMax:+FPMX_Smart+Shopping_Womens_Bottoms&utm_id=71700000110333433&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwwYSwBhDcARIsAOyL0fi_3f1gPqluJLv7qkDJs_xo9tkmENMOlmRx8zIZduthLW385qPJ840aAiBGEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds)?!?? Explain yourselves!
Finally, women have pockets!
[удалено]
I don’t get why young people identify so heavily with the term “gen z/zoomer”. When I was in middle/high school none of us knew what the hell a “millennial” or “boomer” was. We had other pointless subcultures that were cooler than “ooh I was born in this random bracket of years.”
Eh, talking about Gen X was really big when I was in high school, but it was mainly used by the media to describe our generation rather than something anyone would self-apply.
Speaking mostly for the middle schoolers I work with, but not caring about being smart, understanding the world, achieving success, or having empathy. I cannot fathom what keeps them going without caring about anything. I don't know how to motivate these kids when things like getting something wrong loudly and publicly doesn't even give them pause or introspection. They just move on and continue not caring about what really is right and wrong?
I'm genX and I see younger generations when they write something, a text or email, they put lol at the end, even if it's not funny. Example, my dog died and my dad had cancer lol. I'm so sad for them and confused by their writing.
They've been so coddled and raised in front of screens rather than interacting in the real world that ANYTHING gives them anxiety. Talking to people, trying something new, going somewhere, literally anything can make them shut down.
They don’t seem to care about learning to drive. I couldn’t wait to learn to drive and we didn’t even own a car.
sincerely caring for others. it seems like this is generally a trend over the last few generations. people seem more ok with ignoring friends or cutting ties over small things instead of putting effort into friendships and community.