- Messages
- 10,930
- Location
- My mother's basement
...when you realize that the reason so much of the world no longer seems to make sense is not that there's something wrong with the world, but that the world is no longer about *you.* I was talking the other day to an associate in her mid-forties who was expressing puzzlement at the doings of "zoomers," and grumbling how she "doesn't get these kids today." Well, of course you don't. Their culture isn't intended for you. Their marketing isn't intended for you. The world today isn't intended for you.
There comes a time, usually around the time you hit your late forties or early fifties, when you notice that people of your own age cohort are no longer the focus of popular culture, mass marketing, or mainstream politics, and you have only two options -- you can resent this, and spend the rest of your life sinking into a morass of impotent cloud-shouting about "KIDS TODAY" or you can simply acknowledge that the same thing has happened to and will happen to every generation in its own turn. The world is going to move on, whether you want it to or not, and the same thing will happen, in time, to all the Kids Today. Realizing and accepting that, I find, can save a lot of frustration. They're not living in your world, after all. You're living in theirs.
Let us not disregard the role consumer culture and appeals to it play in this, nor how our culture is more than a tad on the youth-centric side. That’s not a law of nature, though; it’s the world we made.
People form habits and biases early in life, generally. So of course the influencers — commercial, political, social — target the young. They did it when I was a kid. They do it now.
I no more live in “their world” than they live in mine. It’s everyone’s world, and we can’t very well absolve ourselves of responsibility for our place in it, for as long as we draw breath and our brains haven’t ossified.
I don’t spend my days and nights as I did way back when, and as so many young people do today. I don’t see them as being so different than I was, and am. I’m just older now and have neither the stamina for nor the interest in carousing. And I long ago stopped paying much attention to the popular entertainments of the day. (If it’s worth my time and attention, I’ll hear of it soon enough.) I hope for their sake that they’re getting some satisfaction out of it.
I do believe, however, that there are critical ages by which certain skills and ways of thinking had better be learned lest the opportunity be gone forever. I strongly suspect that most grumbling about “kids these days” are really expressions of resentment over the grumblers’ own lost opportunities. Rather than honestly assess their own circumstances and weigh what they might do about it, they direct their frustrations at the young people they unconsciously envy.
Some people never grow up.
Last edited: