The Same Song on Repeat
Or Why You Really Need To Stop Talking Shit About Young People When You Only Understand One Part of the World They've Had to Live In
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| Via The New York Times |
The kids today don't have it "easier," they have it VERY different in some ways that may actually be entirely incomprehensible to someone even as young as 35 (give or take).
A pervasive way to talk about "the youth" is to cite precisely one thing, and speak to that one thing as though it's the lynchpin of an entire generation's behavior.
This is as stupid as it is unscientific which is to say very.
For example? An American 18-year-old today was born in 2006.
They have never known America to not be at war.
Mass shooter drills have expanded exponentially since Sandy Hook.
In a decade, training to only be ready to survive against a shooter while they are unarmed is the most standard part of American education than reading any book.
COVID is a real thing that happened. Now, look at this chart from Statista.
COVID-19 deaths by age U.S. 2023 | Statista
Between the beginning of January 2020 and June 14, 2023, of the 1,134,641 deaths caused by COVID-19 in the United States, 1,060,263 were over 50.
To be clear over ninety percent of the American COVID deaths were over 50. That number is high enough, and COVID was widespread enough throughout the continental United States it's a safe bet there are a lot of 18-year-olds who lost a parent, a grandparent, an uncle, an aunt, a family friend, a teacher, or someone over 50 in their life.
And during COVID the entirety of the United States was consuming a lot of media.
The 24/7 news cycle during the Trump administration ensured that over a million funerals were attended by people who saw the cause of death of a loved one debated for political clout.
That's not a reality I can readily picture and I'm merely over 40.
I can conclude that a legislator over 65 might be even more out of touch than any of us Gen Z people.
Your average 18-year-old is more connected than one of us average older people can even imagine.
The constant connectivity gave rise to cyberbullying and that was bad enough.
However, cyberbullying is more or less part of how social media works; exploiting in/out-group dynamics to sell things.
It's how software like TikTok is programmed. It ensures that the core concept of connectivity - the foundation of social media - is now just another billboard.
Facebook doesn't know how to court the 18-year-old demographic and has failed consistently to build the next wave of young users. They did successfully turn outrage - and thus disinformation - into a massive part of how their platform works.
Demographics continue to congeal across different platforms by both interest and use, leading to a generational balkanization that has some ugly commonalities once again: anger, disinformation, and rage bait.
A generation has watched people get their fifteen minutes of fame from saying plainly wrong things from a place of almost pure, child-like ignorance like "Taylor Swift is the best-choreographed dancer in history" to insane vicious falsehoods about Jewish people.
The climate is dramatically different in their own lifetime. Did anyone over 40 in the United States or Canada deal with a massive cross-continental fire that smelled like a smoldering campfire on BOTH coasts until the 2020s?
There is a great example of the absurdity of the demands made of young people: how people over 30 can go on about outdated technology like we had a hand in creating it when we merely just had to use it.
Imagine having "brand loyalty" to a rotary phone.
This is best explained with cursive. English Cursive was created as the result of hand transcription using Roman letters by monks throughout Europe for a few centuries. The printing press should have killed cursive in one or two hundred years.
But no.
The horse and buggy disappeared by 1935 in most metropolitan areas. If we look around the United States today, we can conclude a generation or two did prioritize ensuring that new technology was at least taught with some consistency.
The response in the 14th century to the concept of the printing press was perhaps the first version of "these kids have it too easy because of technology," and entirely too many people kept an increasingly useless technology alive for centuries.
Now the outrage machine of social media makes it appear as though teenagers not being able to read cursive is a bigger deal than mass shootings.
Hold these two things in your mind for a moment.
Think about them.
Young people today are pressured to reflect the values of a past that of course they'll never see but is so culturally and technologically different it's cruel to do so. It forces them to make space in their lives for things that at the very best don't matter much now, and won't matter more later.
At worst, it's asking them to think less of themselves because they can't "use a rotary phone," or something.
Of course, if there wasn't such a massive movement nationwide to defund schools across the nation, we could worry a lot less about what classes were being taught.
The phrase "you'll understand when you're older," takes on a sinister tone when it's used to view young people as not fully human. We see them as half-formed or missing pieces.
There is now a generation that has been told everything they ask for is "entitlement" which is just "money can't buy happiness" reskinned.
David Hogg called for better gun control and he was called a "coward" by an elected official. Because he thought no one should get randomly murdered for no reason.
How entitled.
And I would like the fool of the world if I didn't say this: for some young people "entitled" takes the place of "uppity" if they are from a certain demographic.
This latest generation of young people has a tendency to think about their own future and the future of the world more than any other generation.
A lot of people with authority granted by lucky breaks that brought them fame and money are just so mad at these young people for daring to not shut up and be quiet.
For daring to think about the future that they had little hand in creating and must endure regardless.
When they want to change that future in the slightest the backlash is incredibly loud and more often than not, creepy.
We have a generation that has been trauma-bonded by consistent, systematic failures to change laws that appear to be based on specifically first treating their needs and wants as exactly equivalent and then insisting that those things aren't really important anyway due to their age group.
A generation has been made to endure terror, loss, abuse, and dehumanization from so many angles it's absurd. "You want to be paid a living wage?! OMG SO ENTITLED!" "You want police to be more accountable? OMG SO ENTILTED! You want a CEASE FIRE?! OMG SO ENTITLED!"
Demanding life be improved for not just them but other living people they'll never meet and for at least a generation after them.
While a truly amazing number of alleged adults behave selfishly with a mindless hunger for power here is a generation that has already been made to sacrifice more than ever before.
Could they storm the beaches of Normandy? Maybe.
But too many adults have made the very lives of Generation Z a battleground in and of itself in the most pointless war since war was created.
A culture war.
No one can ever really win, there is no end state and nearly everything can be justified because "OF THEM." Everyone's humanity is up for debate. Everyone's rights are up for debate. And if you disagree?
You are entitled.
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