![Old farts of Hexbear, is there something about younger people that you don't get? [no punching down!]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/b045b71d-71dd-41db-a6c7-79676adbf90b.jpeg){kind=link}
OK this is my list. But first, I need to say that this isn’t a condemnation of those into such thing. They just don’t vibe with me.
- Cannot get into ASMR. I’ve tried. Often its women 20 years younger than me, rubbing their fingernails on hairbrushes. The intentional sounds they make with their lips and fingers are things that would make me want to change seats on a bus.
- Instagram. I was maybe the last person to get a smart phone. It was probably 2016. I’m just fully lazy to take photos of stuff. This is a real issue when I’m single and I need to start putting photos on dating sites, as all pics of me in my phone are me squeezing carrots in my nostrils and similarly goofy things.
- My students’ taste in anime. I try to be all cool and show off my cool taste in anime, maybe drop a Azumanga Daioh clip. It’s all ancient history for 17 year olds.
- Photo and videos done in portrait mode. I guess I don’t watch videos on the go. See #2
Things that the kids these days do better:
- Usually better opinions on current events than people my age
- I wish that cosplay existed when I was a teen. The default when I was younger was drugs.
If anyone insults the kids, I will visit you at your home and do an 
I just don’t see that much a difference between young people and me. For very obvious reasons, MSM stress incredibly minor differences in aesthetic tastes to the point where generational difference is almost exclusively about what type of slop you consume. I don’t think my high school experience is that different from a current zoomer who’s still in high school. Yeah, we didn’t have smartphones, but we still chatted with flip phones and AIM. Apparently, they changed how the SAT is scored so their max score is different from my max score. We watched different TV shows, played different games, and masturbated to different porn, but those are just types of slop. It’s not like my generation think all music is satanic or completely abstain from touching ourselves.
The actual differences I see are:
We didn’t have to face so many school shootings nor do any school shooter drills. I remember having to do a single bomb drill when I was a senior, and nobody took that shit seriously. The bullshit zoomers have to go through now like pigs pretending to shoot at them with fake guns or having to drill on how to carry a peer shot in the stomach is trauma inducing.
I didn’t have to cancel graduation because of a global pandemic nor watch people around repeatedly getting reinfected by Covid.
The political causes people rally to are different. For us, it was how Dubya sucked and the Darfur genocide. Current teenagers have Palestine. Of course, the war on terrorism intimately tied to Palestine, so it’s not as different as it seems. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out the Darfur genocide is also tied to Palestine as well.
Zoomers would actually walk out of classrooms and actually do shit while millennial teenagers didn’t have that in them at all. There’s at least some understanding of politics even among zoomer teenagers.
Zoomers aren’t as uptight about conforming to cishet and NT standards of beauty although they still conform to them in the end. The 90s to late 00s was horribly restrictive in how your gender expression has to completely conform to a cishet hypermasculine or hyperfeminine ideal, no doubt related to the AIDS epidemic. It only started to break down with emos and scene kids, and they were constantly bullied for being f-words.
Everything else like what type of socks you like to wear is completely superficial.
From what I’ve heard, compared to twenty years ago, conditions have greatly degraded at many US schools. massive churn on teachers, bigger classes, fewer teachers overall, fewer resources like nurses, counselors, and librarians. Much more militarized or prisonized school buildings, much more rigid control of students movements. It sounds fucking grim. Plus social media has enabled cool, horrible new kinds of bullying. Like there are apparently a lot of very real, very substantial differences that go beyond shooting drills.
But otherwise, yeah. It’s different, but not so different as to be unrelatable. especially if you try to remember how much bullshit there really was and not get nostalgic about shit.
Columbine changed everything. I think the effect is most sharply felt if you’re a xennial, but I wasn’t old enough to experience a pre-Columbine high school experience. There are plenty of millennial high schoolers who walked through metal detectors. I see the difference between millennials and zoomers as more of a quantitative difference than a qualitative one. The stuff about pigs pretending to be school shooters to “prep” students is a more recent development and a huge wtf for me.
Yes, that’s true. I think social media bullying already existed when I was in high school, but owning to us not having social media as kids, we didn’t really incorporate our online persona as part of our concept as self to the extend of zoomers. In other words, we differentiated between cyberspace and meatspace and we can “walk away” from our online troubles.
It’s interesting to compare zoomers here with my gen x coworkers who are old enough to be their parents. The funniest story was some gen xer who tried to start a conversation by asking whether I watched a bunch of zoomer cartoons and after seeing my blank expression, he then started asking if I watched a bunch of gen xer cartoons that I’m even more clueless about lol. He went from asking about Steven Universe to asking about the Star Trek Animated Series, two cartoon series separated by 4 decades. And the real funny thing is that the midpoint between the two would be shit that I actually watched as a kid, so cartoons like Animaniacs or Darkwing Duck. It was a really trippy experience to be asked about cartoons that you’re simultaneously too old and young when they came out.