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Notes -
Are The Kids Alright?
Motivated by a mainline reddit thread I saw asking teachers "what do kids today not know?"
Because of my career + age + unmarried status, I have close to zero interaction with Gen-Z and ... whatever the next one is. I am starting to get second hand reports from parents in my social circle, as well as manager types who are now hiring Gen-Z.
By most, but certainly not all, accounts, the major differences seems to be just very under-developed basic social interaction skills. Anywhere from hyper-preferences for everything to be done via text/e-mail, to literally falling silent in in-person meetings because of inability to cope with (what I think is) base-line social anxiety (what I mean here is the general sense of awkwardness we all feel the first time we meet someone new).
Is this the case for Mottizens who have these interactions? Are there other signs or common symptoms? Most of all -- why is it happening (if it is)? Will I ever be a grandpa without resorting to Greek Mythology levels of sexual "fuck it, I'll do it myself!"
A common complaint is kids are too soft, people are too risk averse. No, they aren't. They're responding to incentives. Risk-taking is overly punished, such as wokeness, victim culture, and an overly-militarized police and punitive carceral state, so people, especially young men, are choosing to play it safe. A false rape actuation can ruin your life. A swatting means having your stuff destroyed. Yet going outside means you can still be mugged or assaulted by roving gangs of the homeless, the addicted, and the criminally insane.
I'm not trying to place blame on Gen-Z. As a committed boomer-hater, I couldn't agree more than people, groups, communities, and entire generations respond to incentives, learn cause-and-effect (or perceived cause-and-effect) loops, and behave in ways that are logical in the short term if not the long.
What I'm interested in is how all of these things, and more, are reflected in the behaviors of Gen-Z. With the limited contact - direct and indirect - that I do have with Zoomers, I've noticed seemingly unending layers or irony and a pronounced lack of social skills that goes far beyond normal awkwardness etc. Again, I am not blaming Zoomers for this, I'm only after a discussion on how this has come to be and what it could mean.
When the only things permitted to you are the things that take literally zero effort to do, you're not going to [be able to] develop the skill of suffering until you get what you want. Social interaction is one of those things that you kind of do have to suffer through to get good at it, and in a cultural milieu of "disconnect, find another server", why not just do that instead?
As for irony, when the only expression you're really allowed/perspective you live in is "nothing really matters", humor devolves into a competition of how high one can stack the blackpills. (Interestingly, I've not really noticed this perspective from anyone I know in this demographic, really- one could claim "good parenting" averts this, but the same genes that result in good parenting also result in positive-thinking kids, so...)
Karen could, so Karen did. It really isn't any more complex than that- evil triumphed because good did nothing, now we all have to suffer.
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