7 ms·

I'm a 44 yo Xenial, not too old, not young. That is, I'm part of the "walkman generation" . It surprises me how people are less and less open to socialize, to

I'm a 44 yo Xenial, not too old, not young. That is, I'm part of the "walkman generation" . It surprises me how people are less and less open to socialize, to the point that some even see you with disgust if you DARE to interrupt them from.their mobile phone trance. Society nowadays is pretty ugly. Younger generations seem very isolationist to me.

dclowd9901 1y ago
Same gen (42). I feel like we have a really unique lens on all of this, too: old enough to remember being in a smoky bar, socializing (not healthy, but fun as hell), but also young enough to have had some technological exposure at a crucial time of our youth. We _leveraged_ technology for socializing in person. Our online pursuits were around organizing lighthearted social goofiness like "getting iced", LARPing, and flash mobs. All of which would probably make younger generations eye roll to death out of secondary cringe. I guess at some point people started taking themselves way too seriously. Worrying about what others think, or something, I don't know. In a way, social interaction is kind of like a standoff in the dusty streets of an old west town. Someone has to make the first move to expose themselves, and it doesn't seem like anyone wants to be that person anymore.
- benreesman 1y ago
  I'm about to be 41 and likewise very distinctly remember a time when cell phones were a vehicle for organizing the evening or weekend's plans, quickly making a connection with someone you met ("let me get your number"), whatever, buying weed or something. The point was to make friends, get laid, network without calling it that. The idea was that some of those random people would become your crew of friends, one of those girls would become your wife, and you'd end up settled down to kick off the next generation. And I know some people who did end up settled dowm...but not that many, not like the generation right before mine. Kind of hit or miss in my cohort. Near as I can tell that was still roughly the model on paper if less and less until COVID and lockdown and all that. Something snapped, you can see it walking down the street of any city you knew well before. People never came back outside with the same vigor. I don't claim to understand the causal structure between all the various factors: the bleak economic prospects, the decline in institutions, the increasingly rapacious and cynical Big Tech cabal, there are a ton of factors. But COVID before and after, that's when it collectively became too much to easily bounce back from.
  - nottorp 1y ago
    > when cell phones were a vehicle for organizing the evening or weekend's plans Still are! As I post this we're establishing where we meet for beers and at what time on my whatsapp friends group. Ofc, we're old geezers too.
    - gus_tpm 1y ago
      Don't worry me and my friends still do this as well and we are 20-30. I am extremely lucky though, living by myself in the capital city of my country makes it very easy to go out and do stuff
      - nottorp 1y ago
        We old geezers are all married, it’s 50% each sex at this table :)
- michaelt 1y ago
  > I guess at some point people started taking themselves way too seriously. Worrying about what others think, or something, I don't know. When I was a teenager, precisely one guy had videoed his teenage self waving around a broomstick like a lightsaber, and had it end up online. Video cameras and editing equipment were rare and expensive. And that one man was a cautionary tale, not to wave a broomstick like a lightsaber anywhere there are video cameras. Now the video cameras are in everyone's pockets 24/7, and with the internet connection built in. Is it any wonder nobody's waving a broomstick like a lightsaber?
  - fragmede 1y ago
    A look on TikTok for "lightsaber duel" draws me to the opposite conclusion. Yeah, lightsaber kid was cringe worthy; I'm glad it wasn't me. But in the meantime, Star Wars got cool, After Effects went subscription, and there are some really cool videos of fan-made lightsaber duels up on the Internet now.
- AaronAPU 1y ago
  43, and I agree as well. I notice when just out and about other people my age and older still have the familiar vibe. Young people are in another universe and it doesn’t seem like a more pleasant one. There are exceptions though of course
- mtalantikite 1y ago
  A friend of mine had passes to Rage Against the Machine with Run the Jewels at MSG a couple years ago and brought me. A few songs into the RATM set I realized there weren't that many young people in the stadium, because there wasn't a sea of phones recording everything for social media. Just tens of thousands of people pretty locked in to the moment. A younger act and all you see are thousands of screens glowing. I've always felt that we (older millennials) sort of hit a sweet spot technology wise. We pretty naturally straddled that analog to digital world.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  Is LARP dying out? I mean it was always a bit niche and nerdy, but is it on a down-swing? I was actually thinking the other day, I haven’t hit anybody with a boffer in a while, might need to get back to it.
- esseph 1y ago
  Maybe because everything you do ends up on the internet. There's always a camera nearby. People are afraid to open up and be honest, because of the fear of local, internet or political rejection.
  - dclowd9901 1y ago
    Have some conviction. If you're doing something because you believe in it or love it, then why worry about what others think? Die without regrets.
squigz 1y ago
> It surprises me how people are less and less open to socialize, to the point that some even see you with disgust if you DARE to interrupt them from.their mobile phone trance. Have you considered that maybe it's you, and you're just interrupting at the wrong time? Imagine someone's reading a book and you interrupt them and then you blame them for getting annoyed?!
- icameron 1y ago
  I’m not OP but similar in age and remember when it wasn’t always like that. You could talk to someone who was reading the paper on the bus, they wouldn’t be annoyed. Being in public it was fair game. There would be conversations happening between strangers. Now it’s silent on the bus and everyone is on their phones nobody is chatting up strangers.
  - mtalantikite 1y ago
    Can confirm. Also of the same age, and if I was at a cafe reading a book or doing my math homework when I was younger, it was totally fair game for someone to ask me something or engage me in random conversation. If I was really on a deadline and couldn't be interrupted I wouldn't have been at the cafe in the first place.
kogasa240p 1y ago
>Younger generations seem very isolationist to me. Gen Z here, blame smartphones and the destruction of communal areas/3rd spaces; COVID really threw gasoline on an already bad fire.
salawat 1y ago
And why shouldn't they be? The Xenials and late boomers intellectual chops got funneled into an industry specifically intended to attack and monopolize their attention loops and data. To their credit, they're probably having a healthier response to the entire thing than I do by pushing back against further unwelcome intrusion even if it's still pretty subconscious for a lot of them at this point.
socalgal2 1y ago
I'm sure this is more a reflection on me but I try to go out to meet strangers at meetups and I find I quite often don't like the people. You might get the random ultra woke person who makes it impossible for others to have a conversation because they're just waiting to be triggered by anything anyone else says and find a way to spin every comment into an offence. If anyone brings up politics then the meetup is over, at least for me. I struck up a conversation with the person setting next to me at an outdoor cafe. He was probably 84-ish. He'd married someone from Japan he'd met there in the 60s. They had not had any children. I brought up the population issue in a light way (Japan's population is declining), something like making the joke that they didn't help Japan's population decline. He replied something like "anyone who tells you there's an underpopulation issue is lying. The planet has 8 billion people which is way too many". And that was when I knew I wasn't going to continue the conversation. (not Japan but same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk)
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
  Yeah I've found just the opposite, political discussion tends to be way more chill in person.
- andoando 1y ago
  Doesnt seem fair, seems like you brought up politics, intentionally or not.
- albumen 1y ago
  Perhaps it is more a reflection of you, or of US (?) attitudes. This 3,000 person study [1] in Germany matched pairs of strangers for private face-to-face meetings to discuss divisive political issues. It found asymmetric effects: conversations with like-minded individuals caused political views to become more extreme (ideological polarization); by contrast, conversations with contrary-minded individuals did not lead to a convergence of political views, but significantly reduced negative beliefs and attitudes toward ideological out-group members (affective polarization), while also improving perceived social cohesion more generally. These effects of contrary-minded conversations seem to be driven mostly by positive experiences of interpersonal contact. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272725000076 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727272...
zwnow 1y ago
A lot of people are simply insufferable so I dont even try to make new friends. I've got a relatively big circle of old time friends and I'll keep it at that. Im a lot younger than you but I cant deal with TikTok brains same goes for right wing retards or people who believe in religions or other esoteric stuff. It's not easy to meet people with actual intellect
- xtracto 1y ago
  I don't agree with you. I am as leftist as it gets, but I don't let my political beliefs get in the way. I subscribe to r/ccw (gun subreddit) and some conservative subs because I want to understand where the right wing people is coming from. I think younger generations have lost Nuance, in the University I had several good friends who had very opposite political views from me. Still we could sit down and play a D&D round.

dclowd9901 1y ago

Same gen (42). I feel like we have a really unique lens on all of this, too: old enough to remember being in a smoky bar, socializing (not healthy, but fun as hell), but also young enough to have had some technological exposure at a crucial time of our youth. We _leveraged_ technology for socializing in person. Our online pursuits were around organizing lighthearted social goofiness like "getting iced", LARPing, and flash mobs. All of which would probably make younger generations eye roll to death out of secondary cringe. I guess at some point people started taking themselves way too seriously. Worrying about what others think, or something, I don't know. In a way, social interaction is kind of like a standoff in the dusty streets of an old west town. Someone has to make the first move to expose themselves, and it doesn't seem like anyone wants to be that person anymore.

benreesman 1y ago
I'm about to be 41 and likewise very distinctly remember a time when cell phones were a vehicle for organizing the evening or weekend's plans, quickly making a connection with someone you met ("let me get your number"), whatever, buying weed or something. The point was to make friends, get laid, network without calling it that. The idea was that some of those random people would become your crew of friends, one of those girls would become your wife, and you'd end up settled down to kick off the next generation. And I know some people who did end up settled dowm...but not that many, not like the generation right before mine. Kind of hit or miss in my cohort. Near as I can tell that was still roughly the model on paper if less and less until COVID and lockdown and all that. Something snapped, you can see it walking down the street of any city you knew well before. People never came back outside with the same vigor. I don't claim to understand the causal structure between all the various factors: the bleak economic prospects, the decline in institutions, the increasingly rapacious and cynical Big Tech cabal, there are a ton of factors. But COVID before and after, that's when it collectively became too much to easily bounce back from.
- nottorp 1y ago
  > when cell phones were a vehicle for organizing the evening or weekend's plans Still are! As I post this we're establishing where we meet for beers and at what time on my whatsapp friends group. Ofc, we're old geezers too.
  - gus_tpm 1y ago
    Don't worry me and my friends still do this as well and we are 20-30. I am extremely lucky though, living by myself in the capital city of my country makes it very easy to go out and do stuff
    - nottorp 1y ago
      We old geezers are all married, it’s 50% each sex at this table :)
michaelt 1y ago
> I guess at some point people started taking themselves way too seriously. Worrying about what others think, or something, I don't know. When I was a teenager, precisely one guy had videoed his teenage self waving around a broomstick like a lightsaber, and had it end up online. Video cameras and editing equipment were rare and expensive. And that one man was a cautionary tale, not to wave a broomstick like a lightsaber anywhere there are video cameras. Now the video cameras are in everyone's pockets 24/7, and with the internet connection built in. Is it any wonder nobody's waving a broomstick like a lightsaber?
- fragmede 1y ago
  A look on TikTok for "lightsaber duel" draws me to the opposite conclusion. Yeah, lightsaber kid was cringe worthy; I'm glad it wasn't me. But in the meantime, Star Wars got cool, After Effects went subscription, and there are some really cool videos of fan-made lightsaber duels up on the Internet now.
AaronAPU 1y ago
43, and I agree as well. I notice when just out and about other people my age and older still have the familiar vibe. Young people are in another universe and it doesn’t seem like a more pleasant one. There are exceptions though of course
mtalantikite 1y ago
A friend of mine had passes to Rage Against the Machine with Run the Jewels at MSG a couple years ago and brought me. A few songs into the RATM set I realized there weren't that many young people in the stadium, because there wasn't a sea of phones recording everything for social media. Just tens of thousands of people pretty locked in to the moment. A younger act and all you see are thousands of screens glowing. I've always felt that we (older millennials) sort of hit a sweet spot technology wise. We pretty naturally straddled that analog to digital world.
bee_rider 1y ago
Is LARP dying out? I mean it was always a bit niche and nerdy, but is it on a down-swing? I was actually thinking the other day, I haven’t hit anybody with a boffer in a while, might need to get back to it.
esseph 1y ago
Maybe because everything you do ends up on the internet. There's always a camera nearby. People are afraid to open up and be honest, because of the fear of local, internet or political rejection.
- dclowd9901 1y ago
  Have some conviction. If you're doing something because you believe in it or love it, then why worry about what others think? Die without regrets.

squigz 1y ago

> It surprises me how people are less and less open to socialize, to the point that some even see you with disgust if you DARE to interrupt them from.their mobile phone trance. Have you considered that maybe it's you, and you're just interrupting at the wrong time? Imagine someone's reading a book and you interrupt them and then you blame them for getting annoyed?!

icameron 1y ago
I’m not OP but similar in age and remember when it wasn’t always like that. You could talk to someone who was reading the paper on the bus, they wouldn’t be annoyed. Being in public it was fair game. There would be conversations happening between strangers. Now it’s silent on the bus and everyone is on their phones nobody is chatting up strangers.
- mtalantikite 1y ago
  Can confirm. Also of the same age, and if I was at a cafe reading a book or doing my math homework when I was younger, it was totally fair game for someone to ask me something or engage me in random conversation. If I was really on a deadline and couldn't be interrupted I wouldn't have been at the cafe in the first place.

kogasa240p 1y ago

>Younger generations seem very isolationist to me. Gen Z here, blame smartphones and the destruction of communal areas/3rd spaces; COVID really threw gasoline on an already bad fire.

salawat 1y ago

And why shouldn't they be? The Xenials and late boomers intellectual chops got funneled into an industry specifically intended to attack and monopolize their attention loops and data. To their credit, they're probably having a healthier response to the entire thing than I do by pushing back against further unwelcome intrusion even if it's still pretty subconscious for a lot of them at this point.

socalgal2 1y ago

I'm sure this is more a reflection on me but I try to go out to meet strangers at meetups and I find I quite often don't like the people. You might get the random ultra woke person who makes it impossible for others to have a conversation because they're just waiting to be triggered by anything anyone else says and find a way to spin every comment into an offence. If anyone brings up politics then the meetup is over, at least for me. I struck up a conversation with the person setting next to me at an outdoor cafe. He was probably 84-ish. He'd married someone from Japan he'd met there in the 60s. They had not had any children. I brought up the population issue in a light way (Japan's population is declining), something like making the joke that they didn't help Japan's population decline. He replied something like "anyone who tells you there's an underpopulation issue is lying. The planet has 8 billion people which is way too many". And that was when I knew I wasn't going to continue the conversation. (not Japan but same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk)

0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
Yeah I've found just the opposite, political discussion tends to be way more chill in person.
andoando 1y ago
Doesnt seem fair, seems like you brought up politics, intentionally or not.
albumen 1y ago
Perhaps it is more a reflection of you, or of US (?) attitudes. This 3,000 person study [1] in Germany matched pairs of strangers for private face-to-face meetings to discuss divisive political issues. It found asymmetric effects: conversations with like-minded individuals caused political views to become more extreme (ideological polarization); by contrast, conversations with contrary-minded individuals did not lead to a convergence of political views, but significantly reduced negative beliefs and attitudes toward ideological out-group members (affective polarization), while also improving perceived social cohesion more generally. These effects of contrary-minded conversations seem to be driven mostly by positive experiences of interpersonal contact. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272725000076 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727272...

zwnow 1y ago

A lot of people are simply insufferable so I dont even try to make new friends. I've got a relatively big circle of old time friends and I'll keep it at that. Im a lot younger than you but I cant deal with TikTok brains same goes for right wing retards or people who believe in religions or other esoteric stuff. It's not easy to meet people with actual intellect

xtracto 1y ago
I don't agree with you. I am as leftist as it gets, but I don't let my political beliefs get in the way. I subscribe to r/ccw (gun subreddit) and some conservative subs because I want to understand where the right wing people is coming from. I think younger generations have lost Nuance, in the University I had several good friends who had very opposite political views from me. Still we could sit down and play a D&D round.