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If you have children, I am often surprised how they seem to think that the previous generation was stone age. Particular example is that my daughter was surpris
by AshamedCaptain 1y ago
If you have children, I am often surprised how they seem to think that the previous generation was stone age. Particular example is that my daughter was surprised I would give orders to my broker via fax, and that the latency was practically the same they get on the free tiers of their online 2020s bank (this is France). My trusty old ThinkPad, which still boots as if 30 years hadn't passed, still has all such digitalized sent/received faxes I did in the 90s..
- bigstrat2003 1y agoChildren in general have a very hard time grasping the idea that their parents' lives resembled their own at all. For another example, look how every generation of teenagers, without fail, thinks they are the first people in the world to invent having sex for fun. I myself didn't understand how my parents used to easily catch me in most of my attempts to get away with trouble, until I realized (as an adult) that they caught me so easily because they tried the same sorts of things as kids themselves. It's just human nature, I guess.
- dylan604 1y agoI heard an anecdote recently where the kids asked mom what it was like when they were a kid. Mom collected the mobile devices and turned off the internet.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- api 1y agoWhat’s funny is that I hear today’s conservatives moral panicking about kids apparently not having sex or breaking the rules like they used to. The narrative goes that they are too busy just staring at screens and being placated. Conservatives. I hear conservatives saying this. That’s the wild part. In my teens the conservatives would have given anything for what they’re whining about now. I don’t know how true this fun recession is. The stats say there’s a kernel of truth to it but it’s being exaggerated, and if you talk to young people they say it’s as much about the high cost of anything as digital distraction. It’s become crazy expensive to do things in the real world.
- titanomachy 1y agoBlaming this on cost doesn’t really make sense. Sex and minor delinquency are extremely cheap forms of entertainment (as long as you successfully avoid pregnancy).
- AnthonyMouse 1y agoBoth of those generally involve you being in the same physical place as some other kids, which requires some combination of transportation and real estate, both of which cost more than they used to. Meanwhile if they know you can't afford to do anything other than get into trouble somewhere then your parents aren't inclined to give you a ride, so instead you sit at home on your phone.
- Terr_ 1y ago> That’s the wild part. In my teens the conservatives would have given anything for what they’re whining about now. I suspect that's because what they [0] overtly asked for was not what they actually desired. The true desire was to be obeyed, for their teens to eagerly mold themselves onto stated parental-priorities, disassociating with peers their parents had a bad feeling about, etc. In other words, control, rather than outcomes. [0] Here, I'm treating "conservative parents" as a persistent group identity, even though individual membership changes over the decades. The ocean-wave exists even when it's not the same water molecules, etc.
- eru 1y ago> In my teens the conservatives would have given anything for what they’re whining about now. Are you complaining about 'conservatives theses days'?
- panxyh 1y ago'Conservatives' is a label that you put on people whose views are currently seen as conservative. If there is a wild part at all then it isn't that 'they' are saying it, but what we came to view as conservative. In a couple of years you might find yourself in that whining bucket.
- bongodongobob 1y ago[dead]
- b7r6 1y agoMy late grandmother had a pithy turn of phrase when I would act like she "just didn't get it". "Kiddo, every generation thinks they invented sex and fast music."
- antod 1y agoIt's the opposite with my kids. I get the feeling they think their parents were wild party animals (we weren't -maybe only in comparison to today, hell my parents were closer to that). As for the music, for her birthday my daughter recently asked for the first Alice in Chains album - on CD! Yikes. Ours are jealous of bygone music etc, but on the whole kids treat each other so much better now, I am jealous of that part for them. YMMV of course.
- villedespommes 1y agoBecause it was in many ways, the same as a generation before that and one before that. 40+yy ago, HIV was still a death sentence, lung cancer slid to the 3-4th position in CODs caused by cancer. Late 90s saw the introduction of gene therapies. New drugs for diabetes and heart disease came to the market. These aren't small incremental QoL improvements; these advancements saved millions of lives since then. All this progress should be celebrated, not trivialized
- thomassmith65 1y agoIt sounds callous to dismiss any improvement to medicine as trivial, but frankly I grew up under the assumption that humanity would cure diabetes, cancer, blindness, deafness and perhaps death itself by the end of the millennium. It's much more noteworthy to me how little medicine has changed than how much.
- kjs3 1y agoI guess I grew up in 'then', and that sort of 'assumption' is so depressing. But I get that some people only want to see medicine, and by extension science, as black-and-white. "We haven't cured diabetes" (only made massive strides in control and management and came up with whole new classes of drugs that attack root causes). "We haven't cured cancer" (except the ones we have cured, the ones we came up with vaccines to prevent (HPV), and came up with all sorts of innovative and less unpleasant treatments extending lifespan with less side effects), "Haven't cured blindness or deafness" (except for the types we have cured). And haven't cured death...well, I guess you got us there. But, yeah, it's low hanging fruit from the anti-science playbook to focus on what hasn't been done, and pretend that means nothing has been done.
- owenversteeg 1y agoI agree with you that we’ve made progress. To me, the most impressive achievement has been nearly curing cystic fibrosis and our array of tools for dealing with HIV. And yet I think it’s important to be honest. The age-adjusted diabetes mortality rate per 100k has been pretty much flat for thirty years. Life expectancy growth has been meager and the US has fallen far behind Europe. Overall health/physical fitness/mental health seems to be on a steep decline. 90s and 2000s optimists had high hopes for the world. They would have good reason to be horrified at things today.
- thomassmith65 1y agoI occasionally notice that people younger than me seem more impressed by smartphones than me (and I assume, maybe incorrectly, my generation). One theory I have for this is that younger people are taught by teachers, when they are at an impressionable age, to revere the smartphone as the pinnacle of human achievement. To me, the smartphone impressed me for a couple years, but it's just one of many miracles of miniaturization I've lived through - and less qualitatively different than, for example, personal computers or the GUI or the internet going public. My father noticed a similar phenomenon with Rock n Roll. People younger than him saw it as a musical sea-change, but to him it just sounded like the boogie woogie music the radio already had been playing for a decade.
- tasuki 1y agoI'm 40 and very impressed by smartphones. Back in my day, we had a separate (wired) telephone, a camera, a notepad, paper maps, a walkman, and a million other things. Now I just have a phone and it can do all that and lots more.
- thomassmith65 1y agoThat's a valid observation, but we both lived through the advent of the modern PC, and the PC eliminated far more tools than that. It's a convenience to carry around one smart phone instead of a dumb phone, a digital camera, and an iPod... but today that fills me with no more wonder than the advent of any of those three devices on their own.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y agoSmart phones are a pinnacle product that combines materials science, supply chain management, electronic engineering, product design, graphic design, operating system design, application development, computer science, quantum electro-optics, digital signal processing, communication theory, satellite communication, and marketing - all in a small handheld device. Not only are they absolutely miraculous, but they're commodity products that make the miracle seem routine and mundane.
- ics 1y agoAt what age did you notice that? My daughter is 5 and more often than not assumes that life before her was exactly the same as she experiences. Once in a while though she’ll ask if we had iPads made of wood or something like that which is amusing.
- GolfPopper 1y agoI was born in the early 70s, and growing up in America's Mountain West had the reverse experience until personal computers and the internet arrived in the early 90s. From the perspective of my childhood, technology (cars, planes, phones & faxes, rockets, computers, refrigerators and other household appliances, rock music, radio, movies, television, science fiction & fantasy, the machinery of war, factories, farming, medicine, etc) were all elements of society that had advanced in technological progress, but had "always been there". I, of course, knew that there was a world before all that - my great-grandfather, who lived into his 90s and whom I got to know well, had driven a stagecoach as a teenager - but all of those had entered something like their modern form during or in the immediate aftermath of WWII, and to me it seemed like there had been progress, but not systemic change, in all the time since. It helped that all the adults around me largely saw WWII as the defining event of modern history. There was "before the War" and there was "now" (which came after the war). Partly that was result of being born at the right time - the space program was in full swing, computers were a staple of fiction and large business but no more, the counterculture had come and gone, etc. The world really seemed like a timeless place to me as a child, and then about the time I reached adulthood, the Cold War ended, and the Internet Era arrived, and the world changed (and continued to change).