[bongodongobob]

And I hate to make blanket statements about generational stuff, but the incoming teenage generation grew up with social media and covid. These kids are extremely sheltered from my experience. I've got two neighbor kids that I talk to once in a while who are 10 and 12. They're squishy fat babies with 0 social skills and throw tantrums when they don't have their iPads. I invite them and their mom over when I have fires. They play games on their phones and can't make eye contact with me or have a conversation. I've lived across the street from a park for two years now and haven't seen any kids there ever. Not once.

This is all very hand wavey but I'm worried about this new digital generation. I'm now the person I never thought I'd be saying this, but these kids are soft.

[ttfkam]

Grew up with social media and Covid. So… they grew up seeing their friends turned inside out from social pressures we never had to deal with and in the meantime they watched their grandparents and other members of older generations die of a disease prematurely while being physically isolated for an extended period of their formative years. In the meantime when back in class, they get periodic drills simulating someone trying to kill them, their friends, and their teachers en masse.

"Soft" is not how I'd describe that experience.

[MisterBastahrd]

The world exists the way that it is regardless of how you would like it to be. The very idea that somehow watching older family members die from disease or illness is somehow unique to them is utterly ridiculous. Even WITH covid, the outcomes were pretty good. They didn't have to worry about dying from measles or being crippled with polio, and medical outcomes are much better nowadays across the board. And the periodic drills comparison is also ridiculous. Kids for generations in the US have been taught to hide underneath their desks in the case of NUCLEAR destruction. Doing it for shooter drills is simply another scare tactic.

Soft is a perfectly fine way to describe them.

[ttfkam]

> They didn't have to worry about dying from measles or being crippled with polio, and medical outcomes are much better nowadays across the board.

Funny you should mention, measles is back, and worldwide fatalities is on the rise. And are you suggesting that US healthcare has improved in the last couple decades? Antivax efforts have made the possibility of a return of endemic polio possible since folks travel, and it's not extinct. Measles was on its way to extinction in the 1990s, but after Wakefield's fraudulent study and the partisan politicization of disease, a host of diseases we never had to worry about anymore are popping back up again. As child vaccination rates continue to drop, we will see it all again.

The adults by and large have all been vaccinated. The kids however are being treated like guinea pigs in an ideological experiment where the losers are the kids themselves.

And as a child of the 70s and 80s, yes, I personally remember the ever-present threat of nuclear war growing up. I also remember the teen suicide rate being abnormally high due to it. Kinda like the rise we see today. It takes its toll, and doesn't at all mean they're "soft".

[MisterBastahrd]

It does mean that they're soft.

Necessarily.

If you grew up in the 70s and 80s, you likely lived during an era where your parents paid little to no attention to what you were doing on a daily basis. People had children after a childhood of benign neglect and decided that they were going to be their kids' friends and began to hover. They bought into every stupid little bit of propaganda and couldn't let their kids out of earshot. So now they have a bunch of kids who only ever get away from their parental units when they're at school, and they are unsocialized as hell because most hoverparents will take their kids' word over that of their teachers.

They have no internal conflict resolution skills because their parents would jump in to handle the situation. They have little to no socialization skills. They need apps to find dates.

Generations are largely what their parents make them to be, and these kids are the absolute epitome of soft. And they're gonna be real big mad in another 30 years when they don't get anywhere with work because their entitlement continues to outweigh their performance.