I think millenials get a bad rap because they are the first generation with the means to be heard on an international stage. There were lazy boomers, X’ers and there’ll be shitty millenials. Just now you get to see all the shitty millenials in one place by tapping on a pound sign followed by some deuchy trend.
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Yeah I think what people really have a problem with are the snowflakes. There are a lot more snowflakes now because there’s a higher standard of living.
Guys, there are snowflakes from Gen X in the fucking 3rd World. Much less, but they exist.
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I’m just glad I was around to experience peak culture back in the '90’s. We’ve got plenty of time to clean up the mess. Things will be fine.
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Yeah it is. This is a recent one from some guys I really like and admire. I’ve made frames for them and plenty more from around the country/world. Creating something of lasting beauty and value is actually very difficult.
Then there’s also a starving artist type dude on my facebook feed that keeps ranting about the lack of respect people have for “true art”. I’ve had to bite my tongue more than a few times to not just be outright blunt and offensive to him.
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That’s true beauty right there.
These types irritate the fuck out of me.
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Well I know weak when I see it. I remember the times when things went over my head (happened a couple of times in my teen), it felt like the music was random stuff, but it didn’t come off as weak. I was just puzzled.
I used to really love Led Zeppelin when I was 13, but now it sounds weak to me (it’s still in my taste though). I wouldn’t put myself on the same level as when I was 13.
Some people are sensible and most are not. Of the people that are sensible, some are more than others. A bunch are coping by saying that things are subjective. Objectively some brains are more tuned to the little stuff, just like some are better at maths.
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Yeah. Cool skeleton pics are cool in high school, but when you’re still making them at 40something no one gives a fuck about the social commentary the person drawing (or painting) it has attached to it.
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I get what you’re saying but my point is there’s a broader definition of art than the criteria you are looking at and it’s relevance will depend on a lot of things like what it symbolizes and it’s influence within a particular era. I don’t care for a lot of things myself but I leave myself open to them since even something I may consider a piece of crap can lead to others creating real works of art if they see something in it that inspires them. That alone makes it interesting enough(to me) to call it art. But it doesn’t mean I like it.
“In December 2004, Duchamp’s Fountain was voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 selected British art world professionals.”
Another genre would be movies. I would rather be water boarded for 36 straight hours than sit through a David Lynch movie. Fuck Lost Highway. But I do accept that he’s a good filmmaker.
Haha!
Self esteem restored! I’m not an unwashed savage because I couldn’t make it 10 minutes into Eraserhead!
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You were born after 1980?
'82
How old do/did you think I am/was?
How about we look at people as individuals instead of assuming that they share certain characteristics, positive or negative, because they can be labeled as part of some group?
About the generations… We tend to look back with nostalgia, which in the world of cognitive biases is called rosy retrospection. That doesn’t mean we can’t admire people who did difficult things, or handled challenges with grace, but you notice how everyone sounds like a saint at their funeral? Related, the tendency to think that things (or generations) are getting worse is known as declinism.
I work with teenagers all the time. I just love that age. I see a full range of personality traits and characteristics in them. Some of them work really hard, have integrity, and goals, are really kind, and overcome difficult things. If we you don’t like identity politics, start with getting rid of the assumption that the youth of today are all…
Some of our kids are entitled and egotistical. I’d have to see some research before I assume that the current group are more so than any other generation.
On a hopeful note, if you assume this is happening, you can try to make sure that your own children don’t grow up with a sense of entitlement or a grandiose sense of self as the center of the universe. With regards to technology, parents can limit it, if they have the will and the backbone. You can certainly delay kids having cell phones, or not allow computers in their rooms.
This is something I do worry about as a parent. Nobody thinks their kid is a little jerk, but we all know that some people’s children are in fact little jerks. Most of us want to avoid having children who consistently do things that we really dislike.
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NO, YOU WILL FIT IN THIS NEAT LITTLE BOX, PUFF!!!
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The Generation Xbox? Har har!!
We were latchkey kids all hopped up on MTV back in my day. Slackers, rotting our brains playing too much Pac Man. And I came of age during the crack epidemic and the emergence of AIDS. That pretty much tells you all you need to know about my personality. That and I’m mean. Really mean.
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I was reading McCullough’s book on the Wright brothers and there was a statement about the fear that bicycles would cause kids to spend all their time outdoors, NOT inside reading. Ironically, we now hear the opposite that kids need to spend more time outdoors. I’m sure the 30+ crowd of the 1880s thought the kids were little deviant shit bags too.
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Although I don’t dislike each and every boomer, in honesty I’ll admit That although I love some, I am not fond of them generally and they are a bunch I’ve routinely complained about in the past two years.
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Regarding access to technology, I just came across this book review. She’s calling people born between 1995-2012 iGen, because they are the first to grow up with the internet and cell phones. Some of this is worrisome.
Paywall. Please pardon the huge block of text.
Using generations as signposts for understanding group behavior can be a frustrating exercise—every baby boomer isn’t an aging hippie and every millennial isn’t an avocado-toast fiend with an entitlement complex. And yet, as social-science researchers have found, generational distinctions do have some validity, and a better understanding of large birth cohorts can illuminate broader social trends.
So argues Jean M. Twenge, persuasively, in “iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.” A psychology professor at San Diego State University, Ms. Twenge assigns the label iGen (her own coinage) to people born between 1995 and 2012. It is a group, she notes, that doesn’t know a world without the internet and smartphones and is now 24% of the U.S. population.
Who are these people and what do they want from us? According to Ms. Twenge, they are neither as cynical as Gen X nor as overconfident as their immediate predecessors, the millennials. In fact, the older members of iGen (now in their teens and early 20s) represent a radical departure when it comes to their views on religion, free speech, relationships and technology.
To judge by Ms. Twenge’s data, tolerance is their religion. Churchgoing and faith are in free-fall among iGen-ers, while their views on LGBTQ matters are more liberal than those of any previous generation. So, too, their views of sex. They are having less of it themselves but are less judgmental about the sexual habits of others. They “are just less willing to label anything as ‘wrong,’ ” Ms. Twenge writes.
Unless, that is, something is deemed an offense against tolerance itself. Members of iGen, Ms. Twenge says, are more likely than their predecessors “to support restricting speech.” She found that “more than one out of four students (28%) agreed that ‘A faculty member who, on a single occasion, says something racially insensitive in class should be fired,’ ” while 16% believed a student who did the same thing once should be expelled. In a rare moment of judgmentalism, Ms. Twenge adds: “This is the dark side of tolerance; it begins with the good intentions of including everyone and not offending anyone but ends (at best) with a reluctance to explore deep issues and (at worst) with careers destroyed by a comment someone found offensive and the silencing of all alternative viewpoints.”
The supposed enthusiasm for tolerance among iGen-ers, Ms. Twenge says, is trumped by only one thing: the desire for safety, a term with a psychological dimension more than a physical one. “Safe spaces,” as we know, dot college campuses. Sometimes they feature “coloring books and videos of frolicking puppies, neatly connecting the idea of safe spaces with that of childhood,” Ms. Twenge notes. The trigger warnings and other protections mocked by critics as accommodations for “snowflakes,” she says, are “not fringe ideas but those embraced by the majority of iGen’ers.”
More than any other influence, technology is central to understanding this generation’s experience. Across all races and classes, they spend, on average, six hours a day with new media. Ms. Twenge is not indulging in hyperbole when she tells us that this is the first generation that prefers virtual to real relationships. “With the advent of social media and smartphones, teens’ social lives shifted decisively away from in-person interaction. They spend much less time with their friends in person than teens in previous decades did.”
Thus they don’t date as much or hang out with their friends as often. Yet they don’t spend their time reading in any serious or systematic way either. Indeed, they are “much less likely to read books than their Millennial, GenX, and Boomer predecessors,” Ms. Twenge writes. Their academic skills lag behind those of millennials “by significant margins,” and they are “less informed” about current events.
Worse, living their lives online hasn’t made the members of iGen happy. On the contrary, the more time they spend online, the worse they feel. This generation, Ms. Twenge says, is “at the forefront of the worst mental health crisis in decades, with rates of teen depression and suicide skyrocketing since 2011.”
Ms. Twenge strains to find some benefits in iGen’s enthrallment to their smartphones. It’s not easy, however. Confronted with the dismal data about reading and study habits, she weakly suggests creating textbooks that “include interactive activities such as video sharing” and “books that are shorter in length and more conversational in their writing style.”
After offering example after example showing the harmful effects of smartphones on young people, Ms. Twenge is still careful not to moralize. And yet, reading these stories, one can’t help asking: Why don’t parents take these kids’ phones away from them? It is hard to read the evidence that Ms. Twenge has scrupulously compiled about iGen’s technology use without experiencing the sickening feeling that we’re engaged in a massive behavioral and psychological experiment—with young people as the unwitting guinea pigs.
Ms. Twenge ultimately wants to be hopeful about iGen’s prospects, and perhaps we should be—up to a point. Their insistence on safety has led to some positive outcomes, such as lower rates of teen pregnancy and underage drinking. But it has also stunted the development of adult skills and created a generation that prefers the “emotional safety” of virtual relationships to the messy entanglements of real ones. (Wouldn’t want to “catch feelings,” as the kids say.) As Ms. Twenge notes, iGen-ers have greater “maturity fears” than preceding generations did, which is perhaps why they jokingly refer to responsible behavior as “adulting” and why their efforts at tolerance have taken such an illiberal turn. Like so many generations before them, only more so, they have a lot of growing up to do.
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It depends.
I speak on behalf of millineals and most of do whatever we wish. Wether that means taking responsibility and making something of yourself, or not.
Quite bit of us are rather creative, we’ve used technology to our advantage, and to help others.
On the other end are the lazy, distracted, and self fulfilling bunch of us. They eat up brain zapping crap, tote it around, think it’s funny. There’s a crap ton of us that have taken solace behind the computer or phone screen and it sucks.
But I think every generation has this.
I cling onto my personal Beliefs, and I hold fast to principles and teaching that’s have withstood time itself. I respect everyone to the best of my ability, and I find joy in finding myself along my life journey, without losing myself to the many wordly distractions there are out here.
not young enough to be my offspring
well now you know, Pops
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