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  • Artemisartemis@dice.camp
    Aug 5, 2026, 4:49 PM

    I do think it is important how we interact with each other in this area:

    It can be very discouraging to young people to feel like they are being told they are ignorant & useless by people showing up to say "well, *I've* known this for decades," as if a 20 year old should be ashamed that they are learning something for the 1st time.

    But you will also see "shut up, older person. What do you know? That was then, this is now." This is now, sure, but you can learn some shit from what happened THEN.

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Replies

  • Artemisartemis@dice.camp
    Aug 5, 2026, 4:49 PM

    As a Millennial, I got a front row seat to a feverish performance of "young people today suck at everything". Being angry about "kids today" is a tale as old as time, but it still isn't fucking helpful.

    I try really fucking hard not to reflexively pass judgement on people younger than me for behavior or attitudes I simply don't understand. I don't think it does anything good to get mad at younger people for being shaped by & responding to a world so different from what you yourself experienced.

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  • Artemisartemis@dice.camp
    Aug 5, 2026, 4:52 PM

    The Who song "My Generation" is fucking hilarious to me, because it is perennial. Any young person can listen to that song & fucking relate despite the fact it was released 60 years ago. 😂

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  • Artemisartemis@dice.camp
    Aug 5, 2026, 4:59 PM

    Anyway: age divides are yet another way to divide & isolate us.

    It's beneficial to anyone trying to control a population if we distrust & are angry with each other. It is beneficial to them if you have no access to the past & if you slowly become cut off from the present over time.

    There is slice of MAGA fueled by anger at young people. Makes you think perhaps all those "avocado toast" articles were MEANT to create that anger, because it's one way to get votes & create division & strife.

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  • Artemisartemis@dice.camp
    Aug 5, 2026, 5:04 PM

    So many people cross a threshold after which they just fucking despise people younger than them, thinking they are worthless, lazy, & badly-behaved.

    The wild thing about it to me is that this is a continuous process: we experience the alienation when we are young & then turn back around & do it to the generations after us.

    Ironically, it's a repeating pattern passed down from generation to generation. It's also unhealthy as fuck & creates unbelievable resentment on all sides.

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  • Artemisartemis@dice.camp
    Aug 5, 2026, 5:08 PM

    That seems like a cycle that needs to be broken. We can't keep fighting this Youth vs Age battle forever. It's such a fucking waste of time.

    Yes, younger people can be hard to understand. Yes, they probably think about things differently from you & define their values in a different way. That's just how fucking time works. They weren't raised by your parents during your childhood.

    We're going to have to stop hating the young for being young at some point. Time passes.

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  • Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐gcvsa@mstdn.plus
    Aug 5, 2026, 5:12 PM

    @artemis I think the thing that rankles me is that the rise of the Internet since the mid-1990s seems to have given the younger generations the idea that so much of what is merely new to them is entirely unknown to older generations. Internet culture glorifies youth and beauty over lived experience and the wisdom that cannot be gained but through time. Video killed the radio star. Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

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  • mother not wifeglassresistor
    Aug 6, 2026, 7:54 AM

    @artemis

    i think the tension and breaking the cycle has always been there and as generations get shorter and more fine grained(more people and faster info)

    i think its naturally creeping. like with HIV we lost of a whole generation of fun awesome amazing people(our dark ages) but its been 40yrs and at this point we have multi generational polycules and also found families with elders and babys

    im 30yrs older than my oldest and the micro generation before her currently looks like furry goth kids in rave pants

    which means furry grunge kids in rave pants with holes will be 3yrs from now

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  • mother not wifeglassresistor
    Aug 6, 2026, 7:56 AM

    @artemis my point is awesome is ageless and cringe has a shelf life so no one will remember it

    so the most multi generational people and spaces rock

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  • 🔥Cassandra🔥Cassandra@ottawa.place
    Aug 6, 2026, 1:54 PM

    @artemis Thanks for all the thoughts. I agree that it’s useful to imagine and role play. It’s why they try so hard to get people to shut down and accept. But if you’ve rehearsed standing up for your principles, it might be less scary.

    Agreed about the youth. I read a really thoughtful article about the Cockroach Janta Party in India the other day and was really impressed by the kids. They see how things are, what the future is, so much more clearly than politicians.

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  • FoolishOwlfoolishowl@social.coop
    Aug 6, 2026, 5:27 PM

    @artemis There's an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Q shows Picard what his life would have been like if he'd been cautious rather than bold at a critical moment, and goes on to remain a low-ranking technical specialist rather than a high-ranking officer. And what struck me was the barely disguised contempt all the other characters expressed for alternate Picard, as well as the outright loathing of Picard himself.

    There's something very similar to patriarchy in our attitudes towards aging, an up-or-out model that too few people question. In activist spaces, some older people seem to expect to hear "Captain on the deck" when they enter a room, and sometimes they get that and sometimes they're angrily rebuffed. But a lot more older people seem to expect to be just barely tolerated, as if had little to offer and could no longer learn.

    It's polarized and harmful.

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  • FoolishOwlfoolishowl@social.coop
    Aug 6, 2026, 5:44 PM

    @artemis Relatively recently I'd been around a small group, and there was an argument about participating in a mass demo, one of the big liberal marches against Trump, and most of the group was opposed on the grounds that mass demos were useless.

    So I argued for participating, explaining how I thought we'd overemphasized such mass demos in the 90s and 00s, but I'd since come to think we'd overcorrected and that they were important, just not enough in themselves. The argument was grounded in my personal experiences.

    And a couple of people answered that they'd just done a study group on a book that said demos were useless, so I was wrong.

    Like, I wasn't assuming my argument was going to convince everyone, but I found "Your experience is irrelevant" to be pretty infuriating. So I basically left the group over it.

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  • Gary Houstonghouston@mamot.fr
    Aug 7, 2026, 2:34 AM

    @foolishowl @artemis The "utopian" society of Star Trek seems to retain its strict hierarchies, like it's the Soviet Union but with more enlightened leadership. But then bad leadership (at the levels above the protagonists) still turns up frequently.

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  • bloomtime!thesquirrelfish
    Aug 5, 2026, 5:18 PM

    @artemis I tend to think this is very lumped in with normative supremacist attitudes generally - they have a concept of what is normal and deviation from that, even when it's a whole generation(or culture, language, whatever), is considered a negative. Even when it's something that would seem like a positive if it was a different type of the same group!

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  • Blain Smithblainsmith@fosstodon.org
    Aug 5, 2026, 7:50 PM

    @artemis It also feels like these "generation" gaps are also much much smaller lately. When I was a teen and in my 20's the folks that were my parents age and older would do this to me, but rarely folks in their 30s. Now it seems like folks in late 30s have VASTLY different points of view than folks in early 30s. I am 44 and I can't imagine having anything in common with someone in their mid-30s, but I certainly don't look down on them.

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  • Faith, Purple haired feminist 🧋 :v_tg: :v_lb: :v_greyace:faithisleaping@anarres.family
    Aug 5, 2026, 5:27 PM

    @artemis Oh, those avocado toast articles absolutely were. So is every article on quiet quitting or job doubling or really anything written in Forbes about GenZ. There’s a constant stream trying to stoke anger in boomers and GenX and make their “kids these days” feel genuine and like there’s data behind it.

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  • Just Tom... 🐁tompearce49@mastodon.scot
    Aug 5, 2026, 5:10 PM

    @artemis Thank you for what I am becoming accustomed to - another thoughtful and interesting thread from you. I am old enough to have teenage grandchildren. I am hugely impressed by their maturity (that coexists alongside a delightful immaturity). I like to think that they will try to make the best of whatever those of my generation (sadly all too often dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries) leave behind us for them. Surmising what lies ahead, I am ashamed of our failure to care about their futures.

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  • Deb Chachradebcha@saturation.social
    Aug 6, 2026, 4:24 PM

    @artemis I remember when I first realised that the moral panic around punk was preceded by ones around the hippies, and the Beatles, and Elvis, and succeeded by panics around heavy metal, and rap, and on and on. Since then I’ve failed to understand how anyone can have any kind of intergenerational panic around anything anymore.

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  • K-ZO da Snowmankzodasnowman@spore.social
    Aug 6, 2026, 4:39 PM

    @debcha @artemis great framing, thanks for putting it like that. I don't have any inter generational fear about the younger gen, only fear about what is being done to them. Normalization of COVID, social media/surveillance, etc.

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  • Deb Chachradebcha@saturation.social
    Aug 6, 2026, 7:25 PM

    @kzodasnowman @artemis I’ve been working closely with young adults my entire professional life, and AFAICT any handwringing about ‘kids these days’ is a failure to recognize that people are responding in totally understandable ways to a *world* that’s changed incl eg climate change, employment precarity, rising inequality, etc.

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  • Matildajunklight@mastodon.art
    Aug 5, 2026, 5:22 PM

    @artemis

    I've always loved the XKCD about that xkcd.com/1053/

    we prioritise cynicism in our culture rather than enthusiasm and joy.

    We are taught to hate saying "I don't know" - especially as part of male culture (Something I was guilty of when younger when pretending to be a man - now saying "I don't know" is something I embrace)

    I also love seeing things through my childrens (well now young people) eyes and listening & learning from them (something our culture ALSO discourages)

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