Aug 5, 2026, 5:08 PMThat 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.
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.
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
@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
@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.
@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.
@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.
@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.