The quality of life of kids has degraded at least in the US and no not primarily from smartphones and social media.
The answer is simple, life is harder for parents.
And also the lack of third places making it a lot harder for both adults and kids to get together with friends in person without having to spend money
Also the move towards car-centric infrastructure. Which is somewhat related to the lack of 3rd places.
A lot of the movies with these parties had the kids showing up by walking or biking, which just is not feasible anymore. I
I also think about all the teen movies that were largely set in shopping malls. Most of the malls around me have shut down, so what’s next? Pretending people hang out and socialize in Wal-Marts for the sake of the movie?
Yeah the effect of that is really insidious and far reaching, I know it hurt me growing up no question.
The thing is, all the fun things that adults used to be able to do to blow off steam away from kids, keep getting ruined by going more “family friendly”. When I was a kid, there was a thing at the boulder reservoir with music and events, and people would drink and smoke weed and be mostly left alone. They made it family friendly and it started to die, then they decided it wasn’t eco-friendly so they killed it off.
Ragrbrai in Iowa happened the same way. A weeklong ride across the state that changes stops every year. Used to be drunken debauchery at the stops and now it’s family friendly and no fun anymore. Concerts are the same way. I know kids listen to slipknot, but why the fuck should I watch my mouth now that kids are around, when the singers saying much worse (in context) on stage? I’m sure everyone everywhere in America has a story like this. 4th of July on Apple River, in Wisconsin, back in college it was a blast. Alcohol and titties everywhere. I haven’t been since cops started going and enforcing shit.
Smartphones and social media are probably why the kids don’t party like that anymore. They don’t need to gather in one house to all talk when they have their group chats and junk like that. Pretty sad to think about a generation of kids just pissing away their youth looking at a little screen in their hands all day.
Social media has warped many brains into living life as a performance of moments for their feed-posts, and too few exercise their right to Privacy, so everything is tainted with the concept of the Observer that we didn’t have in the past. Yes, we did party like those kids in those movies. It was rad.
Try being more curious about young people and actually listen to them talk when they are willing to be vulnerable to you and come back and tell me this is the problem. That is a lazy, easy narrative there you just spun.
Your assumptions are based on your imagination, since you don’t know that I haven’t done that
Then why do your descriptions of nuanced multifaceted humans portray them as such cartoonishly reductive caricatures dissected from any context outside of their control? Younger people by definition have the least control over their circumstance.
Sounds like you don’t like what I wrote. It’s not a big deal, but it is real. I’ve seen before and after, and what I said is what happened.
IF we want to talk about anything regarding the human condition, that talk will necessarily be reductive. Should OP have written a thesis paper?
He clearly stated that this was his opinion. And I think he’s getting downvoted for hitting a leetle too close to home.
What up GenX! Yep. We had to leave the house because there was nothing to do there!
I dunno. I moved to Europe and there’s smartphones and social media here. But my colleagues kids are at birthday parties and hanging out with friends and going to events every weekend. This seems like a real US thing.
Last weekend there was a big national festival in my area (Nijmeegse vierdaagse). I was late after the friday drinks at work. The trainand the stations were chuck full of teens and early 20 kids. They looked to be havin as much fun and being as stupid as I was at that age. Didn’t seem like much had changed in that regard.
To my knowledge kids in US have 10x the scheduled activities on weekends compared to the past. Apparently the thought of a kid just lying around all weekend entertaining themselves is gone. They have to have scheduled camps all summer as well.
Yes, but ours were usually much much more casual and in much smaller houses. TV makes everyone look rich. Broke people have parties too, but they’re chips/dip and BYOB. Also, without the jocks vs. nerds.
My husband was just telling a story this weekend about when he was “ninth grade cool”. Right before a party a cute girl asked if he had the new Prince album. He said yes and then begged his mom to take him to Sound Warehouse to buy it. Unwrapped it, shoved it in his pocket, and got dropped at the party. “Cool! What’s your favorite song?” “Uhh, the first one.”
Sad that kids now don’t have that experience.
Do kids still go parking?
Do kids still go parking?
So many kids today don’t want to drive or learn to drive 🤷♂️ And based on my partners’ kids, they’re much less sexually driven than we were. We did a bunch of stupid shit if there was a hint of a chance of getting laid.
That’s sad. The hours we spent talking, laughing, and making out in cars were the best part of high school. I wonder if some of the disinterest is from anti depressants.
It’s probably from the world burning down around them. Hard to be horny when you’re full of existential dread.
Yeah, absolutely no existential dread from the Cold War. And we all just instantly stopped believing that the world would end in a nuclear holocaust just because the Soviet Union collapsed. Then there was the Gulf war, then 9/11, then another Gulf war. And we’ve known about climate change and how capitalism is killing our planet for practically the entire time, that’s not new. Oil crisis? That’s been a slowly building crescendo of apocalypse since like the 70s.
I’ll buy existential dread as an excuse for not wanting to breed, not as an explanation for teenagers being less horny.
Should be the opposite. Stressful conditions make us want to fuck and make babies. Maybe I’m wrong, but in any case, sex is about the most effective stress relief I know of.
I don’t think your experience in this case is universal. Birth rates have been steadily dropping as things have gotten worse.
I feel the same way as you, but my wife is the opposite of us.
Wasn’t speaking from experience, or today’s social norms. Meant to say that primates fuck and masturbate when stressed. We do as well.
Kids seems so socially anxious and isolated, making a doom loop against making friends and fucking.
Cameras on phones killed it.
We definitely had to regulate this in college. We threw some ragers where we specifically knew it couldnt be documented where we collected phones and had a whole coat check system. Thankfully, facebook was only for college people, so nothing catastrophic ever happened
This 👆
Yeah, no records may be kept of a house party.
Wait there aren’t parties anymore? What
Apparently kids are socializing in general less. Like it’s a real trend.
My neighbors gen z kids for the last 3 years had parties like this all the freaking time… so yeah they still happens. Maybe its just less common.
I’m aware parties like this happened when I was a kid, I was just too much of a square to get invited (I’m a millennial)
Yeah I never had this as a kid. Maybe I just wasn’t invited though lol
Home security cameras probably don’t help for house parties. Parents can see everything now.
House parties were awesome. I was never cool, but there was always room at a house party. It’s a shame that these died out.
Sorry I was too busy being a geek to go to parties full of people I absolutely hated. That was back before gaming was popular and cool, when you had to EARN your geekdom.
Depends on how stereotypical of a portrayal is in question, but yes, I’ve been to what would definitely be my country’s equivalent.
Houses full of people. Around when people where 15-19 or smth, sometimes even older, but average was prolly 16-17. A couple of 15 year old moped boys for every 18 year driver, but for everyone 18 year driver, prolly 3-4 16-17 year friends with them.
Houses so full you’d strike up a chat with a random person every few meters. Always at the slightly less than responsible parents who allowed their kids to be alone for the weekend in the house.
But like, pretty similar as those depicted, but with our culture, not US, so slightly different.
Yeah, in my country too, we had parties at each other houses, drinks, dancing, chatting, some food. Parents of the organiser would come from time to time to check that all is ok. We would buy our own food, make some sandwiches, buy some drinks, parents would give us some beers or wine( we could have a drink or two even before being 18). It was lots of fun. Even at our Highschool, the school would organise a disco party on Saturdays, no alcohol, but lots of dancing. We did not of course really need cars, Europe is pretty walkable.
Parents of the organiser would come from time to time to check that all is ok.
Uhm yeah the parties I’m talking about didn’t have parents checking on horribly drunken teenagers.
We didn’t have “a drink or two”. I don’t think it’s just once that I’ve carried a person rolled up into a carpet filled with their own vomit out of the house because it was just the simplest solution.
Kinda like a horrible kebab roll, with the person as the meat, carpet as the bread and vomit as sauce.
I think alcoholism is a bit different here perhaps. If we weren’t at parties or driving around drinking in cars, there’d be a youth hangout for under under 18’s, so we’d hang out there. But you weren’t allowed in if you had had a drink. To make sure, my own mom was sometimes at the door with a breathalyser. (My mom was in charge of youth activities in the municipality, she didn’t just show up randomly.)
It wasn’t every weekend there’d be a party, exactly because of how destructive they usually were. Hell, if you had a party, sometimes you’d just get people from the next town over, completely randomly basically, because someone knew someone and so forth. So if you did have a party the hardest part was usually keeping it in check and not have everyone invite everyone they know.
We needed cars/mopeds because the distances in the countryside are a bit longer.
During the summer heats like this (oh god you made me nostalgic noo) we’d hang out all day drinking at the sandpits, dozen or two little lakes and ponds ~5km north from the town center. So someone usually needed to be able to drive. Although that wasn’t so much getting drunk as just having a refreshing drink in the heat and to rehydrate.
Many people lived as far away from the town centre as well, and usually in different directions, so it might be 12 kilometers from the house of one friend to another so mopeds and 125cc’s and cars were kinda essential. I do understand Americans in that aspect but now that I live in the city and don’t go there any more I just use a bike/bus. But in the country that isn’t a thing.
I don’t recognise the movie instantly so I read it with that with the voice of Werner Herzog from that Rick & Morty dick monologue
Laughed out loud though. Or exhaled forcefully, to be truthful. Thank you for that.
I’m slow, were these actually a real thing then?
(Younger) GenX here.
Yes, we partied hard, and we had a lot of fun. We got into tons of shenanigans, and there’s zero video or audio evidence of any of it remaining. We said and did a lot of dumb shit, and were free to roam and make minor mistakes.
We hung out at each others’ houses, at the mall (back when malls were cool), in parking lots, coffee shops, at railroad tracks, parks, the woods, swimming pools, whatever. We just talked for hours and really connected. We’d hop in the car and just go somewhere, sometimes far away, just because. And we weren’t tethered to any monitoring devices in our pockets keeping us glued to messages.
We were free.
I really do feel sorry for the younger generations. Kids these days really do have it very rough. It sucks for y’all, and I do wish I could destroy the internet so you guys could be free, too.
That’s a perfect description! Hanging out on empty playgrounds, running around downtown and climbing on statues, parking by the lake, going for a drive with no destination just to talk and listen to music. No phone, no texts, be home by midnight. I wasn’t allowed to go to the mall and it was devastating.
Yes
Yes.
Like a party with lots of people? Yes. But honestly they are way better in your 20’s when people have their own places and drinking is not really an issue.
It feels like they aren’t as common but I know they aren’t totally gone. My Niece graduated High School 4 years ago and went to them. My Nephew graduated in May and he went to them as well.
There was always the ad-hoc couple inspecting each other tonsils over in the corner.
Totally never did that myself, nuh-uh.
