So this may mean that we are losers, or just permanent fixtures in countercultural circles. New people do enter those circles, but they are from a different cultural and historical moment, and it can show. I'm friends with some of these younger ones, the ones who are more interesting.
This is all very subjective, I realize, and I'm not trying to say "hipper than thou" here; more like "different from thou".
We tried to take it apart--what experiences went into our youth that aren't really understood by younger people. One example given was "I can't imagine NOT being 16, smoking pot, and listening to Led Zeppelin". The drug culture was part of it, but it was a more innocent drug culture than the crack and rave drug scenes that followed. Cocaine and heroin will always be with us, but LSD and pot were the working class drugs of the 70s. One of my friends said that Just Say No is generations old now, and young people are thoroughly inculcated with the idea that drugs do no good. Another friend said drugs fueled all salons, from Paris in the 1880s (opium/laudanum), NYC and Paris in the 1920s (opium, pot, cocaine), the beatniks and their speed in 1950s, for example. He said that drug use made conversations posssible that people wouldn't have otherwise. (I'm not saying everyone should go out and get drugged up, just reporting the ideas that were flying around in the conversation.)
Another one someone pointed out was "I was a kid in Chicago and I remember the guys with long hair would stand up and say 'Stop this war-this is wrong' and I thought that was so right on". Our youth was connected to the counterculture, though we were too young to be hippies, we grew up in the tail end of the movement as it moved into the 70s and the Nixon era. We remember the tail end of the Cold War, detente, and Watergate. It really was the end of the world to have long hair when I was growing up, before it became normalized. We still somehow carry a sense of 1950s politeness with us, a less harsh way to talking to each other than is normal today (see gansta rap, bitch, ho etc etc)
We talked about how these experiences shaped a tolerant worldview that didn't seem to be shared by other generations. Maybe we were full of shit, and there was a lot of Glenlivet in the picture, but what this leads me to is: What do you think are the common experiences that shape the worldview of your particlar generation or cohort?
― Orbit (Orbit), Saturday, 23 July 2005 19:14 (twenty years ago)
― 2, Saturday, 23 July 2005 19:35 (twenty years ago)
Ditto counterculture: beats, yippies, hippies and so on before what you're talking about, hip hop fans in hoodies being treated now the way we punks were in my first gig-going flush of youth, you know?
I'll tell you what I think symbolises the biggest differences: in 1977, my friends laughed at the hippies and prog fans who said of punk things like 'It's not even proper music! They can't even play their instruments!' because they didn't get it. In the '90s, those old friends of mine were saying of techno and so on 'It's not even proper music! They don't even play instruments!' without any sense of irony. People don't connect to the next generation's touchstones and inconography and so on, and therefore can't see the similarities.
― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Saturday, 23 July 2005 19:39 (twenty years ago)
An isolation tank-style immersion in mass media, the end result being a generation that communicates in barbed sarcasm in order to mask a plethora of insecurities.
― Tantrum The Cat (Tantrum The Cat), Saturday, 23 July 2005 20:32 (twenty years ago)
I've always found most generational labels to oddly gloss over and overlap what would be actually divisional events like growing up pre- or post- internet, cell-phone, 9/11, pandemic, etc...
What's the last thing where you felt a profound disconnect with someone who never really lived in a world with or without such and such development?
― Philip Nunez, Sunday, 23 March 2025 22:09 (eleven months ago)
People who didn't experience operating systems before like 2005 and definitely people who've had a smartphone or tablet as their primary device - there's a problem-solving ability (or a constant fear that problem solving will be required) that they're missing.
Tech supporting a 20-year old and an 80-year old feel like basically the same task.
― papal hotwife (milo z), Sunday, 23 March 2025 22:18 (eleven months ago)
A few weeks ago I asked someone at Best Buy if they sold blank CD-Rs. They didn’t know what a CD-R was and when I tried to explain they foisted me on an older co-worker.The answer turned out to be “no” fwiw
― brimstead, Sunday, 23 March 2025 23:09 (eleven months ago)
I really didn't think Best Buy would outlast CD-Rs!
― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, 25 March 2025 19:10 (eleven months ago)
i have no idea if this is actually important or not but I'm teaching my kids the difference between emails, messaging, apps, sites, web search, urls, types of search results, ads, clickbait, comments, public posting, feeds.... because it all just shows up on a rectangle for you now and I feel like where it came from and how you differentiate it is useful to know? then throw fucking ai into the mix as well
― kinder, Wednesday, 26 March 2025 16:26 (eleven months ago)
ime even 20 years ago it was kind of unusual for people you knew irl to be "on the internet" as in having any fixed online presence. in the 90s if your name was on someone's webpage you were "famous" lol.
― kinder, Wednesday, 26 March 2025 16:31 (eleven months ago)
Cocaine and heroin will always be with us, but LSD and pot were the working class drugs of the 70s.
Is this right? I thought speed and lager were the working class drugs of choice in the 70s - though perhaps that's the punk period in the UK (along with 'sniffin' glue')
― Bob Six, Wednesday, 26 March 2025 18:56 (eleven months ago)
when I was a child, there were three channels on the black & white TV... cable was still away off
― Andy the Grasshopper, Wednesday, 26 March 2025 18:58 (eleven months ago)
LSD and pot were the working class drugs of the 70s
Born in December 1971, but I've always understood the preferences to be:
1) Weed2) prescription tranquilizers3) heroin4) LSD and other hallucinogens5) coke if someone else was supplying it
― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson), Wednesday, 26 March 2025 19:39 (eleven months ago)
Actually, amend that:
1) Weed2) prescription tranquilizers3) heroin4) meth/speed5) LSD and other hallucinogens5) coke if someone else was supplying it
― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson), Wednesday, 26 March 2025 19:41 (eleven months ago)
Anyone working in colleges notice a specific shift among incoming Generation-Zoom(the pandemic streaming platform) vs Generation Z (95-2010s) also confusingly named Generation Zoom?
― Philip Nunez, Sunday, 30 March 2025 18:38 (eleven months ago)
None of my current cohort inhaled scotch guard and Freon
― Heez, Sunday, 30 March 2025 20:04 (eleven months ago)
My g-g-g-generation:
Intense hatred of Elon Musk
Constantly referral-farms twitter content, drives a Tesla, obsessed with Space X.
― imperial frfr (Steve Shasta), Sunday, 30 March 2025 20:14 (eleven months ago)
ghosting
― brimstead, Sunday, 30 March 2025 21:09 (eleven months ago)
re: space X,
I wonder if there's a distinction in enthusiasm for space travel between a group who saw the moon landing live at an impressionable age and those who watched the challenger explosion in class.
― Philip Nunez, Monday, 31 March 2025 15:36 (eleven months ago)