Are you culturally older or younger than your real age?

Was talking w similar age friends (28-32) tonight about the huge perceived age gap with people just a few years younger. Partially technology (cell phones didn't become commonplace until we were in college, late adopters with texting, etc. - but OTOH we spent our adolescence with the Internet available but slow unlike people just a bit older), but also cultural touchstones - the important music wasn't just grunge but punk/hardcore and college rock that belonged to a half-generation before us, movies that seem right in our age range but people just a few years younger wouldn't identify with, etc..

i am my age. i'm acquiring a certain patina, but i've always been interested in and engaged with "emergent culture". i keep up, but i'm increasingly aware that my perspective, aesthetics and values are a product of the culture in which i came of age.

older, but the gap is closing rapidly.

10-15 years older, elder siblings partially to blame

Sometimes I realize that bands I put on the jukebox at the bar (I dunno - Dinosaur Jr. or the Damned or w/e) wouldn't be recognizable to someone just a few years younger than me, but OTOH they shouldn't be my reference points either.

I don't know if I'm older, younger, or just a contrarian... wait let me think here... I hate smartphones and I think the best films were made in the 70s; but I also like skinny jeans and post-rock. This is tough.

Also I prefer to pay bills with a check through the mail and pine for a president like Eisenhower... I think that makes me an old person, rite?

About right, I think. I'm 32, so I don't feel like I need to follow the sort of music that's hip or trendy anymore; for example, in the latest ILM end-of-the-year poll, more than half of the artists I'd never even heard about before, let alone heard their music. But I can still buy cool & new records every once in a while, I don't think all good music was made in the past. I'm able to do all sort of basic stuff on computers, and I use the Interent regularly, but since I grew up in an era when there was no Internet (or I guess there was, but it was mostly used by geeks), some aspects of the online culture still feel foreign to me, like blogging or tweeting or the "OMG/ROFL/etc" language. I still like calling people on the phone, messaging them on the computer or even texting them on my cell phone feels like a less pleasant alternative (and I hate people who never call, only text). I don't go to the cinema half as much as I did in the 90s, but I still want to see "important" movies there, I don't feel lying on your couch is the best/only way to watch flicks.

So yeah, I guess I'm culturally about 32.

I'm really not sure. At 31, I feel like a lot of my peers are saying things like "I don't understand this, I must be getting old" but I've always railed against this mentality. Growing up in the suburbs, the rate of cultural turnover is generally a lot slower than in the cities - we'd come to things late i.e. getting into Pearl Jam and Nirvana in the mid-late 90s, a few years after those acts peaked, so some of my references are older than me... I dunno.

I have a theory that says you're of all the things you're likely to be interested in, it's the stuff that was popular just before you started taking an interest in popular culture that you interest yourself in the least. So for example I'd say the year I started listening to alternative/non-chart music was around 1994, so there's about a gap in my cultural knowledge spanning around 89-93 where I know very little. I mean, I know MBV and Cocteau Twins, a bit of this and that, but other than that it's not an era I feel particularly invested in.

This will also depend on older siblings. I don't have any, but I'm sure my younger brothers and sisters will be just as familiar with, say, OK Computer as I am, even though they were kids when it came out.

I missed the memo about iCloud (what is this for??), I don't get iTunes, can't operate eBay to save my life and generally hate paying for things online.

Approaching middle age and I don't care about young people's music any more - seems about right.

My younger self would probably die on reading that but what does he know.

Depends on the medium.

I mean, I keep up with videogames - if not actually *playing them* then I at least know what's current & why
Music I tend to wait for the end-of-year polls and spend the next 3 months getting into stuff from the previous year. otherwise pretty much mid-thirties-bloke canon stuff.
Am not at all up to speed with books, mainly read novels from the 50s and 60s and the occasional booker winner
telly is a thing for watching football on, and i only ever get to see kids stuff at the cinema
I'm definitely a kindle & linux person rather than iphone & OSX.

so - probably about right on balance (34)? mebbe a bit older?

i hate young people's culture but tbh this question is meaningless in the age of permachildren and totally accessible nostalgia.

nooo, you're supposed to answer it *despite* it being a meaningless question

A few months back a person told me they collected lounge music from the 50s and 60s and I was like "ah coool, bachelor pad music!" and he gave me a weird look and said "no, I have a girlfriend." And then I said "no, ya know -- Space Age pop!" and he was like "I don't know, I think lounge is more like jazz."

I felt old but then again perhaps that person was merely an idiot.

i think that's just a confusion of reference points and semantics more than anything else.

I still have a hard time coming to terms with the fact video games are no longer "just for kids"; similar to how my Dad reckons Family Guy and shows like that are aimed primarily at children.

age appropriate (about right)

since i was a journalist/rock critic in the pre-internet era, for years i skewed culturally younger due to my work. this century, parenthood and incipient geezerdom have shifted my cultural focus and i make no bones about being a "70s guy" who is awkward on computers and didn't grow up w/video games and MTV. #cestlavie

I have a fairly significant overlap in musical taste with my eleven-year-old cousin. That said, in terms of other cultural reference points, i probably skew older.

Approaching middle age and I don't care about young people's music any more - seems about right.

― ledge, Friday, 17 February 2012 10:47 (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

My younger self would probably die on reading that but what does he know.

― ledge, Friday, 17 February 2012 10:48 (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just remembered what it is that my younger self doesn't know - that young people's music is shit these days.

I used to skew a lot younger but lately that is falling apart rapidly. I am no longer interested in current popular music, even though when I listen to some of it I quite like it. I'm just not interested in the thing as a whole because it seems juvenile to me.

The other thing I have noticed is that I don't "get" advanced social media. Tumblr has passed me by, and now there's Pinterest, which baffles me. I don't understand why people want to take pictures and things from all over the place and "pin" them up, or post them to Tumblr. I am not trying to say they are wrong, just that I have no real understanding of why they do it (and that must be largely down to age).

Bear in mind that the 'culturally younger' does not mean "I culturally am 20" in all cases.

Tumblr has passed me by, and now there's Pinterest, which baffles me.

I've never heard of Pinterest before, and I still don't quite know what Tumblr is (or why it's written without the "e") either. I guess I'm older than I thought...

I still don't quite know what Tumblr is (or why it's written without the "e")

Tumblr can be used to post pictures (your own or other people's) OR as a platform for a text-based blog (or a hybrid of the two). It seems to be pretty versatile but has become most identified with people posting pictures from elsewhere on the internet, and then other people "like" them or repost them on their own pages, so it just goes round in circles in what appears to me to be a pretty mindless way (but that’s clearly an older person’s view).

Omitting the "e" is just copying Flickr. Then again, I don't know if Flickr was the first to do it.

Thanks for the info!

I've gone beyond the pale. my obsessions right now are old Hollywood and the Great American Songbook. The only person I can fully discuss these things with is my mom.

hahaha tbh that's kinda rad.

i dont really know what this question means

i think it basically means "can you talk to people more than 3 years older than you without them making references that go over your head"

Sometimes I realize that bands I put on the jukebox at the bar (I dunno - Dinosaur Jr. or the Damned or w/e) wouldn't be recognizable to someone just a few years younger than me

lol age is really not the criteria id be using to determine the subset of people who would recognize dino jr song at a bar

i guess i feel like cultural products are so accessible and our lives are so saturated with media and people have a lot more control over cultural consumption that like 'what kind of music i like' doesnt really say as much about how 'old' you are as like the image of yourself you have or w/e

i mean there are weird like quasi-historical stuff (lol people who dont remember desert storm) that this still happens with or experiences with technology or sports stuff where having lived through it matters but liking old movies idk lots of kids watch old movies and sadly many older people still watch kids movies? idk the past is p heavily present in 'culture' now, things dont really go away even stuff thats p heavily disposable gets recycled by nostalgia or irony until its just as contemp as actually contemp culture

yeah w/ the internet and info culture I think the accessibility of 'old culture' has changed a lot - like if you're a hs student and you like the band television it's not as much an embrace of 'old culture', just some band you read about in wikipedia or something.

I knit. Nuff said. ;-)

it feels like the tempo of the "lag" factor of how young/old people make each other feel nowadays, myself included, is wildly different in different contexts- to cite three:

1. music

if I as a 40 year old talk to a 20 year old noise kid who hasn't heard neubauten or merzbow or tg, by the second time I run into them they've already downloaded / read up / contextualized / moved on. Kids self-educate and incorporate really quickly in this skim/hunt/collect/consume metabolism- so their areas of familiarity are less and less tied to what got reviewed or is being sold now or even cycles of what is trendy in tasteful reissue land- it's more random, and turnover is quicker, and it feels to me like in the process connoisseurship has been expanded, de-skilled, defanged and democratized, for good and for bad- access is good, but the facile sense that one is already "done" with an aesthetic as a result of having downloaded one album and read a Wikipedia entry is bad

2. theory

if you went to grad school in the 90s you're still wrestling with problems that grad students today don't really recognize as active problems, so the feeling that certain problems are "old hat" is frequent but less likely to get bridged through touristic nibbling and reading across generational divides (cf. the wholesale rejection of epistemological concerns and the linguistic turn as people make the turn towards object oriented ontology or world systems theory instead of Marxism, etc) Younger thinkers are not necessarily going to be able to come "backwards" to meet you halfway, and casually referencing a certain set of theorists produces blank stares or the guilty feeling that they ought to have read things that they just haven't, but there's less of a sense that people can use tools at their disposal to become familiarized swiftly- the wikipedia entry for Hegel isn't going to bring you "up to speed" with Hegel- you put in the time to read Hegel or you don't- (this is not a matter of young and old but interested and disinterested- but it can feel in practice as if the morcellization of people's attention spans and commitments selects for aphoristic authors of short books over patriarchal tome-creators)

3. sex

If you talk to younger gay dudes about safe sex, they didn't live through lots of people dying of AIDS all around you, as I did, and conversations or encounters can "make you feel old" simply as an index of the different levels of seriousness attached to the same behavior- i mean, younger gay dudes have safe sex and older gay dudes have unsafe sex too, I'm not demonizing anybody here, but there's really a difference that I've seen in what people think they're doing when they commit to the same act- this makes people feel old or young with regards to each other

Also, thanks for reminding me I will be fucking 40 next year. Lol

i feel the 'internet has changed things' argument, but i still think this thread is asking a question that can be given a reasonable answer. and for me, i answer it by saying that if i'm hanging out with other people that were born in 1982 and people that were born before 1977 i will probably keep up with the '70s babies better than the other '80s babies.

although to a large extent that can just be chalked up to 'being a nerd'

If you talk to younger gay dudes about safe sex, they didn't live through lots of people dying of AIDS all around you

yeah this is v true - i feel like AIDS is less... idk visceral to me than gay men even like 5 years older than me?

haha i remember talking to someone who was like 10 years older than me once about how hard it was to find gay porn when he was a teenager before the internet and dealing with the stigma/risk of getting caught with it.

lol age is really not the criteria id be using to determine the subset of people who would recognize dino jr song at a bar

I know my comic persona here is of being 95, but while I have always preferred the cinema/comedy culture of 1915-1975, immersed myself in the indie music culture of '67-96ish, and have little use for post '60s lit/fiction, I am way more "in touch" with things than my parents were at my age. My dad was playing big-band collections and occasionally MOR vocals in the mid '70s, he didn't know anything about whatever the equivalent of Wavves and "Fuck You" might have been.

I didn't really "get going" gaywise til I was in my late 20s, so the worst of the AIDS era never affected me personally the way it did others my age.

i mostly like old movies and the only novelist i really care about post-1960 is dfw (well i do like catch-22 a lot but that's only just over the wire), but i went to see scott pilgrim vs the world like six times and that seems like a generation-gap movie. up until college i didn't listen to any music at all made later than blood on the tracks but now most of what i'm close to that isn't talking heads or taylor swift is from the 1990s, which i lived through but totally missed, so i've always been disconnected culturally from the music i like.

when i Bond with people my own age about cultural artifacts it's almost always video games.

Voted "about right," but it's really for others to judge. I'm 48, still have a landline, don't have a smartphone and haven't kept up with current popular music in at least 25 years, so maybe I'm kidding myself. On the other hand, I know how to photoshop Tuomas in his skivvies into a Louvin Brothers album cover.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

A lot of my friends are 55 years old and up. One guy has been a friend for 20 years and he will be 100 this summer. We talk about Mary Pickford films and old Hollywood, great Dick Cavett interviews, architecture, Dick Francis and I love his stories about the Art Students League in the 40's.

He watched Trainspotting on the big screen when it came out and told me he ended up falling asleep but that from what he saw it had nothing to do with train spotting. He went on to tell me what train spotting was all about.

I find Pinterest and Tumblr redundant. It is like when I'd cut photos from magazines and catalogs and placed them in my own journal/notebook just to have all my likes in one spot. Imagine my friend Xerox copying my journal pages and then pasting that to her journal...and so on.

2. theory

if you went to grad school in the 90s you're still wrestling with problems that grad students today don't really recognize as active problems, so the feeling that certain problems are "old hat" is frequent but less likely to get bridged through touristic nibbling and reading across generational divides (cf. the wholesale rejection of epistemological concerns and the linguistic turn as people make the turn towards object oriented ontology or world systems theory instead of Marxism, etc) Younger thinkers are not necessarily going to be able to come "backwards" to meet you halfway, and casually referencing a certain set of theorists produces blank stares or the guilty feeling that they ought to have read things that they just haven't, but there's less of a sense that people can use tools at their disposal to become familiarized swiftly- the wikipedia entry for Hegel isn't going to bring you "up to speed" with Hegel- you put in the time to read Hegel or you don't- (this is not a matter of young and old but interested and disinterested- but it can feel in practice as if the morcellization of people's attention spans and commitments selects for aphoristic authors of short books over patriarchal tome-creators)

so true in my experience http://i.imgur.com/zi7hd.gif

i have no idea what age most of my friends or acquaintances are, don't really care, and quite appreciate it when others don't make a deal out of asking me how old i am. who gives a fuck?

tune is space, i'd be interested in hearing more about the problems and theorists you think have gone by the wayside. "the wholesale rejection of epistemological concerns and the linguistic turn as people make the turn towards object oriented ontology or world systems theory instead of Marxism, etc" i v much recognise as the grad student fashion du jour, but in terms of what people actually work on and engage with on a day to day basis it seems that these new emerging strains remain secondary. (could be a uk-us difference, of course.)

(and while i'm here, table is the table - is your name taken from merleau-ponty?)

Skewing to younger, but probably about right in this infantalised society.

I feel unmoored from age in every conceivable way. Except around the hairline and around the middle.

I act like I'm 5, I dress like I'm 21, I feel like I'm 100 in the morning...

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.