This was a post on the GenX subreddit (from a Gen Zer) from just a couple days ago asking about if parties as portrayed in late 90s/early 00s "teen movies" were actually a real thing:
The responses from the Gen Xers were a mix of bewilderment and sadness, stuff like "What do you mean parties like this, it's just a normal teenage party!? I feel so ancient and also so confused by this question." The whole comment section is worth a read, especially the disconnect between how the Gen Xers experienced adolescence and how the Gen Z poster does.
It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection. I also disagree with some of the comments here that are bringing up things like "real estate, transportation, and lodging". Sure, those are issues, but you have families and kids in the suburbs today just like you had families and kids in the suburbs in the 90s, and the fact that kids today can't even recognize "basic teen parties" and question whether they are some sort of made up fantasy can't just be waved away by the fact that real estate is more expensive today.
> It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones,
You have to be careful with Gen Z threads like this on Reddit and Twitter. They are inherently biased toward Gen Z people who are chronically online and deep into social media.
If you spend time with kids in the real world, you learn very rapidly that most of them aren't on platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Of those who use Reddit, few of them actually post anything or even have accounts.
The subset of Gen Z who actually post on Reddit is small and a lot of them fit the description of chronically online, so it's no wonder that Reddit Gen Z people speak as if their generation is not socially engaged at all.
That's true. However, I worked as a photographer for about 10 years (quit about 2 years ago) and high school senior photos were one of my specialties, so I got to know a lot of teenagers.
Overscheduling is, I think, the biggest issue. Most of the teens I worked with had something going on almost every night, to the point where rescheduling due to rain or heat was an absolute nightmare. Sports were the biggest offenders. They would often have gym/strength training in the morning and then practice in the evening, almost every evening. Keep in mind I'm mostly talking about summer, so the school year itself was worse. Those that had jobs would do them during the day.
It's completely different from when I graduated high school in '06. Very few sports took over your life in the summer. Football had practice in the mornings for part of the summer, and that's the only one I'm aware of. I don't get the emphasis on sports. I played some in school but never took them seriously and if they required that much time from me I would have been out.
I was a HS teacher for about a decade. The demands on kids and families around youth sports (especially private/club leagues) is out of control. I had students, 14/15-years-old, going to their school team practice then club team practice, not getting home until past 9 pm every night. Families from three states away would enroll their kids in my school half of the year to play on the hockey team (staying with local sponsor family). Tournaments across the Midwest most weekends. These weren’t even future D1 athletes.
I was a multi-sport athlete. My sibling played D1 soccer. It didn’t used to be like this.
I'd like to understand this more. Families like this that I know talk about it as though it's as unavoidable as their mortgage, but functionally isn't this entirely self-imposed? Is it a lack of vision for an alternative? Are whole families succumbing to peer pressure? I don't relate to it.
We only have a 3 year old and a baby, but my wife and I have already argued a bit about this. She's all in on the sports train - it was a large part of her life growing up for her and her siblings. I, on the other hand, did a lot with my free time as a kid/teen.
I think part of the problem is that for people like her they can't imagine their kids not being in all sorts of sports, but they don't realize just how much the time commitment has ballooned. By the time it's too late they're all in and they're effectively in a sports sunk cost fallacy.
There is a happy medium between the "hotels every other weekend year round" travel/club sports and no sports, which is sports for your school or community teams. If I ever have kids I absolutely want to enroll them in sports. It will absolutely not be the travel/club teams that means us going to hotels every other weekend. I am probably naïve in thinking that it is possible to play for your high school without club sports, but I won't be traveling 10 hours by car for a U8 baseball tournament.
Apparently in our school you straight up won't be able to play in the regular school teams unless you do the travel teams starting in elementary school, because everyone else does it. Therefore, your child won't be as good as them unless they're an absolute savant at the sport.
They'll still get to be on the team, but actually playing? Probably not.
This is why I hate the trend towards these massive high schools that's been happening for a few decades.
I went to a small school. I was able to participate in a ton of different clubs. Varsity football players had big roles in the spring musicals. If you wanted to be a part of something and were even halfway decent one could have some chance of actually being a part of it. But when it's one varsity team of 50ish players for a school of 7,000 the odds of ever actually playing are slim to none.
Ah, but here's the kicker - we are a small school. My graduating class had 140, and it's shrunk since then. I believe the grades are now about 110-120 each or so. However, we have some very successful sports programs. The girl's basketball team has won state countless times, for instance. Either way, there are only so many spots on a team and if almost everyone is doing travel teams you don't have much of a chance if you don't.
The quality of coaching is also a factor. My daughter played indoor volleyball for several years on both travel club and public school varsity teams. The high school coach lacked experience and tried to teach her inferior techniques that contradicted what she had learned from the last club coach, so she got frustrated and quit the team.
The sad thing is that kids who can't afford to play in travel clubs will usually never have a chance to develop the skills they need to make the high school varsity team. And even the club teams are sort of an escalating arms race: if you want to make the "A" team then you'll have to pay for extra private lessons and position clinics.
Having two teenage daughters who are athletes, much of this will play out for them depending on how much they really love the sport and whether they are able to play it at the highest levels. If you listen and observe your kids, you'll get a good sense of what THEY want out of the sport. Support them in THEIR journey.
And remember at the end of the day, the most important aspects of being an athlete aren't one's performance on the field. It's everything else - learning to be committed to a team, forming life-long friendships, building positive memories, living a healthy lifestyle, etc.
Yeah, I did track and field in HS (not us) in a club, had to train 4 times a week 3 to 4hs each time, but I chose to do that. I did well in some competitions, but nothing large.
I do fondly remember those times, for the friendships, for helping build discipline, for learning how to properly train and exercise, skills which I still use today, not really about winning competitions.
Have you ever considered where you would be if all the hours you channeled into the sport you hated had been channeled into something you loved? Maybe you could have had the best of both worlds? Who knows...
But I totally understand what you're saying, I can't say I ever (EVER!) enjoyed going to practice, but I stuck it out and ended up making it to the Big Ten level as a walk-on. I'm very proud of that accomplishment.
It sounds like you had innate talent or aptitude that could be honed and take you places. Not all kids have that though, and can probably take it easy with sports and focus on growing other strengths.
It was less about having talent and more about developing in a great program - and that was just dumb luck.
I grew up in a midwest farm town that just happened to have a couple incredible coaches that ran exceptional sports programs. I also had older brothers who were better than me that I learned from.
I was less good and more tough in that I was pretty much the slowest guy on the team in college, but I could absolutely hold my own in practice. Unfortunately, due to the recent NCAA roster limits, there doesn't seem to be a place for athletes like me in college anymore.
From talking to many parents they want to give them activities so their kids aren’t bored or sitting inside on their phones all day. Sports is one of those things and lets them also be with other kids.
The problem is kids being bored can be a good thing but they are never allowed to be. When I was a kid the internet didn’t even exist let alone cell phones and the only rule was “be home before sundown”. Kids now have way too many distractions and structure and are never given the ability to explore their own world on their own. It’s been manufactured for them.
> When I was a kid the internet didn’t even exist let alone cell phones
I grew up before the Internet. Boring kids just watched endless garbage cable TV before the Internet. I'm not sure which is worse; maybe neither; they are each bad in their own way.
And then, when the kid finally has a few minutes of downtime, of course they're utterly drained and just looking for quick easy entertainment, and flick through a few videos on tiktok or YT shorts, with no time for discovering and indulging in deeper interests.
I can't stress this enough to new or soon to be parents.
Hold off on giving your child a phone as long as possible. Once your kids are old enough (your choice...but it's before they are teens), send them outside, shut the door, and go about your business.
Tell them to come back for lunch. Then send them outside again and tell them to come back for dinner.
I mean this in all sincerity. Don't plan their day for them. Make them go out and plan their day on the fly. Friend's house a mile away? Walk over and see if they can come out and play. Not home? Oh well, walk back or head to a different friend's house. There is value in this friction.
Don't be the person who gives your child a frictionless youth. The hard way is the best way.
I agree with this sentiment, but there have been cases of families who have had CPS called on them for letting their kids walk home alone from a nearby park [1]. It's frustrating to know that neighbors, schools, or authorities might interpret normal childhood independence as neglect and report parents to authorities.
Sure, there will always be edge cases. That's just how the world works.
Let your kids go out and ride bikes and you may end up with one getting hit by a car. Those are the risks every parent has to manage.
But if we let the edge cases dictate how we raise our kids, we end up with what we don't want - overly managed bubble-youth kids who can't think for themselves.
Unless you have some compelling evidence to the contrary, this cannot be dismissed as "edge cases" when cultural norms have changed across the board and all it takes is one complaint...
Pre-teen walking to a friend's house a mile away, probably semi-frequently?
Is that a risk or a near certainty?
Looking for online guidelines, I find this:
> According to an American Academy of Pediatrics survey of social workers that was posted in Science Daily, children under 12 years old should not be left alone for more than four hours. The social workers who were surveyed also concluded that child neglect will likely be considered when children are injured during that time period. --- https://www.tedbakerlaw.com/child-unsupervised-neglect/
You can give your child a phone with limits so they call you and their friends so that they can more easily meet up. Just because they have a phone does not mean they have to have TikTok on it.
Yes, that can be a problem for sure. It's incredible how few kids I see outside these days where we live. It's even worse if their friends are all on devices all day and your kids are hearing about that. Parenting is hard.
cultural norms in the US have shifted so much that this becomes impractical. The parents of the friend you just went to are not expecting that behavior.
>The problem is kids being bored can be a good thing but they are never allowed to be
It's not like they'd have a chance to get creatively bored without the (physical) activities. Instead, if they're like most teens, they'd dopamine-junkie rot with their smartphone or game console.
exactly that’s how I describe it as well, this world is highly manufactured. If you opt out you are mostly alone so this also serves as a kind of social circle
My son is starting 1st grade this fall, has been at same school since he was 3 and it goes through high school so, these are and will be his peers and it starts as major FOMO/it's the main way kids socialize outside of school hours. Good way to burn off their energies, etc. But it's also, they're young, we want to expose them to everything, they can find their "thing", etc. He does tons of non-Athletic stuff too (STEM, art, music, etc). So we've been playing soccer, baseball, flag football, basketball, lacrosse, swimming, etc. the last few years. It's getting to the point where some kids dropped a few sports based on disinterest or parent's inability to keep the schedule. We have one kid so really no excuses for us, but some people with multiple kids doing this is a scheduling nightmare. Anyways, what's already started to happen is we've brought in hired coaches. In no time, they'll be club/select league aged and people will faction off to do that. When it does, it will feel like gravity/inertia to do the same. Once you do, if you skip a beat, your kid is basically giving up the sport. They can't just join the baseball team in middle school, they won't make the cut against kids that have been playing non-stop since they were <6.
It is their entire friend group and becomes their identity. It would be hard to intentionally tell my son "you're not playing sports anymore". He may come to that conclusion on his own or coaches may cut him at some point; that's life. But, for those that stay active in it, the inertia of it is strong.
> It is their entire friend group and becomes their identity.
This sounds horrific. I did little leagues, grew bored (and nearsighted), randomly played outside for hours, did videogames (sometimes obsessively), built "forts" inside and out, went to / hosted parties, got into trouble, made amends (usually), family vacations, etc. Over identifying with groups and things seems crazy to me.
Maybe I'm overcompensating for my parent's (and at times my own) religious fervor. So much emotional investment seems unhinged.
Hopefully my kids can learn to enjoy their childhood. There will be plenty of time for serious commitments when they're adults.
> So we've been playing soccer, baseball, flag football, basketball, lacrosse, swimming, etc. the last few years
Swimming is great. USA Swimming has a well-developed system. Elite kids get sorted into the serious clubs where they swim with Olympic champions, etc. But the vast majority of the clubs are rec level and focus on getting lots of people swimming and having fun. Everyone gets a USA Swimming ID number and times are entered into the national system; they get tracked no matter what. Late developers can still be sucked into the elite system if they earn it. Your local park district swim club most likely is in a conference where they compete against other park districts in your county. The only problem is that there are so many kids and races that a meet probably lasts 5 hours.
Soccer is likely to get better. MLS and NWSL teams are developing their youth training systems like in Europe, with success as young kids going through these systems are playing professionally in North America and Europe. They are going to keep sucking the air out of the "elite travel soccer" scam and hopefully what is left are the fun clubs for the kids.
Baseball is likely to get worse. MLB took over the baseball minor leagues and reduced the number of teams. With fewer professional spots available, the "elite" clubs are more and more important to getting kids into them.
Basketball and football, same deal. Lacrosse? Universities couldn't care less about it anymore. It's a dead sport, many parents haven't figured it out yet.
In my hyperlocal area, lacrosse is pretty serious. There's a lot of private schools that fuel it. And, football is our main sport in terms of popularity but a lot of parents are afraid of injuries and don't allow it so lacrosse fills that void. The NFL driving flag football has been interesting to witness, the kids love it and it's fun to watch. I think it could get pretty popular.
Interesting that lacrosse is still popular in your area. The popularity in my area is waning, which clearly has affected my viewpoint.
I like flag football a lot. There are adult leagues too, coed and men’s only. The NFL is smart to push it; kids that excel can eventually transition to the real thing while the rest enjoy it and learn the finer details of the game and likely become bigger fans of NFL teams.
To be honest, lacrosse was popular here well before it became a trend a decade or so ago. I am in the affluent part of my city and every kid goes to private schools so I think it an aspect of that subculture. The girls play field hockey, it's really popular but my middle-class public school self had never even heard of it until we moved here.
I think a lot of families are also optimizing for university admissions. Strong athletes often have an easier time with admissions (assuming they're also good academically).
I remember having an interview with an engineering professor from Tufts when I was applying to schools, and one of the first things he asked me was what team sports I played. Being a typical nerdy kid I avoided athletics -- even though I was good at them -- and was surprised that he was so adamant about team sports. I didn't even take gym class after 9th grade because I figured out how to get an exemption, which, looking back at it, probably made my college applications weaker.
This was in 2001, and I can only imagine it's gotten worse.
When my son was in high school, the whole college application business astonished me--somebody a couple of years ahead of him applied to 18 schools.
The formula that I eventually arrived at is that the college application process is a punishment of the middle and upper middle classes for aspiring to the perquisites of its betters.
Very well put. So many things about the process are set up to favor the continuity of privilege in plausibly deniable ways. Athletics, service, alumni interviews, letters of reference; everything is easier if you’re wealthy and well connected.
Exactly. My daughter was able to get admitted to a good college as a recruited athlete, which helped compensate for mediocre grades. Regardless of the financial issues, that made the entire college applications process much easier and less stressful.
From what I observed about these club hockey players I saw growing up, mainly the kid loves it and made it into their identity. So the parents are probably feeling pretty forced into paying for it. That being said every family I knew doing this sort of thing could easily pay for it.
Often the kids do enjoy it, but I see a lot of essentially "pay to play" - your 10-yr-old playing tier 8 basketball shouldn't be going to out of town tournaments regularly, but club & private is big business and they push an NBA experience of travel, tourneys and gear - with the associated costs.
I mean aren't there also jockeying for college opportunities through school athleticism, and also a culture of over-competitive parents using their children's sports to posture against one another?
For this kid not really. He was always going to work for his dads company so for him the purpose of college was joining a fraternity and partying. I’m sure a number of people on that team felt the same way as it was quite costly and demanded a certain amount of disposable income from the family, which from what I’ve seen leads to a certain loss of ambition from
the kids who see themselves as set early.
I noticed a lot of (upper-middleclass) parents (moms) fear that any none organized activity results 100% in their kid sitting on their phone/computer (they are not wrong on this point).
Rather than restricting screen time, admittedly not an easy battle (stating how it is, not how it should be), they outsource/circumvent that through organized activity.
Then there is the "competitive" nature. Can't have our kid just goofing around, (and I know the next bit is a bit exagerated and sarcastic, but often not untrue), I need the wins for my fantastic parent Facebook posts.
Lastly, non organized means unsupervised. Parents, I think especially in the US, are (thaught to) regard the world as a dangerzone for kids. Hanging around without oversight or protection, it is just time before they will surely get abducted, mugged, raped or murdered. Is this pure paranoia, or a media fueled self fulfilling prophecy? Can you blame parents for being overly protective for their (often only) child?
> For many families, the money they spend on sports is an investment in their child’s future. Roughly two in 10 youth sports parents think their child has the ability to play Division I college sports, and one in 10 thinks his or her child could reach the professional ranks or the Olympics, according to the Aspen Institute survey.
To get into the very top schools, but to get a good education it's vastly more than enough.
Honestly, to the California State University and University of California system high school GPA doesn't matter at all. All you have to do is two years at a California Community College and do well there and you'll have your pick of which CSU or UC to transfer to.
Narcissist parents competing with other narcissist parents to be the best parents in the universe. Social media caters to their twisted world view where everyone is living a polished life of perfection so why not them and their perfect high-success family.
's/narcissist/desperately insecure/', perhaps? To a lot of Americans, the future really doesn't look so good if you fall out of the top 10%...1%...0.1%...
From a number of "what people did, trying to get their kid into Harvard"-themed articles in the past few years, I think it's a pretty common belief that awesome athletic extracurriculars are a secret sauce.
Though I suspect that lizard-brain emotions play a bigger role. Both self-medication attempts to get success by proxy, and also visually demonstrating (to themselves and their peer parents) that their kid is a Success Story at something.
Narcissists are fundamentally insecure people. They have a self-esteem entirely driven by outside perception so they engage in behaviors to get external validation.
You can't even make a high school team anymore unless you start playing club & private at a very young age. Lots of primary public schools (K-6/7) which is where I learned sports and got good at a few, often don't have sports teams anymore, or if they do it's a few passionate people with limited coaching and sports skills who just want to provide any opportunity.
The natural solution would be to increase the number of teams to also accommodate people who are interested but don’t want to or are unable to dedicate their life to sports. But if schools need to cut costs, it’s tough to do.
It’s a common trend in many domains: universities, housing, jobs. An underabundance of resources means people need to gear up to fight over the things that still exist.
> natural solution would be to increase the number of teams
Reminds me of my dad (b. 1945) talking about his HS sports experience in the early ‘60s at a large (~3500) Southern California public school. Not only were there varsity, JV and frosh teams, in high-interest sports like football and basketball there were multiple teams for every grade. Competition was still high if you wanted to play at the highest level, but if you wanted to play, there was probably an option for you.
Public schools are simply not funded the same way today
That's total into the system divided by number of students though.
Is there any measure of how much of that reaches pupils and improves their education versus the amount sucked up by middle layers, consultants, prestige buildings, etc?
It might be similar to the US health spend .. high per capita spend, low outcomes per citizens (compared to, say, Australia) .. with a rich middle layer of providers, insurers, etc.
My HS spent millions on a completely new athletics complex. our math and reading scores were in the dirt, classrooms had 70s era carpet growing crap I don't want think about, the band had 30 year old uniforms...but we had a gorgeous basketball complex.
Or, given the real-world constraints schools are usually up against, pick the worst participants instead of the best. Those who are skilled in a given sport are almost certainly engaged in the sport outside of school, and thus are taking away from those who are much more likely looking to learn about a sport they otherwise don't have access to.
> How do you propose to determine the worst athletes?
Given the aforementioned process to discover the best athletes (which, I assume, means tryouts, but the exact mechanism wasn't specified, granted), the worst athletes should be revealed in that.
Sure, there is room to game that, but:
1. Who wants to be known as a poor athlete where one is already playing at a high level outside of school?
2. Who wants to keep up the ruse of being a poor athlete throughout the year? If you are suddenly amazing at the sport after making it look like you've never seen the sport before, you won't be long for the team.
If someone who is skilled is able to play up that they are weak continuously, oh well. It need not be perfect. A best effort attempt to try and give those who don't have opportunities outside of school is good enough.
> Maybe another approach would be to use a lottery among applicants.
I graduated high school in 2001. During the summer before my freshman year, I signed up for the soccer team. We trained 6-hours/day, 6-days/week during the summer. I thought it was grueling, but I also understood that was part of what made our team one of the top contenders in the state. Even still, we were very much in the shadow of the middling football team.
But I put up with it. Summer in the rural south in the 1990s could be a deeply boring affair, without something to occupy us. I was easily in the best shape of my life at the end of the summer (I could run 11-miles in about an hour without stopping). But then, after school started, I met someone else who enjoyed the same obscure punk music I did, and who owned a drum set, and quickly decided I wanted to play music much more than spend all day every day on the soccer field. So before the first game, I quit the team. I think they went on to do pretty well. My band was terrible, but we had fun.
I guess my point is that—in 1997, at a rural school in the south that very much cared mostly about the football team, playing soccer in high school was still a full-time commitment.
Was talking with a bartender at a restaurant, also a teacher. She would get home around 23:00 and have to wake up around 5:00 while tendering during week days. Her daughter just turning 16 and is signed up for all basketball teams she can be in a hour drive radius. Her daughter was going to be working as a cleaner at the local hotel this summer. As she said, "Basketball is her daughter's job and volleyball is her outlet where she can be a kid."
Most likely is she living vicariously through her daughter's basketball experience or it is seen as an economic improvement, for her daughter or both. Her daughter likely sees that being a teacher doesn't pay well and multiple jobs are needed. This helps push for this "sports is a job" mentality.
Tiger Woods a the Williams sisters promote the idea of making it big if your just work at the same sport over and over at a young age. This is often a case of Law of Small Numbers.
Others might have the worst kind of parent. One that only loves their child if their good at sports.
My son goes to what I call "the sports High School" but he is not particularly athletically gifted, which has caused a lot of friction. I personally believe to my very core that sports are over-emphasized and that we are raising a whole generation of idiots who won't be able to do math or anything particularly useful except guzzle booze and sell used cars to people.
The recent NCAA changes vis a vis roster limits is only making this worse. Want to be a collegiate athlete? You better be ELITE. Walk-ons are a thing of the past. As such, kids with those dreams (or overly involved parents) are pouring their lives into their sport(s).
the over-scheduling in this and other cases is largely due to the fact that if kids are not “somewhere” they will be watching tv or staring at some f’ing screen cause that’s what other kids are doing who are also home. I have a large network of friends with kids and every single one of them over-schedules every f’ing thing due to the lack alternative (or better said kids are better of at ____ than at home alone)
I have to wonder if what's happened in the U.S. is something akin to involution [0] where increased scarcity in what were stable middle class environments leads to seemingly endless and fruitless competition. You used to hear stories about how students at Palo Alto High School work like first year investment bankers, leading to high rates of suicide. Seems like that's ubiquitous now.
"conditions in which a society ceases to progress, and instead starts to stagnate internally. Increased output and competition intensify but yield no clear results or innovative, technological breakthroughs." "more competitive with little corresponding rewards"
I swear the more Xanax people get, the more they overschedule themselves and their kids. I think existence of anxiety prevents people from overexerting themselves, and pharmacologically removing it just lets people, and the children they live through, take on more responsibilities, beyond what is healthy.
I think drugs like Xanax are playing a huge, but under-the-radar type of role in all kind of social contagions that we are witnessing. Every time someone does something crazy or even just a bit "off" I ask myself: "Is that person on drugs?" The answer is likely "yes!" Not illegal drugs, per se, but still.
I don't overschedule my kids. It's ridiculous what I see going on and I'm not friends with those "driven" parents whose motivations I simply can't fathom. There is a total lack of respect for basic academics amongst them, too.
I graduated in '05 and some of stuff my contemporaries were doing then wrt sports and trying to get to the next level was already crazy (playing for the school and doing travel ball as well, so many practices/camps/extra workout sessions) and don't get me started on the craziness wrestlers had to go through. I've heard it's even worse now as it has become more competitive to get to the next level, whether that's trying to get a good NIL deal or trying to play professionally
Except the data repeatedly bears out that younger generations are spending more and more time online and in isolation.
The idea that the internet remains the province solely of a few loner geeks is a total fantasy. Reddit is one of the most popular websites in the world.
Also, I was a shy nerd in high school who used reddit, and I still partied. Fuck, I made my own booze to take to parties.
Meanwhile my youngest brother - who is super social - graduated high school in the last few years and reports that partying is totally dead compared to my day.
Basically, the kids who were socially marginalized in the prenetworks era also did not get to see the parties the socially active kids were having, and would have wondered at it all. It would have certainly been also 'a new experience' for them! Except back then they didn't have a place like reddit to go to and wonder out loud.
Socially marginalized kids were partying too. The only difference was, we weren’t invited to the “cool” parties. These days, there’s definitely a lot less partying overall.
I was the 'coming-of-age-in-the-late 90s' teen and went to exactly 1 party. And it wasn't even the backup party, it was the cool kids' party. Outside of that I hung out with close friends and that was enough, I wasn't interested in parties.
When its snacks and BS while everyone gets hooked up and gets files off the local share to install SC2 for the nth time. It would take hours to get set up. Then more hours of play. We'd go for 10 to 12 hours sometimes, just to get things working.
This was one reason why my crowd loved the Xbox for lan parties. Just make sure everyone bringing an Xbox had whatever game, only needed one box/TV per four friends, and the autoconfig networking meant all you needed is a switch to get a few of them taking on LAN easily. Plug everything in and you're good to go with a crowd.
Ironically, these are still the best games for a LAN party. I set up a fleet of old cheap computers running Linux, loaded with all these offline and now open-source games. We had a blast and ended up playing mostly Quake 3 until about 4-5am.
We couldn't play any modern games, because every single person at the party would have had to have a Steam account or some license to the game, and have to log into it on my computers, then sign out when they were done... what a bunch of garbage. Nobody had their Steam passwords on hand.
With Quake3, you could sit down on any free machine and jump into a game instantly. I was also really surprised because some computers had the "official" Quake 3 purchased from Steam on Windows (friends who brought their own computers), some had the open source Quake 3 engine running on Linux, and some had official Linux clients... and they all worked together flawlessly.
I never went to parties like this. I wasn't socially marginalized, I just wasn't one of the popular kids. Popularity at my school was closely tied with wealth and family status. A relatively tiny group of people lived this sort of life.
I look back at high school and see several popular groups. Did one rise above the others? Not in an obvious way.
Like you said: some were from wealthier families, some were the athletes and their groupies (no surprise). But I went to parties of all shapes and sizes - some in those groups I just mentioned and some in other groups. Didn’t really matter that there was a premier group of socialites.
Were any of the popular girls physically unattractive? I doubt it. Popular boys can be popular without good looks, but it usually requires lots of money or great humour (class clown) or skill in a popular sport like American football or basketball. Look at a few "visually appealing" Instagram accounts. That will show you what basic popularity looks like, extended from high school.
I never went to parties in high school, but based on my experience going to parties in college and as an adult, I imagine your individual experience at the parties would be very different depending on your social groups, social skills, and so on.
Although even as a non-participant, witnessing a party first-hand would be more informative than the filtered version you get from Hollywood.
> the kids who were socially marginalized in the prenetworks era also did not get to see the parties the socially active kids were having
What do you mean exactly by the distinction between "socially marginalized" and "socially active"?
There was a social hierarchy where some kids were considered "popular" and others "unpopular", though really the distinction was more accurately between the beautiful/attractive kids and the average/unattractive kids, and certainly the unattractive kids did not get invited to the parties of the attractive kids, but the unattractive kids had plenty of parties among themselves, to which the attractive kids were usually not invited either.
Perhaps there were some kids who were truly marginalized, with no friends at all, but unattractiveness by itself did not necessarily marginalize you socially.
It's also true that it's "chronically online" GenX folks who are replying to the "chronically online" GenZ folks.
Even if we assume that "chronically online" people and reddit users are nerdier, less social in the real world, tend to be more introverted, less likely to go to parties in general, etc. we're still left with teen parties being normal for the GenX nerds and alien to the GenZ nerds.
As an old, chronically online, more introverted, nerd I can say that I absolutely attended parties in my teens and early 20s (only some of which were lan parties or BBS meetups)
> If you spend time with kids in the real world, you learn very rapidly that most of them aren't on platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Of those who use Reddit, few of them actually post anything or even have accounts.
Certainly true. But it's also undeniable that a huge number of them are on TikTok, Instagram and the like. I think OP's point still stands that today's youth have been affected by that.
Yep, I believe that at this point in rich countries people who are addicted to their smartphone and social media far outnumber those who aren't, at least in all age groups that aren't small children or retired.
Yep, and people get really offended when you bring it up, because so many people are addicted. I see it a lot in threads discussing auto accidents. Nobody wants to admit that a scary amount of drivers are on the roads using their phone constantly. I see it as a motorcyclist, because I can easily look down into most people's cars. My trucker friend also says that he sees a huge portion of drivers just on their phones constantly. Again, it's super easy to see into any car from a semi truck.
The addiction is real, and such a huge portion of people have it and don't want to admit it. When you have to have your phone out while you're driving, you have a real problem.
I get the same vibe from HN and other places on Reddit. Lots of folks are online in multiple places at all times. If I bring up a random internet topic in real like people give me weird looks.
> You have to be careful with Gen Z threads like this on Reddit and Twitter. They are inherently biased toward Gen Z people who are chronically online and deep into social media.
Wouldn't Gen X responses on those threads also be inherently biased toward Gen X people who are chronically online and deep into social media?
People change. Just because a Gen X is nerdy/chronically online now, doesn't mean they didn't party in the pre-internet era. I'm one of them that fits that mold.
I've probably withdrawn more from society specifically because I had the entertainment of being online, tons of knowledge to consume, a tool to build digital things, etc. I had none of that in most of the 90s, so I went to raves and keg parties every weekend and experimented with lots of drugs and even had sex.
Yes, and also society changes people. I think that's the point, and you allude to it:
> I've probably withdrawn more from society specifically because I had the entertainment of being online, tons of knowledge to consume, a tool to build digital things, etc. I had none of that in most of the 90s
The younger generations are suprised that we used to party all the time, because they never had a chance to live under the same circumstances.
I'm not quite sure if smartphones are still all that popular. With the rise of WFH, (and for Gen-Z, having a Covid lockdown college experience), most people are on actual computers and are sitting at home.
Actual computers? People don't have those any more. Not even laptops. They have smartphones and they may have tablets.
I'm over-generalizing of course, but that's the vibe I get. It's because many, both older and younger, entirely skipped the whole personal computing thing.
Anecdotal, but my 15 and 16 year olds, along with their friends, generally dislike computers and think they're inefficient, inconvenient, and too hard to use for most purposes they associate with devices.
In other words, they have no idea what computers can do, and they just want the phone things that are easy to do on the phone.
I've tried to teach my kids about computers, but they're extremely resistant. They just don't care. Their friends don't either, except for one who is notably interested in everything.
No, the legacy social media platforms are more popular with older generations.
Facebook is the canonical example of a social media platform that arrived after Gen X was young, but it now heavily used by Gen X while nearly completely shunned by Gen Z, with millenials somewhere in the middle.
Reddit and even Twitter are legacy social media platforms for Gen Z, especially younger Gen Z. The very oldest Gen Z people would have been too young to even use the internet when Reddit was launched.
Nobody should take a Reddit thread as some kind of proof of a broad generalization. But some empirical data is given in the article, for example, Percentage of 12th graders going out with friends two or more times a week: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lQMo!,f_auto,q_auto:...
I think the Reddit thread is just a reflection of the reality rather than an argument for accepting that reality.
You can attempt to discount the Reddit thread, but the submitted article wasn't even based on that.
In highly developed countries, I think most people under 40 have moved away from Facebook towards Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. I thought the main Facebook users are (1) those in developing countries (messenger especially) and (2) parents in highly developed countries who need to get updates for their kids' school/sports/clubs. Is this still broadly true?
I wonder how the levels of engagement compare between an extremely online GenX person, an average GenZ person, and an extremely online Gen Z person would look like.
No. The “new generation” now knows what the outcasts and the undesirables of the “old generation” felt like. The more I speak to the younger crowd the more parallels I find which just means the “default” shifted towards a society of people who don’t know a different way, but are unaware of what goes on around them. The undesirables of the old knew, but couldn’t do anything about it.
It’s like people who are bewildered when newspapers say bankers got caught having a massive orgy of some 50+ attendees in a hotel in Switzerland. There is always a party, but you’re not invited. Simple as.
I knew the Diddy party charges wouldn’t stick because the aggrieved persons descriptions sound like commonly held parties in Los Angeles with quite a lot of consent involved (and courts aren't able to parse more nuanced aspects of consent, so people are left with a reliance on mutual cooperation)
this detail isn’t as important to people as wondering if I’ve gone to an LA sex party and whatever preconception they have of that and now me
Just like those bankers, and this thread, there is always a party
The type of people posting these questions on reddit today wouldn't have been at those parties yesterday, so I don't think we can extrapolate some overarching theme here
My anecdotal experience with two children who are young adults is that there are still house-parties (nearly) every weekend at high-school, but that there's a lot less drinking, and they're a lot more open and mature (i'm not sure i would have enjoyed being a trans kid in a 90s high school)
I'm not saying the kid who posted this is a 100% representative sample, but at least in my experience of the teenagers I know, childhood has changed drastically in the last 25 years.
If you look at some of the poster's comments there, he laments that even when he does go to house parties, everyone is just sitting around on their phone. I have certainly seen that.
Over protection and coddling are definitely a cause of lower social skills. When I was a kid, parents with leave children with a babysitter who was essentially an older child, sometimes just by a couple of years. Other times the kids would just be wandering around by themselves while parents didn’t care until it was dinner time. “Parties” weren’t just alcohol induced sex fests like they show on TV. Often it was 10 kids bunched around a single computer with $5 worth of chips and soda trying to beat a boss fight. A lot of those things are not only frowned upon now, but as a parent, could land you in jail.
If you wonder why children no longer grow up with a different outlook to life, then that’s probably it.
"It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection."
I honestly believe social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection does a lot less damage to the current generation than partying did to my generation. I can recommend the 1995 Larry Clark movie "kids" for a more balanced view how parties often looked like and which negative side effects they could have. Real life was not like in "American Pie" at all and that is where I guess Gen Z is getting their impression from.
> I honestly believe social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection does a lot less damage to the current generation than partying did to my generation.
Zuck, is that you? :)
> movie "kids" for a more balanced view how parties often looked like
Teens (and pre-teens) having sex, doing hard drugs and drinking liquor is completely unlike "how parties often looked like" for anyone I know but YMMV.
The article title mentions partying, but there's a chart that's just about going out with 2+ friends. That's a terrible thing to lose. I was a kid in the 2000s, and the vast majority of socializing was just harmless fun, not the extreme.
Digital socialization has replaced many functions of physical parties - Discord hangouts, gaming sessions, and video calls offer connection without the logistics burden or social risks. The question isn't whether socializing has died, but whether its digital evolution provides the same developmental benefits as in-person gatherings.
I honestly am having trouble believing folks think that digital socialization is anywhere near an acceptable substitute (vs. an adjunct) for in-person socialization. And tons of research supports this. Can't remember the woman who talks about AI meaning "Artificial Intimacy", where you have 1500 "friends" but nobody to feed your cat when you go on vacation.
For dating in particular, or socialization in general?
I think it's far better to be able to connect with acquaintances online, to this day I'm still playing games with friends I had in high school that no longer even live in the same state as me. Whereas had we been forced to only meet in-person, we likely wouldn't have talked to each other for years by this point.
The economic realities shouldn't be discounted. With more competitive conditions, the youth have to work much harder to secure the same opportunities relative to previous generation. With this comes the decline of partying or other high risk or non-productive activities. It's also true of adults - nightclubs are not as much of a thing as they were in decades prior.
> The responses from the Gen Xers were a mix of bewilderment and sadness, stuff like "What do you mean parties like this, it's just a normal teenage party!?
Well, it's a normal teenage party /in the US/.
I think in Europe, partying always looked a lot different (also different from country to country, here). I also mostly was bewildered by parties in teen movies from the early 00s.
I grew up very sheltered, my mom had anxiety and I was a single child.
I remember being unable to comprehend how in media, people could just go somewhere without issues to met with people or even go for a walk. I knew that was a thing, but I could not imagine what it's actually like and if it's real.
I grew up in the 90s-2000s in a place were people were very serious about school. Very few kids were getting drunk etc, there were very few couples and 0 teen pregnancies, but there was still a healthy amount of socializing. That chart showing going out with 2+ friends was still a high % then, and it matched my experience.
This completely changed after iPhones and Facebook became popular enough. It ruined even the regular socializing. Even the few boy bullies started doing this lame-ass cyberbullying instead. Sometimes I wondered where the cool kids were on weekdays, then I checked my Minecraft server logs.
I graduated high school in 2001, which sounds like a similar era, but what I saw seemed very different. So maybe things changed pretty quickly once computers hit the mainstream and I’m just a bit older than you.
At my high school we had several girls get pregnant. I remember a kid getting a DUI and he made a necklace out of the tube used to blow in the breathalyzer and wore it with pride. In my first class of the day the kid who sat next to me had a flask he’d be drinking from at 8am.
A couple years after I graduated news broke that the track coach was basically throwing Diddy parties (we’ll leave it at that to avoid getting graphic). He, and several others, ended up in prison.
This was all in a sleepy little Midwest town that many would describe as charming and quaint.
Though Minecraft didn’t exist until I was already in the workforce. Facebook came out when I was in college. Facebook seemed to be a thing with certain groups (sorority girls seems to have a lot of competitions to get the most friends), but no one in my group of friends in college talked about it at all. I don’t think any of them even had accounts until later. Web 1.0 didn’t really change society, but Web 2.0 shifted it massively, especially once Web 2.0 made its way into people’s pockets.
I worked at the computer help desk at my university. We would get calls from high school seniors, who got accepted, trying to get their student email address early. They wanted to sign up for Facebook. I always found these calls strange, and the sorority girls too. People were either really into it, like an addict, or they were completely indifferent; I saw very little in between in those first years. Facebook probably blew up way more with the mainstream once they dropped the edu requirement. After that, there was a lot of social pressure to join.
Social media has always felt like a proxy for actual social interaction. It scratches just enough of that itch to make people think they are connected to others, without providing any actual connection, as the whole experience is largely passive.
I'm younger than that. Smartphones became popular while I was in high school. It happened pretty quickly, so we went from no smartphones to having them everywhere within a year.
I think this article was way overdone, based on what I see with my teenage kids. They don't go to any "parties", but during the summer they are at the beach around 4x per week with bonfires at night. Almost 1/3 of their class (at a somewhat small school) is there.
And with Snapchat they know where everyone is. It's typical on a Friday school night they are scanning their map to see, "this group is at the mall. this group is at the football. this group went to her house." And then pick where to go.
Honestly, the current method of social gathering seems so much better than what I did in the 80s.
This right here is emblematic of the change in culture. When Gen X were young you weren't allowed to have bonfires (in most public places) either, but that never stopped anyone. Nowadays the kids are too afraid to do anything.
It is possible. How has the punishment for being caught with a bonfire in a place where it is not permitted changed over the last number of decades?
Or is it just the reduction in lead? That is what is oft cited as the reason for why crime rates have dropped substantially over a very similar period. Which may leave my framing of the kids being fearful to be a little off, rather the reduction in lead would suggest that they have better impulse control, but I am sure you can understand that the intent there is the same either way.
> Or maybe they are less of assholes in that regard.
What's the difference? There has been nothing to suggest that the kids today are afraid of fire itself – with earlier implication that they would have bonfires in parks if allowed to – so, what else could they be afraid of other than to upset someone else? Perhaps you forgot to read the thread before replying?
> And starting them does not make one courageous, just jerks.
Now you're going off into la-la land. Did not read the thread confirmed.
> so, what else could they be afraid of other than to upset someone else?
People, including teenagers, can and do act in pro-social and non assholish ways for reasons other then fear. Simple as that.
> Now you're going off into la-la land. Did not read the thread confirmed.
I did read the thread. The thread projects fear on them, because quite a few people on HN cant explain teenagers not destroying things or not breaking the "no fire in the park rules" by anything else then the fear.
Quite a few people here assume that since they were jerks, everyone young was a jerk and everyone who is not a jerk must do so out of fear.
> People, including teenagers, can and do act in pro-social and non assholish ways for reasons other then fear.
It is unlikely a hermit living in the forest, who hasn't seen another human in years, can find ways to be an asshole. So, technically, it is possible to not be an asshole without worry for others. But it would also be unusual to call such a person an asshole given the lack of opportunities to be one.
Realistically, to be an asshole is, at least in part, to show lack of worry for others. So, no, worry is a necessary precondition here. Assholes demonstrate less-to-no worry, while "less assholes" are more afraid of how their actions affect others.
> The thread projects fear on them, because quite a few people on HN cant explain teenagers not destroying things or not breaking the "no fire in the park rules" by anything else then the fear.
Yeah. No. You just made that up. The only comment in the entire thread you could, if you squint hard enough, take to be about fear is mine. It contained the word "fearful", which is a very different concept to "fear", but I'll grant you that it shares some of the same letters. Perhaps you'd didn't bother reading the entire thing?
But even if you did somehow read the wrong word somehow, it explains that it may not be fearfulness at all, rather greater impulse control. The exact opposite of what you are suggesting.
> Realistically, to be an asshole is, at least in part, to show lack of worry for others. So, no, worry is a necessary precondition here.
Are you sure you are not a sociopath? Your reasoning here id quote off and if trulu fear and worry is the only reason for you to not be an asshole or jerk ... I dont wsmt to be around.
And yes superior impulse control can make teenagers behave better amd not do fires where they should not.
I have nothing to do with this. Ad hominem is a logical fallacy. "Read the thread", as the saying goes, doesn't just mean look at the words on the screen. It also implies understand what is written. Reaching the point of logical fallacy proves that the words were not understood. Why keep replying before reading (meaning also understanding) the thread?
> Your reasoning here id quote off and if trulu fear and worry is the only reason for you to not be an asshole or jerk ...
Fear plays no part in this discussion. It is mentioned nowhere, aside from the inane ramblings that were pointed out earlier, and is unrelated to anything being discussed.
Worry is applicable. It may also manifest as concern. But either way, it is the awareness of others (or lack thereof) that is at least a precondition, if not a defining feature, of being an asshole. Again, the hermit in the forest isn't not an asshole just by virtue of not being unable to act out his assholish ways. It is quite possible said hermit actually is an asshole. But without a situation where worry/concern is applicable, there is no way for an outsider to be able to know, and thus nobody would label said hermit as such. To meaningfully introduce the concept of being an asshole (or to not be), worry/concern about other people also must necessarily be included.
> Are you sure you are not a sociopath? Your reasoning here id quote off and if trulu fear and worry is the only reason for you to not be an asshole or jerk ... I dont wsmt to be around.
per HN rules[0]:
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Even after high school, when I moved to the city we had parties quite often. They weren't quite as large, drunk, or disorganized, but people actually got together all the time. Some places were like designated party spots, where no one had kids or demanding jobs so it was a reliable place to head and have a good time.
My kids don't know anyone or anything like that. It's so strange. They still have sleep overs where they play video games and use their phones. That's fine in a way. At their age I was in the woods getting drunk and starting bonfires. It was fun as hell, but maybe something closer to the middle would be ideal.
That's pretty funny. I was a teen in the late '80s and only attended maybe 1 party as depicted in films and it was on a college campus where a couple of buddies and I scammed our way in by acting like we were college students (actually HS Juniors at the time). It was pretty epic. I know of a couple other notorious parties during that time that I didn't attend. I think the answer is a resounding "yes"--that crazy parties were actually a thing.
It was my favorite activity in the world. But that also makes it tough to "let go" when your 30s approach. Even when the hangovers get worse. I'm kinda grateful for the pandemic shutting everything down for a while. Before that I had massive FOMO when I "did nothing" on the weekend. I know a bunch of guys who did nothing else with their lives.
> It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection.
It's also fascinating how every generation in recorded history has similar claims about the next, yet somehow mankind has improved quality of life for so many.
Simply google (without quotes) "list of ancients bemoaning youth" and read millennia of similar claims, some of which could be used today and sound new.
Gen Z has worked far less and is much earlier in that career than Gen X, among many other things.
Incomes for each income quintile at the same age shows Gen Z as having more income than Gen X did. They are also statistically much worse with money and expenses.
You can dig all this out of historical Census data. Find personal (or household) income by age group, do the same for each cohort over time, inflation adjust, and it's pretty clear.
So I can certainly argue they have higher quality of life than Gen X at each point in their lives thus far.
I think it's such a huge mistake to think "well, it's always been like that, this is just a continuation of what's been going on in recorded history." Especially when the data tells a very different story.
For example, just look at one metric: weight. Kids these days (and, obviously, adults as well) are overweight and obese in numbers that are off the charts (off the charts because you barely had any obese kids in decades past). They used to always call it "adult-onset diabetes", which now they prefer to call it Type 2 diabetes because you see so many kids getting it, which is tragic IMO. To be clear, I'm not solely blaming the childhood obesity epidemic on smartphones or social media - I'm just using it as an example of something that has changed for kids that we should be worried about, not just hand wave away as "Meh, adults have always bemoaned youth."
Rates of teenage depression, loneliness and anxiety have skyrocketed in the pass 15 years, and when you dig into the data it doesn't look like just a rate of diagnosis issue.
Teenagers themselves (as a group) are telling us they are significantly more unhappy than teenagers in years past. We should listen to them.
I think it's such a huge mistake to cherry pick one or two metrics out of hundreds to claim something, while ignoring all the others, especially since you had to go outside the topics in the thread so far to bring in your pet metrics.
Hold up. GenX'er here, graduated college in the mid 90s. Are you telling me that college keg parties in the basements of off-campus housing is no longer a thing?
> the fact that kids today can't even recognize "basic teen parties" and question whether they are some sort of made up fantasy
While I agree there is a technology-driven loneliness epidemic,
what is so sacred about those "basic teen parties"?
People from any time before the 70s wouldn't recognize them either. Also, they were fictional caricatures written for movies, not real life, where teen parties were considerably less interesting.
I never saw the point of those. People, alcohol, what's fun about any of that? Tripping over your own legs with a bunch of similarly incapable humans while drowning in noise and fine particulates is toddler level fun. But with potential of acquiring adult level damage.
Some people want to make everything about "walkable cities." Maybe they can come back with socialization stats for non-driving-age kids, or those in Manhattan.
Something tells me that tightly packed populations in urban settings and their landlords are way less accepting of huge parties in an apartment playing loud music than a small number of homeowners in a suburb are about someone in the cul-de-sac having a house party playing loud music.
I mean normal teen parties when I was a teenager were places for teens to get blackout drunk and make bad decisions. I empathize with your position somewhat, but it wasn't all good.
Not all parties were like that. Or at least I was never invited to those. We geeks stuck to LAN parties, got drunk, and played games. Since there were no girls around, we managed to avoid making any bad decisions :)
Responsibility, the ability to respond. Since you are able to do stuff, you also share responsibility, also for things you do not act upon, even if you don’t want to take it on. You can and you were definitely able to make different choices of what you want and wanted to engage with, and what you decided to ignore. You are an active part of society, if you want that or not.
Another day, another well-meaning internet community falling victim to the creative writing major testing water on Reddit before trying to make it in Hollywood.
Ya I'm shocked by it too, said as a Gen Xer born in the late 1970s, occasionally a Xennial.
I partied for 4 years of college which is something like 30 years in sober adult terms. Our ragers were reminiscent of Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds, all of those old party movies that didn't age well. Scenes from Hackers, Fight Club, The Matrix, Trainspotting, Go, Swingers, Made, 200 Cigarettes, SLC Punk, Dazed and Confused, PCU, even Undergrads (a cartoon) were so spot-on for campus life, living for the weekend. Can't Hardly Wait, American Pie, Varsity Blues, Waiting, Superbad, etc came later, and I almost consider those watered down versions of the feral partying that happened earlier just as the internet went mainstream, but still canon.
A Friday night at my city's bar scene today looks like what our Sunday or Monday was. People half tipsy on 2 drinks, even though they're Ubering home later. The faint scent of ganja now instead of basements filled with smoke and first timers trying laughing gas. Nobody puking or disappearing around a corner to relieve themselves. No sound of bottles shattering. I feel like a curator of a museum now, a derelict from a forgotten time.
In fairness, I went to college in the midwest, where there was nothing else to do. Now the West Coast has effectively legalized drugs, awakening much of the country to the full human experience, and people have done the trips and plant medicine and maybe realize at a young age that alcohol and tobacco are rough drugs that tear you up. Which is admirable, but they also prepare you for getting torn up as an adult. To miss out on learning how to make your way home on drunk logic before you black out seems like a crucial rite of passage has been lost.
And it shows. In our country's embrace of puritanical politics like we saw in the jingoist 2000s, regentrified for the antivax era. In the worship of unspoiled beauty, idolizing of influencers, pursuit of financial security over visceral experience. In the fanboyism, bootlicking and drinking the kool-aid for every new evolutionary tech that cements the status quo instead of freeing the human spirit in a revolutionary manner. I gotta be honest, most of what's happening today is laughable to my generation. Blah I sound like a Boomer. Ok cryable then. We're in mourning. We worry about the kids today. All work and no play and all that. It's killing our souls, and theirs.
I guess my final thought after writing this is that partying is one of the most powerful reality-shifting tools in our arsenal. All of this can't be it. This can't be how America ends. You know what to do.
I remember a friend who was going to school in Boston coming to visit me at my college in western Massachusetts freshman year. I brought him to some off campus house in the woods, probably 200 or so people there, huge bonfire in the back, bands playing in the basement. We're passing a bottle of Jameson back and forth. Probably around 1 am everyone just heard someone screaming "that's my fucking couch!" from the outside deck as a few dudes tossed her couch into the bonfire. The flames were as high as the house and 15 minutes later the fire department was there. My friend couldn't believe what was going on, which honestly was a typical Friday night (aside from the couch burning).
I've lived in Brooklyn for about 20 years now, and while the parties still happen, most of them have become corporate. There are $50 covers and $15 beers, with wristbands you have to load a credit card onto instead of $5 covers and $2 beers in an illegal warehouse (cash only). The kids also seem to be taking ketamine a lot more than anything else, so they kinda disassociate and don't really dance that much at the clubs, whereas mdma and coke were things you ran into more when I was their age and people were not shy about grabbing someone on the dancefloor and grinding on each other for the night. They are definitely more sheltered and tame than we were as a whole, which isn't necessarily a bad thing I guess.
ketamine and whippets too. The whippets are getting quite worrisome. Basement parties are still alive and well, but yes it seems most venues have been demolished, killed by zoning or private-equitied. It's a tale as old as time (or at least as old as nimbyism), regulate something out of existence and then wonder where all the money, goodwill and life went. That and the fact that whenever anything out of the ordinary happens there's always a phone out. Always something to worry about.
I had never really considered partying as a reality-shifting tool, but as someone fond of regional burn events, yeah, it totally is.
Humans have partied for aeons. It's not just about letting off steam, it's about building social bonds, it's about traditions and rituals and marking key points in life.
This whole thread makes me rather sad, but in the same breath, makes me feel like there is real, actionable good to be done by promoting and helping run events. Not corporate pay-to-play curated experiences, which keep you on rails and only serve to condition more consumption behaviors, but relatively low cost, volunteer-run, do-it-yourself events. The latter, from my experience, have an absolutely infectious component of wanting to contribute, volunteer, create art, and drag others into the experience. But they are also a lot of work and not everyone is cut out for it.
It really has me thinking about lowering the bar to any sort of experience that gives folks a reprieve from the default world, however fleeting.
I think you need some sort of youth density for that. If you live in a low-density suburb where most people no longer have kids it's hard, even if you have a tool like the internet.
That is what she gets for having weak boundaries tho. And it is a thing that if you have seen, you will actively teach your kids to avoid - by saying no soom enough.
Teenage girls have a difficult time, saying no, and teenage boys have a difficult time, accepting "no." It sucks, but that's human nature. Being a teenager is clabbered misery.
I suspect that what they do, is have a hunk show up a couple of hours early, with a bottle of tequila.
Yeah and in 30 years a thought post on brainnit will appear in everyone's head and they'll ask Gen-Zer's did you really have a brain that was isolated from everyone elses?
And someone will respond:
It's really sad to me how we fucked you guys up and you didn't even have phones...
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/1lu102v/were_parties_...
The responses from the Gen Xers were a mix of bewilderment and sadness, stuff like "What do you mean parties like this, it's just a normal teenage party!? I feel so ancient and also so confused by this question." The whole comment section is worth a read, especially the disconnect between how the Gen Xers experienced adolescence and how the Gen Z poster does.
It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection. I also disagree with some of the comments here that are bringing up things like "real estate, transportation, and lodging". Sure, those are issues, but you have families and kids in the suburbs today just like you had families and kids in the suburbs in the 90s, and the fact that kids today can't even recognize "basic teen parties" and question whether they are some sort of made up fantasy can't just be waved away by the fact that real estate is more expensive today.