> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.