The quality of life of kids has degraded at least in the US and no not primarily from smartphones and social media.
The answer is simple, life is harder for parents.
And also the lack of third places making it a lot harder for both adults and kids to get together with friends in person without having to spend money
Also the move towards car-centric infrastructure. Which is somewhat related to the lack of 3rd places.
A lot of the movies with these parties had the kids showing up by walking or biking, which just is not feasible anymore. I
I also think about all the teen movies that were largely set in shopping malls. Most of the malls around me have shut down, so what’s next? Pretending people hang out and socialize in Wal-Marts for the sake of the movie?
Pretending people hang out and socialize in Wal-Marts for the sake of the movie?
Wal-Mart “Did someone say product placement?”
The thing is, all the fun things that adults used to be able to do to blow off steam away from kids, keep getting ruined by going more “family friendly”. When I was a kid, there was a thing at the boulder reservoir with music and events, and people would drink and smoke weed and be mostly left alone. They made it family friendly and it started to die, then they decided it wasn’t eco-friendly so they killed it off.
Ragrbrai in Iowa happened the same way. A weeklong ride across the state that changes stops every year. Used to be drunken debauchery at the stops and now it’s family friendly and no fun anymore. Concerts are the same way. I know kids listen to slipknot, but why the fuck should I watch my mouth now that kids are around, when the singers saying much worse (in context) on stage? I’m sure everyone everywhere in America has a story like this. 4th of July on Apple River, in Wisconsin, back in college it was a blast. Alcohol and titties everywhere. I haven’t been since cops started going and enforcing shit.
Smartphones and social media are probably why the kids don’t party like that anymore. They don’t need to gather in one house to all talk when they have their group chats and junk like that. Pretty sad to think about a generation of kids just pissing away their youth looking at a little screen in their hands all day.
Social media has warped many brains into living life as a performance of moments for their feed-posts, and too few exercise their right to Privacy, so everything is tainted with the concept of the Observer that we didn’t have in the past. Yes, we did party like those kids in those movies. It was rad.
Try being more curious about young people and actually listen to them talk when they are willing to be vulnerable to you and come back and tell me this is the problem. That is a lazy, easy narrative there you just spun.
Your assumptions are based on your imagination, since you don’t know that I haven’t done that
Then why do your descriptions of nuanced multifaceted humans portray them as such cartoonishly reductive caricatures dissected from any context outside of their control? Younger people by definition have the least control over their circumstance.
Sounds like you don’t like what I wrote. It’s not a big deal, but it is real. I’ve seen before and after, and what I said is what happened.
Cameras on phones killed it.
We definitely had to regulate this in college. We threw some ragers where we specifically knew it couldnt be documented where we collected phones and had a whole coat check system. Thankfully, facebook was only for college people, so nothing catastrophic ever happened
We had tons of parties just like these only everyone was way better looking.
In the 90s teenage me was way too uncool for these and never got invited once either.
Believe it or not, even adults had home parties. It wasn’t just a kids or teens thing. So maybe you missed out as a teen but you can make up for it as an adult. Potluck dinners or game nights are a good way to start. We went to a potluck dinner for 8 people in a studio apartment a couple times when I was at uni.
Very common. The vibes and people varied based on the people throwing the party. Maybe it was a house party when someone’s parents were out of town. Maybe it was a kegger at the lake kinda outta the way in the dark. And everything in between.
Also, Hollywood wouldn’t have been making films in the 90s and 2000s to make you feel bad if this wasn’t the case. They’d be making the contemporary teens of the day feel bad, which they certainly didn’t because they could identify with the scene.
Social media. People got used to not meeting up IRL. Also kids don’t get wasted as much these days, possibly because they are actually dealing with their trauma and don’t feel the need to drink/smoke the pain away. Of course if you do cut loose these days it’ll end up being filmed and sent to your mum on Facebook. I know half the shit I did as a kid would have been flagged for inappropriate content.
Wait there aren’t parties anymore? What
Apparently kids are socializing in general less. Like it’s a real trend.
Average millennial here. Yes, amongst other parties, I had a college friend who hosted a party like this twice a week and everyone (30-50 people) would be shit faced, his dad had a night shift job so we stayed up all night playing N64, beer pong, and other fun filled debauchery. It was magnificent. Each day we’d tape plastic over the floor to keep things clean and reduce wear, guy was a social genius. Actually I eventually got bored of it but they went on for years.
Sorry I was too busy being a geek to go to parties full of people I absolutely hated. That was back before gaming was popular and cool, when you had to EARN your geekdom.
Yes, but ours were usually much much more casual and in much smaller houses. TV makes everyone look rich. Broke people have parties too, but they’re chips/dip and BYOB. Also, without the jocks vs. nerds.
My husband was just telling a story this weekend about when he was “ninth grade cool”. Right before a party a cute girl asked if he had the new Prince album. He said yes and then begged his mom to take him to Sound Warehouse to buy it. Unwrapped it, shoved it in his pocket, and got dropped at the party. “Cool! What’s your favorite song?” “Uhh, the first one.”
Sad that kids now don’t have that experience.
Do kids still go parking?
Do kids still go parking?
So many kids today don’t want to drive or learn to drive 🤷♂️ And based on my partners’ kids, they’re much less sexually driven than we were. We did a bunch of stupid shit if there was a hint of a chance of getting laid.
That’s sad. The hours we spent talking, laughing, and making out in cars were the best part of high school. I wonder if some of the disinterest is from anti depressants.
It’s probably from the world burning down around them. Hard to be horny when you’re full of existential dread.
Should be the opposite. Stressful conditions make us want to fuck and make babies. Maybe I’m wrong, but in any case, sex is about the most effective stress relief I know of.
I don’t think your experience in this case is universal. Birth rates have been steadily dropping as things have gotten worse.
I feel the same way as you, but my wife is the opposite of us.
Yeah, absolutely no existential dread from the Cold War. And we all just instantly stopped believing that the world would end in a nuclear holocaust just because the Soviet Union collapsed. Then there was the Gulf war, then 9/11, then another Gulf war. And we’ve known about climate change and how capitalism is killing our planet for practically the entire time, that’s not new. Oil crisis? That’s been a slowly building crescendo of apocalypse since like the 70s.
I’ll buy existential dread as an excuse for not wanting to breed, not as an explanation for teenagers being less horny.
Give us y2k and we’ll party like it’s 1999!
Kids seems so socially anxious and isolated, making a doom loop against making friends and fucking.
I used to throw massive house parties. Yes. It was a vibe. I did terrible things at those parties and I am sorry what I put my family through. Silly parties to be honest.
I went to one in the early teens. I imagine it’s harder for teenagers to have a secret party when their psrente are out of town these days
House parties were awesome. I was never cool, but there was always room at a house party. It’s a shame that these died out.
We kind of had that as teens. Just without the fancy decorations. We made it ourselves. Every weekend when someones parents were over night.
