My boomer parents are more addicted to their phones than anyone I know.
Yeah, it's such nonsense. You ever see old people on phones and social media? They're every bit as bad if not worse. These are the people that propped up farmville and went up to level 1000000 in candy crush
My mom calls me for tech support on her phone all the time because "you kids and your phones".
When I went to visit her last year, having not seen her in a decade, she was fucking glued to her phone and I was actually getting upset that she hadn't seen her grandchild in 10 years and yet she's sitting there flirting with dudes on dating sites and playing Wordle and Candy Crush.
It's kind of apparent even in situations where we play boardgames. In my family we mostly play boardgames with questions, trivia, etc. My grandparents have this weird mentality where the game is kind of dumb or the question is dumb if they don't understand the subject or if it's about something that's not in their interests. "What kind of question is this?" "Who knows this kind of thing?"
I got that a lot from my grandmother. I would tell her things about history or science, correct her or answer questions SHE asked me and when I stated facts, she would almost always say "that's stupid" or "you have some really stupid thoughts".
I remember once explaining the Wright Brothers and she just laughed and was like "you know stupid things".
Loved her to death, sweet woman, basically my real mom, but her biggest flaw was how she would straight up insult you for being smart.
Radio, TV, walkman, and even novels at one time were all "rotting kids' brains." Guaranteed we'll be angry at some new tech in the future that will make us seem out of touch.
There was a comic strip I found on r/100yearsago that was basically saying that radio or magazines were ruining kids' minds, circa 1920-ish. I wish I could find it.
I believe it was a bunch of kids sitting around a magazine stand reading comics or newspapers and the tagline was essentially "back in my day, kids actually played and weren't like this".
"You look tired."
Of course I look bloody tired. I'm about 40, with two young kids and a growing business. Life is a constant cavalcade of stress in an always-on way that seemingly nobody in their 60s and upwards has the first-hand experience to understand.
I wouldn't mind if this was legitimate, useful concern from people with relevant frames of reference. But it's almost always from someone who retired a while ago, from a relatively low-stress job, and who now insists on telling you how unhealthy your lifestyle is.
When people say this it's almost always as you said. People are fucking stressed, sad, depressed, etc. and I think people say "you look tired" as a way of saying "you look like you're struggling, but if I said that it would make it seem like you are inferior and I'm insulting you and your work ethic/mental stability".
you darn kids and your open society of understanding and acknowledgment of other lifestyles and ways of life that in no way contradict my own understanding but in fact only enriches my life through shared experiences and a deeper connection with my family and my own understanding of sexuality, identity and lifestyle you fucking homos
"Back in my day, people minded their own business" sounds like a simple and honorable tenet, but what it means is the opposite: "back in my day, people buried their lifestyles or cultures and didn't show it to me and I was happy to live in my white Christian bubble".
I hate it when people assume you've never heard of things from before you were born.
All the fucking time. I sound younger than I am and work on the phones.
I've had people 10-15 years younger than me say things like "well you wouldn't know about David Bowie, because you were in high school when he died".
Um, I went to Labyrinth on day 1 and was in my mid to late 30s when he passed away.
at the end of the day "boomer" is too good of an insult to only apply to baby boomers
This is true. Basically the modern equivolent to "you're a fucking fossil".
More generally it's a criticism of how I don't live in the 'real world', without actually saying it. Or without realizing that they just want me to adopt their worldview wholesale. Or the inane 'work hard', like I'm not doing that already. C'mon.
The irony: that people who say you don't "live in the real world" also are not globalist in any fucking way at all.
I don't know anyone old or young who complains about cell phones these days.
All I see, working the job I have right now, is old people, even young ones down here in the south, complaining about having to use self checkout and how it's taking away jobs and thinking they're doing me a favor making me ring them up when it's my job to babysit the self checkout and you taking my time away from that just makes things go slower. Plus so many people just look at them and stand there like they can't literally read a screen with words clearly written, or they walk up to it and try to hand me the stuff, or they think it's a flawless process and walk away before the purchase finishes after their card was refused.
But maybe that's just the south and people down here are braindead stupid as shit. It's a wonder they even can figure out a cell phone if they can't follow a few simple instructions on a big screen.
So I actually apply to everything you said, but I also hear the cell phone thing. When I posted this, I was in my Florida Walmart's pharmacy and posted this while an old disabled guy in a scooter was giving me the meanest fucking look you can ever imagine.
He then followed me into the bathrooms and you could hear him muttering racial slurs while struggling to urinate.
