Comment by Aurornis
2 days ago
> 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.
>The demands on kids and families
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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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
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.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10605329
Probably just look at Korea tbh
Demands of sports was identified as a major factor harming the ability to raise kids in Family Unfriendly by Timothy Carney.
There has to be some selection bias here. Maybe a certain class of school / student?
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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.
Well, not all of us.
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.
as a socially marginalized kid in those days, I ended up banding together with other sm kids and we had our own parties.
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Me and my nerd friends had LAN parties in somebody's garage etc. I really miss those sometimes.
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Did the "cool" parties really exist?
Like, a movie party looks impossibly cool due to scripting and choreography.
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.
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.
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.
Popularity is also so subjective.
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.
We just had our own parties for our social group. Not as many pretty girls and alcohol stolen from parents but still a good time.
Then when the popular kids were bored occasionally they'd end up at our shindigs
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.
There is still a big difference between not being invited to/attending parties and not knowing if they even exist as a concept.
> 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?
Maybe but they had a pre-internet life to reference and this topic is specifically discussing it
Yes? That's the point. Even the Gen Xers with strong geeky/nerdy predilections had parties back in the day.
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> 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?
Maybe now, yes, but not 20+ years ago when they were younger and going out and partying.
I don't understand the point you're trying to make?
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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.
Hasn't this always been true for the masses for all eras of personal computing? I have been observing since the Apple ][ era!
The majority of web traffic has been mobile since the latter half of the 2010s.
That should also be true of the Gen Xers replying though. So I think that effectively cancels out.
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.
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?
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.
>so it's no wonder that Reddit Gen Z people speak as if their generation is not socially engaged at all.
Still one sees them even outside all glued to their screens.
Also known as selection bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias
We know.
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.
> inherently biased toward Gen Z people who are chronically online and deep into social media
most of the Gen Z people I know fit this description
is there really a significant Gen Z cohort that isn't "chronically online and deep into social media"?