Following up on my piece yesterday about knowing that you are getting old I can reveal, today, that I must be. Sure I don’t feel that old and I still like the things I liked as a child, but I know that I am because people younger than me are both an enigma and an annoyance. So here is my own version of grumpy old men on young people today.
Let’s start with fashion. It is no longer 1983 but the way that the kids dress would make you believe that it was. All those fluorescent colours, the layers, those stupid skin-tight drain pipe jeans, with the crotch around the knees, and shoes that look like plimsoles. What do they think they look like? And the hair, especially the boys with those stupid fringes. Then there is this fascination with piercing parts of their bodies. Sure I had an earring (to my eternal embarrassment) but lips, noses, nipples and tongues. They look like a sexual perverts greatest dream but they are all of 15. I can tell they are trying to be different, but when everybody else has the same bits of metal hanging out of them it is actually called conformity. I tell you what: in 15 years time there are going to be some sad looking 30-somethings.
Then there is the music. All of these bands and singers manufactured by the record industry to reflect these kids and they don’t realise. They think that bands like My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy and Panic, At the Disco are somehow cool and exciting when, in actual fact, they are completely derivative. That isn’t to say that I am at the point where I regularly say that modern music is all crap. I like plenty of modern bands just not the pop-rock that teenagers listen to.
And the way they talk. Every sentence is prefaced with like and every second word is “random”. Everything is “random”. A person who they don’t know is called a “random”. An unexpected event is “random”. The most “random” thing would be if one of them didn’t actually use that word. Hell is another one. Hell is the new superlative as in “That was hell cool” or “I’m hell thirsty” or “That is like, hell random”. Seriously most kids seem to have about 30 words in their vocabularies.
Most of these communications don’t actually happen in person. They happen on MSN, their Facebook accounts or via SMS. It is almost as though telcos saw this phenomenon approaching. They are constantly writing text messages, sending each other MMS messages or writing crap on MSN. Not that what they write is intelligible to most people. Everything is abbreviated letters and numbers replace their phonemically corresponding words and acronyms replace the rest.
So many of the “youth” today seem to have an appalling attitude. It is all about them. Compassion, respect and humanity are all absent. All they want is the latest this or that in order to keep up with their friends and who pays for it? Not them. Most of them seem about as much cognisant of the future as a worm is of the sky.
None of them want to be young. From the age of about 12 they think that they are adults. Falling in “love”, having sex, “cheating” and breaking up. And getting back together. It is like an episode of Home and Away or Neighbours.
Sure, when I was that age we had a look that was “different”, we listened to crappy music (well I didn’t much past the age of 15 when I discovered bands outside of the mainstream) and we had our own way of talking. There just didn’t seem to be this attitude of the world owing us everything, we knew we would grow up and get jobs and have families. Kids today, the children of my generation and just before, have got no idea.
Anyway…I’m off for a nice sit down.
This is very true. I’m having my first child in a few months. By the time it’s a teenager, gen Y will be in their 30s. Let’s hope gen Z are a little less lame, em sorry, “random”.