Hello friends, if you're a Zoomer like me (Well maybe, I was born in '96 so I'm either the last Millennial or the first Gen Z) you may have noticed that we're often the butt of many jokes. "The worst generation of snowflakes ever" or something of that nature. I will admit, we seem a little strange compared to old folks but when you actually take a step back and look at the facts it makes perfect sense.
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Zoomers have dumb language. One of the biggest things Zs get mocked for is lingo: Skibidibop rizz with the gyatt, deadass smh at my goofy ahh uncle. Took me a while to realize it, but when's it's not just memespeak the reason there are so many nonsense words floating around now is because big tech and social media has become so ludicrously censor happy that you need to talk like a fucking baby to avoid getting your post flagged for one reason or another. Even saying too many normal words in the "wrong order" is enough to get shadowbanned these days.
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Kids are inside and on their phones too much. What the fuck else are you expecting them to do? Putting aside the 2 year lockdown due to a pandemic, there's not many options for outside activities. Parks and playgrounds and other things just aren't safe a lot of the times. Whether it's animals, shady characters, or the jungle gym being delapidated. Teens can't go to the malls anymore because they're all closing and anywhere they gather is immediately swarmed with the cops. Nowadays, you go to any big city and the most happening spot is a McDonald's or something because at least you can eat and socialize without getting dirty looks.
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Z's are immature and rely on their parents for everything. I had a professor tell me that a not insignifigant amount of zoomers show up to job interviews with their parents and that's bad. I'll admit that everyone needs to grow up eventually but...when did attentive parents become a bad thing? Most older people I know had a bad relationship with their folks or they passed away early, so they were forced to mature sooner. Now this one is purely subjective because I can't speak for every 20 something and their parents but this just seems like another generational gap that's caused by shifting social values.
I can go on but I just had to jot all this down. The kids aren't crazy, you're just just not noticing how hard they've been hit by the downward spiral of the western world.
As a millennial who registered on thefacebook before it even became facebook... and then deleted my entire account 6 years later after seeing what facebook was doing to society and its horrendous data privacy practices...
I probably sound like an old man afraid of new technology when I say no one should ever be using twitter, insta or tiktok on the reg.
Theres quite a number of scientific studies at this point that show that this basically ruins your attention span, practically gives you adhd, makes you hyperemotional and unstable.
Nowadays, social media stream feeds are mostly extremely mundane posts of pets, landscapes or fast fashion, godawful memes, insane conspiracy theories, nonsensical relationship advice, woke scolding, and ads.
So many fucking ads. Usually done by moronic influencers, when its not just an actual produced ad.
Facebook figured out a long time ago that /rage/ is essentially the best way to drive consistent platform usage.
Mix that with the fact that at the end of the day, these apps exist to harvest marketing data from you to an exceptional degree of precision as well as sell advertisements and you get rampant hyperconsumerism that totally divorces people from actually acting human.
And it doesnt help that things like the tiktok shop and amazon are filled to the brim with scammers and shady practices, so your consumerism will stand a high chance of just being a depressing waste of money.
But seemingly no one can stop themselves from using these abysmal apps.
As for zoomer lingo, i think the last word i was able to figure out was yeet. I guess rizz basically means looking attractive or stylish?
A good number of the zoomers/gen a ive talked to in person use so much of the lingo with so much pretention that i cannot even understand 80% of what they are saying.
Then the massive amount of saying nonsense phrases from shitty mumble rappers starts happening and i am actively offended by how fucking stupid it sounds, and conveys essentially no actual meaning other than vibes.
Maybe now i am legitimately getting into old man yells at clouds territory.
Anyway, social media apps are brain rot that from my point of view has birthed a society of addicts, and this addiction seems to cause delusional magical thinking, bipolar disorder and adhd.
EDIT: Put another way, social media apps and their widespread proliferation and inevitable way they would evolve under capitalism has caused a more thorough, perfect and total kind of alienation in the marxist sense than ever previously thought possible.
Gen Z and A have no reference point for the before times. This is the insane world theyve grown up in.