I have bow, I think, entered the arena of Not Understanding The Kids.
This is a profound relief. As a father of three, it is my role to be baffled by slang, wrong-footed by culture and perplexed by concerns. I am not supposed to understand what they're on about. It is my job to frown slightly from over the top of a newspaper and be amiably run rings round. But, until fairly recently, I was relatively on top of the whole thing, through no fault of my own.
I work in a job where the average worker is quite young, I'm certainly the only one over forty, and there's only one other 30+. This, whilst undoubtedly annoying, has the effect of meaning you do keep relatively up to date, simply by failing to tune out the chatter around you.
(You also get to laugh quietly to yourself as each new cohort imagines they're the first ones ever to try to phone in sick with a hangover, or the first ones to ever take drugs).
I was also, until quite recently, Very Online. I do not mean Facebook, of course, even I know that's a geriatric graveyard where boomers get angry about AI generated racist memes. But Twitter, for all its faults, was quite handy for keeping you, if not exactly plugged into the zeitgeist, then at the very least zeitgeist-adjacent.
Retreating from there to Bluesky has done wonderful things for my mental health and general anger levels, but it's definitely also had the effect of me losing whatever slender grasp it was I had on what the kids are on about.
I am, of course aware, that Twitter was hardly a young person's site, and the kids are mostly on tiktok and snapchat, two media which I long since decided were beyond the pale for me (there is a pub tiktok, it's run by one of the part-time waitresses. I think it has one post after I made her delete the other one for being mean about customers lost property), but there were enough people on there who were still concerned with trying to be relevant for you to vaguely pick up what was bubbling under.
I ceased being concerned with trying to be relevant some time in 2005, I should add. This is all osmosis.
Baling from there has meant I am now, blissfully, out of touch. I don't know what "no cap" means, I can describe things as "lit" if I want to embarrass the hell out of my kids (which, of course, is what having kids is for, n'est-ce pas?), you will never catch me using the word "smol".
(I do, however, still have a vague idea of where they're at culturally, though. Mystifyingly, they all seem to be into stuff that was big in the noughties, who knew knew Drake was still a thing?)
I remember Kingsley Amis saying that he was so glad he lost his libido as he aged, as it was like being chained to an idiot. Dodgy sexual politics aside, I feel much the same way as regards my gentle amble towards irrelevance. For years I have known things that I have no interest in, now I don't know them, which is commensurate with my level of caring, it's a much more equitable way of living.
That said, it was quite funny when the waitress who runs the Tiktok was shocked to discover that I knew what a Brat Summer was. No negative aura points here, in a bit,besties!
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