Hacker News Reader

Comment by jleyank | Hacker News Reader

Well, I’m old and not a parent so I assume I’m pretty much invisible to most young folk. Unless they are asking me a question or engaged in a specific conversation I guess. No big deal, as my concerns aren’t their concerns, and how I socialized is more social (or at least in person) than how they do.

But don’t seek the boomers short as do nothings. Four dead in ohio and all that, and the various riots of 68 were the young. And you can thank this age cohort for the networked device in your hand and the connecting software.

Did we make mistakes, yeah, but at least we didn’t make Facebook.

View on HN

Gen X created pretty much all these social networks though.

Zoomers (the young people this author is likely talking about) pretty much grew up while these networks already took off.

Though the generation the social networks target will likely switch to gen alpha soon, as they're quickly approaching their puperty.

The same thing happened with the Boomers. They thought they were very special and different because television and movies were spending so much time and attention on them.

In reality, tv and movies were machines made by the Greatest and Silent generations to sell products to children.

So boomers grew up to be hyper-consumers who are highly vulnerable to believing whatever the magic box in the living room tells them.

Now Gen X sells products based on the opinion of the crowd and the new fashion is constantly trying to match beliefs with the shifting consensus of a para-social cloud of "friends".

I'm reminded of Vonnegut's bit about the Booboolings, a species who thought it was a good idea to program their children socially...

https://realflashbytes.wordpress.com/2017/11/07/the-sisters-...

This is a weird response, but also validates the points raised in the article. You say you don't care what young people think, but then immediately attempt to validate your generation to them.

Personally I think the thing old people have (information, experience) is not that valuable anymore. We are deluged with information and your grandpas trick for performing some household task is irrelevant. Your grandparents/parents best life advice is going to sound bland when we have instant access to advice from the top minds in every field. Worried about your life having no meaning? Here is a compilation of centenarians biggest regrets.

No, they don’t care what I think (hence being invisible). It doesn’t bug me too much, certainly not enough to be an ass about it. Sorry if I wasn’t clear with the invisible comment.

However, reading your comment again proves my point. Perhaps not invisible, certainly irrelevant. One suggestion, pay attention to what we all did wrong then so as to not make the same mistakes now.

Im on the younger end and I don’t agree with this analysis at all. If it were true you’d see people converging to handful of worldviews espoused by experts which does not map to reality at all.

The truth is humans aren’t optimization machines that gravitate towards high quality inputs. There’s a massive emotional component to learning and development that can’t be ignored. A child will take to the opinions of people they have an emotional connection too over whatever google spits out.

The thing is at a certain age peers become more important than family in terms of emotional connection, at which point adults become to feel alienated. But this is not new, adolescents aren’t basically wired by evolution to break from their elders.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com