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Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

I guess this is just my getting old moment. I watched planes fly into buildings, friends go off to war and die, and had memory of three economic crises by the time I was 24. Which was way better than my parents generation which was (arguably) better than my grandparents generation. This generation is complaining about... having phones?

Bah, get off my lawn so I can yell at a cloud.

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I don't know, the 90s were kind of the peak. We've been pretty downhill since

And, I will admit a lot of indicators and below the surface trends were in the wrong direction since the 80s at least--the 00s are just went everything finally collapsed

> I don't know, the 90s were kind of the peak. We've been pretty downhill since

Are you sure this isn't just nostalgia? There was a lot going wrong in the 90's.

like the other comment in reply to my parent, the 90s were relatively benign compared to the 60s/70s and the shit that 2001 ushered in

Were the 90s perfect? No, of course not. We had a very long economic boom, technology advancing in a very optimistic way (vs. today where technology is actively making things worse)

Now, what fed a lot of that caused a lot of our problems today--the 24 hour news cycle spun up, there were troubling economic trends like the fact that wages basically never went up after Reagan so I'm not saying that time has nothing to answer for

The 90s were pretty benign if you didn't live in the wrong place (like Eastern Europe, where life expectancy cratered after the fall of the Soviet Union). I mean, my memories of the 90s were pretty great, but I was a young adult in the US.

It was the period between Cold War hysteria and War on Terror hysteria. Of course it was much better in crucial aspects.

The 90's had a Marine division occupying LA so at least some ups and downs. Probably a relative bright spot between Vietnam&Stagflation and 9/11&Housing bubble though.

The problem is that it's impossible to get all of your peers to put down their phones at the same time and do the hard work of rebuilding normal social structures and low tech communications channels.

You (a teenager) can invite your peers to your house to hang out for some hours after school or on the weekend. In the past they would accept because they had nothing better to do, or if they did, that would be communicated and everyone would join. Today your peers are likely to just decline the invitation. There is plenty of entertainment at home: their phone. And if they came over to your house, they would mostly scroll on their phones anyway. It's a widespread, untreated, mostly-unrecognized addiction.

Imagine how difficult it would be to quit heroin if all of your friends and all of their friends had to quit heroin at the same time or else no one can. The government will step in eventually.

You’re having your old man moment because you’re reading an article designed to make you feel like the youth are stupid people and you, as an older person, are smarter with more real problems.

You are the exact target of this article and you are being persuaded by it.

It's all about housing - gone from 4.5x salary in the 90s to over 7x salary now: https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco...

This generation grew up in the middle of at least two of those economic crises, has witnessed countless riots, faced down a soul-crushing pandemic at the peak of their childhood, and has lived their entire life without even a shred of hope in their political system. The few of us who got blessed by the tech lottery live comfortably, while the rest live with no hope of making a decent living, owning our own house, or starting a family.

This article discusses Gen Z diving into their phones as a symptom of the generational malaise, but don't mistake the symptom for the cause.

No offense: I think you're missing the point. Phones are just the vector (that is also a kind of status symbol) for a few powerful types of social needles, each filled with a drug that attacks various mental feedback loops that debilitate you, and that those drugs are business models affecting your kids (if you have any) should cause some concern as society stratifies physically, socially, and economically. Wars and businesses have life spans. This situation becomes life. I think there's a significant difference. YMMV, especially if you live someplace where you can physically avoid the issues which at this point is the most viable strategy.

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