they/them, over 30. Call me Wyrm. possibly mothman, probably a Taurus. texas. tags are infrequent to nonexistent. been a wildlife rehabilitator, worked retail insanity, and antique work. words are Difficult.
It’s so fucked up that digging a bunch of holes works so well at reversing desertification
I hate that so much discourse into fighting climate change is talking about bioenginerring a special kind of seaweed that removes microplastics or whatever other venture-capital-viable startup idea when we have known for forever about shit like digging crescent shaped holes to catch rainwater and turning barren land hospitable
We need to lay more blame for “Kids don’t know how computers work” at the feet of the people responsible: Google.
Google set out about a decade ago to push their (relatively unpopular) chromebooks by supplying them below-cost to schools for students, explicitly marketing them as being easy to restrict to certain activities, and in the offing, kids have now grown up in walled gardens, on glorified tablets that are designed to monetize and restrict every movement to maximize profit for one of the biggest companies in the world.
Tech literacy didn’t mysteriously vanish, it was fucking murdered for profit.
Maybe this is the wrong platform to pose this question given the average tumblr user but
Is it just me or did our generation (those of is who are currently 20-30 ish) just not get the opportunity to be young in the ‘standard’ sense?
Like, everyone I talk to who’s over 40 has all their wild stories about their teens and 20s, being young and dumb, and then I talk to my friends and coworkers and classmates, and we just… dont.
My mom tells stories of skipping school to sneak across the border and spend the day at a bar in Mexico. I was threatened with not being allowed to graduate because of senior ditch day. One of my friends had to go to his first hour class on senior ditch day because the teacher, who almost exclusively taught seniors, arranged a huge exam that day with no available makeup days, specifically to punish kids who took part in ditch day. Our wild and crazy ditch day was playing mini golf and then stopping for ice cream on our way back to one of our friends’ houses to play cards against humanity.
Don’t get me wrong, we had fun. But all of that, threats of not graduating, threats of failing classes over a single test, over some mini golf and ice cream?
Throughout high school and early in college, my friend group got kicked out of malls, stores, and even a parking lot just for being there wrong. Not being loud of disruptive. Not causing problems. Just being there too long, or without buying anything.
My mom graduated high school, after repeating her senior year, without a single grade above a D, and was offered a full ride scholarship to a state university to play on their women’s football team. I had a 3.8 GPA, multiple extracurriculars, a summer job, and over 100 hours of volunteer work, and barely got into that same university, and then couldn’t afford to go there anyway.
We’ve made getting into college so important and yet so difficult that kids are sacrificing their childhoods for it.
Then they become adults and it doesn’t go away. Your employer/ potential employers are searching your social media and internet presence so you’d better hope no one has ever posted a picture of you at a party, or with alcohol, or wearing revealing clothes, or whatever else they’ve deemed unprofessional. And if you want to go out it’s a 10 dollar cover and drinks are at least 8 dollars, and you need to tip if there’s any kind of live entertainment, who can afford to do all that regularly?
My physical therapist, when I was 18, told me about his 21st birthday, how the last thing he remembers is people taking body shots off him. I spent my 21st birthday alone, was in bed by 10pm because I had to be at work the next morning. My boss had already told me that they knew it was my 21st, and if I called out, she’d write me up for improper use of sick leave because you’re not allowed to use sick leave for a hangover. I don’t know anyone whose 21st birthday was a big deal. No one went out and partied for it.
I dont really know where I’m going with all of this. I guess I just don’t understand the point of it all. We spend our youth working hard to provide a future that we still can’t afford. We have to be responsible and professional as teenagers. And we get nothing out of it. We can’t afford life or friends or fun. At least our parents got to have fun being young and dumb, we just got groomed on kik.
So I’m not the only one noticing this. I wish I had an answer or at least something to say about it. But I dont. I’m just tired.
Original report (waybacked PDF) is from 2007. That’s Gen Z kids.
When I, Gen-Xer, was about 12 - in my rural home, I had about a three-mile range. (Could’ve pushed it to more, but didn’t want to walk that far.) In the city, it was about a mile. Not that anyone was checking; again, that was about the distance I wanted to walk, and besides, that covered all of “downtown.”
My kids? Closer to that 300 yards limit at the same age. Not because I wanted to restrict them, but we live next to a freeway on-ramp and between two sets of train tracks… and there is absolutely nothing kid-friendly within a half-mile for them to visit.
I spent my 21st birthday bar-hopping. My kids spent their 21st birthdays at home with a nice meal. I don’t think either of them wanted to go bar-hopping - but yeah, as a society, we’ve removed a LOT of teen-friendly options.
See also: End of Third Places, switch from video game arcades to home consoles (hey, then every kid has to buy their own copy–great for game-makers!), shutdown of malls or restrictions on youth at them, closure of public parks, reduced/removed after-school programs, etc. Plus the places that think it’s illegal for a 12-year-old to walk to the corner store unsupervised.
I am, however, DELIGHTED to hear that the booze & other vices industries are panicking over Gen Z not going out to party. Like, you spent 30-odd years removing all the places and ways people can hang out together and have fun outside of someone’s personal house, and… guess what, when people hit milestone events (graduation, milestone birthdays, job promotion, whatever), they don’t immediately flock to the Party Zone that they have never been welcome at. How shocking.
It sucks that Gen Z does not get to party, does not have good celebration options. REALLY sucks that that’s often because school or job has decided to tell them not to celebrate, rather than just not having places to go. I’m just not upset over party capitalism taking a hit.
Leverage had a lot of well-researched things to say about the real world, but the one I always come back to, from The Double Blind Job:
Sophie: These are not small fines. Last year, my department handled a case where the company had to pay out $2.5 billion.
Hoffman:
Oh, yeah. Everybody heard about that. But what the news didn’t tell you
is that that company made $16 billion on the same drug. That fine was
14% of the profit. 14%. That’s like tipping your waiter.
“A fine is a price” – John Rogers, creator of “Leverage”
In some countries the fines associated with things like parking tickets are defined in terms of the offender’s income, so that a ticket that might cost an average person $20 would cost a billionaire millions. I think we should do the same with corporate fines - if a company does something that breaks the law, it should be fined in proportion to how much it made from breaking the law, so that a company that makes 16B through illegal means gets fined, say, 18B for doing so.
I’ve always had chronic fatigue. I remember being twelve, and an adult mentioned how I couldn’t possibly know how tired they felt because adulthood brought levels of exhaustion I couldn’t imagine. I thought about that for days in fear, because I couldn’t remember the last time I didn’t feel tired.
Eventually I came to terms with the fact that I was just tired, and I couldn’t do as many things as everyone else. People called me lazy, and I knew that wasn’t true, but there’s only so many times you can say “I’m tired” before people think it’s an excuse. I don’t blame them. When a teenager does 20 hours of extracurriculars every week and only says “I’m too tired” when you ask them to do the dishes, it’s natural to think it’s an excuse. At some point, I started to think the same thing.
It didn’t matter that I could barely sit up. It was probably all in my head, and if I really wanted to, I could do it.
When I learned the name for it, chronic fatigue, I thought wow, people that have that must be miserable, because I am always tired and I cannot imagine what it would feel like if it were worse.
Spoiler alert, if you’ve been tired for a decade, it’s probably chronic fatigue.
Once I figured that out though, I thought of my energy as the same as everyone else’s, just smaller in quantity. And that might be true for some people, but I’ve figured out recently that it absolutely isn’t true for me.
I used to be like wow I have so much energy today I can do this whole list for sure! And then I’d do the dishes and have to lay down for 2 hours. Then I’d think I must gave misjudged that, I didn’t have as much energy as I thought.
But the thing is - I did have enough energy for more tasks, I just didn’t go about them properly.
With chronic fatigue, your maximum energy is obviously much smaller than the average person’s. Doing the dishes for you might use up the same percentage of energy that it takes to do all the daily chores for someone else.
If someone without chronic fatigue was to do all the daily chores, they would take breaks. Because otherwise, they’re sprinting a marathon for no reason and it would take way more energy than necessary. We have to do the same.
Put the cups in the dishwasher, take a break. Put the bowls in, take a break. So on and so forth. This may mean taking breaks every 2-5 minutes but afterwards, you get to not feel like you’ve run a marathon while carrying 4 people on your back.
Today, I had a moderate amount of energy. Under my old system of go till you drop, I probably could have done most of the dishes and wiped off the counter and then been dead to the world for the rest of the day.
Under the new system, I scooped litter boxes, cleaned out the fridge, took the trash out, cleaned the stove, and wiped off the counter and did all the dishes. And after all that, I still had it in me to make a simple dinner, unload the dishwasher, and tidy the kitchen.
It was complete and utter insanity. Just because I sat down whenever I felt myself getting more tired than I already was.
All this to say, take fucking breaks. It’s time to unlearn the ceaseless productivity bullshit that capitalism has shoved down our throats. Its actively counterproductive. Just sit down. Drink some water. Rest your body when it needs to rest.
There will still be days where there is nothing to do but rest, and days where half a load of dishes is absolutely the most I can do. But this method has really helped me minimize those, which is so incredibly relieving.
if you told diogenes the cynic about being trans he’d be like “lol that’s a sick troll you’re epic” and you’d be like “diogenes no i’m serious” and he’d be like “lol that’s even better lmao those guys are so mad about it” and then he’d start going by new original neopronouns every single day specifically to piss off the whole symposium
I just had an idea for a really dumb comedy sketch where a transphobe starts ranting about what really makes a women a woman, and diogenes returns each time with a different cis woman or outwardly femme intersex person that doesn’t meet the criteria saying “behold, a man!”
“a woman has XX chromosomes”
*Diogenes with an androgen insensitive XY cis woman*: behold, a man!
“Nono, a woman can bear children!”
*Diogenes with someone who has medical complications associated with pregnancy*: “behold, a man!”
“nono, a woman produces the large gamete”
*Diogenes with a postmenopausal cis woman* “behold, a man!”
