What would you be like as a 16-year-old today?

Kate, you say that, but I am reasonably certain you went to middle school or junior high. You almost certainly visited a shopping mall or a department store at some point.

The version of me born in 2008 would be intolerable to the version of me born in 1971. He would be much more stridently left-wing than teenaged me was (I wasn't an edgelord, but I was definitely an asshole; still am from time to time), and probably be assumed to be some variety of queer by his small circle of friends. I hope he wouldn't listen to shit like 100 gecs, but he probably would. I would find it a great struggle to resist slapping him when he wouldn't shut up about whatever it was he wouldn't shut up about at any given moment. I would be praying for him to hurry up and become a surly, glowering hermit.

I think growing up in today’s world would be … mostly terrible for me.

There times I wish I’d been a bit earlier, but am glad I wasn’t born any later. For context, I didn’t experience the internet until arriving in college… in fall 1995, and that wasn’t at all “the internet” as we know it today.

Been “born”, obv

Pretty much every teenager I know is LBGTQ+ and has changed their name to something like Ash, Jinx, Sphinx, or Lynx. They are all so sweet and smart and kind.

this is the great part of today's youth culture.. I remember in high school how my buddies (including myself) absolutely peppered our sentences with homophobic slurs. Not proud of it, but that's how we talked, not even realizing that a certain percentage of my fellow students were struggling with their identities.. we sure weren't helping them

I knew no 'out' people in high school, but a ton of people that we pretty much knew that had to wait until college to come out, because my school wasn't particularly open to gay people. the culture was very dudebro.

suspect i'd be about the same tbh. though i'd likely be on RYM instead of here, sad to think about

i guess i wasn't even on here yet at 16 actually. i was on video game music boards. it'd be discords now

I got a lot of my musical interests from my dad, who had a voluminous record collection. I saw the Stones not long after my 16th birthday in 1981. I can't think of what the equivalent would be today, but that would probably be my main interest.

I had a lot of tough times in elementary and middle school (tapering off when high school came) because people just liked to fuck with me - I was probably too naive, and guileless, in interactions with classmates. The means to fuck with people like that have multiplied exponentially since the 80s/90s - now it can be done at night! On weekends! It’s unimaginable to me.

Kate, you say that, but I am reasonably certain you went to middle school or junior high. You almost certainly visited a shopping mall or a department store at some point.

― alpaca lips now (Ye Mad Puffin)

i mean if you're genuinely confused i didn't _enjoy_ any of that shit, i don't have _nostalgia_ for any of that shit. yes, i went to shopping malls. they were very loud and unpleasant and gave me a lot of sensory overload, because i'm autistic. i'd just as soon "hang out" in a wind tunnel.

if you're at all interested in my primary education, from 2nd-8th grade i went to a catholic "parochial school". i was in the same building and had basically the same teachers that whole time period. they may have called a couple years of that "junior high" but functionally speaking there wasn't really any difference, except that there were fewer and fewer people the older i got. there were 9 people at my 8th grade graduation. i don't know what you mean by "middle school" as an experience that i would have had that today's kids wouldn't. i honestly didn't know that they don't _have_ "middle school" these days.

The version of me born in 2008 would be intolerable to the version of me born in 1971. He would be much more stridently left-wing than teenaged me was (I wasn't an edgelord, but I was definitely an asshole; still am from time to time), and probably be assumed to be some variety of queer by his small circle of friends. I hope he wouldn't listen to shit like 100 gecs, but he probably would. I would find it a great struggle to resist slapping him when he wouldn't shut up about whatever it was he wouldn't shut up about at any given moment. I would be praying for him to hurry up and become a surly, glowering hermit.

― Tahuti Watches L&O:SVU Reruns Without His Ape (unperson)

i can't imagine wanting to slap my past self. my past self went through enough shit as it was. my past self deserves kindness, compassion, and love, which weren't things they got a whole hell of a lot of. that's how i feel.

suspect i'd be about the same tbh. though i'd likely be on RYM instead of here, sad to think about

― ciderpress

lol, i basically came here from rym. still pop by there from time to time. they're much younger than me, there's a whole new generation of people there who are into much different stuff.

autistic

(Side note to my note: I’m really enjoying this Village Voice oral history but man, in the paper’s prime era, I would not have been able to hang.)

xxp Yeah, I had a regular cast of tormentors. Not sure how many of them would have been able to carry their torment over to the internet; their style was more punching in the back of the head.

i'm sure they would find a way

i can't imagine wanting to slap my past self.

well, unperson is imagining wanting to slap his future self

the trap i'm falling into here is imagining myself as 8-10 more than 16

or 11-12 maybe

16 was completely different. my interests were a lot less important for once than my friends, my crush, getting high

I knew no 'out' people in high school, but a ton of people that we pretty much knew that had to wait until college to come out, because my school wasn't particularly open to gay people. the culture was very dudebro.

this is huge. basically there were a few out kids at my school, and they were all very 'scene gay'

the boy i had a crush on was very dudebro skate kid who went to my cousin's school and used homophobic slurs a lot but the way he looked at me told another story and later he did tell me he was into boys. that was sooo important because there was nobody else in my peer group, it was like throwing me a life preserver

the weed thing, i do wonder because i got really into it, if i had a few dollars it was going toward substance abuse. but like this was a moment where weed was still kind of a psychonaut-lite thing that appealed to kids who wanted to explore consciousness, but was shifting toward becoming a couch potato thing that appealed to kids who wanted to sit around and play ps2. i wasn't that- maybe i never would have touched it.

i just don't know exactly what the weed did to me psychologically lol. never know...

that's what i used to think for a lon g time but i'm getting the picture maybe & ain't a pretty picture!

grateful to have had those years before the internet became "this"

I don’t have a ton of fond memories of a kid but I am grateful for (and miss) touching grass

this is the great part of today's youth culture.. I remember in high school how my buddies (including myself) absolutely peppered our sentences with homophobic slurs. Not proud of it, but that's how we talked, not even realizing that a certain percentage of my fellow students were struggling with their identities.. we sure weren't helping them

― Andy the Grasshopper, Tuesday, March 5, 2024 3:52 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah hard to overstate how addicted we were to calling everything "gay" back then, idk how to explain this exactly but it definitely seemed like a lot of mainstream culture portrayed queerness as some weird life choice and not a thing you didn't actually have control over

thing was back then I didn't really know anyone who was out of the closet. there was just one person at my high school who I didn't really know because he was a grade above me. but we were in one class together and I used a gay slur in front of him, not directed *towards* him but rather at someone else for a dumb reason, like someone who said they liked Limp Bizkit. anyway the gay guy turned around and acted very offended - my face dropped and he just started laughing. but I never forgot how horrible that felt and didn't say the word again. like my dumb ass didn't even consider a gay person might hear it and not like it. again, very few people were out of the closet. but it's not like that now!

I've never respected myself but I would slap around me from age 16 - 27

i was a fucking mess age 16 and would probably be the same as a teen today tbh but i think it'd be a much better quality of mess, for the reasons that a few folks have mentioned above. i realised i was trans as an adult and i'm pretty goddamn certain i'd have realised a lot earlier if there had been more queerness around when i was younger. there weren't any out queers at my high school at all. i didn't meet an out gay person until i was in my twenties and didn't meet an out trans person (or indeed fully understand what transness was) until i was in my thirties.

i was very isolated as a sixteen year old and it's hard to be sure but i think i'd be a lot less isolated as a teen these days, what with all this internet business and all. easier to find your people today than when you're living in a small Scottish town in the nineties and social media isn't a thing yet. would have been nice to have had friends when i was sixteen

When I was 16 I was weird, awkward and confused and did not fit in with anyone I knew, not even my friends. Same deal up to my early 20s.

This last year I've been to gigs, fan events and protests in London and have discovered that there are now thousands of young people who dress and act like me when I was that age and who I would have fitted in with fine (but not now I am a boring middle-aged chubby bald man obvs) - so that has been kind of a bittersweet discovery, a pyrrhic vindication with no use except to confirm that the late 90s in England were A Bad Time Actually.

where does this 16 year old me today live and who with

My assumption is that you're supposed to imagine you live in the same circumstances you did then, just [x] years in the future. Which means that the first suspension of disbelief I have to overcome is picturing people who are somehow "my parents", but born in 1964 and 1967 instead of 1928 and 1931.

for starters

and then everything else

I guess the real question is, does this make you fundamentally a different person? as I mentioned my son is very much like me but he is growing up in a world where basically all the information in the universe is at your fingertips. he can look up sports stuff, find videos of anything he wants, listen to any music that's ever existed, find the answers to anything he's curious about, all in an instant. I think having that ability does change your brain chemistry somewhat.

I agree, I've seen it in all of my kids as they've grown into adulthood. The way they navigate the world is radically different than the way I did at their ages. That has to have an effect on cognition.

I mean things seem so different now. I take them roller skating and all the teens there who aren't in the rink are on their phones. even while talking to each other. when I was that age I was fairly online but it felt like the internet world and the real world were two separate places. the idea of meeting someone who I only knew online seemed like such a radical idea; nowadays that's how most couples meet. hell the idea of using your real name online was weird. even in my son's 3rd grade class it seems like half the kids are talking in memes. my 1st grader wanted to film a video of her doing gymnastics and at the end she said "don't forget to give me a thumbs up!" and I was like "hey where'd you learn that?"...I mean it's not like we just let them watch YouTube all day. of course she wouldn't tell me. but yeah social media engagement being some sort of currency now I think really rewires the way they think. there was an article I read about Mr. Beast which really drove this home - the gist of it is this guy is just really really good at playing the game, he knows the algorithm, he knows what gets clicks, and his entire persona becomes whatever is championed by the algorithm. to a smaller degree this sort of thing seems to be happening with a lot of kids these days.

It feels so hopelessly arbitrary: I could be like anything at 16 now, depending on what was influencing me. I was 16 in 1980, having just got interested in music in the 77 - 79 punk and post-punk wave. And my perception of it was - filtered through John Peel and music papers - that this music revolution was the most exciting thing in the world at the time. Not just the music, but the fashions, the attitudes and the lifestyles etc... It's quite possible I might not even be that interested in music at 16 now.

Jim and frog, to current teens the phone IS real life and IS other people. What are they looking at when they look at their phones? Texts from people, chats with people, stuff created by... people.

Personally I am tired of the trope of phones vs. life or phones vs. people. Phones are a means of accessing people and life.

tend to agree and would ask anyone who feels this very strongly to honestly ask themselves how theyd have been talking about video nasties or grunge or cable tv or whatever if the question was thrown back to being your current age now when you were 16

the phone IS real life

ehh, read a depressing article about kids in China that lock themselves in the bathroom with chatbots

nothing new about depressing articles about what kids are doing somewhere with this new technology

I remember v much treating electronic communication as 'not real life' at that age, even when it involved people I knew IRL, until the one day two formerly good friends began tearing into each other on an mIRC channel over one having taken the other's g/f, and the lasting real world fallout from that, including leading one of the friends to walk to the restaurant the other worked at and say simply "you won", then walk away with nobody able to find him for hours, and....yeah, then I no longer felt that way.

(friend turned out to be ok, and in fact, I just msged him an hour ago - the other friend is my oldest friend).

there was also the time this Norwegian poster on a message board was complaining about his college and one of his professors showed up and threatened to get him expelled for the 'disparaging things he said'.

and Calum.

Oh I recognize the duplicity of 'darn kids these days' while I played hours of Pitfall on my Intellivision console

it's a very different form of social interaction - you're interacting with a bunch of people at once, many of whom you don't know, you're watching stuff that pretends to be spontaneous but obviously is not, you do things with the goal of going viral or getting a lot of likes which you do primarily not through "being yourself" but rather figuring out the shit that worked for other people. why do young people pull out their phones at every show or big event? because it's not about being there, it's about other people knowing you were there, curating their view of the person you try to present yourself as. then you add in all the filters and effects and camera tricks which make a person's social media persona completely unlike what a person actually looks like, plus the total context collapse which goes with online content from people you barely know...to me it's just a very different way of interacting with the world than what we're all used to. like I remember going to parties at 17 as opposed to going to parties at 27, when everyone was filming stuff and posting pictures and tagging everyone - it changes your mindset I guess. it's not all negative but idk it does seem stressful

“when I was that age I was fairly online but it felt like the internet world and the real world were two separate places.”

This is the thing

Apologies if am repeating myself, gang, but in 2020/2021 my daughter had a serious girlfriend that she never actually met or touched. This has been a strange time, so it is really hard for me to think about this topic without considering the weirdness of the last several years.

I do fucking think the omnipresence of social media is deleterious to mental health, only simply because pretty much everybody's online profile/persona is heavily sanitized and stage managed, and anybody outside of that mold who presents themselves a little more honestly and is more self-aware than others often feel that they don't measure up when comparing themselves. not realizing that they're comparing themselves to the people's 'airbrushed' personalities.

i've often said I have distrust for anybody who I've never seen stepping in it either publicly or electronically, because that person undoubtedly HAS fucked up, but went to great lengths to hide negative perceptions of them or influence other people to support their side of things. much like the actions of a very small, cult-like theatre collective in town that is essentially trying to tell people "don't work at these theatres we don't approve of...or else".

a serious girlfriend that she never actually met or touched

me on pornhub

I'd probably be too online (and on a lot of Discords instead of bulletin boards and forums?). I'd surely have learned to make beats/computer music earlier, and probably would have learned Ableton. I think I either wouldn't play drums, or I would be much better sooner because of all the resources and examples out there.

I really wonder if I would have learned to love reading if I would have had devices to haul around with me for solitary entertainment instead of books (probably not).

It's quite possible I might not even be that interested in music at 16 now.

I feel this one. The place music has in kids' lives I do think is pretty different. Kids still use music as a way to signal identity, to signal a difference from their younger selves, but they wear it more lightly somehow. It's hard to remember how hard it was to hear and track down certain music. That whole experience is gone. There's no secret knowledge. There's just no need to get wrapped up in it. Easy come, easy go.

It's also kind of strange to realise that the entire concept of rock bands is ancient history, a heritage act now. A curio from other times!

yeah, a rock band playing the Super Bowl will almost definitely never happen again

My 16-year-old isn't very interested in music unless it's in Japanese, Korean, or Chinese. Not my thing but I am happy that they are happy.

the entire concept of rock bands is ancient history

I actually know a bunch of friends' kids who are really into punk, Green Day, rock camps, etc... and the last time I saw the Linda Linda's, they had a pretty strong teen & preteen following. A buddy's 11 year old has a little denim punk vest with spikes and patches (including Korn)

Well I rest my case..

Actually it's not true there's no secret knowledge.. a glimpse at the DJ sets of our own residents or any others reveal zillions of songs and musicians I've never heard (and I Love Music!). Not quite sure how to put it into words..

I mean hasn't rock'n'roll always been ancient history? Creedence were doing rockabilly songs

i had really bad ocd and tics when i was 16. and my way of dealing with it was to self-medicate with lots and lots of drugs and alcohol. so who knows maybe the internet would have been better in the long run somehow? and i would have been able to google for medical help. i refused any and all psychiatric help. not that there was much. my parents halfheartedly tried to get me to go to a shrink. and they sent me away to a private school for fucked up kids like me for a year. that almost killed me. so, i shouldn't be too quick to think the internet would have been pure evil for me. you never know. my ocd would have loved the clicking soooooo much.

would i listen to music if i was 16? hell, i don't listen to music _now_

AMEN

just have too much else going on. music was an autistic fixation for me, a special interest i could sink my skill points into. i don't think... i think if i'd had other options, if i could have sunk my skill points into Gay like i'm doing now, i would have done that instead. i'm a little embarrassed about how much i know about rock music.

^^^

i have discovered that i actually really like natural history and earth science, who knew

I can't imagine I'd be any happier or well-adjusted than I was back then. I was quiet and awkward, social media and its intrusiveness would have been a nightmare (I don't much care for it now). I was often prone to vague misanthropy and a good deal of naivety, so it doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility that I'd get sucked into some of the darker online rabbit holes. I can easily imagine it happening, but maybe that's my brain's tendency towards bad scenarios and outcomes, idk.

having music on is essential to almost every waking moment of my life to the point that sometimes my mind starts whirring about the possibility of like - what if one day i just stop hearing

when there's no music on there's def some sort of brown noise or at least the AC and always the sound machine on waves - i struggle with silence, like why don't you just just drag me to hell right now

i think i also grew up in a modest and quiet household that didn't really participate in the joyful noise of community, so i prob overcompensate for that

i had really bad ocd and tics when i was 16. and my way of dealing with it was to self-medicate with lots and lots of drugs and alcohol. so who knows maybe the internet would have been better in the long run somehow? and i would have been able to google for medical help. i refused any and all psychiatric help. not that there was much. my parents halfheartedly tried to get me to go to a shrink. and they sent me away to a private school for fucked up kids like me for a year. that almost killed me. so, i shouldn't be too quick to think the internet would have been pure evil for me. you never know. my ocd would have loved the clicking soooooo much.

― scott seward, Thursday, March 7, 2024 1:59 PM (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

ocd p much derailed my whole life at 16 as well

i don't really have any judgements about cell phones - outside of the madness that is looking at your phone while driving which makes me want to kill - and i could put "cell phones" on the *things you don't care about* thread but never having a cell phone is one of the smartest things i've ever done for myself. because i never would have seen a tree for the past however many years people have had them. "know thyself" is something i read in a book once. as if the zillion hours i'm online for work all day - and clicking on newspapers and social media and youtube - and the gazillion hours of streaming t.v. isn't enough stimuli in my clicking-fried brain. the idea of going EVERYWHERE with that stuff makes me shiver with fear.
and, it goes without saying, if i was 16? i wouldn't even know what my family looked like.

assuming everything about my family was the same, i think 16 to adulthood would be harder. once i hit adulthood though maybe easier. i think i would run away from my family and the mormons sooner than i did. but maybe economically supporting myself would be harder. but then i would be exposed to more and have more opportunities potentially. i don't know.

much less likely i would go to byu for college. all the shit i went through would be the same, just earlier and more intensely maybe. i would maybe learn some sense sooner though and not make some of the huge financial mistakes i made in my 20s. i bet i would be an outdoors back to the land kind of guy in my 20s. i lived in moab for a year with people 10 years younger than me and met some folks like that. i don't like the world of smartphones now, i think as a young person today i would probably be militant about it.

My son is in high school, I think he's a lot like me, so I'd probably be a lot like he is now? Which is -- not that different from how I actually was at 16? A lot of this thread is about how different life is now for kids, and I think that's true for some kids, especially queer kids, but by and large my son's high school life looks a lot like I remember mine looking. Yeah he's on his phone a lot but *I* was on the phone a lot -- just like he does, I spent a lot of time as a kid in my room talking to friends, just with a different device. He goes to school, he plays some sports, he does homework, he hangs out at his friends' houses and watches movies and gets pizza -- there's nothing about it that's alien to me, nothing I can see, at least.