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

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

but that's an argument for another message board

it doesn't matter what era I was born in, would still be a fool and make the same mistakes and live with the bad consequences. Halfway ready to fucking top myself, but still smiling.

if i was 16 and had the internet? i would never ever ever leave my room for one single minute and i would have to have reconstructive hand surgery at 17. on the other hand (lol), i would know more about music and movies by 18 than i know now at 50-something.

haha scott said what I was going to say: i think the amount of easily accessible pornography would make me an invalid if I were 16 years old now.

'why do I have hair down there?? none of these people do!!'

honestly i was a mess until basically yesterday and i don't think going back would make it any different now

actually if i were 16yo today i'd no doubt be paralyzed by the decision whether to go into debt for the rest of my life or skip college

i think the amount of easily accessible pornography would make me an invalid if I were 16 years old now.

back in the day we just found it in the woods iirc

Oh yeah, a 1984 Hustler was a real find in the park

Penthouse pop-up book was a great discovery

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

― CEO Greedwagon (Neanderthal)

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.

― This is Dance Anthems, have some respect (Camaraderie at Arms Length)

it makes me sad to see all the self-negging in this thread, y'all there is nothing wrong with any of you and none of you deserve to be slapped, at any age

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.

― frogbs

philosophically it's very much a "the only way hitler could have won world war ii was to not be hitler" kind of question, and honestly, in general i'm not terribly fond of counterfactuals. i guess if i had to justify asking the question (i don't, for the record) i'd say it gets down to the question of regret. not for myself, not for what i've done with my life, but the circumstances i grew up in were... far more fucked than i recognized at the time. circumstances are very fucked now, but in different ways.

idk, it's kind of easy for me to transport my parents in time, envision a version of my mom born in the late '70s, a version of my dad born in the late '60s. my parents weren't really defined by the ages they lived through. all the problems they had, they could just as easily have had 30 years later.

i do feel that the internet world and the "real world" are two separate places, just as much as i did in the mid '90s... not so much in the sense of who we _are_, but in the sense of how we're shaped by our material circumstances. in the mid '90s for me, the internet was just so much better than "real life". all the time i felt like i had to put on a fake persona, pretend to be someone i wasn't, to try and conform to the social expectations of the people around me. had to mask. on the internet, i felt much more like i could be my authentic self. the weird thing is that in retrospect i absolutely was _not_ being my authentic self, since i consistently presented as male online. well. mostly consistently.

online-only relationships? not many. i had a brief irc correspondence with a girl (well, someone who presented as such, at the time - no clue about today) who liked boys in dresses. there have always been people out there like that, they've always been pretty important to a lot of transfemmes, but it was a rare thing. that particular online thing was a bad idea for a number of reasons. when i try to think about ways i could have figured shit out and transitioned back when i was younger, chance encounters like that come to mind.

i was definitely a bit of a hikikomori avant le lettre (yay Lehnworter), though i wouldn't say "ahead of my time". if only because i'm suspicious of teleology. i do think there were, in retrospect, practical reasons for it. autistic, gender dysphoric, heavily traumatized, i mean, it kind of makes sense that i didn't get out much. i'm also pretty good with words so it makes sense that i spent so much time behind a screen. as much as a lot of my behavior is a lot more common in these times, though, i don't really get a sense i would have "fit in" any more today than i did 30 years ago.

the weird thing is that today, i do feel a lot more comfortable in real-world settings than i do online. i think partly it's because online life has genuinely gotten hellish, mediated by corporations that push people to tear each other apart for their own profit. you know, back in the golden days of ilx, when we tore each other apart, we did it for the sheer love of it. and also because we were fucked up people who hated ourselves and each other. not so different from the youth of today, now, are we? hell, it even turns out that a lot more of us are queer than we could have imagined at the time. (queerness and self-loathing being pretty correlated and all.) a lot of the toxic bullshit that was just part of everyday life back then has migrated online and gotten more toxic and virulent as a result. at the same time i do think people are maybe less assholish in person. the internet provides a perfect outlet for all our worst tendencies. i feel like for a lot of people, our online depictions of ourselves are not dissimilar from dorian gray's picture. not intentionally so! i don't think people genuinely set out to be the horrible people we often are online. it's just... the medium. the "message" is hatred, cruelty, bigotry, all done for the profit of a few corporations who have genuinely been able to shape the internet in _their_ image.

idk that's a little bit ranty. the main thing i get from today's youth, and again this is something that i experienced a lot... is that so. many. people. are completely starved of loving touch. it's endemic among trans women in particular, but i think it's also something the youth experience a lot as well. like people genuinely need loving touch. i'm autistic as hell and i _absolutely_ need loving touch and i have a hard time getting it. particularly since the sorts of loving touch i need don't necessarily line up well with NT social norms.

hell if i know from the autism thing. if it was always there and we didn't notice it or if things have just changed. my neurodiverse queer physical therapist says that it's a common thing, that some people don't have much space in their cerebellum. i haven't had a brain MRI or CT or anything but i guess it's possible that my ability to have an encyclopedic knowledge of 1970s progressive rock came at the expense of the brain cells that allow other people to walk in a straight line. i do feel overwhelmed a lot at the pace and complexity of today's world. maybe it is just me being old. i'm not nostalgic. i don't things were better in the "old days". when i try to imagine someone from the 19th century transported to today, it involves them being overwhelmed by the noise and chaos that we mostly take for granted. probably that's just a reflection on me.

as far as not wanting to admit one has fucked up... i don't know that it _helps_ in a lot of cases to admit one's mistakes. one of the things i see a lot is that when someone makes a mistake, _particularly_ when they belong to a marginalized group, they're labelled and judged forever for that mistake, and everything else they've done suddenly stops counting. you can call that being "cancelled" or whatever but there is this expectation of _perfection_ that isn't realistic. but it's also understandable because of the way the profit-driven social internet structurally centralizes conflict. it's really, genuinely baked into the model at its core. people just "being better people" isn't going to change that. that belief, to me, serves to deflect responsibility from the structural factors at play.

would i listen to music if i was 16? hell, i don't listen to music _now_. i 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. these shitty old white dudes who abused women, it makes sense that all the people who stan classic rock now are white male conservative shitheads. as much as PINK FLOYD RULES nowadays there are... better sounds, better ideas. more accessible ways of understanding the world. god, there was no way i could have watched _ways of seeing_ when i was 16. now? the only thing keeping me from doing it is time. never enough time. constantly being pulled in twelve directions at once. maybe it's my ADHD but god almighty i am surrounded by _endlessly_ fascinating things, of course i'm going to want to know more about them

fuck rock bands playing the super bowl, bring back brass bands doing duke ellington tributes like in 1975. i've _watched_ that. i can fucking _watch_ that, today, in 2024, and i've done that.

green day, yeah. weezer. i know this... she's in her 20s, but she's super into weezer. god help me if i can understand it.

if i was 16 and had the internet? i would never ever ever leave my room for one single minute and i would have to have reconstructive hand surgery at 17.

― scott seward

fwiw even though i didn't have the internet at 16, i had BBSes, which had pornography. didn't ruin my hands any more than TV ruined my eyes. (my eyes are trash-tier, but TV has nothing to do with it.) i know there are those fucked up 4chan trans girls who are filled with self-loathing because they don't look like their favorite anime waifu. i, on the other hand, am filled with self-loathing because of things like my favorite tv show as a child and the best picture oscar winner of 1991. there's a lot of toxic, awful porn - i mean i'm a _trans woman_, even today you don't find "trans porn" you find t-slur porn - and it does have negative effects, and it's not the root of all evil.

the other thing is that i'm actually thinking of getting some LDR stuff going on... it seemed really stupid for a while given the surfeit of lampreys hot queer people around here, but it's always Complicated... physical distance kind of insulates one from a lot of Complications, and even without direct touch i find that just being able to talk with someone about, uh, shared intimate interests can be of tremendous benefit. i mean hell yeah i'll send lewds. now that i think about it _that_ would be the complicated thing about being 16 for sure. i've seen most of my friends' tits. that shit don't fly when someone's a minor.

I cannot really imagine how my parents would be without the Vietnam War, or my grandparents without WWII. The stuff they went through shaped who they were. My father was born in Los Alamos, because HIS father was tangentially involved in making a rather large bomb. Not stating this as a boast, just facts.

Not sure how I was self-negging, Kate, I am at peace with being a boring middle-aged chubby bald man, no use pretending otherwise.

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.