Reader Rudolph Harrier comments on a previous post:
What makes things worse is that Zoomers have only learned how to deal with existing services. Music sites everywhere are littered with comments of “I heard a song I liked but it’s not on Spotify so how can I listen to it again?” They are so used to dealing with phones that concepts like opening a zip file or using the print screen function are beyond them.
Now I’m not blaming them, since they were raised in a world where they had little choice but to do that. Companies are heavily pushing lowest common denominator subscription services while simultaneously forcing you to go through them for all repairs. (Can ANYONE do anything beyond the most basic of maintenance on a new car?)
But this puts them in an extremely bad position when things break down. If your conception of getting food is to use UberEats, and UberEats is no more, what then? You see the same thing on the tech side where most tech jobs consist of using standardized tools, existing cloud services, with minor local or cosmetic differences. But if the basic architecture goes down, these skills are worthless.
The bright side is that the Zoomers who are self motivated enough to look into this stuff do tend to be pretty knowledgeable through self-teaching, but they are in the minority.
Millennials are also in a bad position, but this is more because they’ve intentionally allowed their survival skills to atrophy, rather than never learning them in the first place.
For Gen Y the question is whether we can figure out that things need to be fixed by replacing them with something new, rather than trying to clumsily reimplement the old broken system.
My comment:
Rudolph’s observations of the breakdown in progress harken back to my identification of Gen Y as an Artist-Adaptive generation.
The vision of our future we were raised to expect was living the Boomer dream of working a steady 9-5 and coming home to a raised ranch in the suburbs, but in a static 1990s Liberalism that extended forever.
As it turns out, the future had other plans. Everybody who isn’t hopelessly delusional knows it now.
All civilizations have to die, and the one we grew up in suffered a mortal wound sometime around 1997.
Most Ys want to cope with the implosion of the world they grew up in by hoarding Star Wars toys and running Back to the Future on a constant loop.
But that retrograde behavior isn’t serving anyone.
Like the last priests of Atlantis, history has chosen us to pass on some vestige of pre-collapse civilization.
We didn’t ask for the job, and most of us don’t want it, but that’s not our call. Fate has spoken.
And if we don’t speak to younger generations, they will live out their lives thinking that it has to be this way, because they’ll never know it ever was any other way.
You can talk to your kids, younger cousins, and even younger siblings about what it was like to just get on a plane without a strip search.
Or use a payphone.
Or compose a term paper on a typewriter.
Or socialize with friends without a prearranged playdate or an SMS planning session, but instead just going to the local hangout spot on a Saturday afternoon and seeing who showed up.
Remember when there were no commercials before movies – just trailers for other films you looked forward to seeing?
Remember when pretty much every business provided at least decent service, and every institution but the DMV could be counted on to perform its intended function?
It used to be that way, and therefore it can be that way.
Don’t let the world forget.
Pass it on.
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