Enough already! — Es reicht! / https://www.flickr.com/photos/29487767@N02/6872259969/

We were so much cooler.

Every Sunday, my goal is to do nothing. Nothing, as in making a sloth look hyperactive.

I track this non-activity by trying to get the least amount of steps possible on my FitBit. Any number south of 1,500 is a strong indicator of my complete lack of movement.

Finding all my media queues empty (damn you Hulu and Netflix), I was nervous that I would have to do something. Luckily, I remembered Amazon Prime Video.

Flipping through the available shows, I landed on the MTV reality show Are You the One?

After twenty minutes, knowing I would now watch the entire season, I thought to myself, “Fucking kids today.” Actual fucking kids. The entire show is about hooking up with each other until you find the “One.” They had a Boom-Boom Room set aside for sex, but the kids didn’t need it. It was like a scene out of Caligula. On basic cable.

It was awesome.

The day before at Donuts we got into a conversation about how it seemed that kids get into bad things much faster than we ever had. Real world examples of pre-teens hooked on heroin, drinking in the dark (so it didn’t show up on Facebook), and the fear of Snapchat.

I assume that our parents had similar conversations. We argued that the acceleration of technology, the speed of communication, and the availability of information, is game changing for kids. For many of us, our parents had these conversations at the advent of the Internet, cell phones, cable tv and email.

In 1999, American Pie had a story arc where a lead character setup a webcam to broadcast a sexual experience. He emailed the link to the entire school accidentally. Hijinx ensued.

In 2014, a throwaway line in a throwaway movie—Goodbye World—mentioned a Youtube video of a character having sex getting 20 million views as if it was unremarkable.

Kids today are different than us oldtimers. They experience things differently, and technology itself allows them to communicate differently.

Jeremy Searls, went down to the US Open of Surfing and interviewed kids about the event, and created this comedic, very meta, video.

(The video is super NSFW.)

Everyone’s behavior was web-based. — Jeremy Searle

Kids haven’t become bad. The world hasn’t gotten worse. It has just become faster and more visual. Ideas and conversations live as images and videos versus the text of Gopher, early Yahoo and even Web 2.0. We no longer have to read the web, we can now see and hear it, and take part in it.

The internet is no longer a thing that kids use and that we need to protect them from, but a place where they live. Where their identities form and their views on the world are molded.

While in gaming, augmented and virtual reality fit, they are not something that kids need. It is something adults need to understand how kids view the web.

We still see it as words and links and information. We find YouTube to be mystical. We can’t understand how a 18 year old demonstrating cheap DIY decorating projects can make so much money and be so important to so many. It’s just fucking YouTube after all.

Kids today live in the web, and we can’t understand it. Kids today are living walking memes, and it freaks us out.

But the world is not coming to an end. The overstimulated, oversexed, overdrugged teenager today is no different than the overstimulated, oversexed, overdrugged teenager of yesterday.

Who were us.