They Never Got Their Own Culture

We rag pretty hard on kids these days.

They're always on their phones. They consume instead of create. They don't go anywhere. They don't dress interestingly. They don't have great music scenes. They aren't building anything. They aren't rebelling.

And I'm starting to think that's probably undeserved.

I'm one of the last Gen Xers. I grew up at a strange moment in history where I wasn't quite old enough to participate in the glory days of everything, but I was close enough to feel their glow.

I've always felt like I was born about ten years too late.

There were still frontiers, but I could see the footprints of the people who had gotten there first.

Music was still changing. So was fashion. Technology was visibly evolving in front of us. New forms of media appeared. Entire subcultures could seemingly materialize overnight.

The Simpsons were once going to destroy the social fabric of Western civilization.

Now they're wholesome family entertainment.

I can't imagine what it feels like to be born in the new millennium.

Young people today never really had a chance to own their own culture.

That used to be one of the privileges of being young.

Your parents weren't supposed to understand your music. They weren't supposed to like your clothes. They weren't supposed to know what you were doing.

The confusion was part of the fun.

Now a kid discovers Nirvana and Dad says, "Great album."

He finds an old hip-hop record and Mom knows every word.

Baggy jeans come back and their parents tell them they wore them the first time.

I once tried to convince my own kid to get a mohawk for the summer.

He wouldn't do it.

Think about how badly we've fucked this up for them.

We're supposed to be horrified by the mohawk.

Instead we're suggesting it.

We never left.

Culture doesn't seem to replace itself anymore. It accumulates.

Every song is still available. Every movie. Every television show. Every fashion. Every aesthetic. Every subculture.

Punk isn't dangerous anymore. It's a Spotify category.

Everything rebellious eventually becomes something you can buy at the mall.

So what's left for a teenager to take from us?

Maybe that's why they don't seem particularly interested in expressing themselves through fashion. Yoga pants, joggers, hoodies, slides with socks — things that would have been social suicide when some of us were young.

Maybe they aren't failing to express themselves.

Maybe they're asking, what's the point?

Because the same thing has happened to accomplishment.

When I was young, being the best guitarist in your school meant something. You might actually believe you were exceptional.

Today your phone can introduce you to a twelve-year-old on the other side of the planet who can play something you can't even comprehend.

Exceptional has become ordinary because exceptional is what the algorithm shows us all day.

Sports records that once seemed superhuman fall. Kids train with techniques, equipment and information that professionals didn't have a generation ago. What once represented the limits of human performance becomes the starting point for the next generation.

And knowledge has done the same thing.

There was a time when someone with a manual, some intelligence and a whole lot of savvy could teach themselves a computer language and start building things.

Today, before you can reach the frontier of almost any mature field, you have to climb over decades of accumulated knowledge.

Programming isn't just programming.

It's operating systems, databases, networking, security, frameworks, libraries, cloud infrastructure, machine learning and layers upon layers of abstraction built by generations of people who came before you.

The frontier keeps moving farther away.

There was something powerful about the informed amateur — the person who knew enough to start fucking around but hadn't learned enough to know what couldn't be done.

We romanticize those people now.

The garage inventor.

The self-taught programmer.

The kid who picked up a guitar and accidentally created a new sound.

But we've spent decades professionalizing, specializing and optimizing everything.

Before you're allowed to push against the edge now, you're expected to spend years learning where the edge is.

Then we hand young people a device containing essentially the accumulated knowledge and culture of humanity and ask why they aren't more curious.

Maybe having everything at your fingertips isn't the advantage we think it is.

Maybe wonder requires a little scarcity.

Boredom probably did more for us than we realized.

There was fuck all else to do.

So you rode your bike somewhere. You started a terrible band. You built something stupid. You hung around a parking lot. You called somebody. You got lost. You found something.

Not because our generation was inherently more interesting.

Because the world still made us go looking.

Today's kids don't even get the luxury of believing something is impossible.

Artificial intelligence arrives — something that would have been literal science fiction during my childhood — and to them it's another app.

Of course it is.

They were born into a world where impossible things happen through software updates.

But there's one reason I suspect this entire argument might eventually prove wrong.

Every generation probably believes the map has been filled in.

We recognize the frontiers that mattered to us, so when those frontiers close we assume there aren't any left.

Maybe AI will actually lower the barriers again. Maybe young people won't need twenty years of specialization to navigate twenty different fields. Maybe knowing what question to ask will become as important as memorizing how everything underneath it works.

Maybe savvy gets another turn.

Or maybe the next great cultural movement is already happening and people my age can't see it.

I actually hope that's true.

Because if their music sounds terrible to us, their clothes look ridiculous, their technology seems pointless and whatever they're building makes absolutely no sense to their parents, then maybe we've finally done them a favour.

Maybe they'll finally have something that's theirs.

And this time, we should have the decency not to understand it.