Well, to be honest, I didn't understand it when I was a part of it. Which is why at 15 I was scratching and crawling my way out of it as fast as I could.
What I am observing is not a wholly new phenomena...I've met people my own age who are alarmingly immature, insensitive and out of touch with the world outside their circuit of modern-age suburbia. But, we are talking now about their kids...and, much of the time, they are even worse.
And what do you mean, you aren't special? Of course, you are special and if you know other people like yourself that is because you attract other people like yourself, not because people like yourself are abundant.
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Originally Posted by The_Jazz
First, to comment on the supposed threadjacks, I think it's interesting that the first thing people thought of was the late 1960's. My initial reaction was "gee, this is one of the central themes of War and Peace, at least as the evolution of Pierre goes".
In my book, this attitude is simply a part of the aging process. And it's partially true. The young are in the midst of their voyages of self-discovery. Older people have mostly arrived. Most of the young have no idea what they want from life or how to get it.
I don't think that it's escalated at all, MM. High school kids always stay the same age; the individuals age out of it, but there are always high school kids. Us older folks just notice it more because the differences between us and them grow more pronounced every day.
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I think there are factors at work in our society, including but not limited to the internet, that have caused this naturally occurring phenomena to funnel a bit. This is my own impression, but I have concurred it with other people...like my mother, who has witnessed three generations - her own, mine and now her grandchildren's. She has commented very often about the remarkable difference in attitudes, in values and in the sense of entitlement between her children and her children's children.
A good example of how fast things are changing is this: I have three daughters - 21, 18, and 8. A couple of months ago my eight year old came home from school and told me she was concerned about her weight because some of her friends were on diets. She is not overweight even in the slightest and neither are her friends. This is 2nd grade I'm talking about. I decided to ask her sisters about it and they were horrified. The first they remembered girls becoming truly self-conscious about their looks was in the 5th and 6th grades when they were getting ready to go to middle school. And this is in less than one generation. I know this isn't an isolated incident because there had been a discussion about it here on TFP months before my daughter came home and told me this.
I again purport that it is escalating. Granted, this isn't the scenario purported in the OP, but I think these things are rooted in the same causal phenomena.