How stupid is Gen Z?

They're the most awkward generation skills ever. Zero social skills. Any conversation is met with a dead stare or a mumble.

They all dress like homeless and look unshowered.

Best to auto-ignore and let them rot in their parents' homes where they all live being working is too toxic.

They grew up in a world where screens replaced human connection. Where ghosting became the norm, instead of speaking up and being vulnerable. With a climate going to shit real, real fast (hello, 10th month of HOTTEST EVER in a row). They have absolutely nothing to look forward to: No housing, no affordable education, no climate, an upcoming shortage of potable water, AI replacing the MAJORITY of white collar jobs in the coming decade..

Everybody born between 1945 and 1970 has had it EASY compared to the myriad of challenges this generation, and the next, are facing. The majority of DataLounge will be long dead before swaths of the Earth become unlivable.

They are petrified, and for many good reasons so. But sure, let's continue to shit on them.

They have bad hygiene too.

Just because they're petrified is no excuse for them not to learn.

I'd bet a lot of them were never taught basic life skills like laundry and cooking. They probably have no idea what a lint trap is. I wonder how many men, in generations past, never learned what a lint trap was since that was part of "women's work".

R2 victimizes them by taking all their responsibility away.

R2, love the dramatic reading

[quote] I'd bet a lot of them were never taught basic life skills like laundry and cooking.

I think they can learn? I hear there's this app called TikTok which shows instructional videos on how to do said chores.

Ask a Zoomer to address an envelope. You won't believe what they come up with. (Jimmy Kimmel had a segment on this last week, but I've seen this in person at work with college kids trying to address envelopes).

I think it's sad, OP.

Not that Gen Z kids don't know how to empty a lint trap, but that someone at your advanced age is still using some sort of communal laundry facility. They're young and starting out. At least they have an excuse for being poor.

Christ, what makes you think this is just the Zs??

When I rented out my FL house to go back up North to work for four years, they killed my central air because they never changed the filter. And these were Millennials.

I always say I don't trust anyone under 50, because I know what horrible educations they got, as well as how much their parents spoiled them.

R11 Weren't you a professor? That doesn't say much about your teaching skills.

Also R11, everyone over 50 had lead poisoning which is why so many are violent and stupid even into their old years. You're an example

They can't address an envelope?🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

They are not stupid. They are growing up in an entirely different world which most of us don't understand because it isn't the world we grew up in. Unfortunately for them the are the transitional generation. The generations that come after them will be in line with them, not us.

What is this "better world" that we, pre Millenial, Gen-Z folks grew up in?

Post Gen-X, these little fuckers have had everything handed to them. But to go on about our decaying environment and cripppling student loan debt etc. just gives them an excuse to be apathetic bumps on a log. Grow the fuck up.

Fight to change those things that are so evil. Isn't that what the Baby Boomers did (ignore the fact that most of them became devotees to the "Greed is Good" mantra of the 80's). Civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, all that happened because people were fed up. They sought to change the status quo instead of crying about it and playing the victim. Instead of worrying about mis-gendering, mis-pronouning, canceling people, take a stand on real issues that impact more than your little Tik Tok, IG metaverse.

I 'have noticed, despite being born into technology, they have zero troubleshooting skills. I (Gen-X) have had to show my millenial co-workers on how to go about troubleshooting issues, instead of just throwing my hands up and getting bitchy because something didn't work correctly the first time around.

It's interesting watching Baby Boomers and Gen X go on as if they weren't the two most privileged and comfortable generations in American history.

Born into post-WWII luxury. No draft. Abortion. Affordable housing and education. And all of it thanks to the Greatest Generation and Silents who fought for that for them and which they took away from everybody after them.

R18 No draft ?

(TL;DR warning) R12, you can't teach kids who don't want to or are too lazy to learn.

Before an exam, my students would always ask me to give them a "study guide." I said, "Your notes are your study guide! What do you want -- a list of the answers to the questions on the test?"

Turns out that's exactly what they wanted, because that's what they'd been getting for years from their previous teachers (and their professors too, I imagine). I told them, "Look -- you're supposed to learn everything we go over in class and everything I assign you in the book. An exam is when I take a sampling of all the things you were supposed to learn and ask you questions on those things." What a concept!

And don't forget -- I wasn't allowed to fail anyone, and neither are most professors. So I know exactly what your degrees are worth. If you got a D (or, many times, even a C), you should have failed.

But my students learned -- because I actually made them do relevant things. One assignment was to attend a meeting of a government entity or a special interest group (which I approved ahead of time), get a picture of yourself with said individuals, and give a presentation to the class on what you learned. That was a big hit! Some went to county commissioner meetings or court trials, some went to groups like NORML, one straight guy went to Orlando Gay Pride, you get the idea. The government officials were thrilled to have young people attend their meetings, and gave tons of praise to my students just for being there. They had a blast. And I had lots of other learning activities in my classes as well.

R12, you can think whatever you want when you've only been in the back of the room. Stand in the front for awhile -- you might learn something.

r20 Kudos to the project to get out of the classroom and into the real world! What a fantastic way to learn.

That's kinesthetic learning, R21. and lots of students learn better that way. The trick is to make American Government 101 relevant to them, and not just boring memorization (although there's a lot of that as well). The instructor needs to show them that there's a good reason to learn the stuff -- otherwise, why would they bother? I'm still trying to figure out why I had to learn algebra in high school.

And thanks for the compliment. I really miss teaching. But with the environment the way it is now, I would never even dare to walk into a classroom. I was always always always out to my students (it is a civil rights issue, after all), which is why I was never offered a tenure-track position here in FL. It's a shame, but whaddya gonna do? Working as a statistician paid better anyway.

My cunt relative is raising a loser son in her image. He uses both he/him and they/them pronouns.

Can someone please explain what he's trying to autistically signal to the world?

r22 I had a geography teacher in middle/high school that truly believed that "geography is out there, not in the classroom." He made us do some great projects out in the real world. I think I owe my love for our physical world to his tutelage.

In the real,world how many are doing laundry somewhere, open the lint catcher, and just know it was a small army of GenZ that have uniform all refused to empty the lint catcher?

And let’s face it it’s the person that is starting the wash that needs to check the lint catcher not those who are already done.

I call bullshit or another lame attempt to start a thread by making up shit. Is everyone a liar?

DL the home of BullShit and make believe.

r25 Signed: Butt-hurt GenZ. Don't call me out on my ineptness. I'm fragile.

I live in apartment building with shared laundry. And Swiss style, there is a schedule posted with times allotted to each apartment.

Not a single Gen Z tenant knows how to do use either a washer or dry correctly, nor how to read a posted schedule.

Furthermore, if you point out that the person who is scheduled to do his or her laundry cannot because the machines are occupied, the Gen Z person using the machines is not cool about it - deflecting ("I need to do my laundry and the room was empty") and suspicious/offensive ("its suspicious you identified it was me, because I am .... black, arab, woman...etc").

Are you kidding me? I remember hearing in the 90s my aunt complaining about some roommate who didn't know to empty the lint trap.

Younger generations have always been looked at skeptically by older generations. Gen Z sucks because social media sucks.

Looking at teenagers from older times versus now, I really don't see a lot of difference.

[quote] It's interesting watching Baby Boomers and Gen X go on as if they weren't the two most privileged and comfortable generations in American history.

No as if necessary. We weren’t.

I didn’t live at home until my 30s, I paid off my student loans, my parents didn’t pay my rent and phone bill, I got jobs and kept them. And I didn’t make an industry of blaming my parent for everything I didn’t like about my life.

I had to research and find information in high school and college, go to the library and read. I couldn’t sit on my ass and google everything. I had to write my own papers. I couldn’t buy them or copy and paste from online.

If you think there isn’t a huge chasm in work ethic starting with millennials, your head is in the sand.

R29

See honest real,life impacting issues. Not some BS about lint.

I directed a play in 1993 and had to teach a high school senior girl how to use a broom.

Young people are always seen as stupid and useless by the elders. And rightly so. And the young repay in kind. It’s maybe worse today with social media but it’s hardly only GenZ driving that worse.

The silly the dumb the one note nellies thrive on DL

My son is Gen Alpha and I have the impression that he and his peers view Genzers as total pussies.

Im fairly confident that all of you come across a good number of competent younger people in your day to day lives and utterly ignore them because you're only looking for evidence that supports your predecided diagnosis of their generations.

Why is OP letting random Gen Z-ers use his dryer?

R34, that's what everybody does to all generations not their own!

I think you should pay attention to your own problems, and avoid stalking young adults.

Yeah, you... you.... CREEPERS, you!!

Unfortunately, R34, none of these geniuses work at deli counters where they understand what container to use when you ask for a pound of something. There's a bagel deli where the counter worker has never gotten my order right. I always have to go over the items after they're bagged.

. Let's not talk about the ability to make change.

Why would you be so proximate to one that you're cleaning its lint trap, OP?

Is it your granddaughter?

At least the social, employment and personal issues of the Gen Z generation have distracted from the old commonplaces of whose grocery line to avoid based on the checkers' wearing false eyelashes, a wig hat and never giving eye contact as they ring up the same item three times and mash the bread under canned goods.

When everyone is equal there is no racism or sexism!

Complain all you want about Baby Boomers, Millennials and Gen Whatevers.

For me the nightmare of dealing with Gen Aniston is the worst!

At this stage of my life I never interact with them and even rarely see them.

i agree but i'm also tired of this. i guess i wish that there was intergenerational sympathy instead of this pathetic shitflinging. many zoomers are absolutely furious about the horseshit way they've been brought up and conditioned to be weak and helpless by the gutted and overstressed education system. i don't want to really think this through right now but i think it's true that a lot of you people are sad and lonely and it's easy to get off on cheaply putting young people down or whatever but you're acting like the same ghoul that cut you down when you were young and trying to establish yourself in the world. But this will keep going on. And the same vicious people will in another moment express bemusement - why can't people get along, why is our culture so ugly and antagonistic, blah blah blah. Get a life get a new fucking thing to post about you tired rotten stupid cliche OLD MISERABLE FRUITCAKE

there are like a dozen of these stupid ass threads a day.; shut up and fade into irrelevancy. i was already sick of you when you decided in 1995 that you weren't going to update your mind at all.

Boomers started all this shit when they got on Facebook and kept reposting that Boomer anthem 'anonymous letter' that talked about how tough they were compared to the generations that came after theirs.

You would think drinking out of a garden hose in their youth was their crowning glory-- as if it were their generation's equivalent to Flander's Fields or Omaha Beach! Give me a fucking break.

As always, not ALL boomers, these are generalizations. Let's not shit on everyone just because of their age, just as you wouldn't want someone assuming the worst about you for this or that. That should be done on a case-by-case basis.

OP our dicks get hard so we win gran

They are gorgeous with big hard dicks and big luscious lips. AND they don't have common sense about mechanical machines. But yes they have intuition about electronic gadgets and master them at lightening speed. But they can have poor spacial reasoning - in the real world - not dextrously fast at all. But yes they can be very chill about the variety of humans and can be very openminded.

See how this works?

r46 actually, Gen-X's claim to fame is that we drank out of garden hoses. Get your generational prejudices correct, at least.

For the “I put myself through college” crowd: Tuition was a quarter to a third of what it is today, while salaries haven’t tripled or quadrupled. Rente were about 20-30% of your income, not 50-60%.

Rents*

I don't envy them, growing up in a world where you have to have a master's degree to do the sh*tty job their parents did and didn't have a degree, and go half a decade or a decade in debt, to pay for. They will never be able to own a house alone, in a competitive major US city without a co-signer, with the income from the sh*tty job. They are good at tech but not peopling. But, we all know here on the DL that peopling is tiring and overrated, and most of us don't like it if tell the truth. People are energy and time drains, with a few exceptions. We've done fucked the environment and the weather and the political systems but hey. They're vilified because they're upset about it? I'm Gen X and we didn't do much to help things, ourselves. Our Boomer or Greatest Gen parents had it all and they kept the status quo going. We didn't stop them. Now they're scared old voters and fall for the scare news, every time.

Equivalent tuition to what I paid in 1967 is 28k without housing or financial aid. No loan forgiveness. Shove it.

I didn't have a hard time paying out-of-state tuition in 1978. It was over $10,000 a year more than for an in-state student. I worked a thirty hour a week part-time job all four years; it forced me to learn time management. I knew if I didn't study hard, I would have flunked out and lost that investment I was making. I also did odd jobs for people. I only went out to party one night a week. I shopped at the discount stores. People thought I was "square", but I only had an $8,000 debt when I was graduated, and I paid that off in three years. So, it bothers me when people can't pay off their student debt, after partying four times a week, going on Spring Break, buying new clothes, going to restaurants when their dining expenses were already paid for, etc. etc. etc....

I don't mean to be a hard-ass, but my grandparents and parents lived through the depression and World War Two; I knew what sacrifices they made when they were younger. I could live in a limited life for a couple of years, and then use my education to grow wealth afterward. I didn't need to worry about student debt.

In fairness to the wee ones, I only address envelopes maybe a few times a year (thank you notes after holidays, mainly). All my bills are on auto-pay. I don't think it's necessarily a sign of any apocalyptic decline in general skills.

Milton-Bradley just announced a new, “simpler” version of their Scrabble board game, aimed at being more attractive to Gen Z players who might feel intimidated by competition and big words, and enabling them to play by being given descriptive hints on cards to think of words and working on teams so there’s more of a word-contribution collective effort. In effect, dumbing the game down to meet Z’ers’ attention spans and more restricted vocabularies.

It's millennials' turn to criticize and wonder about what these new young idiots are doing.

The boomers and Gen X had a grand old time doing it to us. Now it's our turn.

OP = angry elderly janitor