I remember back in the day I had LiveJournal blog. I used to throw all of my teenage angst at that blog. I remember some of the posts on there were just lists of things I hated, and lists of people I wished died. It's weird looking back on the memories of these things with a now more mature mind. I feel it was healthy to get that out rather than bottle it up at that age, and seeing as only my close friends had a link to the page, I didn't really worry about people seeing it. Eventually some family members found it and made me delete it, but i had made a backup of it anyway.
I've always wondered how kids of the past generations did this sort of thing. They didn't have a huge digital platform to just puke their mental garbage onto, so what did they do? Did they start smoking or drinking, and just hold it all inside? Did they write in a diary or journal and hide it under their pillow? They must have done something with their thoughts.
That brings me to the children of today. These little fuckers have to create a whole fake life online, boasting about how amazing everything is, and how awesome their lives are. They're basically creating a product to sell out of their lives. I guess my generation did that with sites like Myspace and Vampirefreaks too, but it still seems different this time around. It all seems a little weird, but I guess that's what every generation says about the up and coming one. "This is why the kids are misbehaving" or "remember when it was this way and better". For my generation it felt like a giant thing for attention. Now it's not even just kids, but everyone throwing up pictures of what they ate, and a selfie in their expensive workout clothing in a gym mirror, or a throwback picture to that perfect vacation they went on that you 100% can't afford.
I was eating dinner at a sushi place last night and saw a big family of about eight people sitting down for dinner. There were three small girls, no older than six. They all had one of the newest iPhones in their hands and barely looked at their family or ate any food. I understand that phones are pretty much a part of life now, and not just some "cool thing that some friends at school have", but it was still just odd to see that. To those girls, they just have a thing that's part of their lives, and everyone else their age. To me, it seems like they shouldn't be anywhere near that shit until their much older. There's the old man in me, thinking that my generation did it better than this one.
Maybe we did, maybe the one before mine was better, we'll never know. The world keeps spinning, people keep being born into a weird world that's slowly on its way out, while the old generations of people fade out with it. There will always be something new that no one but the young kids understand, and everyone from the older generations is just going to have to quietly be grumpy about it while they slowly drive somewhere because they "don't trust those damn self driving cars".