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I think this is inadequately handled.
https://www.thecut.com/article/gen-z-ipad-kids-generation-screen-time.html I just clicked through to his first link about iPad kids. On the issue of raising children in a big city like New York, my impression is that in the past the norm was to live near relatives and trusted acquaintances (co-religionist or co-ethnic, for instance), and let bands of roving kids wander the neighborhood with little parental involvement, to be called back for dinner. Now, they know people from different parts of town, meet up at a park, then go out to lunch together at a restaurant. That is not inherently lower effort than the previous arrangement. They might not have to keep their apartment clean or cook lunch, but now they have to keep children quiet in a restaurant, which doesn't really allow adult conversations.
The kids don't have permission to do what they would prefer, such as playing a game, so they settle for the permission they can get, to watch a show on a phone, which is still better than fidgeting and getting dirty looks. That is not necessarily permissive, though, since their first choice of running around, playing, and exploring is denied them. I don't get the impression that kids are eager for permission to watch more shows. They're much more eager for permission to take small risks. I offered some kids the opportunity to look at stuff on their chrome books or chip away at little pieces of soapstone. They strongly preferred the stone, but I stopped because it's too loud for the adults. That is not permissive. There is no permission to make noise and accidentally hurt a finger. It would be more permissive in the case of the restaurant to give them a little playground like fast food places used to have.
As a teen and young adult, I read Classics. Lately, I've been reading Brandon Sanderson novels. This is because I had a lot of free time then, and don't have it now. The Motte and Sanderson novels are compatible with brain fog from waking up every few hours to feed an infant, and interacting with other young children every few minutes, while Kant is not. I don't really have a good model of what's going on with Taylor Swift or Marvel fans (are there still Marvel fans left?). As I recall, Don Quixote was basically a spoof about a man who read a lot of Star Wars novels, thought that Jedi were real, and then decided that he was one. I gave up because the second hand cringe was too strong, not something that I can recall happening with any other novels.
I'm not sure that it makes sense to talk about reading Sanderson instead of Dostoyevsky as permissiveness. The latter is, of course, better, but I'm tired and my memory is bad. I'm unable to read it after working and caring for children. My parents are retired, and reading Dostoyevsky again. They have a little book club. They have permission to spend time on good books, permission to spend the best part of the day on that, instead of on working.
Again, a lot of people don't seem to feel permission to be an ordinary person, doing a slightly below average 9 - 5 job, sending their kids to the ordinary public school, to themselves become an average person living an average life. Who can work a stable job at Kodak for 30 years? "Many people have lamented that kids these days say they want to be famous YouTubers instead of astronauts." Sure. The only astronauts I know anything about are the ones that got stranded because Boeing messed up bringing them back. Which was a story entirely about how unreliable Boeing now is, and not at all about the astronauts themselves.
I was chaperoning a kids' dance party this week. The kids don't know how to dance, even things like the Cupid Shuffle, where they literally call out the moves. Some attempts were made to do that dance where they squat, bounce, and throw their legs out, kind of like in Russian dancing. The dance they attempted was harder than normal folk dancing, but at least known. This was because they don't know how to dance, not because we're so permissive we let them dance however they want. They probably want to be taught how to dance. The adults might even prefer to teach them a dance, but didn't necessarily have permission to do so, or knowledge of how to go about it.
On clothing, I likewise don't necessarily find the mess that is our current clothing choices to be permissive, so much as burnt out or depressed. People mostly aren't dressing in clothing that they love and find beautiful for their own idiosyncratic reasons. Straight men don't seem to have a ton of choice for what to wear in public, outside of special interest clubs. They're dressing in jeans and hoodies because that's the cultural norm, to which they are dutifully adhering. I like Uniqlo clothing and follow their collaborations. There was a surprising amount of buzz this fall about slightly less terrible looking sweatpants. They sold out! They come in not only grey and black, but wine! So exciting. Theoretically, people have permission to wear all sorts of things. Actually, they are so confused and guilt ridden, they wear the same dress a hundred days in a row. That is not a sign of permission.
I'm not sure what's going on with the adults eating exclusively chicken nuggets and Mac & cheese, but it sounds like depression again? Or an eating disorder? It certainly doesn't sound enjoyable.
Seeing this in the Quality Contributions for this month cemented it for me next to @urquan and @FiveHourMarathon's exceptional comments, as well as @MaiqTheTrue downthread.
We don't value average. Even the atrocious dancer has value as humorous Content, and the great is obviously, well, great. So why would anyone want to be average? The kids have correctly identified that learning is hard and that nobody cares about the average dancer. So why would they? It's never let them see you sweat taken to its natural endpoint; what's worse than being bad at something is being seen to genuinely try at something and to still be bad at it.
It makes sense when most things become performative, rather than -- I want to say liturgical.
Liturgy was Greek for "work of the people," in a ceremonial sense. It's great if whoever is performing the liturgy is an excellent chanter or something, but it isn't fundamentally important. It's important to celebrate the occasion, to perform the rites, for everyone to believe and say and experience the same things. But most of postmodern society is profoundly nonliturgical.
The reason to be an average dancer is so that you can attend a folk dance. It's fun to swing, or blues, or square, or circle dance, and a person, especially the man if it's the kind of dance with a lead, should be about average for it to actually be fun, and not just awkward, or an initial class. But, currently, we mostly do performative dances, or break off into little high skill niches, as has been discussed elsewhere. Which is too bad.
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It is not time for me to make an effort post on this, so I offer instead some fragmented thoughts.
Or in general, they do not know how to ask, and we don't know how to answer.
This is how 100% of the young men I know operate (though it's not how I've seen boys operate, so naturally there's some hope left). It's universal. Where are all the women [effectively] flashing their tits at young men who take risks, anyway? (I am not a woman so I can't be part of the solution; men actually can't do this outside of very specific circumstances.)
This is a Boomer-parent-specific problem in general. We're 40 years into our society-wide 100-year Prohibition/Panic cycle on the kid-snatching thing so this is going to continue being a problem for the next 50 years.
It is society's allergy to risk that destroyed them. Scared their kids will touch a needle in the ballpit (wtf?), scared they'll get sick or hurt, scared of the inevitable lawsuit, scared of the judge that will find in the plaintiff's favor with financially ruinous results.
Yeah, but the men who really do this all converge on women's clothing these days. I prefer looser pants, and always have (there are a few things I'm not willing to compromise my otherwise high agreeableness on; this is one of them, not that I really need to do it these days), partially because of high sensitivity in relevant areas (mainly around the waist), but long skirts (and tights, when applicable; it's literally just long underwear lol) are warmer (they trap air, like a wetsuit does) and are easier to move around in than jeans are. They're softer and available in a wider variety of materials, too. If they fit better I wouldn't wear anything else. This happens with undergarments too; the male ones are bulky and relatively uncomfortable, but the female ones that still function when applied to male anatomy are actually the exact thing I want [provided I can hide that I'm doing it perfectly; this isn't actually a sex thing, but most people will take it as one, obviously]. While certain manufacturers have tried to make this for men, they put a stupid seam at the bottom length-wise, which defeats the entire purpose.
And this ultimately bleeds into their children. They stop asking. The "kids are naturally rebellious" meme is something Boomers have exposure to but not something that naturally happens if you're a half-competent parent (to the point that I believe the rebellious ones simply had incompetent parents, or ones that would fail to be consistent because 'it was convenient for my kid to take risks in childhood when they were small, now they're teen-aged and want to take larger ones and I'm big mad about that').
This is why, if they make the mistake of appearing before me, I tend to address them directly, because they aren't going to do that themselves. My goal when I meet one is, ultimately, to encourage the expression of... uh, expression in an environment of "everyone you know hates you, wishes you were dead/wishes you'd just go back to the iPad, and your co-ethnics won't help because they have internalized the exact same message, it's For Your Safety".
It's not exactly rocket science to figure out why teenagers are shunning drugs and having less sex. They have internalized "not an adult" (it's like that thing the kids do in IT, but in reverse, where not being an adult is the thing that gives you protection from the invisible clown that lives in the sewers) and they'll stay that way until they die- their kids will probably be all right, though, shame it'll cost them all their good years before they figure that out.
The first step to fixing a problem is making sure those affected are even acknowledging there's a problem with it in the first place.
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I work with a guy who's an extremely picky eater. Every day for lunch he eats a cheese toastie from the nearby garage. His wife cooks him chicken nuggets and chips for dinner every night. The team once went out for lunch at a nearby Thai restaurant, and he had a bowl of ice cream.
While it will not surprise to learn that he is rail thin (almost emaciated) and his teeth are in shockingly poor shape, he gives no outward impression of being depressed at least as far as I can see.
Well, let's put it this way.
Most kinds of meal and by extension every ingredient has some kind of unpleasant taste to it. Sometimes, I plan meals based on what unpleasant taste I'm OK with submitting to on that particular night, and if the only things I have in my fridge are or add up to that, I go out for a burger or tendies instead if I have the opportunity to do so. (This can also happen with scents, and maybe a more extreme pickiness is created when the two are combined- though scents usually prompt initial aversion.)
Some of these ingredients have worse tastes than others, or those tastes are stronger in some people (insert "kids hate brussel sprouts" meme here, which I've always found pretty weird- though a good chunk of this is just parents being shit at cooking and just forgetting about certain things because they haven't eaten anything truly new in 20 years: he's not resisting the food to be difficult, he's resisting the food because it smells terrible right when you open the box and you forgot that matters).
I believe most people experience this with intentionally bad-tasting things- beer's the best example, because they're all bitter and awful as an inherent property of being beer. But it's the kind of unpleasantness, or the unpleasantness you are actively tolerating for other reasons, that makes it a viable beverage. Coffee is the same way, to a point- the reason people put cream and sugar in it is because they aren't actually in it for the coffee taste, they're doing it for other reasons. It's a coffee-flavored warm milkshake at that point, and I like milkshakes because they're milkshakes, not because they're coffee-flavored. (Most specialty coffee is absurd to me for this reason: because a lot of it is made to express the coffee flavor, and that flavor is bad- otherwise you wouldn't have to add sugar and cream and chocolate to it- so why would I want to spend 5 dollars on that when I can just get the cheap drip coffee and season it to the coffee-flavored-warm-milkshake taste that I actually wanted in the first place?)
The exception to those things are so-called "hyper palatable" foods. Your burgers, your tendies, your toaster pastries. There are very few distinct or recognizable ingredients in them, and so the possible space of undesirable tastes and textures is minimized (and in the case of processed foods this is either intentional or an emergent property in their development)- except perhaps for the store-bought frozen ones. Those are all turbo-garbage and they aren't even any cheaper; I don't know why anyone buys those outside of something their kid can prepare on their own when required. The frozen pizzas are like that too.
Take Doritos, for instance: it's a corn chip with good-tasting stuff on it. Or a McDonald's cheeseburger: it's [homogenized] beef, a slice of [homogenized] cheese, mustard and ketchup (both highly consistent mass produced substances), and maybe a bit of pickle (whose method of preparation is consistent and results in a taste that dominates what the cucumber originally may have tasted like). Pizza does that, tendies do that (bonus points for being a sauce-delivery mechanism; also, the McDonald's Szechuan sauce actually was as good as the meme suggested), toaster pastries do that, PB&J does that (though this kind of sandwich is actually really unpleasant to eat).
Contrast that with, say, a fancier curry (not the Glico stuff): you have all the ingredients in the sauce (including the fish sauce, ugh), the peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, etc. You get a larger cross-section over which taste can go wrong (and... if you don't put those things in, it's just not curry) and it stinks up your kitchen something fierce because that's just what garum-based cuisine does (actually, lots of stuff does this- roast beef in particular is fucking awful for this; I can't begin to count the number of times I'd get home from school and smell that in the oven, but because it would take time between the 'oven's on, something's cooking' signal and the 'this is roast beef, not cookies' signal it'd be a cocktease 100% of the time).
I suspect this is heritable; my folks cook the absolute shit out of everything they make (everything's gotta be well done) and don't appear to actively enjoy eating what they make, but what they do make other than that are very simple 3-ingredient casseroles (or meatballs, or what they call chili) that take the form of what I described above. Of course, that's also very vulnerable to low-quality ingredients or the mix being wrong, and if one of the ingredients is changed then you literally can't make it any more.
On the rare occasions I cook, I also depend 100% on recipes. I can't "season to taste" when I don't know what it's even supposed to taste like, or if I do that, one of the ingredients on its own tastes bad anyway/once you can taste it, it's too late to season it; it doesn't help that I'm constitutionally incapable of chopping things in a way that doesn't mash them to bits (nobody else has a problem with this).
So if you're in control of what you eat, and you can spend 10 bucks on one of those store-bought BBQ chickens or get tendies instead, I'll take the tendies every single fucking time, because those chickens tend to be dry, under-seasoned, slimy, and you have to take them apart to eat them- why the absolute fuck would I take the effort to do that, or expect anyone else to, when the tendies are strictly superior 100% of the time if I'm in the mood for chicken?
Maybe it's learned helplessness; maybe if I did meal prep for the same meal 10 times and recorded exactly what I did, I could gradient descent my way into the tastiest possible version of a dish 100% of the time (which I think is what those meals-in-a-box promise, but they don't advertise that fact- the reason I don't want to cook is because it takes a half hour to chop everything and the produce I'd have to buy is always sub-par at best, which those services do not solve). But I don't think that's worth the cost or effort because that would take me literally all day and I can just go out for a fucking burger instead- maybe when I can no longer do that I'll consider it, or I'll be making food for my [hopefully future] wife and I can at least customize or appreciate it for that reason instead.
... interesting point of view. Yet taste matters if you drink your coffee black. It is an acquired taste, but like most things in one's culture, it can be acquired.
(Coffee is easy taste to acquire -- it comes with caffeine which is nice. Same for beer, mutatis mutandis for alcohol. Capsaicin very concretely triggers a burning, painful sensation, yet there are several food cultures built on that.)
The reason I bring is up because one could tie this back to risk-taking, or lack of it. It is not unexpected that some people may look down on adult who doesn't take the culinary risk to acquire taste for common foodstuffs in his culture. Similar principle applies to failing to learn other habits expected of adults in his (to some extent, also hers) culture. The reason for pushback is simple: if enough adults avoid acquiring the expected culture, soon they define the default culture, which is changed and different (poorer, simpler, less complicated from the pushback point of view).
Returning to topic of coffee: It is lamentable that increasing amount of people seem to prefer "milkshakes". I presume coffee-flavored coffeine milkshakes can be produced without any genuine coffee beans. If everyone turns to drinking milkshakes, will there be any interest or capability for producing good coffee?
If it tasted good in the first place you wouldn't have to acquire a taste for it. The more unpleasant a food is by default the more of an acquired taste it is; and as you've noted the cross-section of people who prefer the rough edges of coffee sanded off or covered up is larger than those who like it black.
Maybe it's just that there are other pleasant parts of the taste profile of milkshake-coffee that are much easier to focus on, where the parts of the coffee taste you would otherwise have to acquire are suppressed by doing that.
The problem with hyper-palatability at ground level is that it decreases the amount of unpleasant tastes one would normally be expected to tolerate day-to-day (so on the safety version of the hedonic treadmill, yeah, it'd lead to worse risk tolerance). Tendies only taste like 3 things and they taste the same way every time (the difference between good tendies and bad tendies has to do with the proportions of each taste as well as whether they taste whole or not- actually, good vs. bad has to do with the amount of each flavor, and how much of the [Void] flavor they added- a lot of things I should otherwise like are rendered less enjoyable because they put too much [Void] in it, so they taste [Empty]). Noodles and the wide variety of things you'd put on them are a lot less... predictable.
I guess it's similar to my taste in music in that way: I actively prefer very little (or hyper-specific things that I'm not sure most people even recognize as music), but that doesn't stop me from being able to enjoy (or at least tolerate) a wide variety of other stuff. That said, my ability to intuitively understand them is limited; someone else must act first.
That's also a peer-bonding thing. If I ate nothing but tendies I wouldn't be any fun at dinners nor could I entertain effectively; eating whatever I want whenever I want is a thing I'm consciously aware I'd have to give up if I ever get married.
Considering how the coffee pod culture has shifted into espresso I think the answer is still yes. People will intentionally eat and drink (and in this case, refine) bad-tasting things just for the variety, that's also why the microbrew/IPA culture exists.
Yes, I like to make my meals as inedible as possible too. I guess it helps with portion control, and not being able to even taste the fucking food after the first bite is certainly a way to hide any other bad [or absent] tastes otherwise present.
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Chad tendie-maxxer vs. Virgin balanced-and-varied-diet fan.
god_i_wish_that_were_me.jpg. Only partially kidding. In some ways, it'd be nice to be so unaffected by flavor fatigue and the culinary Coolidge Effect such that I could eat the same things every day and not get tired of them. Especially if someone prepared them for me to bypass the sandwich effect. It would be embarrassing ordering off the kids' and dessert menus each time going out with co-workers, though, particularly as a man.
While not entirely surprising, if you told me in isolation someone ate cheese toasties, chicken nuggets, and chips everyday, I'd guess it was someone on some sort of poor man's dirty bulk diet (maybe more like unhoused man's dirty bulk diet). Usually I'd hypothesize the terrible teeth would be mostly due to poor oral hygiene and not diet, but given how wedded he is to eat-hot-chip-and-tendie, perhaps there is some real nutritional deficiency and/or microbiome issue there as the primary causal mechanisms.
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Interesting, I wonder what's going on there? And whether social pressure would get him to eat more variety, or just cut him off socially? It seems like it might be a problem if they have kids, though now the schools offer free lunches even on breaks I guess.
My uncle once talked my father (baker at 5 star restaurant, foodie of the French and James Beard tradition) into eating more wasabi with his sushi than he preferred. He talked for several days about how much he regretted it, and how annoyed he was.
He has two children. I always wonder what dinnertime is like.
Girl: I don't want to eat mashed potatoes and broccoli! I want chicken nuggets!
Mother: Now now, you can't eat chicken nuggets all the time.
Girl: Why not? Daddy does!
The counter-argument is irrefutable.
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This is a great post.
One of the problems adults seem to have is assuming that kids have no agency in their interpretation of their instructions from adults. One of the classic examples is the Participation Trophy, widely decried for making kids think they did something when they didn't. I grew up at peak participation trophy, I have a box of them somewhere or other. Little marble bases with little plastic baseball players on top, given to me for playing first base on a winless team when I was nine years old or so. Most critics think that the problem is that kids will think they achieved something that they didn't, and maybe some did, but all I got was a distaste for trophies in general. I had some trophies, they weren't interesting, why worry about them?
On the other hand, when I was 12, and my little league team went 18-0 and made it to regional playoffs, and one of the parents had little pullover windbreakers made for that team, I valued that jacket greatly. I still have it, somewhere. Achievement is an objective fact, strength is an objective fact, beauty is an objective fact. Attempts to hide the ball will simply create new instances of Euphemism Treadmills.
In the same way, I think a lot of what is getting criticized as childishness by Freddie is in reality a warped view of maturity inflicted on kids. Being quiet, being compliant, being unobtrusive, are all traits that are valued and rewarded in children. Then we find ourselves with adults who grew up that way and wonder what happened.
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Are these not still a thing where you are? I see lots of them.
Not really. We went to one with a wooden ship play fort in Louisiana, and it was lovely until we got rained out. I think Chick fil-a has them here.
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Amusingly literary opinion seems to switch between:
vs.
at regular intervals depending on levels of romanticism in society at large.
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