(repost, for reasons lol)
i'm ambivalent about it. it's a pretty ambiguous impression of everything that i'm not sure i can parse, and i care deeply about it but am a bit too tired to really feel it in earnest, let alone invest in the work of effectively and accurately understanding each corner of culture involved.
there's a lot that's distressing and disappointing, a lot that's relieving and promising, and i'm not particularly sure i have the clarity of mind to articulate where everything is. much of my perspective is pretty specifically defined by my limited connection and awareness of the world around me... and without having any specifically substantive socialization to help ground me in the splashing waves of emergence and divergence of culture through their intersections and their bubbles, i find that i'm increasingly uncertain my opinion would accurately reflect anything.
since my search bias is mostly centered to my interests in things that i find to be enriching/uplifting/nourishing for my conception of human behavior, i'm more inclined to want to hold onto and preserve the precious treasures of comforts people find in externalizing their experiences and wishes through their crafts and professions. people learning about themselves or others, learning through new experiences and recognizing different patterns underlying their interiority and the environments that contextualize that.
i generally try to avoid carrying cynicism about it. if there's anything of the existing 16y/o to 26y/o generation (or some other approximate range near there) that i believe i would note...
...it's probably that we might fare better with a kinder (not necessarily "blindly saccharine" or something at the expense of sincerity, though people have their own rationale for how to value both sincerity and sweetness, or whether sincerity and/or sweetness must be absolute, and to what end or through which means-- additionally that sweetness can certainly happen to be sincere regardless of how it appears to others, it's probably more that many people believe it to Necessarily Sacrifice a kind of authentic sense of reality or practicality, and that kind of sentiment can be pretty complicated),
and gentler (not necessarily at the expense of whatever forms of pragmatism each respective person would prioritize. it seems people generally mock teens and young adults for yearning for some hopeful sense of identity and utopia, or perhaps worse, people pity them from the position and disposition of obstinately detached onlookers while sometimes coupled with some diverse attachment to what things should be and what we must've lost in order to explain the conditions of youth we presently find. i'm not sure i find their pity and accusations of delusion to be convincing or particularly constructive),
and more careful mosaic of contexts (not necessarily the "coddling" or "eggshell-walking" people seem to be wary of, but more accurately that we could be more cognizant/curious with cultural and interpersonally conversational patterns that cause damaging conflicts without purpose beyond insult, and then construct more meaningful patient relationships with each other's perspectives to be a bit more aware of what exactly we might have been wary of, without devaluing or resorting to derision of that if possible. it doesn't make us more "deserving" of a self-concept of "sensibility" if we do grow patient, which i note because a lot of people sort of hold their impression of their "reasonable" responses as being reflective of something, or they'll seem confused that someone else isn't listening somehow, often something akin to performatively playing the part of the "bigger" person. it could be genuine, of course, but it also doesn't really change that it causes a sort of obstinate relationship with people that conflict with them and wouldn't yield to them)...
...a mosaic of communities/cultures/environments to that effect, in order to actually be able to effectively learn from each other and nourish whatever it is we're looking for, whether for ourselves or others. that's particularly because of the general impression of people seeming overwhelmed and increasingly unwilling or less enabled to trustingly engage with the world around them... and from the kinds of background-and-foreground sociological pressure that exist here, i imagine people are a bit more likely to be pretty deeply crushed into some sort of fatigued inertia in their own little bubble of isolation, on average.
that being said, it's a pretty messy generalization, and i know plenty of communities that either don't experience this or otherwise have been more likely to relieve it through their connections with each other and their relations to their creative work within that circle.
well, i suppose we'll see what happens :>