Toward the end of our (X) childhood, a number of major transitions in the handling of kids were being made:
Playgrounds were being transitioned into minimally-dangerous versions of themselves
Bullying was being cracked down on
Latchkey parenting was being recategorized as neglect and being cracked down on my CPS
This meant that Gen X kids had a lot of situations to deal with as kids where they had to develop physical skill as a means of staying safe.
For example by the age of 7 I could climb a tree and be pretty safe because I had developed upper, lower, and trunk body strength, awareness of how strong a branch is and how to test it for strength, how to detect when a contact point I was resting on was slipping, and how to control my mind enough to maintain enough focus to not slip up while climbing.
On playground equipment, I had to be ready for a fall onto concrete, and I had to know when wood was likely to produce enormous splinters (I actually got a huge splinter through my ass once. It went in below my butt cheek and came out above it), and I had to deal with the results of kids going crazy trying to spin the spinny thing as fast as they could. I went flying off that thing so many times.
Also, during the summer when I was 7, my friend was 8, and we had little bikes, and we would spend the entire day outside wandering the town. We often would find a stream and slowly work our way up the stream. This involved a lot of balancing on rocks and logs, catching small animals, even fighting my friend sometimes. We’d swim in muddy streams that were full of broken machinery and glass bottles, and it was up to us to know how to stay safe in that environment.
The world was just less safetyfied back then.
Now I see people of age 20 or so, and they walk like toddlers. I’m not talking about disabled people here. Just people who are able-bodied, but they move like they’ve been recently downloaded into a human body, like it’s unfamiliar to them.
I’m among the first millennials. I grew up without a computer. While we had that single, ancient Apple II in school for the Oregon trail, it was just as a “treat” and never in any serious educational use. Didn’t even have a computer lab till high school, and all they really taught us was word processing/typing. I was lucky we had some extra off site courses available that taught some IT, CAD, HTML, and programming. But that was by the end of the 90s, 1998-99.
But yeah, point I’m making is while computers were around, not everyone really knew about them. I think there were a good number of middle class millennials who got to grow up with access to a computer at home. My family was too broke to lay down 2 grand on a computer that my parents had no understanding what it was useful for.
There’s strong statistical evidence suggesting that millennials are, on average, older than gen z’ers. It not clear from the latest studies what could have caused this presumed age gap.
Those same studies also evidenced the startling fact that the tested individuals shared over 99.9% of their genome and could in fact belong to the same species, which is what prompted all the recent controversy after one of the lead researchers said in a televised interview that “they’re all people”.
As a millenial I found I had a lot more in common with my Gen Z brother than I do with my boomer father. However, the little shit treated and thought of me like I’m a boomer. He’d consider my shitty FPS playing on console to be a sign “I couldn’t play games” (I’m a PC gamer).
I’d like to think he’ll mature and realise he was being a little cunt but I doubt he will.
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