Over the last few decades, folks have started to pay a lot more attention to the various differences in behavior and upbringing between each generation. After all, as technology shifts so quickly, so do the small things that end up totally shifting generational perspectives and beliefs on everything from work, to music, mental health and more.
Someone asked “What scares you the most about the next generation?” and people shared the possibly toxic traits and behaviors they’ve noticed. So get comfortable as you scroll through, upvote your favorites and be sure to comment your thoughts below.
#1
I don't know. On one hand, I think younger folks are more open to talking about mental health. This is good, and sure beats my parents "just bury it so deep in your soul it never comes up" strategy.
On the other hand, it seems like kids today are way more sensitive about things. Sorry, but arriving too late to a sold-out movie or an airline losing your bag isn't a "genuine mental health trauma". No, that waiter isn't give you "microaggressions"... he's just in a f**king hurry because, if you look around, this restaurant is slammed.
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#2
How big the gulf between educated, critical thinkers and reactionary illiterates will be. And how the latter will significantly outnumber the former.
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#3
The sheer ignorance. So many don't read books. They have limited vocabulary. I don't speak to many who seem to think critically. They are raised to take standard tests and consume content, rather than analyze and contemplate. It's terrifying.
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#4
Their inability to function when things get tough. I work with many 18-25 year old, and the second something becomes too difficult or they get told something they don't want to hear, they sit on the floor and refuse to do anything. Or they stomp around crying out how we're all "toxic and abusive towards them."
I see it other places as well. Part of life is, unfortunately, challenges, and things won't always go your way. The reactions they have are just downright frightening.
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#5
Their arrogance and misusing buzzwords out of online YouTube therapy sessions, f.e. they were "traumatized" after that last math class. Their self centered behaviour will be trouble for us all down the road.
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#6
They CANNOT use a computer. They can surf the web, but cannot do anything useful. Many of my students are worse than my parents at doing simple things like attaching documents to emails or understanding the file path.
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#7
Increasing lack of critical thinking and the inability to differentiate truth or reality compared to what they are spoon fed by various types of media that don’t care about people’s best interests.
We have already seeing the increasing consequences of that over the past 20 years, and it will only get worse.
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#8
The brain rot they experience from all the social media.
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#9
I teach young kids (so Gen Alpha). A lot of them can’t persevere through a challenge without going to pieces. And it’s not like “I’m crying because I can’t find my notebook because I’ve had a rough day and this is just the final straw.” It’s “I’m crying because I can’t find my notebook and no one is coming to rescue me despite the fact that if I looked in my desk for more than .5 seconds I’d find it.”
They have no understanding of their actions having consequences. My class was out of control in the lunchroom (running, pushing, throwing food) and went all surprised Pikachu that the teachers supervising lunch kept them in for recess.
They’re also lazy. We’re just starting to learn how to answer a question in a complete sentence and use evidence from a text to support our idea. I’m not asking for a ten page thesis, I’m asking for “I know the boy is happy at the end of the story because he said ‘This was a great day!’”. I model the skill, I give them sentence starters, and they still can’t even just complete the sentence starter, so they’ll just write “he’s happy” in their notebook and expect me to be like “Perfect, this is wonderful”.
A lot of it is bad parenting. It’s not just the iPads and TikTok. A lot of parents will step in before a kid is ever even challenged by something and fix it for them so they don’t learn to problem solve. They expect me to spoon feed them answers and refuse to do anything that takes more than a minute of thinking. They also make excuses for their kids’ behavior and don’t discipline them (I had a parent this week try to explain to me that the problem isn’t that their daughter talks in class, the problem is that other kids are talking to her when she talks to them). I don’t foresee these kids being able to function in any career that expects them to do anything other than exactly what they want to do and that asks nothing of them.
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#10
That they are so anxious, need constant outside validation and tend to be afraid to do things on their own.
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#11
The thing that scares me the most about this new generation is that they are so reliant on technology. They are growing up in a world where they can't imagine life without the internet or their phones, and I think that's really dangerous. These kids are going to be adults soon and they're going to be completely unprepared for the real world if they can't function without a screen in front of them.
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#12
Their inability to think for themselves. They need to be told what opinions to have by whatever are the dominant ones on social media.
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#13
Nowadays attention spans have gotten so short , so many of them can’t sit through a book if they tried. It is sad i hope books don’t ever become a thing of the past
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#14
I see a general lack of empathy and so much social anxiety . Sometimes i am sure my grandkids would rather text people than have a face to face conversation... even with their friends.
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#15
That they're inheriting a dying planet and student loan debt, low wages, and rising housing costs mean they're basically serfs with the illusion of freedom.
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#16
Still having to work at terrible jobs and feel miserable.
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#17
That they cannot tell the difference between facts and propaganda online.
#18
Now think about writing. They can't use a stop. It's sentence after sentence after sentence nonstop.
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#19
Nonexistent reading comprehension
There’s story after story of teachers who teach upper middle school with kids who can’t point out the main character of an elementary level paragraph story, or find the theme of a simple passage. It genuinely scares me that next election, some of these “covid babies” who had critical learning year(s) robbed from them will be voting based on what people tell them to think because they don’t have the mind to research for themselves.
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#20
No respect for the authority - kids today don’t pay any respect to elderly and not even their parents. They will grow up careless of other people, no empathy for anybody, just looking after themselves. There are exceptions of course, but majority of kids today are like this.
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#21
Losing touch with the real world due to excessive screen time.
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#22
The sexism of some young men. It seems like they also don’t question sources and fall easily for propaganda pushed through social media.
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#23
Cheating their way through school. These are future doctors or nurses.
#24
Lack of coping mechanisms. I don't understand why, I am not a parent. But a lot seem to be unable to cope when things go awry, and very keen to claim a label which excuses/explains their total inability to cope. This is not criticism of those with genuine issues, I'm talking about the self-diagnosed.
#25
I’m a high school nurse and this is what I see:
- They have no patience and expect things to happen instantly. They don’t understand that there is no instant cure for things. For example: They think I’m crazy because I want them to sit for 10 minutes with ice on an injury.
- they can not handle being uncomfortable at all. They want to call their parents and go home for everything.
- anxiety. So much of it. They come in to the clinic freaking out because they can’t breathe, shaking, limb numbness, panicked look on their face, etc. I ask them if they could be having anxiety about something and they tell me they aren’t anxious about anything. But it’s pretty obvious they are. It just comes out of nowhere and for no particular reason. I deal with so much mental health. These poor babies.
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#26
Their sadness. Young people seem so sad - and a bit depressed too. Sad people tend not to move things forward - they just try to survive. We took all the reasons they had for optimism, hovered over their every move, and now they seem to feel resigned and sad :|.
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#27
That they will have a much lower quality of life than previous generations. Too many people and not enough fresh water.
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#28
Teacher here... the issues that worry me:
* Cell phone addiction. Teenagers in class: head down. Teenagers at the bus stop: head down. Walking across the street, riding a bike, walking: head down. It makes me sad.
* Inability to focus: brain rot, meme culture, short form content equates to everyone having the attention span of a goldfish.
* Complete lack of any understanding of finances, lack of any aspiration, no interest in developing job skills that can help them in the future. This generation is going to be shocked when they find out how hard their parents work and how much it costs to live in their home town.
* Complete lack of any knowledge or understanding of the forces that brought us to our current political environment that they are about to stroll into as voting age adults in a few years. The state of things will be taken for granted, resigned to fascism or openly embracing it. The will to enact change for the better is gone, seen as futile. It saddens me to my core.
This isn't all the young people I see but I would say it's over 50% at least. There are many that give me great hope. The bright, intelligent, creative and deep feeling students I have will be the only forces holding back the ugly in the future. I hope that the value of empathy, self reliance and intelligence gains a resurgence among the youth. It makes me happy to see young people discovering older technology. I hope they someday realize the value in rejecting the need to be connected to the internet every single second of every single day of their entire lives. There is SO much more to enjoy in the world than your cell phone. I understand for many teens it is the only escape in their lives, I hope they can escape the grip of technology as well somehow.
Image credits: misterdudebro
#29
I mentioned it elsewhere in response to how tariffs might impact my work:
But I’m a biochemist and I often oversee the hiring process at a biotech company I’m at…. I HAVE NOT HAD AN AMERICAN WITH A GOOD COMPETITIVE RESUME SHOW UP IN MY INBOX FOR A WHILE. Even for your garden variety RA roles, almost nothing…
so when I hear from teachers that “the kids are getting worse,” I DREAD what it’s gonna be like for Americans trying to break into tech constantly having to compete with nations that have their academic s**t together (China, South Korea, lots of EU countries, etc).
#30
They believe that they can demand high starting salary without working experience. Totally amused me.
#31
How much screen time they'll have.
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#32
I'm a Gen Z, and I'm afraid that Gen Alpha won't do as well in school because their parents (not all of them, of course) keep placing them in front of tablets.
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#33
They have to "think" in a group, but that thinking is always vibes and feels and not facts and data.
I am confused as to how when I was a child, we all thought the information age would be one of intelligent beings who could decisively act on data. If that data is not there, then how to find it and ingest it and comprehend it. Now, their decisions and ideas are fed to them, they outsourced their thinking to someone else. Even here in South Africa, our election cycle was full of comments about how lacking the youths are. Election campaign influencer videos would have comments "thanks for this, I might not have gone to register to vote" or "ilysm I will register too".
Even juniors who come out of university, taking on development internships, are shocking. Mentoring becomes torture. I would understand if they were a first year student, but how they make it past graduation and into the workforce (so I'm actually convinced it because they all just used generative AI tools).
There is no individual anymore, and the hive seems a combination of stupid rather than smarts.
Listening to them read should also be included in the Geneva Conventions.
#34
The lack of mature male role models.
#35
That they will expect to consume everything in 30 second sound bites.
#36
1. Tendency toward collectivism and failure to value individualism
2. Lack of resourcefulness and of the innate need to “make do” for themselves
3. Lack of curiosity
4. Obsession with and confusion of appearance versus true experience.
5. Lack of reading skills—comprehension and ability to read through anything more than 2 sentences or five bullet points.
6. Abject lack of resilience in the face of adversity or challenge
7. Lack of future time orientation.
8. Financial illiteracy
9. Ignorance of and lack of curiosity about history and humanities
10. Self-centeredness.
#37
Their relationship to the Internet. How much time they spend on it vs. in-person activities. How it’s been used as a babysitter for them. How protections for children on it are a joke. How creeps and bullies freely use it to prey on children. How very little guidance is given to kids in schools to be able to suss out what’s real or fake, and how propaganda, botting, and algorithms work.
Image credits: Blu_Skies_In_My_Head
#38
The reliance on computers and an all electric system with batteries. If we get a bad solar flare it's the stone age.
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#39
Like someone once said about Margaret Thatcher, they have no hinterland, no sense of history, or more accurately, they aren't being provided with a proper sense of historical context. They think the world didn't exist before they got here and won't exist after they're gone. They (and not just them, to be fair) don't understand where the dominant ideologies today came from or how they evolved, or how the technologies they use evolved with and are dependent on interconnected systems of commerce and exchange, or how political power circulates throughout the world. It's no wonder that they feel so much unfocused anger and disillusionment; it's an understandable response to constant bewilderment. To them, things just seem to happen, and happen again, for no discernible reason.
#40
As a teacher I have a lot to say about this. I'm GenZ, and many of my students are also GenZ. I have a mutual understanding with them and work very well with them. We understand each other's lingo, our interests are similar. I understand my GenZ students and can see myself in them every day, from my best ones to worst ones.
Things are very different for the Gen Alpha kids. I don't teach any this year, but I did supervise them on a field trip the other day. They are so different it's quite scary. No attention span, strange sense of humour, extreme social awkwardness, no individuality. These students are difficult to talk to and they have no social queues.
Maybe i don't understand them because I didn't grow up in the same era as them, but what I see are children who have had their brains melted by tiktok and other similar media, all the students show symptoms of autism and Ironically the students of the same age in the autism class are far more polite, understanding and socially aware.
I'm scared of a generation that is shaped entirely by the Internet and serves at the whims of whoever the algorithm chooses to push. Gen Alpha should be called Generation Algorithm.
#41
That they actually find that skibidi brocoli hairdo cool and attractive.
#42
Bunch of shut-ins home schooled by day drinkers & already on line. Don't see the problem.
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#43
I read comments on a space focused Snapchat and kids were saying stuff like “why do we waste our money sending stuff into space? We knows it’s all empty” and “Waste of tax $s we should just spend it on the military” and everyone and was agreeing with him.
#44
They are socially broken. All they do is consuming yt/ticktock content without needing for self-improvement. They don't want to read, draw, solve puzzles, even play games that teach being creative. Kids stopped having critical thinking and their opinions are based heavily on dumb edits. They don't respect elders and want to be treated like royals.
I know same can be applied to Gen Z, but we weren't exposed to brainrotting shorts. Videos had more meaning put to them, could teach things and give food for thought (aside from elsagate, but most fellas just refused to watch it in pretty short time).
I can't comprehend what society will become when kids are old enough.
#45
They are going to have to confront things that no other generation (in living memory) has ever had to deal with. And we prepare them for this by mocking their fears and the pain they feel about the future that awaits them.
That kind of thing will test the resilience of the strongest souls, let alone a generation of gaslit, scapegoated & terrified individuals.
