hey, vsauce. michael here. skeletons are scary andspooky, but you know what else is? teenagers. their attitude, the way they dress andthe music they listen to. can you even call it music? pff, kids these days. but what are kids these days? what's with all the concern and what's a generation? why do we think that coevals, groups ofpeople of roughly the same age, act so much alike? the sheer number of articlesand papers and internet posts published daily comparing then and now,both sincerely and ironically, is astonishing. we can't seem to get enough about kidsthese days and just how different and
awesome it was to be a kid back in thegood old days. generational labels make human historylook ordered and discreet, instead of scary and messy. they also have a delightfullysuspicious tendency to flatter those using them. george orwell put it well."every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that wentbefore it, and wiser than the one that comes after it."there's a name for this sentiment. juvenoia. sociologist david finkelhorcoined the term. it means "an exaggerated fear about the things that influencekids these days." juvenoia is a concerned disappointment that because ofiphones or the internet or tv or rock
music or those pesky horselesscarriages the world just isn't fit for kids like it used to be.generational conflict really has been going on for that long. after all, "honor thy [your] father and thy [your] mother" was an ancient commandant for a reason. in the 4th century bc, aristotleremarked that youths mistakes are due to excess and vehemence, they think theyknow everything. here's an engraving from 1627 admonishing the 'now,' compared tothe ways of 'old.' in the early 1900's romain rolland complained thatthe new generation of young people were, quote, "passionately in love with pleasureand violent games, easily duped." new
people and the direction society isheaded in has always been seen with somedisapproval. xkcd famously collected a brief history of juicy examples. in 1871,the sunday magazine published a line that may as well have been written todayabout texting. "now we fire off a multitude of rapid and short notes,instead of sitting down to have a good talk over a real sheet of paper." and thejournal of education in 1907 lamented that at a modern family gathering,silent around the fire, each individual has his head buried inhis favorite magazine. the point is there's nothing new under the sun. not even thesun, in fact. the sun is believed to be a
third generation star. this constantcycle of generation clashing can sometimes sound like a broken record.are these commentaries really providing insight into the minds of future leaders orprematurely judging a coeval based on how it acts as teens? despite theincessant concerns otherwise, the proverbial 'kids these days' seem to bebetter off than ever before. drug use is down, exercising is up, math and writing proficiency haveincreased, crimes committed by young people have decreased, hate commentsreported by children have dropped, the
number of 9th to 12th graders who havebeen in fights has dropped, and the number of teens who fear attacks at schoolhas dropped. but still, juvenoia persists. but why? well, it kinda makes sense. i mean,children are the future of a species, so it's reasonable to assume that naturewould select for features in a species that cause adult members to prefer theway they were raised and distrust anything different. after all, parents, bydefinition, were a reproductive success for the species. they made new members. sowhatever choices and influences brought
them to that point must have been goodenough. any deviation from that could be a problem. so worrying about the young mayhave been naturally selected, just like eyes and fingers and breathing air andpooping. but here's the thing. our brains don't accurately remember thepast or apply memories fairly or rationally. that kind of thinking has aplethora of interesting causes. first, at a social level, concerns for and aboutthe youth are often exaggerated, because exaggerating is effective.you'll generate greater mobilization around the cause if you can convince people thatwe're on the cusp of a crisis here, folks. also, our increasingly connected worldmeans more potential contacts with
people outside the family, the tribe,the neighborhood. even though juvenile problems often involve people thejuvenile already knows, stranger danger is a more powerful fear. "my kids havegood friends, who are good influences, so why should i worry?" can be replaced todaywith "even so, people you don't know are threats, so worry." other reasons forjuvenoia are personal and often it's not so much the world that's changed, it's you.are drivers today really worse than they were when you were young or do yousimply have new responsibilities and experience that makes you more aware ofdangers that were always there? we remember the past abstractly. there justisn't enough room in our brains or a vital
need for complete voracity whenrecalling things. thus, we are more likely to remember the general way we felt in thepast, without the petty annoyances, more salient still, for the present.secondly, loss aversion and the endowment effect.people perceive a loss as greater than an equal gain. in one famous study, when asked howmuch they would pay for a coffee mug, people gave prices that weresignificantly lower than what people given the mug first said they'd bewilling to sell it for. this may play a role in how we valuewhat we already have - our memories and favorites - over what's new.
there's even neuroscience backing upwhy new stuff seems so bad to you. it's called the reminiscence bump.storage of autobiographical memories, memories about yourself, increases during times of change. incidentally, this is why you rememberexciting things as lasting longer than they really did, but rarely remembertimes of boredom in detail. i've discussed before the ways in which thiscauses us to feel like time slowed down during particularly quick butsignificant events. anyway, adolescence and early adulthood,particularly ages 10 to 30, are major
times of change. many important thingshappened during those years that define your identity. so, it's no surprise thatalong with things that have happened recently, memories from this bump period aregreater in number and more emotional. the books and songs and movies and slangwords and behaviour you loved and used during this time correlates quite well with what you will,when you're older, remember the most fondly. as we can see, juvenoia is natural.in fact, a healthy dose of it is
important. there are plenty of things weshould be fired up about improving. what's sometimes lost though, whenexplaining that juvenoia occurs in every generation is the fact that the natureof juvenoia hasn't always been the same. the generation gap of antiquity, or ofthe 1300's, wasn't the same as it is today. the more rapid speed of change may beone reason, but another is the appearance of a new type of creature around theturn of the last century - the teenager. the word teenager wasn't even used as astage of life until 1922. john savage's 'teenage' is a fantastic read on how humansociety sort of accidentally invented the teenager. you see, as factoriesgenerated new unskilled jobs,
young people could acquire somethingneat - their own money. suddenly, marketers realized that products could be made forthe youth. they were no longer stuck with what their parents decided on. also,the surge in immigration at the time highlighted for a new generation the viewthat identity wasn't something you're stuck with. it's fluid, personal, decided. furthermore, calls forcompulsory education around that time, that is, making it the law that children go to school, further solidified the segmentedidentity of children by forcing them out of the world at large and into commonplaces surrounded mainly by their coevals.
in that environment they coulddevelop behaviors and opinions and culture shared just with themselves. compulsory schooling also increasedliteracy in adolescence, which gave them all the more power to hear stories writtenfor them and about them in books they could buy with their own money. kids these days suddenly weren't just younghumans waiting for life experience, they were separate beings with their ownculture and voice. a fact that caused juvenoia to change from the edibleskirmishes of the past into the full-fledged panics we know and lovetoday. this brings us to a bigger
question, though. sure, you may say, that makes sense, buteven someone who didn't grow up in this society could plainly see that in theold days culture wasn't as dumbed down as it is today. things used to be made by the elites, forthe elites. now they're made for the masses who demand sensational atavisticpablum instead of rational critical thought, like scholars, and, well, you know, me.those examples sure are convincing but the plural of anecdote isn't data.you can pick different examples and argue the opposite point. mozart wrote poemsabout farts. there is amazing work and there
is simple work made at all times inhistory. in fact, as steven johnson points out in "everything bad is good for you," ifanything, when given the chance to buy or participate as they choose, the tendencywe find in humans is a preference for more cognitive demands, for smarterentertainment. what it takes to keep up with the increasing density andintricacies of narratives in media these days is impressive. to be fair, of course,beneath the stimulating organization there is no substance anymore, right? i mean, here's what one noted critic said oftoday's easy brainless mass culture. "we
do not turn over the pages in search of thought,delicate psychological observation, grace of style, charm ofcomposition, but we enjoy them like children at play laughing and crying at the images beforeus." wait, sorry, that's something literary critic g. h. lewes wrote about dickens in1872. the point is, taste is subjective. art to 1 percent is garbage to another.you may dislike the language or violence or morals depicted on tv today, but there'sno denying the fact that entertainment, including popular entertainment,is requiring more and more thinking on the viewers' part than ever before.johnson created this visual comparing narrative
threads in episodes of different tvshows over time, and this shouldn't be surprising. our brains crave stimulation.a lump that sits and stares into space isn't naturally selected form in the same wayas a brain that learns and synthesizes and organizes. now that entertainment canbe made for niche audiences and watched and re-watched on demand and discussed ad nauseam online that natural desire can be sated by media. johnson goes so faras to say that reruns have made us smarter. they've enabled entertainment tobe made that rewards being watched and thought about over and over again.the names and stories and relationships and dramas people today have to keepstraight in their heads to be
functioning consumers of modern mediaare impressive by historical standards and affect more of us than ever before.johnson points out that in his time dickens was only read by 0.25% of hiscountry's population, while today innovative shows like 'the west wing' or'the simpsons' easily reach twenty times thatproportion. okay, but how about this? where are the mozart's and dostoyevsky'sof today? well, they're probably here, but thereputation of dostoyevsky is built by time, something the judgments of contemporaryartists haven't had enough of yet. finally, when it comes to judging worksthat merely tease the base emotions
let's not forget the quote from unamuno i've discussed before."more often have i seen a cat reason than laugh or weep." cats and humans are curious and canproblem solve, but only humans can laugh at fart videos. so, what really ought we be treasuring?there's a problem here, though. although writers like johnson have been able toput forth convincing arguments that movies and tv have been serving more andmore cognitive complexity, they've failed to find the same evidence for pop music.nearly all studies on the subject have found that, unlike other forms of popularmedia, pop music has, in fact, become, since the 1950's, less complex in itsstructure and more homogeneous.
mathematically speaking,more pop songs today sound alike than they used to.what's up with that, music? well, here's the thing. pop music is justone type of music being made today and it's role, what its its listeners want fromit and who they are are much more specific than the widerspectrum of genres a movie theater or netflix caters. a pop song needs toprovoke quick mood, stick into your head and fit anticipation and pay off into afairly regular amount of time. there are only so many ways to do that. so, perhaps,pop music producers have simply gotten better at scratching the specific itchthey're challenged to scratch.
i mean, imagine criticizing doctors for usingpenicillin nowadays. uh, back in the good old days treatment was innovative. there were leeches and onion plasters, amputationand good luck charms. now it's all just penicillin, penicillin, penicillin.it's all the same. criticizing popular music for all sounding the same ignores thesameness of every pop song's goal. but what about generations? what are they exactly?i mean, humans don't have babies all at once every twenty years or so. new peoplejust keep showing up, about four more every second. but that said, there are biologicalchanges humans go through as they grow
and age, roughly creating a few lifestages. alright? now, this list of generations goes all the way back to themid 1400's. it applies mainly to the western world, especially the us, and isthe work of william strauss and neil howe, whose landmark 1991 book"generations," contains one of the most influential and ambitious generationtheories of our time. these are the guys who coined term 'millennial,' by the way.they set forth and have continued to expand a theory that society follows apredictable cycle of moves, each lasting about 20 years - about how long it takesfor everyone in a life stage to move on to the next.
the social mood and the common lifestage a coeval experiences it during are what distinguishes one generation fromthe next. strauss and howe call each social mood a turning. a turning describes the waysociety will act, by either establishing, accepting, challenging or fracturing inlieu of established customs. to illustrate the cycle, let's start justafter the american civil war, in the so-called gilded age. here we findamerican society in the first turning, what they call a "high." this is a twenty yearperiod when society is largely in agreement about the direction it wantsto go in, because it recently
coalesced in the face of a crisis.institutions are strong and thus young adults are cautious and conformist. but then people tire of socialdiscipline and call for reform, a period of awakening occurs. the majorityconsensus is attacked in the name of greater and broader individual autonomy.the distrust in institutions left in the wake of an awakening leads to the nextturning, an unraveling, where in place of broad cultural identity, moral crusadespolarize society over what should come next. finally, a renewed interest in consensusthat responds to crisis by banding
together occurs. society's mood shifts toa belief that coalescing and building together are the answer. the cycle thenstarts again with a high - the majority agrees on society's directions andinstitutions strengthened during the crisis until people tire of thismajority structure and an awakening leaves those institutions week and armedwith less public consensus. this is followed by an unraveling, whereindividuals polarize over moral issues and the youth, raised in the previous twoatomizing moods, feel alienated.which brings us to, well, today. strauss-haus theory, if true, tells usthat this will be an era where society
will band together and buildinstitutions from the ground up in the face of crisis. it's not clear what thatcrisis will be, but if their theory has predictive power, the climax of thatcrisis will occur in 2025. the whole theory is a great way to learn about youas history. al gore once even gave a copy ofgenerations to every member of congress. but it is unscientific and unfalsifiable.you can find a pattern in anything if you pick and choose the right examples. as for the usefulness of itsgeneralizations, well, philip bump points out that the us census bureau only recognizesone official distinguishable generation.
baby boomers. do you think you are ageneration x, a millennial, generation z? well, that's fine, he says, you call yourselfwhatever you want. it's all made up. the baby boomers are a cohort, significantin that no matter where they were born or who they are, their size alone determines a lot abouttheir path. but other population segments, based solely on birth year, just don'tmean much. a more useful way to divide them into cohorts might focus on some other lessage-related trade that correlates better with behavior. wealth, region, sexuality, etc.
regardless of its accuracy there's onething generational theory and its critics do at least agree on.people change as they age and the larger society surrounding people influencesthe degree to which generations feel conflict. so, generational thinking is akind of guidance. it's one that helps take us on a journey,manned by an ever changing and changing crew. some crews are different thanothers, for sure, and you need worry and concern to stay safe. but at the end ofthe day, it's still the same boat and the same waters. generations and juvenoiaare like what picasso said about art - they are lies that tell the truth.
and as always, thanks for watching. here's a bonus. while doing research i found a websitethat will allow you to find what word was first used the year you were born. it'spretty cool. it's also a dong. that's right, something you can do online now, guys.in fact, here's some dong news for you. the shows that you know and love onthe vsauce network now have their own home, where they can flourish and bewho they want to be. the channel's name is dong. go over there right now to check itout, we've got some cool things from the internet. that's what dong's all about.it's an internet safari. it's neat things that
we all find as we research for these episodes.so i'll see you over there on dong. and thanks for watching.
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