I started realizing I was out of touch musically when there were big festival lineups and I didn’t know 95% of the bands.
i am an “old hat” in my fire dept. been here 21 years. know a lot. seen a lot. still learning a lot. trained a lot of the newbs. who are mostly 20-30 now. and definitely a cohort of their own. eager. but also dismissive of some of us old guys sometimes. lately i feel like it’s time. i kinda want to transition to a more academic life too. but am grappling with the fomo when the next big job comes in, though i have been at a lot of local history making fires. just kinda feeling invisible, so maybe it’s time to retire.
At 40, I don’t think I really am. I’ve never kept up with pop culture, so if you asked me who the hottest musical act is right now, I wouldn’t have a clue. My MP3 collection is so eclectic that even Lemmy probably wouldn’t recognize half of what I listen to. So, if that’s what you mean by being out of touch, then perhaps.
However, I do make an effort to stay abreast of current events, political movements, and what’s happening in the world.
That said, I do feel myself becoming somewhat disconnected from the general cultural zeitgeist as I get older. I’m much more focused on my family these days than on keeping up with what my kids are into. For example, I genuinely don’t understand the humor behind things like Skibidi Toilet, nor do I have any idea what the hell MrBeast is doing. I couldn’t tell you what the most popular YouTube channels are, either.
So perhaps I’m not out of touch with the world itself, but I’m definitely becoming less connected to the culture of the younger generations. And honestly, I’m not entirely sure that’s a bad thing.
When some actress died recently and there was like 30 posts on reddit and all I could think is who the hell is this? And to be honest, I realized I didn’t care and it’s time to leave reddit. Then I thought, I’m getting old, I don’t need a virtual obituary and just want to see cat pictures or something funny after work.
I can feel it happening now. I don’t know what’s going on on the real internet anymore.
Once I was a spy young adult and all the memes and culture was made for me. Now I don’t even know what the kids are saying its like a different language.
I’ll watch the minority report even though I’m not a fan of getting my info from YouTube, and I wonder if I’m the boomer watching fox news now. I don’t even really like Sam sedar just with the boomers dying out media is made for millenials now and I’ll click click bait it I see it.
When I saw a bunch of headlines about some movie award ceremony. “Who’s So-and-so’s mystery date?” “Everything you need to know about NepoKid, Jane Paddle’s actress daughter”, and so on… But I didn’t even know who were So-and-So, Jane Paddle, or any of the famous people whose relatives we were talking about.
I’m out of touch, twice.deleted by creator
Literally never. Not once. I was your nerd at school who’d find joy in a science encyclopedia, and really thought everyone else my age acted like the dumbest people on Earth.
Today’s “67” was yesterday’s something else. And it’s never not made me cringe.
Did you listen to nerdcore? It’s a shame it died out, but I still listen to some of the songs.
What year is it?
67
Brother I have never once been “with it”, as the kids say, and the rock I live under gets comfier every year so I probably won’t try to change that.
The day my boss, who asked for my help, said “That’s not what GPT said” and promptly ignored my input, wasted 2 days of a customer’s time and $700 of their money (refuses to walk back his time doing what GPT said), then finally allowed me to fix the actual problem using my meat popsicle intelligence’s output, which took 14 minutes.
We’re doomed. He votes.
Like… 5th or 6th grade. I could at least hang up til then. I walked into class on the first day after summer break one year and was just like “wtf is everyone talking about? Why does the brand of clothes I’m wearing matter? Why’re everyone being dicks?”
I searched my newsgroup indexer by year and all of the movie titles since 2020 looked like the fake ones from Seinfeld.
Probably always been a bit out of touch. Never really enjoyed pop culture. The first time was probably around 10 when everyone started getting into social media and I was like why the fuck would you ever put your real name and face on the internet.
