When I joined Lemmy. But it’s a good thing

In middle school/junior high, when everybody started talking about rock music and rap music and stopped talking about video games and anime! Lol

Whenever there is some viral story about some youtube/ticktock celebrity.

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 spry 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 if I see it. I try to absorb everything through RSS feed if possible, and add sources like minority report to there so I can keep up, and fuck more and more it feels like the news hits me like it hit my fox news grandpa, and I’m developing my own figure heads I shake my fist at angrily and triggers. I’m starting to get old people junk mail. I haven’t used windows so every time I stupidly agree to help someone I actually have to ask them where a specific menu is or how to interact with their ui. It threw me off when they removed file extensions from being visible.

I can feel the process, I’m kind of losing touch with normal people, the youths, a lot of people I used to relate to. I see people in public watching short form content and I judge them slightly, so many small things I’ve noticed becoming what I would describe as a ignorant old man. Someone’s going to try to make me use a new app or I’m going to get confused and scared when I can’t use Linux.

Its partially by choice but man the world just isn’t really made for me like it used to be. Maybe being out of touch is the inability to change with the times. Mainstream media is just doing millenial fanfare now and milking us like they used to milk the boomers, so now everything I used to like has this weird corperate nolstalgic haze added to it. They’re brining back mike myers to do a new Austin powers movie which will be fine and I’ll watch it but it will feel alienating like they’re trying too hard to appeal to me like they’re trying to playcate a child. And all the cool new shit is made by tiktokers and stuff I’m too old to understand. I don’t know what the hell the backrooms are or understand why I’m invested but thats what’s probably actually where the “real” culture is at. The semi organic culture that is the most free flowing and inventive is often with the youths, and you just slowly lose touch with that.

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.

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.

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.

What year is it?

67

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