
I do honestly find that attitude really annoying sometimes? Like why do older generations find it extremely funny that, like, yeah, younger generations grkw up in a world that works slightly differently from the one they grew up in? Same vibe as all the YouTube videos and Ellen and shit going like "OMG THESE ZOOMERS DONT KNOW HOW ROTARY PHONES WORK LOL" like 1) pretty sure most of you grew up with touch tone anyways, and 2) yeah? would you expect them to? you never once tried to teach them about the way things used to be so why would they know about a world before smartphones/answering machines/touch-tone/high-speed internet/digital clocks/whatever.
I wonder if it's just a coping mechanism to deal with the sudden shock of realizing how old they are and that their child never living in a world where answering machines didn't exist puts their life timeline into frightening relativity.
oh absolutely the latter, at least in my mom's case. It wasn't mean, just a sudden realization of the gap you hadn't realized until just now exists in your model of the world.
the thing I can think of that hit me like a truck recently was an older and a younger streamer having a "cultural exchange" thing and after explaining what a pager was, the younger still didn't understand what the point was or how it would serve any meaningful function. Like, it would have taken fully half an hour to present all of the "OK, so, here are a bunch of scenarios and how they would play out with a pager..." necessary to paint the picture of the world that is before cell phones but also where payphones and other public phones exist.