Idiocracy (2006)

[SunlitZelkova]

6 hours ago, lajoswinkler said:

Zoomers were raised in environment exposing them to the most horrific things imaginable. When did we ever have whole generations involved in sharing videos of brutal murders and violent, sickest forms of pornography? When did we have generations of children in constant danger of getting their life ruined by online abuse on social networks? They say the wrong thing, they wear something wrong? Before you had classmates laughing at them, now you have danger of becoming the laughing stock of the planet. I do not envy them. It's an insane amount of stress and peer pressure that has led them into unprecedented conformity.

I know you replied to DDE but as a Gen Z guy I just feel obliged to respond. The entire population of Gen Z, or a majority of it, has not been involved in sharing videos of brutal murders, nor violent pornography. You are zeroing in on the most fringe parts of society, and then a fraction of that fringe, and then extrapolating that to two and half billion people.

6 hours ago, lajoswinkler said:

Teachers from all over the world are noticing a decline in students' attention span, empathy and motoric skills. This is not made up stuff. This already started to be noticed in the 90s, but grew to serious proportions in the next decades.

The generation X are parents of younger generation Y and Z. Millenials (generation Y) are making a much worse thing with alphas. And why did this happen? I don't know, but it is a recognized problem. I've got friends who work in education in EU and they are experiencing increasing work related stress because of how violent and entitled children are rising in numbers. Some have even quit jobs they loved and thought were their calling. Same story around EU countries, same story in USA, Canada, ...

Children have always been hard to control. Indeed, you are correct about such trends. My aunt is a kindergarten teacher here in the US and has said her classes in recent years have been the worst she remembers.

But what does this have to do with these people as adults? If you looked at the youth history of any wide subset of people, especially from their first decade of life, everything they do is probably going to make you say "this generation is going to destroy the world." Indeed, there are records of people dating back thousands of years saying such things (or rather, writing about them). But they always turned out fine.

Older generations are always complaining about younger ones, but it doesn't have to do with reality. It's just a way of looking at the world and nothing more. It has no relation to how things actually are.

7 hours ago, lajoswinkler said:

Computer literacy is VITAL in today's world. I am not going to defend this statement. It is basically axiomatic. Current state of affairs is already creating problems at workplaces and it's just laughable. I repeat, these are averages. I am not generalizing. Behaviours and properties of average people have changed for the worse.

That's true, but tending to use a smartphone instead of a PC, not knowing the "official" method of touch typing, and not knowing what a website is has nothing to do with computer literacy. You're wanting people who will spend their day filling out forms and replying to emails to carry a burden that should be the IT guy's.

7 hours ago, lajoswinkler said:

Regarding drugs, drug problem is not the same as before. For many generations we had drunkards as a fairly constant variable. Things have changed. Cannabis used to be a rebelious thing. Huge amounts of alcohol and ethanol poisoning have been a norm for quite some time, they are not even seen as rebelious anymore. What cannabis used to be, now are cocaine and synthetic drugs. For the past decade or so, serious hard drugs which have viciously bad consequences on neuroplastic brains became a normal party property. Proof? One of the most horrific proofs are increasing concentrations of cocaine's, metamphetamine's and metabolites of other hard drugs in sewage waters of average towns/cities. We can't hide urine and feces and they speak a story of increasingly poisoned population.

Yes, but none of what you have written indicates this is a specific problem with Gen Z. Higher levels of drugs in sewage systems don't indicate what age group is using them.

Studies in the US, Canada and Europe do indicate that the majority of cocaine users are young adults (as of 2025 "young adult" exclusively refers to Gen Z). However, this only applies to the US, Canada, and Western-ish Europe. Furthermore, just because the majority of cocaine users are from Gen Z does not mean that Gen Z itself has a drug problem. We are still talking about a tiny fraction of the two and half billion Gen Z people who walk the Earth. Gen Z is also not the only age group to comprise hard drug users. This youth heavy drug use is also not prevalent in other countries.

This has less to do with "Gen Z" and likely more to do with the very specific societal conditions in countries where such a trend can be found. The whole of Gen Z is not inherently more interested in drugs than any past generation.

7 hours ago, lajoswinkler said:

Things are changing. This practice is not sustainable because we will have so many problems with psychotic individuals in the future. What will this do to the public health? What will it do to democracies which depend on the majority being sufficiently rational?

To be honest, I don't really see where your fears are coming from. For one thing, "psychotic" individuals, which I assume is the term you are using to refer to people with schizophrenia or bouts of psychosis, or other mental health issues, don't tend to be a nuisance to society and instead are far more likely to harm themselves. At worst, the developed world's already high suicide rates will get higher, but we aren't going to be dealing with an increase in crime because of "psychotic" people. The majority reason for any increase in crime is probably going to fall on healthy people making bad decisions.

Quite frankly, if a society is already in a state where more people are using hard drugs than before, its public health is not in a good state to begin with. Instead of dreading over the future state of public health, why not get out there and work with organizations that are trying to solve the existing public health problem using data and hands-on response? Because the vibe I get from your posts is that "These people need to stop doing these things." Emphasis on the period, too. That's not how a drug problem is resolved. Drug use can be reduced but it requires civil society and government working together, not expecting the users to suck it up and quit their bad behavior, especially when the users in question are young people. Guess who makes up that civil society and government that has the responsibility and sole power to create a solution? Gen X and Millenials for the most part (with boomers thrown in too of course).

People do not just wake up one day and decide to use drugs, except in very rare cases. The conditions they live in drive them to do that. And the young people, who do not hold positions of power and have no control over the world they are in, are not to blame for their actions if the world is in a certain way that then drives them to commit those actions. It is the older folk who for reasons unknown are still regarded as wise and solely worthy of power despite that distant, ancient trope having long since been shown to be not that great as a universal measure of qualification for leadership.

One last thing... (Again, it was in the reply to DDE but as a Gen Z guy I feel inclined to reply)

7 hours ago, lajoswinkler said:

Mythical PC illiteracy? Oh, you clearly work with talented ones.

"Gen Z" consists of individual human beings, with different abilities and proficiencies in those abilites. It is not, in fact, a model of android produced by the Rosen Association.

When I argue that Gen Z is not degenerate and unintelligent, I am not saying they are superhuman specimens of perfection, I'm saying they are normal people. There are people that will be thought of as dumb and there are people that will be thought of as clever.

If the Gen Z people around you seem horrendously unintelligent, aside from extrapolating your own personal experience to billions of people, why not consider other options? Maybe the education in your specific district is low quality? Maybe the profession you work in where you encounter Gen Z has just begun to attract less than competent individuals? Maybe your standards are unrealistically high for an entire generation of human beings? Maybe you are just tending to remember bad experiences with young people more than good ones? And expanding on that last point, maybe people are only interesting in trying to figure out problems to the extent that they are ignoring everything good about Gen Z?

Generations are really just a way of positioning a species temporally. In extraordinary cases, you might be able to assign physical traits to them (Japanese people born since the 1990s are notably taller than Japanese people in say, the 1920s) but they can't actually be used to categorize behavior. Because especially among humans, behavior is a wildly varying thing that for the most part has nothing to do with a person's physical state.

[FleshJeb]

@SunlitZelkova My responses include:

• CLEARLY, they've solved the lead paint problem that plagued earlier generations.
• OK, OK, we'll let you sit at the adults' table for the holidays.
• Jesus kid, can I (a GenX) adopt you?

Damn fine argument, sir. I'm deducting 0.5 style points for apologizing for butting in. My sixth grade teacher once told me, "Never apologize for your work." As I've gotten older, it's become a deeper and more layered sentiment than I initially thought.