Reading another thread, I came across this post, which basically posits that modern-day adults are doing more childish things and should be treated as children.
I don’t know that I agree, but I’m curious to see what the collective opinion around here is.
My personal opinion is that the proportion of the population that is immature is probably relatively constant, but that grownups of all ages have done childish things as hobbies for a long, long time- look at model railroading, or R/C cars, which have been around quite a while.
Probably the only time when people didn’t do this kind of thing was when they had to farm the fields for 14 hours a day and didn’t have time or energy for anything else.
I don’t think “still plays video/computer games” is a fair measure of an adult’s childishness (though the amount of time spent playing them might be). Video games have grown up since I was a kid; and adults have always played games of some sort—bridge, canasta, solitaire, poker, golf, bowling…
I noticed this especially in the government sector. In Chicago the library workers wear anything, I’ve seen them in halter tops. Now, that looks so unprofessional to me. Postal workers in Chicago look like slobs as do 90% of the bus drivers.
I live next to the Social security admin building and the workers coming in there are dressed in jeans and t-shirts. It’s amazing how the governement workers don’t seem to have a dress code
Originally Posted by Bosstone
"Meh. I’m pretty confident that perception is wholly because the advancement of personal technology is pretty new. On the whole, people have always done for fun what they did for fun as kids, it’s just that the technology advancements of the past few decades have been marked enough to really notice it.
Nobody ever comments that kids in the early part of the century who used to bike to the movie theater still go see movies, or that kids in the 40s and 50s who spent much of their time in front of the TV now…spend much of their time in front of the TV. No, it’s just the kids who grew up with video games and now play video games as adults who are infantile. And of course people who are adults now began eating fast food when they were kids - that’s when fast food became popular!
Western culture and technology shifted pretty significantly in the third quarter (fourth fifth? around there) of the 20th century. That’s recent enough for many older people to remember a time before then, but long enough ago that the people who were kids at the time are now adults. So the older folk saw the innovations being adopted by the kids and treated them as kiddie stuff, then got confused when the kids didn’t abandon the stuff they thought was on the same level as dolls and toy guns but which were actually a good bit more enduring than that."
I think a distinction should be drawn not between adult activities and childish activities, but between work and leisure. Nobody has a lot of opportunity for leisure on a farm; from sunup to sundown it’s all work, and everyone has to help. When Western culture began to industrialize and after child labor laws started being passed, children had a lot more leisure time than adults, so ‘play’ was seen as something kids did and ‘work’ was something adults did.
These days adults get a good bit more leisure time and there are a lot more options for daily leisure activities than hanging out at the pub, reading the newspaper, or watching TV. Adults have the opportunity to ‘play’ a lot more, but it’s become ingrained in us, particularly the older generation, that ‘playing’ is what kids do. We younger adults are still working, and working hard, but we’re getting to be more active and…I don’t know, obvious? in our leisure time, particularly as the internet and gaming networks connect everyone up and provide analyzable statistics for everyone to shake their heads over.
I’m always astounded by how many “adults” play stupid games for hours on end like golf, bowling, bridge, bingo, or by how many “adults” waste hours and hours not even playing a stupid game but just sitting and watching other people play a game like baseball, football, hockey, and basketball. That’s childish to me and not something “adult” do.
It always comes back to the video games doesn’t it? Some adults just can’t get it through their rapidly graying skulls that video games aren’t “kid’s stuff” and they really never were.
Or should we make fun of those howling fangirls that still listen to The Beatles? They’re all in their 60s now!
Or how about those WWII vets that read all those comics after coming home from the war? Clearly, the lot of them are children that never saw the REAL WORLD.
Nope, it’s only video games that makes someone a developmentally arrested adult. I guess I’d know that if I didn’t love video games so much instead of doing important things like holding down a job, being married to a wonderful woman and paying my bills. Wait, I do those things too!
To be fair, stuff like clothing was brought up as well, but I personally don’t see a trend towards egalitarian informality in day-to-day life as anything to be upset about.
Now, when folks start wearing diapers in public, then we can start talking childish.
So, are real adults working non-stop every day? I’m really curious because I’ve heard this before. What are the “adult” activities and what are “childish” ones?
I have hours a day more leisure time than people did even 1 or 2 generations ago. I guess I could continue work in the evenings so I could buy more stuff but that doesn’t seem very adult to me either.
I think that the big difference is that, when you worked, you dressed and acted in an adult manner because you got adult pay with adult benefits and retired with an adult pension-it was an adult game with an adult payoff. For a lot of people that adult payoff is long gone, so why should they dress professionally if management is going to treat them like Burger King employees?
I know it’s not just video games, but if you ever get a geezer talking shit about “kids these days”, one of the first things they mention, without fail, will be video games. And it’s never anything about the games themselves. It’s that they exist and adults play them and that’s so childish.
Forgetting all about card games and comic books and dime store novels and rock music and all the other stuff that they enjoy that used to be called childish, but isn’t anymore.
It’s ridiculous and I can’t wait for these fogeys to go senile so I can stop hearing it.
