Adults really more childish than in years past?

[Bosstone]

Bringing my post over from that thread, since it was something of a hijack:

@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.