The piper is coming. No I’m not defending alcohol, but the level of drug addiction among our young people is shocking. The amount of digital addiction is shocking. I work in youth crisis so I am not talking on my ass, most young people are addicts now. So it’s all fun to talk down about boomers who drank but holy fuck is this generation ever screwed.
While what you seen is definitely real, it may not be as bad as what you see as you work in the field of youth crisis. You see it so often as that is your job and it can skew your findings to be more to the negative side as people that are not having those issues likely aren’t going to a youth crisis center and therefore are not around you. Again, it is very much a thing, but you do have some unintended bias as that is what you do for a living.
You are assuming that my experience is limited to youth crisis.
I have 11 years of experience working in addiction,… My response to your cynicism is this… You can only truly understand the scope of the greater issues on all levels … And with all generations, once you’ve worked in the field. And it helps to have lived experience.
Edit: oh yeah I know, I’ll up vote the uninformed opinion, and I’ll downvote the person who works in the field and is an educated and trained and expert /s
If it helps, I gave you both updoots because the discussion was enlightening and mostly productive. :)
Go to your settings > scroll down to “Show Scores” > uncheck all that shit. You don’t need it. It’s a vestigial dark pattern from commercial social media design to keep you checking how well your comments are “scoring” as if that made any sense.
It should never have been surfaced to frontend of Lemmy.
Having a coping mechanism because we are not hopeful about the future is standard from my experience
Truth.
And that’s why it’s really not a contest, and we must forgive our parents’ generation and a few going back from there.
Right? At least I can drink and work.
Wait…
I don’t want to have an automatic yeah no yeah no back and forth with you but… I suspect I’m much older than you and I can attest here that most people, even in professional roles, were hammered all day. They were as “functional” as this current generation is on ridiculous amounts of weed, psychedelics, and uppers… That is to say, not as functional as they could be. There’s no “what’s worse” contest here; the choice of drug doesn’t change the underlying issue. I’m a recovered addict and I work in the field of addiction so I’m speaking from the heart.
I just injected another marijuana in your honor good sir /s
And yet it didn’t make you funny, weird 🤷
Nope, everything else was though
Not all of them are even old enough to buy it yet.
That never stopped me, when I was a teenager.
That’s something I applaud the younger generations for. I’m just hoping that it’s not due to not socializing in person.
From what I’ve seen in the UK, it’s not that the youth particularly see temperance as a virtue it’s more than unless you’re going to a Spoons pints are £6 if not more these days. Ket is big in Britain too, on account of it being cheap especially compared to pints. They don’t want to be filmed while hammered and immortalised on tiktok either.
I feel it’s a common problem that economic factors are often attributed to moral ones.
Older Millennial here, they are right, too bad people my age didn’t get the memo. Never understood, even back in school, why getting plastered is celebrated.
Because… well… points around in multiple directions
That’s not going to make anything better though. You’ll just go down a path of addiction and self-destruction. Plus it’s expensive.
You know what else we also didn’t poison ourselves with at anywhere NEARLY as high a level as boomers did? Lead.
Now we just consume lead trough plant based protein supplements
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/16/nx-s1-5576294/protein-powder-lead-consumer-reports
But that’s mostly because the US supplements industry is an unregulated disaster.
“trough”? That’s a new one to add to this thing:
English is a tough language. It can be mastered through thorough thought though, while you sit next to a trough.
That is still a very worrying sentence when the only safe level is 0
Safe level is zero but there’s a gradient of severity
of course. I’m alluding to the fact that while theres been a significant improvement, we still in many places consume worrying amounts of lead.
originally i wanted to write that we didn’t have lead exposure, but …
Flint Michigan. and that’s actually not even the worst municipal water system by far. That’s merely the one that got a little more publicity than most.
It’s nice that we don’t have fumes from leaded gasoline, generally speaking–that it’s no longer the standard and most household sector products that use fuel don’t take leaded gasoline.
Yep. I don’t hear many folks talk about Jackson, Mississippi’s lead water problem. You’d think that being the capital of Mississippi that it would be talked about more.
Yeah. I’m not a Boomer I’m GenX, but as I get older I come to realize - poisoning myself with alcohol is becoming more & more appealing. Life sucks.
The main reason I’ve decided to abstain from alcohol is because I’ve seen first-hand what alcoholism does to a person. I’ve don’t want to end like my dad.
Same! I’m Gen-X and promised myself at age 4 when I witnessed my dad was always stumbling into the house drunk & ill & scary, I have no desire to put any poison into my body. Still never have and never will.
If alcohol guarantees death at 60 like my alcoholic narcissistic pos dad, I think I’ll just keep drinking. Other drugs too because I’m not a fucking square like he was :). If you have someone (even if it’s just you) to protect from yourself, I completely understand. edit: shit, if you have another good reason, that’s cool too. I’m drunk.
Sadly, found out my niece has been getting blacked out drunk in college repeatedly. In one of the videos she showed me, she probably consumed more alcohol in a 5-second clip than I have in 2 years. Just a bottle of Tito’s, and she just chugged it.
Not sure if boomers includes late forties but I quit drinking 4 or 5 years ago & went vegetarian.
Best decisions of my life after marriage & having kids.
Late forties is late gen x, a firm decade between you and the boomwrs
Damn, even gen X forgot about gen X
We found better poisons.
Tide pods?
Too awful tasting.
Well… you would know
Sleep aids work but suck if you fail. That’s what I tried doing.
I stopped drinking against my will, and every day I open the news I wish to god I could pick it back up.
Millennial here, been drinking heavy for 20+ years. Young generation missing out. But at the same time I respect the decision
Thing is- it’s the boomers that pushed things like the 21 to drink laws and the absurdly strict enforcement of them (like sending a parent to jail if their kid has a party).
You guys spent a few decades decrying teenage drinking, making it hard for teens to drink. And now you all are shocked when kids do something else.
Don’t forget- nicotine is 18+ not 21+. So chances are every high schooler has a friend or a sibling that can get them vapes.
Vapes are small. Many don’t look like anything in particular to someone who doesn’t know what they are. And they are easy to hide, easy to conceal, easy to transport, AND easy to use throughout the day.
So for a substance for kids to get into, it’s got a lot of advantages over alcohol.Plus which vaping is much more common to do alone. Kids are spending far less time on in-person social interactions now (probably because boomers flipped out over stranger danger).
You know its funny that caffeine and nicotine and alcohol and fake sugar all cause me serious health issues.
I pray we stop putting caffeine in everything especially soda so I can enjoy it again.
But honestly; Im fine drinking my caffeine free teas and fruit drinks and water though.
Maybe I should see a doctor lol.
One time a friend of mine showed me this chicken they got from the food pantry and one of the ingredients was caffeine. Needless to say I don’t eat much food pantry meat these days. Why was there caffeine in that chicken I may never know.
I’m middle aged, I’ve never smoked, at the most in my younger years I’d drink one glass of wine or cider or something like that a week. I don’t anymore, I have maybe 3 drinks a year tops now. It’s amazing to me how my parents’ generation is still alive because they smoked like fiends and drank buckets of rum and cokes on the weekends, and I’d say that they weren’t big drinkers compared to others.
Vaping isn’t a great alternative. Pick your poison. Fapping on the other hand… don’t sleep on edible cannabis either
