While I didn’t understand the analogy, I will happily admit that, yes, I’m making the case that some norms are better and some are worse.

a few generations ago, there was a moral panic that the kids weren’t all right because rock and roll music was corrupting. It was loud, vulgar, etc and therefore wrong.

My point was to emphasize how across generations, everyone seems to think that the youth have bad norms and it’s somehow wrong, and then they grow up and the world keeps spinning, and the cycle repeats.

It’s awfully vain to think that the norms of your generation in your nation at your point in time are magically the ”better” ones.

The parent comment reference a novel idea that phone calls could have a subject line. It’s novel, it’s clever, it would solve many problems beyond just “people are scared to be human”. The world moves on, and we can improve it or we can launch ad hominem attacks on the next generation.

>Différent generations have different norms

Yes.

> and it’s not right or wrong.

No.

This sort of relativism of all norms, mores, morals, and ethics needs to stop. There are some cultural and social norms/mores that are better than others. We know this, because empirically some produce better outcomes than others. Mass-scale social anxiety at having to interact with another human being is NOT healthy for society, and is likely the underlying cause for a significant amount of the current social ills that are either new or increasing over time.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess 17 year olds who can’t call people aren’t the reason for societies problems. Certainly less to blame than the 45yo’s who bemoan them.

Every generation thought that society was collapsing. Despite that, time progresses, people age out of the population and a new generation is born. And society (mostly) doesn’t collapse.

Those 17 year olds grow up into adults with the same unaddressed anxieties.

When I was 17 I spent like an hour emailing a teacher telling her I’d be late on an assignment by a day. Because I was very anxious about writing an email to a “superior” and didn’t know how it’d go, or what the “right” email looked like.

Now I email hundreds of times a day, and have constantly shifted deadlines to no professional detriment. I still get nervous emailing a new important person, but you do it anyways.

Do people really forget what it’s like being young? Sometimes you just grow up and move on.