Gen Z here, blame smartphones and the destruction of communal areas/3rd spaces; COVID really threw gasoline on an already bad fire.

I guess at some point people started taking themselves way too seriously. Worrying about what others think, or something, I don't know. In a way, social interaction is kind of like a standoff in the dusty streets of an old west town. Someone has to make the first move to expose themselves, and it doesn't seem like anyone wants to be that person anymore.

I've always felt that we (older millennials) sort of hit a sweet spot technology wise. We pretty naturally straddled that analog to digital world.

Near as I can tell that was still roughly the model on paper if less and less until COVID and lockdown and all that. Something snapped, you can see it walking down the street of any city you knew well before. People never came back outside with the same vigor.

I don't claim to understand the causal structure between all the various factors: the bleak economic prospects, the decline in institutions, the increasingly rapacious and cynical Big Tech cabal, there are a ton of factors.

But COVID before and after, that's when it collectively became too much to easily bounce back from.

Still are! As I post this we're establishing where we meet for beers and at what time on my whatsapp friends group. Ofc, we're old geezers too.

I am extremely lucky though, living by myself in the capital city of my country makes it very easy to go out and do stuff

When I was a teenager, precisely one guy had videoed his teenage self waving around a broomstick like a lightsaber, and had it end up online. Video cameras and editing equipment were rare and expensive. And that one man was a cautionary tale, not to wave a broomstick like a lightsaber anywhere there are video cameras.

Now the video cameras are in everyone's pockets 24/7, and with the internet connection built in. Is it any wonder nobody's waving a broomstick like a lightsaber?

I was actually thinking the other day, I haven’t hit anybody with a boffer in a while, might need to get back to it.

I notice when just out and about other people my age and older still have the familiar vibe. Young people are in another universe and it doesn’t seem like a more pleasant one.

There are exceptions though of course

People are afraid to open up and be honest, because of the fear of local, internet or political rejection.

Have you considered that maybe it's you, and you're just interrupting at the wrong time? Imagine someone's reading a book and you interrupt them and then you blame them for getting annoyed?!

You might get the random ultra woke person who makes it impossible for others to have a conversation because they're just waiting to be triggered by anything anyone else says and find a way to spin every comment into an offence.

If anyone brings up politics then the meetup is over, at least for me.

I struck up a conversation with the person setting next to me at an outdoor cafe. He was probably 84-ish. He'd married someone from Japan he'd met there in the 60s. They had not had any children. I brought up the population issue in a light way (Japan's population is declining), something like making the joke that they didn't help Japan's population decline. He replied something like "anyone who tells you there's an underpopulation issue is lying. The planet has 8 billion people which is way too many". And that was when I knew I wasn't going to continue the conversation.

(not Japan but same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk)

This 3,000 person study [1] in Germany matched pairs of strangers for private face-to-face meetings to discuss divisive political issues. It found asymmetric effects: conversations with like-minded individuals caused political views to become more extreme (ideological polarization); by contrast, conversations with contrary-minded individuals did not lead to a convergence of political views, but significantly reduced negative beliefs and attitudes toward ideological out-group members (affective polarization), while also improving perceived social cohesion more generally. These effects of contrary-minded conversations seem to be driven mostly by positive experiences of interpersonal contact.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727272...

> If anyone brings up politics then the meetup is over, at least for me.

> I brought up the population issue in a light way (Japan's population is declining), something like making the joke that they didn't help Japan's population decline. He replied something like "anyone who tells you there's an underpopulation issue is lying. The planet has 8 billion people which is way too many". And that was when I knew I wasn't going to continue the conversation.

You brought up an intensely political issue (population decline), they responded, and then you got mad at them and felt like they brought up a political issue?

It sounds like you are doing exactly the thing you are complaining about "ultra woke" people doing.

I think younger generations have lost Nuance, in the University I had several good friends who had very opposite political views from me. Still we could sit down and play a D&D round.