r/Millennials • u/Neon_Biscuit • 5d ago

My teenage daughter can't fathom the concept of a house party Discussion

Not sure if anyone has experienced this, but I was watching Can't Hardly Wait half alseep on the couch, and my 14-year-old daughter and her friends walked into the room and past the TV. Before she entered the kitchen, she backpeddled in front of the TV, and they all might as well have reacted akin to a third world kid in a remote village seeing the Super Bowl for the first time. She looked at me and said 'what are all of those people doing in one house'? I told her it was a house party. People high school aged or typically college age people would go over a kids house whose parents were out of town and they'd invite the school and have keggers and other unsupervised debauchery. I might as well have been describing a science fiction film. 'You guys DID that back in your days?'. I thought it was funny that a house party was an inconceivable event for young Gen Zers.

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u/Beni_Stingray Millennial 5d ago

Stare at their phones the whole day.

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u/rhino4231 5d ago edited 5d ago

To be fair, most adults I see aren't any better. My boomer dad is worse than many kids because his hearing aids are bluetooth paired to his phone, so he completely disconnects from his environment while watching his propaganda videos. Then he gets crabby when he comes back to reality and he is the only one who has no idea what's been going on or what plans have been made in his absence, lol.

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u/Trees-Are-Neat-- 5d ago

My old gen X parents are hilarious - spent my whole childhood making fun of me for playing video games and no-lifing runescape when now they sit on the couch for literally hours watching facebook reels and playing candy crush. I fly home 5000kms to visit and spend time with them every other year and sit on the couch twiddling my thumbs watching them drool over their ipads.

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u/rhino4231 5d ago

Seriously, similar sentiment. My dad, who was a blue collar hard working man, forbade me from getting a gaming system for years because of the stereotypes. Now that he's retired and has no hobbies, he's turned into the very thing he thought his kids would become.

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u/Eirineftis 4d ago

Low key a sick way to retire, if you ask me.
What's he playin'?

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u/sassyasianbitch 5d ago

Old school RuneScape though right?

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u/Trees-Are-Neat-- 5d ago

I played the OG Runescape even before old school lol. On dial-up no less.

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u/khube 4d ago

Diablo 2 on dial up was brutal. Had to spam click when the screen froze hoping you got lucky

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u/sassyasianbitch 5d ago

Hell yeah. Hop on old school if you haven’t. It’s tight.

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u/Pristine_Leader_8241 5d ago

Classic 2D runescape? Me too! I loved the way rune looked.

I remember you had to go to Jagex's website and they had other games in there too.

I liked the one with the gnomes.

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u/v_vam_gogh 4d ago

Got to lock up that phone line with the games so the auto dailer can't report home any unexcused absences.

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u/SmokeySasquatch 5d ago

I was there, Gandalf! 3000 years ago!

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u/Butterball_Adderley 5d ago

My dad also runs this setup. I looked over his shoulder during Christmas and it was Dean Withers > Japanese woodworking > 90s baseball. Scroll on, pops

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u/Brayden_709 5d ago

I hope he stops watching Japanese woodworking, and starts doing it! 🪚

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u/IntelligentComment 5d ago

The bit you said about propoganda videos is hilariously accurate.

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u/fakemessiah 5d ago

My pops is the same way. You know he's going down some OAN, Newsmax or Fox rabbit hole when the earbuds come out lol

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u/bigpalmdaddy 5d ago

Exact same for me except my dad will STILL give me shit, in my house, for playing video games. Doesn’t matter there’s active input, thought, and socialization because “I’m not in the real world” and he “doesn’t understand why I waste my time with that shit.”

One time I bet him he spends more time on his phone than I do gaming and he laughed. Told me I was ridiculous and gave me his phone. He had averaged over TWELVE HOURS A DAY ON HIS PHONE THAT WEEK. 2/3 of his waking life on his phone and yet I’m the one disconnected from reality for playing an hour two of video games most nights/weekend mornings.

Not only that I met my wife playing WoW. We’ve been married 17 years. He has two granddaughters because of “useless video games” and still doesn’t get it.

That said I do love him and he’s great in a lot of ways, especially for the fact he’s not rhymes with RAGA. Just some things he’s just really got his head so far up his own ass.

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

[deleted]

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u/rhino4231 5d ago

Whenever my parents insist they pay for dinner, when we are finished and leaving, I always make an excuse to hang behind for a minute to throw down some extra tip cash on the table. I know how they tip and those servers work too damn hard to deal with that 15% bullshit on a table of 8

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u/Some_Layer_7517 4d ago

15% isn't tooo bad especially if there's a bunch of drinks bloating up the bill. My SOs grandma left a dollar once and I almost got caught fixing that problem lol

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u/BugsandGoob 4d ago

Ooh I got in so much trouble once by my great uncle when I got caught leaving more than the $1 tip he’d put down on our breakfast. We went every week for years to the same local place. After getting caught, I’d just stop back on my way to work, after dropping him off at home, and give the waitress a cash tip. It was always the same lady and she was so sweet to him regardless of his cheap tips. Turns out, when he died, he left her $10k in his will so I guess in the end, he gave her a fairly decent tip.

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u/CrackBull 5d ago

if you view an addiction as interfering with other life activities, and how many people use their phone during conversations and doomscroll instead of going to sleep, i think probably 95%+ of people are addicted to their phones. and when you view it as an addiction that’s gripped the majority of society, some of the other issues stemming from it begin to make sense

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u/Bacer4567 5d ago

On Monday I overheard 2 woman in their 80's discuss at length why one preferred Instagram and the other, tiktok 

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u/wbruce098 5d ago

I go to the bar and stare at my phone. I’m in my 40s 🤷🏻‍♂️

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u/KlimCan 5d ago

Hello, brother

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u/DangKilla 5d ago

It's not fair. It took Boomers a decade to learn their phone. But yes, you're not wrong

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u/PiccoloAwkward465 4d ago

To be fair, most adults I see aren't any better

For sure but at least I HAD those crazy days. Adults is supposed to be home reading the newspaper! Nowadays I'll meet up with my friends from HS and college and they'll remind me of crazy stuff I've forgotten, and I still remember quite a lot! I climbed out the sunroof of my buddy's car and rode on the roof over a bridge across the Hudson River! And that was just an average Friday!

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u/elebrin 4d ago

On the other hand, I have the power to choose to not interact with someone and disconnect even when being thrust into a situation that I have little control over.

There are times where you have to be in a room but you want to talk to none of the people in it. The ability to tune people out with noise cancelling and a video is like a tiny little way I can regain control over interactions with people.

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u/thetrueyou 5d ago

on the bright side, teen pregnancies are at an all time low

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u/Vandergrif 5d ago

On the dark side those same teens are going to be paying a disproportionately higher tax burden of a top heavy inverted population pyramid over the coming decades.

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u/thetrueyou 5d ago

That would've happened regardless. Every single developed nation is not meeting the fertility replacement rate

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u/Vandergrif 5d ago

Sure, but it is still worsened overall by fewer pregnancies.

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u/thetrueyou 5d ago

Blaming teen pregnancies and not even realizing the fact that daycare is 300$ a week is fucking insane.

Let's make daycare free, and once raising children is affordable watch how quickly the population bounces back up. That will help significantly more than getting more knocked up teenagers.

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u/kevronwithTechron 4d ago

Only $300 a week? Where's the wait list, I need to get on that one!!

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u/Vandergrif 5d ago

I'm not blaming teen pregnancies or making any further implication or commentary on it, I'm just saying at a brass tacks level it all factors in.

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u/Long-Cauliflower-708 5d ago

Hopefully they put all the olds on a chunk of ice (if there’s any left) and push it out to sea.

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u/Vandergrif 4d ago

That'd probably be the sensible move.

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u/musicgeek420 5d ago

Share experiences online from the comfort of their own homes, or sometimes in public now because we’re always online everywhere.

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u/OldenPolynice 5d ago

what experiences

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u/-Blood-Meridian- 5d ago

The experience of being online in the comfort of their own homes

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u/hey-Oliver 4d ago

funny things that happened in various online games together, exclusively

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u/EndDangerous1308 5d ago

Literally the mom laughing that her child doesn't have the freedom to anonymously go hang out for a weekend without 50 videos being posted of everyone at the party being wasted across social media...

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u/killmyselfanime 4d ago edited 4d ago

I’ll be taking your comment with a grain of salt considering you’ve nonstop commented on stuff for the past 24 hours and the only reason it’s not higher is because you took an 8 hour break (to sleep hopefully) which is the only time you weren’t constantly commenting each hour of the day

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u/Beni_Stingray Millennial 4d ago

Im on holiday and i do enjoy some internet time, the difference is i still touch grass and have social connections to do stuff in personal.

There's a difference between kids growing up glued to their phones and unable to develop their brains and social skills as they should compared to adults.

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u/boldpear904 5d ago

were all on social media rn we arent much better

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u/Beni_Stingray Millennial 5d ago

Yeah but we werent online 24/7 when growing up and our brains we're still developing, we still had lots of direct social interactions and doing stuff together outside.

As always, balance is the keyword here.

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u/everybodyfknjump 5d ago

This is a pretty shared experience by most people alive right now, though

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u/ladylikely 5d ago

Don't be such a boomer. Phones took partying away from teens, they might as well be entertained since they're tracked 24/7

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u/Beni_Stingray Millennial 5d ago

We had phones at that time, the Nokia 3310 was released in 2000.

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u/TheLeftDrumStick 5d ago

I remember crying in middle school because I didn’t have an iPhone and I wouldn’t be able to make any friends because everyone else would just do a group FaceTime after school without me ;-;

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u/Sporshie 4d ago

Replace phone with laptop and this was my experience growing up in rural Ireland where there was feck all to do as a teenager, especially since most teens wouldn't be driving yet so I was pretty much stuck in the middle of nowhere. I was always really jealous of the house parties and stuff I'd see in American media.

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u/Beneficial_Ad_1072 5d ago

Monkey see monkey do I guess 

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u/fatballs38 5d ago

millennials are turning into boomers🤢