(no subject)

[palominocorn]

I've had a volleyball-induced skinned knee for five days now (healing, just annoying about it) and I keep thinking about how any time I hurt myself doing anything fun, people (my coworkers) immediately jump to "you need to stop doing $HOBBY".

I'm not talking things like broken bones or concussions here; I really do mean bruises, scrapes, muscle fatigue, that sort of thing. These minor injuries that heal within a week are, for some reason, such a horrifying prospect that my coworkers will actively lecture me about quitting things that give me a lot of joy.

Meanwhile these people will get sick with COVID19 repeatedly and still go unmasked to concerts and bars, because I guess that's not as bad as having actual longterm hobbies that keep my mental health stable purple slightly tender spots on my forearm.

Comments

[yvannairie]

I've noticed this too.

[palominocorn]

So it's not just my coworkers being a joyless, dysfunctional lot? Ooof.

I've been thinking about this kind of thing a lot. I wasn't a latchkey kid exactly, but I did spend a lot of time entertaining myself, and I got a lot of leeway to do things before adolescence. Probably a little too much: my parents should not have let me play hot potato with a switchblade (I still have a scar from that LOL).

I've noticed that, starting with people born around 1995 (a few years younger than me), kids and teens got progressively less freedom. To the point that the kids of today are metaphorically bubble wrapped so that they don't get a single scratch ever. I think that's a major factor in their messed up risk assessment: if you grew up with the mentality of a bruise being the Worst Thing Ever, and you couldn't do anything that might possibly give you one, you're not going to have the "eh, it'll pass" approach like someone who was allowed to climb trees does.

When I was a kid it was normal to see young children biking around side streets, playing in the creek, running around the playground, all unsupervised. By the time I was a teen, that was basically not a thing anymore. And by the time I was in college, seeing teens just hanging around at the library, the mall, the local food joints, like my friends and I had was also rare. My neighbors won't even let their kids play in the FRONT YARD OF THE HOUSE ffs.

[yvannairie]

💯 I don't really have anything to add other than that it makes sense and also... it took longer over here, I feel. Like, people five-six years younger than me are pretty wild-grown still, but people ten years younger than me exhibit the same kind of stiffness. I don't think it truly went away over here, it's just that we all live on the Yankees' internet so the younger generations end up having similar conflicts.

[palominocorn]

I can't speak for Finland (and the impression I got in my homeland is that, up to my last visit in 2013, kids were still growing up the way I did), but here I think it wasn't so much an internet thing, so much as a lot of government and school initiatives to "raise awareness" of threats to kids. Stranger danger and superpredator campaigns are a big thing, and while my parents were (obviously lololol) not into it, so were various safety campaigns. Some of the latter were good (wear a bike helmet), some were fine but people went overboard (skin cancer from sun exposure IS a thing that you want to avoid, but sunscreen has become a gateway substance to orthorexia because of all the hubub), and some were just. Bad. (I am so fucking sick of the "Gatorade will kill you" nonsense.)

These were a thing before the internet as we know it coalesced, and then the proliferation of modern social media just made it explode. And apparently spread it to other countries.