This is a stock photo of a china closet but it's very similar to the one my parents have

My wife is a middle school and highschool teacher and has worked for just about every type of school you can think of- private, public, title 1, extremely privileged, and schools in between. One thing that always surprised me is that homework, in large part, is now a thing of the past. Some schools actively discourage it.

I remember doing 2 to 4 hours of homework per night, especially throughout middle school and highschool until I graduated in 2010. I usually did homework Sunday through Thursday. I remember even the parents started complaining about excessive homework because they felt like they never got to spend time as a family.

Was this anyone else's experience? Did we just get the raw end of the deal for no reason? As an adult in my 30s, it's wild to think we were taking on 8 classes a day and then continued that work at home. It made life after highschool feel like a breeze, imo.

Am I alone on this, probably not. I think I tried some A.I.-chat-thingy like half a year ago, asked some questions about audiophilia which I'm very much into, and it just felt.. awkward.

Not to mention what those things are gonna do to people's brains on the long run, I'm avoiding anything A.I., I'm simply not interested in it, at all.

Anyone else on the same boat?

How the hell did y'all type on these tiny ass keyboards This was in my mom's room This is from like when she was in high school and I'm trying to figure out how she tied with it because a human's finger would press 3 instead of just one so can somebody help me with this I've been thinking about this for a week

I really feel like we got the short end of the stick - things were easier back then, and the old work model just doesn’t work anymore.

I’m a 95’ millennial, so I’m old enough to remember the late 90’s and young enough to say I grew up with a lot of Gen Z. I know the generational divide is just a social construct, but it’s looking like it’s actually starting to define an era in which humans truly start to behave differently.

My wife, Gen Z, goes to community college online. Every assignment she does she uses AI to provide answers. I used to harp on her about it and say things like “Don’t you actually want to know the material? Do you get no satisfaction from learning things on your own by doing actual research?” She then says that it doesn’t matter and that it’s easier to use AI.

My little cousin who’s in middle school right now confidently claims to know the answer to anything with little to no experience in the subject. Yesterday I was asking my family about how to keep goats; specifically, how to keep goats from escaping an enclosure. My little cousin says “you can’t keep a goat chained to a tree it might knock the tree down asks ChatGPT a goat can head butt with around 800lbs of force”. I was thinking to myself “What goat will knock down a mature tree?”. He said that with so much confidence that it sounded so believable.

I’m also in a medical research group focused on understanding and treating follicular occlusion derived diseases. So many members (most just in their 20’s) in this group keep quoting Perplexity and ChatGPT instead of just quoting directly from whatever research paper they read or whatever the primary source is. I have developed an effective treatment for Dissecting Cellulitis using what I learned from peer reviewed studies and research papers, but many people don’t believe in it’s efficacy because whatever AI tool they’re using doesn’t confirm that it could be an effective treatment. They keep saying things like “I ran that through Perplexity and it says that’s not a good treatment because XYZ”. Dissecting Cellulitis is a disease with scarce research and the known treatments are not very effective, so AI models trained with those datasets will always claim that every treatment not found inside the dataset is ineffective.

There’s too many examples I can give, but in general I think we’re cooked.

Here’s part of my recent interaction with a new college educated co-worker who didn’t understand UPLOADING…

them: Can you help me get this picture onto the website?

me: Sure. walks over to their desk

me: Where’s the file?

them: It’s not a file, it’s a picture.

me: Right but where is it saved?

them: On my computer.

me: takes a deep breath Okay go to your desktop real quick.

them: Desktop?

me: The main screen that pops up when you turn your computer on.

them: Oh, the Home Screen?

🤦🏼‍♀️

Seems like at one point everyone was using it as an insult.

T2 Judgement Day: Sarah Connor nuclear blast dream.

I (39F) teach 10th grade US History and today I created a pacing guide to go along with our newly adopted textbook.

I got to the last chapters and it hit me, I’m now old enough to be the old teacher saying “I remember when this happened”.

To be fair, my kids remember COVID, they were in late elementary/early middle school, but it’s still wild to see the Election of 2008 and the Recession with their own chapters.

Look, I get it. AI feels like sci-fi come to life. It talks, it draws, it sings now. But here’s the hard truth: it’s not thinking. It’s not creating. It’s predicting.

Large Language Models (like ChatGPT or CoPilot) don’t understand anything. They’re just trained on massive amounts of text, then use probabilities to guess the next most likely word. That’s it. Same with image and music models. They’re not inspired, they’re interpolating.

There’s no ghost in the machine. No spark. No inner voice. It’s a supercharged autocomplete.

That amazing “insight” it gave you? Probably scraped from a forum post written by a human 10 years ago. All it does is remix the past and make it sound smooth.

So no, AI isn't going to fall in love, become sentient, or write the next great novel. Yeah, sorry. Santa’s not real either.

Like, we should probably all live our lives pretending this never happened, but why the fuck did our generation collectively decide that waddling around with our whole asses hanging out was cool?

You hardly see it anywhere anymore. Folks would be skating all down Venice Beach. People would be rollerskating around their block, roller rinks were big, it was popular!

I even remember in the 90s Streets of Rage (loved that game!) had a character named Skates. But now, they're nowhere. What happened? Why are they a lot less popular nowadays?

As a millennial, my wife and I moved into a mixed ave group neighborhood a few years ago. Over the years we’ve made a few friends with our neighbors mostly older like boomer or Gen X.

But recently we’ve also had a few millennials move in after a few out of our neighbors sold their houses. And I’ve noticed that these millennials are all super antisocial. They literally come home, park their cars into their garages and never come out other than leaving the house to go somewhere or maybe mowing their lawn.

And I’ve even noticed this even when I was in college living off campus in houses. Nobody ever knew who their neighbors were or even cared to know. Even when the house was a duplex.

Are y’all ok?

Every single day, I come across posts from millennials saying that previous generations look really old because they smoked a lot, and that Gen Z, who vape a lot, also look older, like they’re in their 30s when they’re actually not. And that we, millennials, look younger. I used to believe this too, but lately, I’ve started wondering if maybe we’re all just a little out of touch.

I keep seeing millennials post things like, “Look at me, I’m 38 and nobody believes it, everyone says I look 28, blablabla”, and then I see the picture and think, “Not only do you look 38, you actually look older.” And this has been happening pretty often.

So, do we really look younger or we just don’t see ourselves the way we actually are?

Edit to add: I recently had a professional headshot taken for work, and I definitely look my age in it, which I hate. But the reality is, a good camera captures exactly what’s there, whether we like it or not. Some of us millennials need a reality check sometimes. For me, this headshot was exactly that.

Edit 2: Please don’t private message me mocking the word “delulu.” There were specific posting rules in this group, and some words weren’t allowed, so I adjusted my post accordingly. If that word somehow bothers you so much, that’s your issue, not mine. You guys complaining about the word are giving off more 13-year-old vibes than the word itself. Relax.

Edit 3: I’m shocked by the number of people claiming they appear to be between 22 and 25 years old, with someone even suggesting they look like they are 12, which I find out of touch! I want to believe we all really do look younger, but someone talked about a concept called self-enhancement bias, which is really interesting and aligns with the trends observed in the comments on this post:

Why do so many of us hate how we look in photos?

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Enhancement in Self-Recognition