You've probably seen more than your fair share of content like this before.
You're browsing social media, checking out what your friends and family may have posted, and you eventually come across it.
Images of life being enjoyed by generations past, maybe something from the 70's, 80's or 90's, and the message in text form just below such photos saying something to the effect of, "Kids today don't know how easy they've got it! We had no internet, no texting, no Facebook, none of that stuff! We had to walk eight miles to school every day, trudging through six feet of snow each way, even in May!"
Okay, so I exaggerated that last sentence for comedic purpose.
But let's be honest, we've still seen such content and statements shared online, am I right? In the eyes of many adults, kids today live on Easy Street, with anything they could ever want easily procurable at the touch of a button and living in Cyber World with the growth of social media in the last twenty years.
Respectfully, this mindset by many adults is also complete and utter bull crap.
I drove down to Elbow yesterday to watch a play put on by students from Loreburn Central School. Not just performed by them, it was actually an original work that was written by two of the castmates. It was called 'Unspoken Reflections', and it dealt with the pressures that kids find themselves under today that are coming at them like a freight train, whether it's school work, issues at home, peoples' expectations of them, and of course, that lovely little thing everyone's addicted to, social media and the online world.
I was impressed by what the students came up with, and I like to think the message that the play sent reverberated with people who were watching it down there in Elbow.
Kids today are expected to perform at a high level in school, be obedient and respectful at home and not "cause a fuss", and with the rise in social media, many of them end up feeling like as if they're missing out on something if they're not online for hours every day, creating profiles and exhibiting something that I can only compare to a mask that they wear. Online? Everything's hunky dory, everyone looks great, and life is awesome. Offline? It can be the complete opposite sometimes, but that's not what your followers on Instagram want to see and read about, is it?
The play's central message hit home with me in one particular way: kids are almost expected to carry themselves like as if they're adults, but too many of us almost forget that at the end of the day, they're STILL kids. They're still developing human beings, and they're still learning all about the world around them.
The question that continuously pops up online these days is how great would it be if us kids in the 80's and 90's had things like social media, or how things would be if those generations grew up in today's environment. Most people seem to think it'd be a great idea that would make life easier.
Not me.
You couldn't pay me to be a teenager in 2025.
I come from a generation that grew up right before the big boom of social media. My class and I graduated from Outlook High School in 2004, and it was a year or so later that we all saw the global explosion that was Facebook take place and start to infect - sorry, infiltrate our society.
What was a typical week like for me in high school, without things like social media or even texting?
It was hanging out at school, talking with friends and making plans for the weekend, or screwing around in spare periods. We'd talk about where the party was going to be after that Friday's football game, and after everyone understood the 'assignment', it was back to life as usual.
It wasn't too complicated, and there was no Facebook or Instagram to keep track of everybody, or produce hurt feelings when one person wouldn't follow or 'Like' someone else. And there wasn't this monstrous thing called 'Cyber bullying' just yet, which is perhaps a whole other article.
In short, life was pretty agreeable growing up when I was a kid. There were trials and tribulations, of course, but that was just par for the course when it came to growing up. We had it good, and I think people sometimes forget that because they believe that kids today have it better.
Honestly, if social media was around in those early 2000's, it may have wrecked me from an emotional standpoint. I give today's kids all the credit in the world for growing up in a turbulent world that demands perfection from them at all times, whether it's coming from online or their everyday lives.
Kids are strong as hell, but at the end of the day, many of us need to remember that they are still, in fact, just kids.
For this week, that's been the Ruttle Report.
