Text messages and phone calls. I don’t need to see my boomer relatives racist posts.
That was disappointing, when you grow up thinking your parents are progressive and then as old age and its symptoms happen their guards drop and you find out that they always had some racist tendencies. I guess credit to them suppressing them for so long.
In my parents’ old age they’ve gotten more progressive. I reject the notion that people naturally trend towards conservativism as they age… I just think there are a fuckton of entitled “I got mine” boomers.
I recently read an article that claims people become more progressive as they age, but society becomes more progressive faster, so it just seems like they become conservative.
i think it was just the case in the past because people tended to have more means and affluency as they grew up in the 70s and 80s, so they naturally gravitated toward people like eisenhower and reagan.
Yep. I saw a fairly recent study talking about this. The short of it is that they found no correlation between age and political leaning for ANY generation, but a strong correlation between political leaning and wealth.
As people begin to benefit more from the system, the more they support pulling the ladder up behind them.
The correlation to age here is that it gets harder to adapt to new information the older we get, so people are more likely to double down rather than change their perspective as society gets more progressive and inclusive. The best weapon against racism is experiences that put people in situations to meet people with different life experiences than them. Get them outside their little white suburban bubbles. This is why conservatives hate college so much. It’s often the first time kids are put in a situation where they’re both out from under the thumb of their parents and exposed to kids who grew up in different circumstances than their’s.
This certainly has the ring of truthiness to it.
i really must be lucky because my mum and dad are as liberal and accepting as can be. i guess i was just lucky to grow up in massachusetts and attend a pretty liberal methodist church. my pastor growing up even hand wrote me a letter when i came out as trans and apologised for how some of the church needs to change.
How close did you grow up to Boston, or did your parents live in a city for a period of time? The closer you get to a city, the more liberal the population becomes, and there are some pretty backwoods areas of Massachusetts. My dad was conservative until he went to Boston College and worked at the bank collecting loans from the poorer sections of the city. Even Cape Cod had MAGA protesters yelling at the Bourne Bridge about the plan to house immigrants on the Air Force base for all 4 years of Trump’s reign of terror, and I could probably still find the Trump 2016 flag that I used to drive by all the time.
i was always outside of worcester actually so i only got to go into boston occasionally i grew up in grafton, northbridge, and millbury and went to church in shrewsbury. :)
That’s pretty similar to me, though I grew up just over the bridges on the Cape. I always thought we were in a super liberal area being in Massachusetts (plus we were like halfway between P-Town and Boston), but as I got older, I was shocked by just how conservative it is there. It’s like a bastion of snowbirds’ summer homes and retirees who all care more about their property taxes than the kids who live there.
yeah millbury tends to me more democratic but then auburn and leicester is more republican :P
honestly i do want to move overseas just as a goal but if that doesn’t happen, i’d love to move to salem or northampton
I am originally from the south but my mother joined the Air Force and we moved away after she divorced my dad when I was very young. I’m so glad that I was able to experience life outside of that racist bubble. I’m not sure how I would have turned out had I grown up there.
Probably racist as well.
Source: anonymous with an irrational hatred of the French, despite several generations removed from the French colonies.
We just didn’t see it in the past because we were all kinda racist. But we grew out of it.
I’m the opposite. I don’t need to see my Gen Z relatives desperate pleas for attention.
My boomer relatives are relatively liberal and don’t feel the need to share more than the vacation they’re on, the cocktail they’re drinking, or their high score on candy crush.
Edit: I assume the downvotes are from butthurt Gen Zers. I don’t mean to generalize, I can’t imagine anyone doing that when discussing an entire generation, I’m simply offering my own personal experience. When my cousin is posting photos of himself in a banana hammock and my sister is posting daily cringe videos of her words of “advice”, AND IG keeps trying to show me this because the algorithm is trash, this keeps me off social media. Right, I should just not “follow” my relatives. Or, I could just stay away entirely. It’s fine.
Seriously, every time I see stuff like this, I just wonder if people have completely forgotten that you can text and call your family and friends.
There are also these crazy things called SMS and phone calls
SMS and telephone and IRL.
I haven’t used Facebook for over ten years. I was using Instagram for a while but the algorithm makes using it utterly pointless.
Do you really need to be on top of everyone all the time? Give your relationships room to breathe. Allow yourself to have engaging conversations with people to catch up and get to know them and the things that matter most to them. Allow yourself the liberty of not knowing the most ridiculous crap that they choose to share with the world.
Edit: Oh! I have a friend who I turned on to GroupMe a long time ago. He and his family still use it regularly. So, if you’re looking for something, give that a look.
I know where they live and have their phone number
Texting?? I also use this technological innovation called living with your parents.
I don’t use any social media. I give my phone number to family members. They can call/text if they want to reach me.
I dont
Simple. My sister keeps in touch with the family via Facebook and I keep in touch with her by phone. 😁
I call them
A private Signal group for nobody besides us.
Yeah same here, we even have a bunch of different groups like a sort of venn diagram. Works perfectly well including meetups.
Yeah it took a while to get everyone onboard but signal has been the only messaging app that I use. Now even some of my friends and family use it for chats I’m not part of.
I donate $1/year per person I convinced to use it.
You feel like you can’t disconnect from these things, but you can. Group text plus family learn quickly that you’re outside of social media. They learn to deliberately send photos or call and if your spouse is more social, they become the conduit for “news” and it’s filtered down to you when important
I use this alien technology called a phone.
Signal for whole family chat; phone and SMS variously; discord for some
Signal
I don’t use social media to stay in contact with family; I use various messaging/call technologies.
