Why today’s kids are so very different | Nathan Davies

Like kids from any generation, they just want to have fun. They don’t care about so-called culture wars. But there’s one other, massive difference, writes Nathan Davies.

It’s been more than half a century since The Who penned their youth anthem The Kids Are Alright.

Fast-forward to 2023 and they might actually be right.

I spend a fair chunk of my time at music festivals, stadium concerts and little pub shows.

I also have a teenager who’s obsessed with music and has just started gigging with his own band.

Both of these facts mean I’m around young people a lot.

And it’s great.

You’ve honestly never met a bunch of smarter, more engaged, more accepting people than the modern teenager.

Go to any live show and you’ll find straight kids, gay kids, non-binary kids, trans kids, white kids, black kids and Asian kids all having a great time, all supporting and encouraging each other with no hint of judgment.

Like kids from any generation, they just want to have fun. They have absolutely no interest in being fodder for the so-called “culture wars” or being held up as an example of how the kids have lost their way. They just want to mosh.

They’re also far less obsessed with getting wasted than their parents’ generation – good ol’ Generation X – was, and that’s refreshing.

The idea of attending a gig sober was more or less unthinkable for most Gen Xers, at least until middle age caught up with them and they realised there were physical and mental consequences that accompanied tipping litres of ethanol down your gullet while watching a punk triple bill at the Holdfast Hotel.

It might have something to do with the fact you almost have to remortgage your house these days to have a big night on the booze, but it’s clear the kids just don’t have the same attraction to the devil’s brown liquor, and this makes for a generally more pleasant time in many cases.

The gigs of my youth often had a slightly menacing air to them, the feeling that everything was on the edge of going completely pear-shaped.

This was mainly because everything was actually on the edge of going completely pear-shaped, and that was mainly because pretty much everyone there had been on the cans all day, and a day on the cans for some people means a night of swinging fists.

You just don’t see that kind of thing anywhere near as much as you used to.

And the kids have dropped the attitude that if you’re not drinking there’s something wrong with you, and attitude that’s been a core part of Australian culture for the past 200 or more years.

Nobody looks at you sideways for drinking a water these days (except perhaps a publican who’s trying to turn some kind of profit from a gig).

It’s not that easy being a young person in the 2020s.

They’ve had to deal with a pandemic that robbed many of them of the transitional years between youth and young adulthood.

They’ve had to come to terms with the fact the generations before them and the governments those generations voted in have somehow allowed house prices to get so high the “Australian dream” of owning your own home is now little more than a fantasy for a lot of kids not lucky enough to have some family coin behind them.

And they’re having to reconcile with the fact technology is progressing at such an incredible pace it’s almost impossible to know which careers they should be aiming for in high school, or if the entire concept of a “career” is actually nothing more than a quaint and outdated concept.

(This might be a good time to let everyone know I’ve actually outsourced all of my writing to Chat GPT and, so far, he’s done a fairly decent job.)

So these are all things people should probably at least consider before they start throwing around lazy cliches about the kids of today being woke snowflakes who could all have two houses if they’d just stop spending all their money on avocadoes and bubble tea.

Not that the kids probably care that much. They’re too busy being excellent to each other.