h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What's the matter with kids today?

(as the song goes)

I first noticed this when a friend's daughter (early 20s) was talking about a weekend away she'd had with her boyfriend. Courtesy of groupon, they had got a cheap weekend in a spa hotel. Since then, I have heard of similar excursions by youngsters.

What???????????

Don't they have any sense of adventure? Why are they doing stuff that their parents would do?

The world might have changed in the past 20-30 years, but surely young people's sense of daring and devil-may-care shouldn't have.

Surely they should be out doing things that cause their parents to bite their fingernails down to the quick.

Any thoughts? Can anyone put my mind at rest that the world of the under-25s hasn't entirely gone all conventional?

I travel to foreign countries to spend time in pubs with people I've never seen before.
Does that count?

At their age I was wandering around with rail pass, rucksack, tent and sleeping bag.

I couldn't of even afforded a special offer room only at a hotel best we could manage was the occasional luxury night in a cheap Bed & Breakfast or the YHA.

Now the question is, If I had the money then what would I have done.
Probably flown to Majorca and got incredibly drunk while staying in a down market hotel

In 1955 I horrified my friends, scared my parents and lost my girlfriend because I went alone on a daring and adventurous holiday to a distant (and unknown to my family then) land..... Cornwall!! I travelled by train and actually spoke to strangers at the tender age of eighteen.
My children have been all over the world as have my grandchildren both alone and in company. I think most kids today are brilliant but we only hear stuff about the 'chavvy' types!

In 1955 I horrified my friends, scared my parents and lost my girlfriend because I went alone on a daring and adventurous holiday to a distant (and unknown to my family then) land..... Cornwall!! I travelled by train and actually spoke to strangers at the tender age of eighteen.
My children have been all over the world as have my grandchildren both alone and in company. I think most kids today are brilliant but we only hear stuff about the 'chavvy' types!

I've seen a lot of places as a member of a touring choral society. In college, I saw six European countries in this way. Each of us had to raise a couple thousand dollars in order to do it, though. Still, doing it on my own would probably have been much more expensive. We got to visit Westminster Cathedral, see a Shakespeare play in Stratford on Avon, see a performance of the Berlin Ballet, enjoy the Alps in a double-decker bus, and visit so many museums that they are all a blur in my mind. The final-night banquet was at a restaurant in Paris. In my late 30s I saw the sights of Taiwan and Hong Kong. In my fifties I toured Prague, Vienna, Budapest, and central Italy.

If you're traveling in a group, there's a tour guide who is familiar with the territory and can help you if you run into snags.

Young people still go on group tours, with or without gigs.

I have a trip booked to Ukraine (I know, I know) to visit Chernobyl. I asked my 28 year old son if he wanted to come and he looked at me as if I had lost my marbles!

PP.

As long as you haven't lost the Elgin Marbles, you'll probably be all right.

pah... youth is wasted on the young..... late thirty-somethings are the new wreckless rebels and risk-taking hedonistis.... and.... Who says your only gona do things one's parents might do, in a spa break....

Poor younger generation..they are always getting a rear kicking because they are either too hedonistic or too responsible..You do realise that they are not a different species.They are us but 20/30/40/50 years younger.

My most daring adventure was a pony trekking holiday in the West Country (with strangers).
I have noticed that some of my young colleagues seem to go away much more often than I did. But there's plenty that don't do anything much different from me.

There are certainly more opportunities these days, the world seems a much smaller place. But why should all the youngsters want to do unusual things? They're a mixture of personalities.
A weekend in a spa hotel sounds lovely to me!

When you're young enough to go on ski vacations in the Alps or run marathons in France's wine country, it's often the case that you don't have the money for air fare. When you're old enough to have amassed a nest egg big enough to let you fly anywhere you want, any time you want, chances are that running and skiing have to take a back seat to activities where there are fewer mobility issues

I guess we did kinda 'potentially dangerous' things, when I were a younger kid/child, than I am now, but, I think we probably didn't consider them to be dangerous; and, neither did our parents, really.
I'm basing my thoughts here, on the idea of how we've collectively changed, in recent decades, effectively since the advent of technology, in our digital 'connected' era.
I never used to think anything, about travelling off, iwthout a mobile phone; we didn't have mobile phones, and I guess now, to an extent at least, the mobile phone in particular and the idea someone, especially a kiddy is out of 'contact' for any period, is just kinda forign to many parents, and people....

So, like when I was... err, 14 or 15 I think, me an a couple of friends, packed our rucksacks, got about £3K sponsorship, and did a sponsored hike, for err a bit over a fortnight I think, with nothing more technological than a trangear burner to cook with, a coupl of compasses and a whole batch of papper ordence survey maps... no contact with parents or anything, until the moment we each walked home, through the parental house door And, dangrous things whilst we wer edoing the hiking... yeh... p[robably some what I think now is called frestyle climbing (no ropes), often whilst drunk and... yeh, all kindsa stuff I guess Simular shorter trips, we did when that sort of age, or younger, cycling mainly for long-weekends, or weeks away, with no real plan, just a tent and some idea of which direction we were going in... and canoeing/camping trips too Maybe things were just 'more in proportion', without, thinking about it, the 24 7 news we have now, and over-sensationalised and hyped up 'danger' 'news' that seems to have gotten rather popular... The only people in my peer group, in the way-back-when, I can recall getting badly hurt, injured etc, were those who did so, really very near their homes; car accidents, in roads in the town, one guy who got shot by his Brother which was highly amusing (wasn't really a bad injury, just a .22 airrifle I seem to recall; and we all played about with air rifles in the woods back then) Then we got a bit older... some of the peer group experimented with drugs only one to my knowledge died from that, and that was I think by the time he was in his 20s, and kinda not associated with our youth so much I guess... the silly boy....

I was working on my garage yesterday and managed to slice a finger on something, I don't know what, but everything was pretty grubby. There was blood washing the wound. My younger neighbour said 'you need to get a tetanus jab for that'. It never occurred to me. I squeezed it, it bled a bit more, and I washed it and put a plaster on it and got on with the job.

It would not have occurred to me at any time over the last 50 (cough) years to deal with a wound like that by rushing off to A&E. I've done it more than once over the years and have never rushed off to A&E.

Perhaps kids today (huge generalisation here) are rather more 'risk averse (hate the term - but it gets the idea across).

PP.

We were always worried about tetanus, and veils (sp?) disease, when I was a kid, due to the area where we lived, but with up to date tetinus jabs, didn't really bother much beyond that... I useually self-treat injurys... myself, if I can... broken toes, fractured forearm, broken finger, boils, ingrowing toenails, bad deep facial wound... neearly severed off finger... - all home treated, far too miner to bother with the doctor for Risk-adverse is so... silly... I mean... like I'm gona stop, and go out to a shop to buy a testing thinggy, to see if 'that random wire hanging down in the loft' is live or not... when I can just touch the end to find out Partly, perhaps a more risk-aware, or risk-scared culture, present in schools thesedays, maybe? (I really don't know....)

Freestyle climbing while drunk?

Cutting your finger in the garage?



Quick, Igor, give me a hand!

PP.