As it turns out, engaging in horrific acts of war and cruelty is not the favorite pastime of the human race. The recreational pursuit that has truly kept us occupied for aeons is actually that of complaining about the stupid shit the next generation does.

If you’re too much of an irritatingly fetus-like age to have a younger generation to complain about, then rest assured it will happen. You’ll be wandering along the street some time and some little pischer will utter slang you couldn’t even pretend to understand the meaning of, and that’ll be it – a knot of seething hatred will be born in you that will keep you warm and toasty until you fall down dead.

For the current collection of more mature gentlemen, mostly Gen X-ers, we have two generations to look down our collective nostrils at. The Millennials – some of us will actually just about fall into that generation but still find ourselves grumpy enough to complain about their antics, and Gen Z – those who are reaching their mid-to-late teens now, and haven’t lived in a world without the internet.

While we really try to understand and occasionally partake in the trends that come so naturally to these upcoming generations, there are others that just completely baffle us and we’d rather bathe our eyeballs in acid than, say, consider Miley Cyrus a cultural icon.

To those Millennials and Gen Z-ers who might be reading this, don’t think we don’t see the irony in making this list. We made idiotic decisions, wore stupid clothing, uttered phrases that make us cringe now. But the generation before us complained about those things, and – hell – we’ve just been biding our time till we could do it to you young morons.

15. The Fidget Spinner Lifestyle

This one, like so many, started out as a pretty good idea. A tool for those with feeling the strain of stress, or experienced genuine attention deficiency, or those who just couldn’t keep themselves still. A marvellous concept, with what appeared to be an aesthetically pleasing design.

Little did we know it would swiftly become the disease that defines an age. They’re everywhere you look, now – on every street corner, in every hand. You’ve allowed yourselves to become infected.

Unless the entirety of both the newer generations are harbouring a genuinely debilitating mental illness, they seem to have been struck with a case of idiocy. While this is far from the first fad to grip a generation (don’t you dare say “Pogs” in that tone of voice), this one is just a bit pointless – it’s basically just passive and pretty. You’re not feeding a digital pet to stop it from withering and dying while learning about empathy, they don’t bring you closer to one another through camaraderie or competition, you barely have to move and it just…spins.

14. Selfies: Say “Duck Face”

Selfies. The word just induces bile to rise to the back of our tongues, so we end up punctuating it with a sharp expulsion of spit.

There are occasions of course when selfies are acceptable. If, for example, you’re on vacation and you want to make your friends vomit with jealousy, it’s perfectly fine to take a selfie of yourself in front of the Taj Mahal. If you’re clutching your newly-earned diploma in the field of extraterrestrial vivisection, you should go ahead and mark the occasion with a selfie. The difference is, these photos are documenting something, an occasion. Something other than simply your self. Not just yourself…and your stupid duck lips.

If, however, you’re just taking selfies to show people that you’re existing in the world, or that you happen to be sitting in your car (or worse, actually driving your car while you do it), or – bafflingly – if you’re just standing in front of a mirror, then this is narcissism.

You’ve even invented a contraption to assist you in your pointless shutterbuggery, a pole that allows you to take selfies at the most flattering angle. You call it the selfie stick, we call it the Narcissistick.

13. Artisanal Everything

We admire craftsmanship as much as any other generation. Craft beer, arts and crafts, Kraft cheese – all are very fine things indeed. In fact, the endeavour from which the current artisanal movement has sprung has it’s roots in an admirable sense of entrepreneurialism. At first, you appeared to be rising up against big business, being creative in offering superior products, with a rebellious disregard for health and safety requirements. Vive la révolution!

Except, no. Vive la nothing. You took something beautiful and made it stupid.

Everything you make, you claim to be of artisanal quality, even if you only developed an interest in making moonshine 3 weeks ago. You might wear a t-shirt that denounces capitalism, but your overpriced Breakfast Cereal Restaurant is a participant in the gentrification of working class neighbourhoods. Just because you’ve developed a penchant for wearing suspenders and flat caps, does not make your app development company a quaint mom-and-pop store.

You can’t claim to be an artisan unless you’ve practically broken your back in obsessive labouring, learning your craft as an apprentice before taking the traditions and adding something of yourself to them. “Artisanal” should not be mistaken for “amateur”, and an artisan is not a guy in a bowler hat selling donuts from the trunk of his car.

12. Lack of Genuine Apathy

This one is particularly galling, so forgive us if a certain level of venom accompanies this entry.

There have been some marches, a couple of so-called movements, you’re perfectly happy to hashtag a cause. But that’s basically as far as it goes. This coming generation is actually personified by a brand of apathy that’s not just dumb, it’s rather scary.

The problem is, you don’t care enough to ask some important questions. While the internet has gifted you with greater access to information, you just sit back and consume the most compelling story before regurgitating it on social media without doing any kind of due diligence. For perhaps the first time we have a generation that is – with very few exceptions, though those exceptions are encouraging – unwilling to get off of it’s ass and dig around in the dirt.

You’re happy to make Edward Snowden a brand ambassador for truth, but you’re not going to do anything about the abuses he exposed. You’ll tag every Facebook post with “Black Lives Matter”, but you won’t work to uproot the systemic failures that mean we still have to remind people of that fact.

The truth is, it appears as though you don’t care. You do the equivalent of shrugging every time you see an injustice in the world – not because you’re being selfish or you lack empathy, but because you aren’t motivated to rummage around in the mire of corruption.

And maybe that’s our fault for not being diligent enough to prevent these attitudes.

Ask questions, be proactive, set fire to stuff.

Well, maybe the last one is a judgement call.

11. Crowdfunding Your Lives

Crowdfunding is awesome. No two ways about it. Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Patreon – whatever platform you use, it’s removed a great many gatekeepers from the worlds of manufacturing and the arts, allowing creative, inventive people to bring their products directly to their public.

It also means we, the public, choose what we want to see on the market. Even if that is Single-Use Disposable Monocles.

However, there’s a kind of taint that runs through an otherwise excellent concept. And it has something to do with the coming generation’s sense of entitlement.

Somehow, they’ve gotten hold of the idea that people should just crowdfund their whims. They want a new car – the public should crowdfund that. They don’t want to get a job to support themselves while studying like the rest of us did – time to hop on Indiegogo. This generation doesn’t seem to be too proud to ask for the cash we’ve earned, so that they don’t have to work for it. That’s not even touching on such nonsense as paying them to eat potato salad!

If you have an awesome idea that you’re committed to giving birth to, or you lost your legs while tomb raiding – we’re going to support that. But don’t expect people to crowdfund your gap year trip to Vietnam.

10. Social Media Stars Birthed From Youtube

Every generation has its celebrities, and we wouldn’t presume to deny the next their idols. To our eternal shame, we brought the concept of pointless celebrity into existence, creating people who are just famous for being famous – that one’s on us. But the coming generation has it’s own peculiarity: social media stars.

Don’t get us wrong, we absolutely encourage the fame of YouTubers. Sure, it struck us as weird at first, but we’ve come to understand that these are creative producers of quality content that deserve some admiration. We even find ourselves sort of not entirely hating PewDiePie. Sort of.

What we find dumb are those people who have become famous through…we’re not really sure why. Some of them get paid by companies to make videos of themselves unboxing products, others generate income by acting like assholes while labouring under the impression that they’re undertaking social experiments. There’s no point to these people’s existence, and yet they’ve achieved a social media celebrity status, showing up at conventions and making speeches to adoring fans about how to make money online.

Beyond anything else it’s baffling. We’d like to understand it, then we too could pull in millions adding commentary to our supermarket run, but we can’t. Ergo, it’s dumb.

9. Hashtagging uselessly in conversations

Every generation bemoans the coming generation’s slang. We experienced it, and by jove our parents experienced it, and their parents before them did with the bippity bop. Or something.

But this is something else entirely.

Hashtagging we understand (our parents don’t, because that generation were idiots) – is a useful tool when tracking trends, or in searching for particular topics on the social media thingy. We hashtag – it took us a while to get the hang of it, but we do it.

But what we refuse to do, and what we cannot abide about the coming generation, is the use of the hashtag in verbal conversation.

We’ll be having a perfectly pleasant chat about bowel movements, and then you’ll suddenly drop in the words “hashtag dysentery”. What does that even mean? Are you expecting someone to put a search upon the air we breathe in order to locate your vocal hashtag and somehow link back to our conversation about tainted takeout? Are you somehow incapable of constructing an entire sentence about the effects of salmonella?

Stop it. Immediately. And don’t you dare make the hand sign when you say it.

8. Overly-Emotional TV Talent Shows

There have always been TV talent shows. For some reason we think it’s entertaining for people to get up on a stage and do things that we would pelt rocks at them for if we saw them doing it on the street.

You do yoga with your dog, do you? Rocks in your face…but not the dog’s.

We mostly don’t have a problem with TV talent shows, even though they’ve damaged our precious music industry beyond repair, and no-one seems to have to struggle for a record deal the way they should.

No, what we have a problem with is the exaggerated emotional aspect. This generation seems to be hopelessly hooked on heartbreaking narratives in their reality television. It doesn’t matter how terrible or banal a person’s “talent” may be, if they struggled with an addiction to licking marker pens and learned to play the spoons while in the gutter, then they’re worthy of mega fame.

It’s not that we’re not emotional, it’s just that we refuse to join you in deifying a 16 year old who is under the impression that this is her final chance to “make it”.

The production companies caught onto this trend, and now every talent show is just an endless stream of one-last-shot tales soundtracked by Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” performed by anyone but Leonard Cohen.

Lame.

7. Job titles designed to make you feel more important

We get it, things haven’t quite worked out the way you were led to believe they would. You were born into a world that told you that the this new technologically advanced existence would mean no doors were closed to you, that everybody would achieve greatness. You were failed by those who thought your self esteem couldn’t take the truth that not everyone can be president.

But what was your reaction? You took the mind-numbing, mediocre jobs that were available to you, and through sheer force of vocabulary made them seem as though you were doing something worthwhile.

Bartender became mixologist, customer service advisors are now brand ambassadors, and there are no sales assistants – just product ninjas.

While the power of your self denial is impressive, at some point you’re going to have to accept that you’re not a Refuse Distribution Specialist…you’re a garbage man.

6. You think you’re a unique snowflake

Okay, the blame for this one definitely lies at the feet of the generation or two that came before. The coming generation have been set up for ultimate disappointment in this regard, but they also have to take responsibility for perpetuating it.

Perhaps it began with the fact that they were given a formal graduation ceremony when they left kindergarten, maybe it’s the trophies that everybody got given just for participating, could be the insistence that every child give every other child in class a Valentine’s card so they don’t feel unloved.

Balls to that. For some reason we shirked from informing this generation that not everybody is special, and now they believe that they’re unique among the collective. Some of them will be, of course, but logic dictates that the majority will not be these anomolies.

We knew that some of us were useless idiots, our parents and teachers yelled that at us while beating us with furniture, which gave us a healthy sense of dread and low self esteem.

But the new generation are obsessed with expressing their non-existent individuality, and they refuse to believe for a second that they might be mediocre. They gobble up fictions about “chosen ones”, and are still waiting for some magical sign confirming that they are one.

Your Hogwarts letter isn’t coming, some of you aren’t special. Get over it.

5. #SomethingGoals

It’s good to have goals – they stop you from wandering aimlessly around the apartment, nude only from the waist down, peeing wherever you happen to be standing.

But this generation needs to understand that not everything needs to have the pressure of ambition attached to it.

#RelationshipGoals – you do not need a goal for your relationship beyond mutually loving someone as they deserve to be loved. Don’t repost a celebrity’s beachfront honeymoon and hashtag that as your aim. It’s stupid, and it’s meaningless.

#SquadGoals – firstly, a squad is what a group of squids should be called. If that’s your goal for friendship, we need to get better acquainted, because that’s awesome. However, if you’re trying to mould your friendship group to look like something you saw on social media – dude, you’re doing friendship wrong. 

#baegoals #lifegoals #bodygoals …why  not #goalsgoals? You’ve made yourself the #goalsgeneration, which sort of says everything, doesn’t it? It’s not a commitment to yourselves about your ambitions, it’s a self conscious pronouncement, a shriek into social media that you desperately want what someone else has.

Just relax, the world really doesn’t need to see how hard you’re trying!

4. YOLO is a lie. It’s called reincarnation…and zombies. 

You Only Live Once. Possibly the dumbest acronym to exist since the birth of language itself. Firstly, it’s not true – people are brought back from the dead all the time…sometimes while still buried, which really annoys graveyard groundskeepers.

Secondly, is that really the best you could come up with to express that particular sentiment? Think about it – you’re trying to verbalize a sense of triumphant fatalism, the grasping of life by its soft dangly parts and riding a wave of awesomeness into the great unknown. You need a phrase to shout to the world that you are young, and reckless, and you don’t care how many listed buildings you destroy as you ride your home-made space shuttle through the town. For this, you came up with an acronym that sounds like a brand of candy. Seriously, start using Carpe Diem. You can never fail to sound epic with that one.

3. They Are So Damn Earnest

Obviously there’s nothing wrong with a little bit of sincerity. And yes, perhaps life has made the previous generations a bit jaded. But, honestly, the rising generations seem to be incredibly, nigh-sickeningly earnest about everything.
Your dog died? They’re holding a candlelit vigil to recognize your grief.
You lost your job? They will stage a march against the corporate pigdogs who took umbrage against your “F#*k (Company name)” tattoo.

There is nothing to which they won’t react with a sense of heart-rending melodrama, their slightly weepy, “I feel your pain” nonsense present for every minor hiccup and cause.
It’s not that we’re against their empathy, it’s just that kind of constant saturation looks kinda incongruous after a while.

2. The Fear is Real

Again, the fault for this probably lies in the previous generations. A couple of decades ago, the world began to seem a very frightening place for people. Not that dangers weren’t already lurking around every corner, it just wasn’t as widely publicised. Unfortunately, parents began to stop letting their kids out unaccompanied, they started boarding up abandoned mine shafts, and there’s nary an electrical substation in the land that young ‘uns can use as a jungle gym.

As a result, the coming generation has become sort of isolated and fearful. They’re afraid to take risks because they never knew what it was like to spend stormy days inside a rusty nail riddled “club house” risking tetanus and probably cholera.
Sure, it’s fine to have a balanced sense of risk, but that doesn’t mean you should stay inside your house, getting the only excitement in your life from seeing how long you can binge a Netflix series before hallucinating.

1. Anonymous Trolling

Remember when trolls used to come charging through the village, chewing the sweet flesh of the young before the sun came up and turned them to dust? Those were the days.
Now, trolls are just members of this new generation who get their kicks from anonymously making people’s lives a misery. The key word there is “anonymously”.
You see, the members of this generation who indulge in this moronic behaviour don’t have the balls to take responsibility for their misanthropy. No, they’d rather hide behind a screen and get some kind of sick glee out of hurting people. It’s not just a few people, either, they number in their thousands. That’s right, we’ve raised a new generation of sadists.

Thing is, before this generation, if you wanted to express your dislike for something (or just wanted to be a dick), you just stood up and let people know about it, and you accepted that there might be consequences.
These days, you don’t need to have the courage of your convictions, just the cowardice of your computer.

Sources: breitbart.com, elitedaily.com, clashdaily.com, collegehumor.com, entrepreneur.com