Talke Talks: Skibidi-Klo | nd-aktuell.de

Howdy from Texas, dear readers,

Do you also like to complain about young people? “We played outside until it got dark!” / “We could still do mental arithmetic and didn’t need a smartphone!” / “We didn’t have gluten intolerance yet and drank out of the rain barrel?” Then you’ve come to the right place, because today is going to be an exception blasphemed.

As a “geriatric millennial” born in 1986, the year of Chernobyl, I try to have as little contact with Gen Z as possible. They are conceited and more stylish than us; They are also in direct competition with us on the job and dating market (in Germany because their school and study time was shortened, in America because people here are willing to work and get married earlier and therefore meet new people more often must apply and remarry).

Gen Z are more traveled than us because their Gen Instead of throwing up grain in the woods, they film themselves sipping espresso martinis in the bar – if they go out at all, because they pay much more attention to their mental health than we do (we were all diagnosed with ADHD etc. at the same time, from X to Z, from the dear Internet). Gen Z are allowed to luxuriate in the warm embrace of body positivity, while I was still devouring magazines that listed how many pounds female stars had lost and gained.

As kids, these Zoomers learned better English, better make-up and better anti-harassment awareness thanks to YouTube. They dared to come out as genderfluid when the word “gay” was still considered a swear word in some places (you can’t even imagine it anymore!); In short, they make Generation Y look like a thing of the past. They often look older than us – just look at Kylie Jenner or the protagonists of the new hit show “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives”, women in their early 20s who look as if they were microdosed with Chernobyl-contaminated mushrooms instead of mushrooms consumed. And then they impose fashion trends on us who can remember 9/11 vividly, instead of believing the event to be a conspiracy like they do: socks over leggings, oversized blazers with sneakers, licked head hair with laminated brow hair.

I have much more and prefer to have something to do with Generation Alpha, after all, one of their representatives lives at home with me: my daughter. Of course, it is still unclear how these creatures born from 2010 will develop. Unfortunately, the conditions are difficult: Covid not only destroyed lives, but also social contacts and pushed the remaining analogue children’s activities into the digital; created so-called “iPad kids”. They have their own language, and the parents call them “Tiktok-Brain-Rot” (i.e. brain-gamblers): Alphas are self-proclaimed “Sigmas” and “Rizzlers”, have fat “Gyats” and are constantly “mewen”. (That means something like »Cool pigs with big bottoms who like to pose). I prefer “Talahon”, the potential German youth word of 2024, because it is international and enigmatic. “Skibidi toilet” is also international and enigmatic, a term that comes from the Russian internet and remains a mystery because no one knows what it is supposed to mean. As if the Russians hadn’t convinced us enough with their wars, trolls and election manipulation.

But Alphas also cause trouble offline, for example in local Sephora branches (that’s something like Douglas on steroids). Girls between the ages of eight and thirteen use their child benefit to buy refrigerators for facial care, gua sha massage stones and 500-ton hair stylers. Of course, we parents are to blame for this self-indulgence. Gen Y is, as the youth say, Ohio (read: glitch). If you are older than me, I hope you feel a sense of schadenfreude after reading this. If you are a Millennial, you will share my pain. Nobody reads after Y anyway.