Monday, August 1, 2011

Agism?

I'm in the home stretch of this comic, very close to finishing the entire first chapter. It, and some video games, have distracted me from making blog posts. Not like anyone’s reading BUT ANYWAY.

I don’t like to visit forums anymore, or keep in contact with a lot of my skype contacts. It’s for a couple reasons. I don’t feel like I have anything to add to conversations, most forums get cluttered with dumbasses, and whoever's not a dumbass is usually fourteen.

Now, I'm almost 22, and I hesitate to keep talking to someone who tells me they're still in high school. I've seen the accusation of ageism being thrown around, hating on people younger than you simply because they're younger. I'm going to state my argument against them in this lonesome corner of the internet, away from flame wars.

I when I was fourteen, if someone told me that I'd be hanging out with eight-year-olds, I'd probably be confused, if not annoyed. They can be the most well-spoken and polite eight-year-olds on the planet, but I'm in high school, and they're in third grade. I think I still played pretend in third grade. I can play with those eight year olds, but it’s not going to be something I do with a peer.

So, at 21, when I'm told people are still in high school, I hesitate to really make friends with them. I remember how I was at fourteen... what my problems were, my likes and dislikes. I make Evil Inc at age fifteen, I can just read through those to remember what it was all like. I don’t want to hang out with old me. I won’t call myself dumb, but I just don’t think I could find much to say or relate to. I liked Naruto and Bleach back then, while now I read Black Jack and Skip Beat. My big problem in high school was unrequited love, my big problem now is getting a job and an apartment. We could talk, but there’s no way I would treat 14 year old me as a long-term friends, just as I wouldn’t treat an eight year old as a peer.

Plus there's just the added barrier of eighteen years old... are you a pedophile for making friends with a bunch of fourteen year olds? I mean, just think if a twenty-year-old wanted to do that in real life. If you're lucky, you can feel like the cool older brother/sister. If you're not, or if everyone is treated as a peer... well, you don’t feel like you are. You feel out of place. Its only six years, but it feels like a generational gap. Hell, I don’t understand my own siblings likes, and my sister is only three years younger than me. My brother, six years younger, likes Hannah Montana unironically. They still watch Disney Channel. Even when you're acting open-minded, it’s not like you can talk about the same things, the same problems.

Its not ageism to want to avoid or exclude those younger than you. It’s just pesky real-world issues and awkwardness bleeding over into this perfect, amorphous internet blob.

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