Please tell me about your interesting young adult!

[Thesnailonthewhale]

All the young adults I've met recently and that's about a dozen between the ages of about 19 and 24. Are all so fucking boring.

My 22-year-old colleague who I have to sit next to, lives at home with his parents, no expenses or bills to pay, it's not saving for anything so essentially has to ground a month pocket money and almost infinite spare time. I asked him what have you done this weekend, or last week or whatever. This last weekend he spent three evenings watching twitch streams about Pokémon until about 3:00 in the morning. Didn't go out with any friends. Didn't go and see the world. Didn't go. Didn't do anything. Just sits around watching TV watching live streams.

Another one who's about 23 who I know through a friend. We were having lunch together and I asked her what does she get up to then in her spare time. Nothing apparently. Hasn't been to see the world. Hasn't been visiting anywhere. Not interested in galleries, exhibitions festivals literally nothing. And so we find out what it is she does with her time, and it's just a shrug and she might be watching something on Netflix or whatever.

When I was their age I was going I was going to Europe for the weekend getting the cheapest flight possible, staying in a hostel and exploring the world. Going out with my friends we'd go to museums and art galleries because we were boring like that. Or we'd go to a theme park for a day or whatever. But we do something and have interesting stories to tell.

So please restore my faith in young adults and tell me the interesting things they are up to please!!!

To be fair there have been people like this in every generation. I was at school with some, at uni with others, have met one or two at work (not many as it’s not a job that lends itself to this behaviour).

To be more positive OP perhaps you could help her tomorrow - either by pestering the person responsible for her, or giving her some minor task to do for you? She must be bored stiff and feel like a real spare part. Perhaps if she does something she’ll relax a bit.

She would have been 11 max.

She is not my problem to solve I'm afraid with regards to work. The only thing I've done is ensure she got a lunch break by pinging her "boss" at 1:30 asking if anyone was taking her anywhere for her lunch....

I've been perfectly pleasant to her, tried to include her in conversations etc even offered her a cup of tea and she just shrugged.

So I shan't be bothering with her tbh. Like I said, I shall quietly ignore her after ban"good morning, how are you?" And a "bye, have a lovely evening".

most excellent and very impressive, and congrats for rising a great daughter

I think you are slightly missing my point but anyway.

@LysistrataSusanCarter

another slight derail this is for your daughter :

Keynes’ ideas were groundbreaking they shifted economics toward focusing on demand and government intervention to stabilize the economy. But for all its strengths, his framework has some pretty big limitations, mainly because it treats human behaviour as if it were static and predictable.

In reality, people aren’t passive robots who just react mechanically to policy changes. They watch what’s happening, learn from it, and adjust their behaviour accordingly. When they see inflation picking up, or sense that unemployment might rise, or start anticipating what policymakers will do next, they change how they spend, save, invest, and even work.

Modern macroeconomics has shown over and over that if you ignore these adaptive, strategic responses, your interventions can easily be neutralized—or worse, backfire completely.

That’s why, as insightful as Keynes was, his model feels incomplete today. It captures an important piece of the puzzle, but it doesn’t fully account for the messy, forward-looking, and often clever ways real people and businesses actually behave in the economy.

If you think being drawn into conversation 3 times in two days is relentless... Then fine.

At their age, I had immigrated to another country, happily married and had two kids. While it was the best choice for me, I'm glad my kids are pretty content and don't feel the need to run off at the first opportunity like I did...

Now young adults, one of those two kids has been flown out by his employer to the Netherlands to work on ship engines - he's also has a speech disability so if you questioned him like that, he'd probably give boring, one word answers as he's dealt with a lot of abuse for how he talks. If you were to message him, he'd warm up faster and likely respond more.

The other is volunteering with the local library to develop a tabletop game and podcast around local history and folklore, while working fulltime. I asked her how she's respond to your OP questions, and sadly, she was clear that she'd edit herself to a generic answer. She's not going to talk to someone new about her favourite fandoms, that she's been reading AO3 and a pile of YA murder fiction, or that she spent hours last weekend dancing in our house to her favourite music. She'd call herself content, though she gets why others would find her ways boring, and needs time to warm up and trust people yes even with things as simple as liking baking.

My third is similar - I think we can forget how much more these kids, and now adults, have been judged for every thing they do since even before they were in secondary. When I was there age, I could largely ignore what the world thought - they have it surrounding them, beamed at them constantly, having teachers constantly tell them how the rest of the world is judging them. I can see why they may need a bit more to warm up to chit chat.

This is why we made our kids do things like go to the corner shop, order things for themselves in restaurants, go to a bar to ask for some juice etc from an early-ish age because we didn't want them to be young people who found basic human interaction scary or cringey. They hated it at first, but the upshot is they can interact with strangers.

Exactly this.
I cannot get my heads round people who reach late teens / early adulthood unable to make a simple request of a stranger, or answer a simple question or conversation opener.
(Diagnosed conditions that would prevent this, aside)

But the young person is there to experience the world of work.

The world of work, includes interacting with people you come into contact with. Many, many jobs that will mean clients, customers, service users, patients, etc. Some will include people you interact with and never see again. Some will include building relationships with those people over time. Most will include interacting with colleagues on a daily basis. Even folk that wfh are likely to have to speak to people in meetings or service calls. Your colleagues ARE likely to be people who are different from you - different ages, or background or skill sets. Even (as no doubt someone will come along and claim they never speak to anyone in their job) if there is a job where you don't speak to people often, you will still have to get the job in the first place.

This young person need to develop this skill if they ever hope to get a job.

Not all young people. I would say that is a generalisation.
However, as this thread shows, there are too many people excusing it and saying it is fine. That is an issue, IMO.

and ?

Some people are seemingly trying to imply people were in isolation for 10 years or something.
We all went through periods of lockdown. It was a very strange time for everyone, but it didn't last that long (even as a % of a 17 yr old's life) and was now several years ago.
I know many, many people who were teens in lockdown who were perfectly capable of having conversations with adults long before lockdown, were perfectly capable of continuing them (through Zoom / Facetime / etc) during lockdown, and have had years of opportunities to have F2F conversations with people in the years since lockdown.
I don't think you can put a 17 yr old who has not been taught social skills, down to lock down.