Have you seen all of the college commence addresses go bad as speakers talk about AI and college kids boo them? Clearly the audience, now moving into a job market, does not want to hear from experts about they are not needed since AI can do it..
IT BRINGS BACK HOPES FOR A SIMPLER TIME..
Back in the 90s and 2000s, tech was your side passion. It was your side hustle, and you would do a lot of tech stuff but maintain your analog life. Now with tech so ingrained, perhaps the analog life is the side hustle.
Back then, the internet was not really used for your work, but the internet was an escape from school. Now you’re so chained up to be online all the time, now you’re escaping from the internet because you’re trying to escape from schooling or work because it’s so ingrained with technology.. you just need a break from that. So instead of like the old days, you needed a break to go into the tech world, now you’re striving to leave the tech world for that break.
That brings this all back to something that happened the other day that honestly caught me off guard and made me think. My son, who’s age 15, requested that someone purchases him a hacky sack. What makes it even more interesting is that it seems several of the hacky sacks he wanted were actually sold out online.
Perhaps something cultural is happening again among teenagers.
The kids.. ARE alright?
Everything cultural eventually comes back around. Styles of clothing, styles of jeans, sneakers.. shirts… we already know how this works. Basically, if you had a flannel shirt in 1995, throwing it away would have been a mistake since it all came back. Culture always loops back around eventually.
But the hacky sack is different and more interesting because it’s symbolic of something larger than fashion. The hacky sack represented a simple time when you literally just stood around with a group of friends and a little ball bouncing between each other’s feet. There was a tribalism to it, a social connection that didn’t require an app, a livestream, notifications, Wi-Fi, or an algorithm.
It has been around in popularity since the 80s.. but it became a cultural sensation during the Clinton years.
Back in December 1995, it made the list of the top things the ‘kids’ were in to..
Could that be why there is a resurgence?
A lot of younger people today have grown up completely submerged in technology. School is online. Work is online. Entertainment is online. Friendships are online. Even arguments and relationships happen through screens now. Millennials grew up alongside technology and viewed it as exciting and liberating. But this younger generation may view it completely differently because they never had a world without it.
Maybe that’s why there seems to be this strange new appreciation for low-tech experiences. Over the past couple of days, we have watched several graduation ceremonies that turned into disasters because of overused AI systems. In one clip, kids couldn’t even be announced properly at graduation because the school switched to an AI voice system this year and the audience booed it. In another clip, a speaker was talking about how AI was the future and the students themselves started booing that too.
It almost feels like low tech is becoming the vogue and hip thing to do now. Analog life may actually be becoming the rebellion.
And perhaps the hacky sack fits perfectly into that moment.
Recent reports have suggested that hacky sacks and footbags are quietly seeing a resurgence in popularity again, fueled partly by social media nostalgia and younger people rediscovering analog activities. Some retailers and online stores have reportedly seen certain hacky sack models sell out, while online searches and social media mentions of the classic footbag have sharply increased. The appeal may be simple: they’re inexpensive, social, require no batteries, and force people to physically interact with each other again in real life.
…teenagers of today aren’t trying to escape into technology anymore. Mom and dad were cool after all.
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