FreeThinkingLass

@Supersonic_Red I loved reading the jackets on LP's. We enjoyed going to school dances or prom before it all got so complicated. We wore our hair simple - clean and flowing. No need for expensive stylists. Life felt free and natural.

Good morning, Generation Jones. ☕️ Yesterday’s conversation was so much fun that I woke up thinking about all the things only our generation would understand. High school was a blast then. We passed notes instead of texts. Had actual cruising spots. Memorized phone numbers. Listened to the radio waiting for our song to come on. And somehow survived without GPS, Google, or anyone knowing where we were 24/7. 🤣 We really did grow up in two completely different worlds, and I think that’s why so many of us connected yesterday. Now tell me yours. What’s something only Generation Jones understands?

@lyndanJim @Supersonic_Red The leading edge of the Boomer wave had a huge demographic impact on housing as well as career pipelines. I agree about gen jones getting leftovers. It taught me to work hard and be grateful for my blessings. I can relate to the economic challenges faced by young adults today.

@Supersonic_Red Honestly - I always felt like an in between generation. The older baby boomers took all the good stuff and we had leftovers. I remember those high interest rates and the housing market prices being out of our reach. Thank you for saying so well what I could never put into words.

Honestly, I had no idea this would resonate with so many people. I think a lot of us have spent years feeling culturally homeless between generations. Thank you for sharing your memories, stories, and kindness with me. It’s been wonderful reading all of it. Generation Jones is real. ❤️

@littlebayschool We have been awash in inherited notebooks and other materials. My mother is still in her house with over 60 years of accumulation. Members of our family seem to have the soul of archivists and museum curators without the space or time for it all.

I had a dream last night that I was going through my late dad’s things and I found this tall stack of notebooks where he’d carefully recorded all the seeds and plants he put in his garden each year. I got very sad, wondering what I should do with them. All that work and how could I just throw them away? But I have my own notebooks, I thought in the dream. I really don’t need these. And I got very sad again. I think I dreamt that because I’d been thinking about that young couple who’d been traveling and making lots of books of their adventures. A lot of people criticized them for that. And I get it, I’m someone who believes most people would be happy with children too. I just don’t think the books were that bad. We will all have the equivalent when we die. Even if you have kids. It isn’t about trying to be eternal. And what are we supposed to do, never work on anything? Because we think it might be thrown out one day? Certainly some things are more worth writing down, planning, doing, and reflecting on than others. But even if all your stuff ends up in Goodwill, you should still allow yourself to have a good, fun, creative time while you’re here on earth. Whatever that means to you.

@Supersonic_Red Yep - We were too young for Woodstock but old enough to get wallopped by double-digit inflation, unemployment, and interest rates as we came into adulthood. We understand the harships of our young adults much more than they'll ever understand but we catch Boomer hatred from them.

There’s a generation a lot of people forget exists. We were born at the tail end of the Boomers, but we are not culturally the same as people born in the 40s and early 50s. We are Generation Jones. And honestly, it explains a lot. We grew up in a world that still felt fundamentally analog, but we were young enough to be dragged headfirst into the digital revolution. We are the bridge generation between rotary phones and smartphones, between slide rules and AI, between Walter Cronkite and algorithm driven media. We remember when there were only a few television channels and the entire country watched the same thing at the same time. We also adapted to the internet, email, forums, social media, streaming and now artificial intelligence. We lived before and after the technological singularity hit everyday life. That is not a small thing. People born in the 40s came of age in a post World War II America that was still industrial, deeply hierarchical and institutionally stable. Their formative years were shaped by the Cold War, Vietnam, the civil rights era and a society where information moved slowly. Generation Jones came later. We inherited the aftermath of all of that. We were the kids who watched Watergate destroy blind trust in government. We watched manufacturing begin to collapse. We saw divorce rates explode. We were the first truly latchkey generation in massive numbers. We learned independence early because many of us had to. We grew up with one foot in old America and one foot in whatever this new thing was becoming. We played outside until the streetlights came on but we also learned DOS commands. We learned cursive and keyboarding. We had card catalogs and Google searches. We went from vinyl records to cassette tapes to CDs to MP3s to streaming in one lifetime. We remember maps. We remember memorizing phone numbers. We remember life before GPS and before every human interaction became filtered through a screen. And because of that, I think Generation Jones developed a very unique perspective. We are adaptable because we had no choice but to adapt. We learned technology as adults instead of being born into it. We remember a slower world but were forced to survive in a rapidly accelerating one. That creates a very different mindset than either older Boomers or younger Gen X and Millennials. A lot of us also reject the caricature people now associate with “Boomers.” We were not buying houses for the cost of a sandwich in 1965. The interest rate on my first house was over 14% and that was after buying down a point. Many of us got hit by recessions, outsourcing, pension collapses and economic instability just like younger generations did. We watched promises evaporate in real time. We understand older generations because we were raised by them. We understand younger generations because we had to evolve alongside them. That’s why the Jones generation often feels culturally homeless. We are rarely discussed, rarely defined and usually lumped into categories that don’t actually fit us. But we exist. We are the human transition point between the industrial age and the digital age. And frankly, there will probably never be another generation quite like us again.

@Arkypatriot I had two Barbies - one authentic and one faux. They were eventually joined by Skipper and Alan dolls. I also had a Thumbelina. Some of my friends had Chatty Cathy dolls, but I never did.

I did not have the Ginny doll or the Revlon doll or saucy Walker. But I did have all the rest of them. What about the rest of you?

@TheParty1sOver @ihtesham2005 I've noticed the same. I assumed it was from a concussion, but maybe it's the spellcheck effect.

@ihtesham2005 This is WoW!! Fantastic! I've actually noticed over the last few years that I can't spell as well as I used to. Spelling was always my forte but not so much in these recent years! Probably because I'm typing & not actually writing!

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

@RichRichg99 @ihtesham2005 This old codgerette still writes to-do lists and birthday cards by hand and uses a paper calendar. Let the youngsters think I'm a dinosaur; I don't much care.

@ihtesham2005 It seems to this old codger that Seniors should be pushed to Write Things Down to improve their cognitive skills. Shopping lists, To-Do lists Birthdays etc. all should be pushed to Write it, don't type it!

@ItTakesFaith @ihtesham2005 I suffered a mild concussion a while back. Nothing is truly mild, of course. I feel some differences and some are likely permanent. One of them is reduced handwriting fluency. I find myself flipping letters in a way that I never did before. I should probably journal by hand.

Curious: I wonder how the developed writing quality factors into this analysis. Those who demonstrate consistent and fluid writing; would seem to better process (and control) what they are communicating. Whereas, one who is inconsistent and out of proportion; would seem to indicate a thought processing pattern that can only form one letter at a time… Previousky, it was thought handwriting skill was merely an “artistic” function… but what if it’s in fact a deeper cognitive indication, of neuro level processing…?

@ihtesham2005 I suspect we'll see something similar when we look at navigation by map and memory vs responding to the GPS instructions. When we consider aging brains, the impact may be even greater.

By the close of business on Friday, May 15th, the New York State Department of Public Service (DPS) posted a white paper on "Clean Energy Zones (CEZs) for New York State. Yes, you are reading that correctly. The ORES process (Office of Renewable Energy Siting) still isn't going fast enough for them. They aren't redacting environmental reports or crushing home rule efficiently enough. They know our grid is in a state of impending failure this summer from all of the energy generation they took offline following the 2019 Climate Act. Their solution? Supersede the already totalitarian Office of Renewable Energy Siting. They want to create CEZs so they don't have to, even for a moment, pretend they want to engage us rural Americans, our zoning laws, and our town boards. We are an impediment to them. Here's what CEZs would look like in practice: -State identifies preferred infrastructure zones -Transmission planning focuses there -Procurement favors those regions -Developers flood into those regions -ORES then processes the individual projects inside the designated zones Siting would occur BEFORE ORES even sees the projects. The paper admits some regions would experience “significantly higher concentrations of infrastructure projects.” If your town happens to reside in one of these "zones," it's game over. You won't even get a chance to file a little comment on an ORES docket. @KathyHochul already hinted at these "zones" in her 2025 State of the State. She has also mocked our home rule and expressed frustration in how much "rural New Yorkers are pushing back on commercial solar and wind." The solution? Force CEZs on rural Upstate NY while shutting down all public participation whatsoever. Do you understand the communist nature of all of this yet?

@FredSimonTLM We still have a couple of manual typewriters. I didn't have the heart to get rid of them. Maybe it's time to clean one up and buy some fresh ribbon. One of our adult children is the sort who might give it a home one day if it doesn't look too neglected.

This is still possible.

@underbrightwing Our 6th grade teacher read aloud to us from the Little House on the Prarie books. It's still one of my fondest memories of my school days. The other would be the smell of fresh-mown lawn wafting in through the open windows as we approached the end of the school year.

I read aloud to my 8th-10th grade classrooms. Tom Sawyer, The Pearl, Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, To Kill a Mockingbird, Screwtape Letters… Some of the most engaged and effective classes I had.

@BBHerodotus How beautiful. He sure loved his books.

The home of General George Patton

@alex_fasulo It was bad enough that they decided to lay electrical cable along Lake Champlain. Powering NYC via Quebec Hydro must have lined a lot of pockets.

It was “forever wild” until foreign commercial solar corporations came to town. Suddenly our Adirondack Park is for sale to Canadian renewable conglomerates. We need help in Upstate NY. Our state is being held hostage by the Office of Renewable Energy Siting.

@DeplorableFLMan @WatcherontheWeb Let's add schools to that. Illegal immigrants have no business putting their kids in our schools. Go home.

@WatcherontheWeb If they do this with banks, employers, and landlords - the illegal immigrant crisis is over. They are purposely not doing these kinds of things - which means that they do not want to solve the issue.

Illegal truckers are lining up at trucks stops, unable to find loads because the carrier will be found liable if they get in a wreck... Legal truckers are getting paid higher wages to pick up the slack... And your blackpilling, anon?

@jonbrooks 45K while earning 20K on two salaries. Mortgage rate of 12% with a buydown HUD program. Prevailing rates 15-16%. This was for a 700 sf cape. Money was very tight. While things are tough for young adults now, previous generations didn't all experience a walk in the park either.

Asking older generations how much they paid for their first house. $15k-75k. Incredible.

@woofknight I love my old crock pot from college days. It has a knob - high, low, off. Works like a charm every time, and no need to look up instructions.

@quachelsey Oh no, Brattleboro was such a lovely little town when I was last there.

This isn't limited to Burlington... Brattleboro, VT is much smaller with the same exact issues. You cross the CT River from NH and it's a nightmare zone

The last time I got my piano tuned, I encountered the iPad asking for a tip. This was a new one one me. What's next? A tip for the plumber?

@HRTLegal I volunteered in the school store when our kids were in middle school. The 'poor' kids, decked out in designer brands, carrying expensive phones, got everything free- even spirit wear. Our kids, dressed simply from Sears, had no phones, and got the basic supplies we could afford.