Last weekend, I was helping my granddaughter Emma with a school project when she asked if she could “AirDrop” some photos to my laptop. I stared at her blankly, then watched in amazement as pictures magically appeared on my screen without any cords or emails involved.
“How did you do that?” I asked, genuinely bewildered.
She gave me that patient-but-slightly-exasperated look that grandparents know well. “Grandma, it’s just AirDrop.”
Just AirDrop. As if I should know what that means.
After spending over thirty years in high school classrooms, I thought I understood young people pretty well. I’ve watched trends come and go, seen technology evolve, and adapted my teaching methods countless times. But my own grandchildren? They operate in a world that sometimes feels completely foreign to me.
Don’t get me wrong—I adore them. But there are moments when I feel like I’m observing a fascinating, slightly alien species. Here are five things about their generation that leave me scratching my head.
1. They’re glued to their phones but feel lonely
The math on this one just doesn’t add up to me.
My grandchildren are constantly connected—texting, snapping, posting, scrolling. And they’re not alone. On average, people spend 4 hours and 37 minutes on their phones each day, as noted by Exploding Topics.
That’s nearly a part-time job’s worth of social interaction, yet they’ll complain about feeling isolated or left out.
When I was their age, we had maybe three phone conversations a week, and those were brief because someone else needed the line. We hung out in person or we didn’t hang out at all. Simple.
But here’s what really puzzles me: research has found that increased time on social media was linked to greater feelings of loneliness. More connection somehow equals less connection? It’s like being surrounded by people at a party but feeling invisible.
I watch Emma scroll through hundreds of photos of her friends having fun, and instead of feeling included, she seems more aware of what she’s missing. It breaks my heart, honestly.
2. They avoid phone calls like they’re contagious
Here’s something that truly mystifies me: my grandchildren will spend hours typing messages back and forth, but ask them to make an actual phone call? You’d think I’d suggested they perform surgery.
Last month, my grandson needed to call a restaurant to ask about their hours. He stood there for a full five minutes, staring at his phone like it might bite him. Finally, he looked up and said, “Grandma, can you just call them?”
This is the same kid who can navigate fifteen different apps simultaneously and somehow makes money playing video games online. But a simple phone conversation? Terrifying.
When I taught high school, I used to have students call colleges for information or phone local businesses for research projects. Try that today and you’ll get blank stares and genuine panic. They’ll text, email, DM, or send carrier pigeons before they’ll dial a number.
I keep wondering: how do they plan to handle job interviews? Client meetings? Emergency situations? Some conversations just can’t happen through a screen, can they?
3. Their slang
I’ve been teaching teenagers for over three decades, so I thought I understood how young people talk. Boy, was I wrong.
My grandchildren speak in what sounds like a completely different language. Everything is either “fire,” “mid,” or “no cap.” When something’s good, it “slaps” or “hits different.” When they agree with something, they’re “dead” about it (which initially concerned me greatly).
The speed at which their vocabulary changes is dizzying, too. Just when I think I’ve mastered “slay” (apparently meaning to do something well), they’ve moved on to something else entirely. I tried to tell my grandson his basketball game was “lit” and got the kind of look usually reserved for people who still use flip phones.
What really throws me is how they can have entire conversations I can’t follow. “That’s so based, no cap, it’s giving main character energy but also lowkey cheugy.” I understood maybe three words in that sentence, and I’m not even sure about those.
Sometimes I wonder if they do it on purpose—create this linguistic barrier that keeps the adult world at arm’s length. If so, mission accomplished.
4. They expect everything to happen instantly
Watching my grandchildren navigate the world is like observing beings who’ve never heard the word “wait.” If a webpage takes more than three seconds to load, they’ll refresh it impatiently. If a video buffers for even a moment, they’re already scrolling to find something else.
Last month, Emma ordered something online and then checked the tracking information six times in one day. When I mentioned that things used to take weeks to arrive through mail order catalogs, she stared at me like I’d described life in medieval times.
“But why would you wait that long?” she asked, genuinely confused.
They’ve grown up in a world of instant downloads, same-day delivery, and immediate responses. The idea of delayed gratification seems completely alien to them. When I was teaching, I used to assign research projects that required students to wait for library books to be returned or interlibrary loans to arrive. Now, if the information isn’t immediately available through a quick Google search, they assume it doesn’t exist.
This instant-everything mentality extends beyond shopping and entertainment. They expect immediate feedback, instant validation, and rapid solutions to complex problems.
Looking across the generational divide
Don’t get me wrong—I’m not writing this from a place of judgment. My grandchildren are incredible humans who’ve taught me more about adaptability and innovation than I ever expected to learn in my sixties.
But sometimes I wonder if we’re living in completely different worlds that just happen to overlap at family dinners.
Maybe that’s always been true between generations. My own grandmother probably scratched her head at my generation’s relationship with television, credit cards, and long-distance phone calls. Perhaps every older generation looks at the younger one and thinks, “How do they live like that?”
The beautiful thing is, we don’t have to understand everything about each other to love each other. Emma still asks for my chocolate chip cookie recipe, and Jake still calls when he needs advice about college. We find our common ground somewhere between their digital native world and my analog roots.
What about you? If you’re in a similar stage of life, what baffles you most about the younger generation? I’d love to hear I’m not the only one feeling occasionally mystified.
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Explore our first video: The Brain Beneath Our Feet — a short-film by shaman Rudá Iandê that challenges where we believe intelligence comes from.
Instead of looking to the stars or machines, Rudá invites us to consider that the first great mind on Earth may have existed without a brain at all… and that the oldest form of thought might be living beneath our feet.
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