Boomers think these 7 habits make them polite but younger generations are begging them to stop

“They’re not trying to be rude, but are they?”

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Mark Wales

Jul 10, 2025

By Mark Wales

July 10, 2025

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Photo credit: Images via Canva – Photos by Latino Life and mariashipakina – Boomer and Gen Z

There is nothing wrong with politeness and a particular point of view, unless, of course, your interpretation of kindness is different from everyone else’s. Case in point? Boomers and every other generation.

What is it about Boomer energy that can just rub people the wrong way sometimes? It’s quite common for different age groups to have different needs and habits, and perhaps the Boomers you know may find 20% tips an absolute must, yet the concept of a service fee infuriating. Maybe they feel there is only one perfect way to load a dishwasher. Maybe job loyalty does have value. Whatever the topic, Boomers are likely to have a certain opinion about it that they feel is the best.

Finding ways to communicate and connect are important dynamics to building community and bridging the generation gap, and sometimes understanding what Boomer actions bother the other generations can help start a dialogue. VegOut Magazine described seven habits that may seem thoughtful to Boomers, but are actually emotionally taxing to younger generations.

Calling whenever they want

Boomers largely grew up in an age of landline phones that often ran unexpectedly. Instead of the horror that Millennials experience from an unsolicited phone call, Boomers find them normal and inviting. A reach out to say “Hello!” means they care and are interested in your life.

Younger generations feel it’s an uninvited threat. Where’s the heads up text? Nothing triggers anxiety like an unexpected ring.

Solution: How about everyone just chill? Older people can learn to text first. Younger people can acknowledge they don’t have to answer the phone, and often don’t anyway.

The unexpected visit

Seth Meyers, comedy, uninvited, neighbors, visits, social norms, formality, traditional manners

Boomers grew up in an age of the unannounced visit. There was a time when neighbors just rang a doorbell and offered up some extra muffins, freshly baked. Today, people guard their homes with intensity. A doorbell ring is terrifying, especially if pizza hasn’t been ordered.

Solution: Boomers, just send a text first. It’s not that complicated. Younger generations, you can always hide in the closet and pretend you’re not home.

Comments on personal appearance

Into today’s world, unsolicited comments on someone’s appearance seem a bit risky. And yet, Boomers never seem afraid to comment on someone’s weight loss or ask questions like, “Why aren’t you smiling?” These questions and comments were once considered tools of connection. It showed interest and concern for the mental and physical health of friends and people in general.

Younger people guard all aspects of “self” and “body image.” It’s dangerous territory leading toward hurt feelings and possible backlash.

Solution: If you don’t have anything to say nice, don’t say it. Even if you do, probably don’t say it.

Unsolicited advice

With age comes wisdom, yet sometimes nobody wants to hear it. Knowledge acquired over time and experience is valuable and should be passed on, but in certain contexts. Younger people often find unsolicited advice to be a rude personal attack, so be careful about offering a note no one asked for.

Solution: I had a friend who used to always ask, “Do you want to hear my opinion?” before they shared it. It was a pretty amazing quality that gave me time to prepare for what might be coming. In the end, it’s best to get permission. Simple.

Chain messages

chain mail, texting, emails, short-form content, emoji, digital native, culture, common ground — Breaking chains. Image via Canva – Photo by Merydolla

There’s nothing quite like the inspirational chain meme your grandma found. Especially when it was making the rounds eight months ago. Like everyone else, older people benefit from feeling connected. They’re just attempting to get in the digital meta. It’s easy to point out who’s out of the loop when you’re in it.

Solution: Can we all cut one another some slack? Instead of attacks, reconnect and appreciate the meme or image you already saw months ago. Replying with, “Ha, that’s a good one” isn’t that much of a stretch, and it isn’t that much to ask when given an opportunity to share love instead of disdain. I have an aunt who gets concerned when those chain mails say, “Pass this on to 10 people…” I told her to send them my way, because I’m not afraid to dump them in the digital garbage.

Lengthy conversations for business

Boomers have worked networking and building relationships into their business model. A chat about what’s trending is a great way to ease into an important conversation. It’s a way to be polite and build-up camaraderie before the deal is done.

Younger generations don’t want to waste time. A “thumbs up” emoji can be enough to get things going.

Solution: Acumen took a look at getting generations to learn how to connect with one another. They found that “common ground” was crucial for networking. Younger people can work on patience and respecting the time offered by older generations, and Boomers can learn to fire a quick text instead of dragging every conversation into a “life lesson.”

Checking and rechecking replies

Boomers may not be totally confident in how the whole digital world works. It’s not uncommon to receive texts and emails asking, “Did you get that email…” or “Curious on your thoughts of the text I sent.” These follow-ups were designed to show interest and thoroughness. Younger people can just find them bothersome.

Solution: Boomers can learn to not treat texting and emails like a personal journal. It’s okay to be brief and to the point. A short message doesn’t mean someone is being short with you. Speak with People suggested that younger generations can give Boomers the “benefit of the doubt.”

The wrap up

Everyone is trying to fit in the best they can. It can be difficult to adapt and move with the times. Some day, younger people will be a little out of touch with the next generation.

Philosopher and theologian Martin Buber wrote, “All real living is meeting.” The more we can learn to help each other connect, the better. Learning to be curious about other people and their generation instead of dictating will build deeper and more mutual connections.

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Photo credit: Canva – A man with fast reflexes.

Culture, Internet

Italian man claims to be ‘human cheetah’ with lightning-fast reflexes

“I blinked and I missed it”

Mark Wales

4/29/2026

At first glance, this probably looks like a camera trick. Ken Lee, an Italian content creator, has built a massive online following by doing something that doesn’t quite feel real. Viewers refer to him as the “human cheetah” because it appears he has near-instant reflexes.

Grabbing objects out of the air with uncanny precision, flicking clothespins and lighters, and throwing a blur of punches and kicks at impossible speeds, it is easy to call him unbelievable. Half the audience thinks his viral speed videos are fake. The other half is just as convinced they are watching something incredibly rare.

@kenleefastestman
KAIOKEN DELL’UNIVERSO!🐉😱 PER VOI DIVENTO LUCE!!!💥(Super Saiyan 11° livello!💫) #kenlee🐉 #kenshirorealstar💥 #kaioken #universe #animeman #live #supersaiyan #ultrainstinct #maivisto #manga #dragonball #fastest #saitama #brucelee #goku #funny #divertente #comic
♬ suono originale – Ken Lee👽⚡

Hands so fast they blur time

In the video above, a timer runs to confirm its authenticity. In what looks like half a second, he reaches out and snags the lighter from the table. To prove it is real, he does it twice.

Having amassed millions of followers on his TikTok page, the identity behind the mysterious influencer remains largely unknown. Active since around 2022, with almost 100 million accumulated likes, Lee has cultivated a fandom around his self-proclaimed “Superhero per Hobby!”

Do you believe it is real? Is this person the fastest human alive? Many followers cannot wait for the next video to be posted. Plenty of his fervent fans are Italian, so sifting through the remarks takes a bit of hunting. Here are some comments that sum up how much people enjoy the fun and the spectacle:

“Ken lee the fastest and the best”

“Most dangerous human”

“Is this what the lighter sees before my homie steals it”

“It was sped up during he grabbed the lighter, if u count up with the timer u would be off by like 0,5 seconds whenever he grabs the lighter.”

“If the flash were human”

“How is it possible to get such powers ?”

“I blinked and I missed it”

@kenleefastestman
AIR OF THE DRAGON! 🐉😱 #kenlee🐉 #kenshirorealstar💥 #animeman #over100000 #ultrainstinct #over100000 #saitama #goku #brucelee #speedoflight⚡ #manga #cartoon #fastest #flash #velocita #sport #impossible #lighters #world #record #real #speed
♬ suono originale – Ken Lee👽⚡

People love good entertainment

The awe of peak performance attracts people to watch elite athletes, musicians, or even dancers. There is something that deeply satisfies all of us when a human appears to push a skill to its limit. Whether it is real or fake seems to matter less than the opportunity to chime in on some good entertainment.

How far could any of us go by practicing and repeating a particular motion over and over until it is mastered? Beneath the flashy nickname and his viral speed videos, Lee’s content has a way of drawing people in. This is not a superpower. Just repetition. Focus. Obsession. And maybe some digital wizardry.

@kenleefastestman
KEN LEE💫THE NEW SUPERHERO! 👽⚡️🌎🐉#kenleespeed👽⚡ #fastestmanalive⚡️ #speedoflight #worldspeed🌎 #superhero
♬ audio originale – Ken Lee👽⚡

Testing the science of speed

If you wish to question the validity of Lee’s performances, maybe some basic science can help. Human reaction time is not just a reflex. A 2024 study found that the nervous system can fine-tune responses in real time. Practice can make movements appear almost automatic.

It has been well established in research that the gap between seeing something and responding has a limit. A 2025 study concluded that the most elite extremes allow for reaction times of 100 milliseconds. At that speed, the human brain can barely process that something has happened.

Science explains Lee is not necessarily moving as fast as we might perceive him to be. And therein lies all the fun of it. We cannot prove it is real, nor can we actually prove that it is fake.

Maybe Lee is the “fastest man alive” or the so-called “human cheetah.” Or maybe he is just a remarkable entertainer. Either way, he has clearly tapped into something strange and fascinating: a blend of human ability and fantasy that people do not want to miss.

To give context to Lee’s videos, watch this performance on Tú Sí Que Vales:

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Photo credit: LisaStrachan/iStock via Getty Images – Fear not: There isn’t anything that needs saving.

Culture, Media

Despite all the likes, literallys and dropped g’s, English isn’t decaying before our eyes

Why “bad” English is nothing new.

Good Partner

4/22/2026

Valerie M. Fridland

As a linguistics professor, I’m often asked why English is decaying before our eyes, whether it’s “like” being used promiscuously, t’s being dropped deleteriously or “literally” being deployed nonliterally.

While these common gripes point to eccentric speech patterns, they don’t point to grammatical annihilation. English has weathered far worse.

Let’s start with something we can all agree on: Old English, spoken from approximately A.D. 450 to 1100, is pretty unintelligible to us today. Anyone who’s had the pleasure of reading “Beowulf” in high school knows how different English back then used to sound. Word endings did a lot more grammatical work, and verbs followed more complicated patterns. Remnants of those rules fuel lingering debates today, such as when to use “whom” over “who,” and whether the past tense of “sneak” is “snuck” or “sneaked.”

The language went on to experience centuries of tumult: Viking invasions, which introduced Old Norse influence; Anglo-Norman French rule, which shifted the language of the elite to French; and 18th-Century grammarians, who dictated norms with their elocution and grammar guides.

In that time, English has lost almost all of the more complex linguistic trappings it was born with to become the language we know and – at least, sometimes – love today. And as I explain in my new book, “Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents,” it was all thanks to the way that language naturally evolves to meet the social needs of its speakers.

From dropping the ‘l’ to dropping the ‘g’

The things we tend to label as “bad” or sloppy English – for instance, the “g” that gets lost from our -ing endings or the deletion of a “t” when we say a word like “innernet” – actually reflect speech habits that are centuries old.

Take, for example, “often.” Originally spoken with the “t,” that pronunciation gradually became less favored around the 15th century, alongside that “l” in “talk” and the “k” in know. Meanwhile, the “s” now stuck on the back of verbs like “does” and “makes” began as a dialectal variant that only became popular in 16th-century London. It gradually replaced “th” whenever third persons were involved, as in “The lady doth protest too much.”

While dropping the “l” in talk may have been initially frowned upon, today it would be strange if you pronounced the letter. And the shift makes sense: It smoothed out some linguistic awkwardness for the sake of efficiency.

If people learned to look at language more like linguists, they might come around to seeing that there is more than one perspective on what good speech consists of.

And yes, that absolutely is a sentence ending with a preposition – something many modern grammar guides discourage, even though the idea only took hold after 18th-century grammarian Robert Lowth intimated it was a less elegant choice based on the model of Latin.

Though Lowth voiced no hard and fast rule against it, many a grammar maven later misconstrued his advice as an admonition. Just like that, a mere suggestion became grammatical law.

The rise of the grammar sticklers

Many of today’s ideas about what constitutes correct English are based on a singular – often mistaken – 19th-century view of the forces that govern our language.

In the late 18th century, the English-speaking world began experiencing class restructuring and higher literacy rates. As greater class mobility became possible, accent differences became class markers that separated new money from old money.

Emulation of upper-crust speech norms became popular among the nouveau riche. With literacy also on the rise, grammarians and elocutionists raced to dictate the terms of “proper” English on and off the page, which led to the rise of usage guides and dictionaries that were eager to sell a certain brand of speech.

Another example of grammarian angst reconfiguring the view of an otherwise perfectly fine form is the droppin’ of the “g.” It became so tied to slovenly speech that it was branded with an apostrophe in the 19th century to make sure no one missed its lackadaisical and nonstandard nature.

Up until the 19th century, however, no one seemed to care whether one pronounced it as “-in” or “-ing.”

Evidence suggests that -ing wasn’t even heard as the correct form. Many elocution guides from the 18th century provide rhyming word pairs like “herring/heron,” “coughing/coffin” and “jerking/jerkin,” which suggest that “-in” may have been the preferred pronunciation of words ending with “-ing.” Even writer and satirist Jonathan Swift – a frequent lobbyist for “proper” English – rhymes “brewing” with “ruin” in his 1731 poem “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D..”

Embrace the change

Language has always shifted and evolved. People often bristle at changes from what they’ve known to what is new. And maybe that’s because this process often begins with speakers that society usually looks less favorably on: the young, the female, the poor, the nonwhite.

But it’s important to remember that being disliked and bad are not the same thing – that today’s speech pariahs are driven by the same linguistic and social needs as the Londoners who started going with “does” instead of “doth” or dropped the “t” in often.

So if you think the speech that comes from your lips is the “correct” version, think again. Thou, like every other English speaker, art literally the product of centuries of linguistic reinvention.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.

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Photo credit: Canva – (L) Kids wrestling in the yard; (R) young children playing chess

Culture, Media

10 boys and 10 girls were left alone in separate houses and the different results are just wild

The premise was simple but high stakes.

Adam Albright Hanna

GOOD Staff

4/19/2026

It sounds like the plot of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. However, in the mid-2000s, it was a very real and very controversial reality television experiment.

Footage from the UK Channel 4 documentary Boys and Girls Alone is captivating audiences all over again. It offers a fascinating and chaotic look at what happens when you remove parents from the equation.

The premise was simple but high stakes. Twenty children, aged 11 and 12, were split into two groups by gender. Ten boys and ten girls were placed in separate houses and told to live without adult supervision for five days.

The Setup

While there were safety nets in place, the day-to-day living was entirely up to the kids. A camera crew was present but instructed not to intervene unless safety was at risk. The children could also ring a bell to speak to a nurse or psychiatrist.

The houses were fully stocked with food, cleaning supplies, toys, and paints. Everything they needed to survive was there. They just had to figure out how to use it.

The Boys: Instant Chaos

In the boys’ house, the unraveling was almost immediate. The newfound freedom triggered a rapid descent into high-energy anarchy.

They engaged in water pistol fights and threw cushions. In one memorable instance, a boy named Michael covered the carpet in sticky popcorn kernels just because he could.

The destruction eventually escalated to the walls. The boys covered the house in writing, drawing, and paint. But the euphoria of freedom eventually crashed into the reality of consequences.

“We never expected to be like this, but I’m really upset that we trashed it so badly,” one boy admitted in the footage. “We were trying to explore everything at once and got too carried away in ourselves.”

Their attempts to clean up were frantic and largely ineffective. Nutrition also took a hit. Despite having completed a cooking course, the boys survived mostly on cereal, sugar, and the occasional frozen pizza. By the end of the week, the house was trashed, and the group had fractured into opposing factions.

The Girls: Organized Society

The girls’ house looked like a different planet.

In stark contrast to the mayhem next door, the girls immediately established a functioning society. They organized a cooking roster, with a girl named Sherry preparing their first meal. They baked cakes. They put on a fashion show. They even drew up a scrupulous chores list to ensure the house stayed livable.

While their stay wasn’t devoid of interpersonal drama, the experiment highlighted a fascinating divergence in socialization. Left to their own devices, the girls prioritized community and maintenance. The boys tested the absolute limits of their environment until it broke.

The documentary was controversial when it aired, with critics questioning the ethics of placing children in unsupervised situations for entertainment. But what made it so enduring, and why footage keeps resurfacing years later, is what it reveals about how kids are socialized long before anyone puts them in a house together. The boys weren’t born anarchists and the girls weren’t born organizers. They arrived at those houses already shaped by years of being told, implicitly and explicitly, what boys do and what girls do. Whether that’s a nature story or a nurture story is the question the documentary keeps asking without quite answering, which is probably why people are still watching and arguing about it nearly two decades later.

This article originally appeared two years ago. It has been updated.

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