Is it the urge to be on of a kind?
When I was in my 20’s we spend time in smoky bars, dressed in jeans and suede jackets, discussing Shopenhauer and Nietzsche and God holy lord: Sartre, we didn’t understand one single f*ck of it, but it was our way to be individuals and one of a kind, not realizing we only wanted to belong to a tribe.
Intellectuel tribalisme doesn’t work on volatile visual media, so getting a tattoo, that catching duck face look and poking boobs are the Instagram tools to differentiate and belong to that tribe, in the illusion it is individualism.
Nothing is changed, drivers are the same. And to be honest, I find the social skills of nowadays teens much more pleasant than it was in my time.
At the end, hopefully, we all end up with some grand children on our lap.
In my time as a youth, we spent our collective moments talking about New Orleans jazz, and whether or not the Dutch Swing College Band could really be called a "Jass" band or not. Pop music occupied a quite different slot in our collective psyche: light entertainment and a kind of lesser music... not serious stuff at all. Today, jazz hardly features for me, and the pop has been replaced by another niche genre: swamp pop rock. Go figure.
Jeans were very hard to find in Scotland during the 50s; once I found a source, I wore nothing else unless for business meetings later in life. Today, they are all I own that I'd wear; the rest of the stuff hangs there, out of fashion, gathering dust. Oh, I have a suit - one - reserved for funerals.
Regarding grandchildren on the lap: be very sure they are your grandchildren, and only then let them anywhere near your lap. In all cases, ensure you have a plastic sheet between self and baby. You can't trust them: they sometimes smile as they wet.
I'd be interested to know where you find youth today with better social skills; strikes me they have none at all and some appear to celebrate the fact. Perhaps it's because they can't really stand one another that they bow their heads to the little screen when forced to be together?
:-)