HHH
Malls and print magazines would be dead even if GenZ loved them. Nobody else is using them either
Cash... yeah, that's a progressive generational thing. The younger you are, the more likely you are to be comfortable with new payment methods. Until a major problem happens, in which case they'll never go back... like my grandparents generation after the Depression.
Football. The article talks about brain injury. That's the parents' concern, not the kids. What I see, though, is that in the places that I frequent, football is no longer cool. Maybe in Middle America it's the same as always. But I grew up and have spent a lot of my life in and around ski towns and mountain towns. When I was a kid, despite crappy football teams on the one hand and Olympic gold medal skiers on the other, there was no replacing the star quarterback position in the social hierarchy.
Now what I see already with the generation in their early 20s, is that the coolest kids are playing soccer or are snowboarding or doing some "sport" that wasn't even a sport when I was kid.
As in: "My buddy Jako is a sick slackliner! Check out his [insert social media channel that I'm not cool enough to know about either]".
The football kids are like some quaint, Normal Rockwell reminder of simpler times, when people didn't care about social media and traumatic brain injury.
In fact, I think the shift in the culture (selfies, Instagram, Facebook) all tend to create pressure against team sports with anonymizing uniforms and toward individual sports and especially individual sports that allow some time of personal expression.
So even though New England still turns out Olympic Gold skiers, most of the younger generation is not interested in a sport where following a perfect line a few inches tighter than the previous guy is what it's all about. They want people in the half pipe showing their moves.
They don't want Roger Staubach, that's for sure. But I think they're also moving away from Carl Lewis. Husain Bolt and want Bode Miller are in traditional sports, but they have panache that goes beyond the sport.
I expect the big names will look more and more like Chloe Kim. She is the ultimate GenZ American sports figure so far - individual, "expressive" sport that has a sort of anti-tradition cool to it.
Of course, all of the above is just the ill-formed opinion of a guy who doesn't follow sports and now qualifies for the senior discount at a whole host of chain restaurants. So quite likely to be bullshit.
