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Grouper date? No thanks.

As for the article... I think that this is the first generation of the "you get a prize for competing" kids growing up. Expect more of this pap in the future.

Is that prize for competing new generation thing for real? I feel like I've been hearing about that my whole life. In elementary school field days I think we got "certificates of participation" but I don't think any kid was confused about the importance of getting 1st 2nd or 3rd.

Well I did say "I think". I have no data to back up my feeling. I'm 54 and I can recall getting "participation certificates". But as you said, we knew the difference with just being in it and actually winning.

But as time went by, and I noticed it getting really bad in the 1980s, it became: "It doesn't matter if you come in first or not. because everyone is special." and "There are no losers!" Except that there are. And if you soak children in that type of culture, they grow up believing it. So that when they are confronted with the fact that they aren't special as adults, it's fucking traumatic. There is a disconnect. They just can't understand what is going on. So you as a business have to cater to the spoiled adults, or lose them as paying customers.

Except now they all constantly think they are "losers" because of the way the world functions?
I mean, have they stopped this and started focusing on helping kids build up actual self esteem yet?
I need some freaking data: did anyone who experienced this really think there were "special" or, maybe, that the adults were a bunch of liars and hypocrites?
I can see how good things could come out of bits of it, like learning how important it is to participate, if they had a choice in the matter, which it never sounds like they do, but I keep seeing stuff from people in their twenties and even thirties that make it look like great swathes of them are incapable of doing anything without a cheering section.

I feel like I've been hearing about that my whole life

Yeah, me too. It's been going on for at least a generation above me, too. And having come up in a Quaker milieu, this stuff was totally normal anyway. We played sports without really keeping score when we were just playing for fun.

Also, group dating is absolutely nothing new. Given that when I was in college we didn't even use the word "dating" (too old school) and essentially hung out in packs endlessly until a couple people hooked up, this really doesn't seem like a new thing, just a real human thing coming up against the flawed assumptions of social media designers. I can also attest that "group dating" was normal in my grandparents' generation and in the nineteenth century. So I don't think the sky is really falling here.

I think this is one of those facile explanations for what's wrong with society that functions to basically let everyone off the hook. I'd rather congratulate kids overtly for participating and be concerned with lifting them up, than have the de facto system I actually grew up in, where adults in classrooms could belittle, humiliate and even abuse kids without compunction, and of course kids went home to more of the same, and no one talked about it and everyone swept it all under the rug.

If there's some character flaw we'd like to think we see in an upcoming generation, let's specify that and show evidence we can actually discern it and address it head-on, rather than grumble about it sidewise. It always reminds me of that old-school character in Mad Magazine who always complained about hippies interfering with his 43-man Squamish game.

It's possible to be honest about the way a ranking system works and its eventual outcomes while still honoring everyone.

Yeah, that "rejection is unbearable" thing comes off as a bit snide. I did online dating in my late thirties, I've done others who've done in at older ages, and for people of all generations the process can feel brutal and rejection pretty painful.

If that generation has found a way of avoiding the misery of a bad date where the person opposite has instantly decided "no" and is sitting there tight-lipped responding in grim monosyllables to every open question and anecdote and conversational gambit you can think of, more power to them.

Rejection is unpleasant by nature and a normal human experience. It's one thing to look back on decades and think of what you'd like to avoid, it's another thing to imagine it is unbearable and must be avoided at all costs. I'm not even talking about dating; I mean life. Have you ever met someone who has never experienced rejection? Speaking of things one would rather not repeat.
I don't have an issue with group outings or business exploiting their particular issues, I have a problem with people who fully expect people to not only accommodate their issues but know about them in advance. Maybe I just keep happening to wander into super rich guy events where everyone is a paid actor/server who is in on all this or communes with invisible boundaries and no one is handing me the appropriate memos.

I can pull out wacky example after wacky example but I'm pretty sure it's always going to devolve into one of two ways: dissecting the minutae of the example instead of what it's meant to illustrate.

Why, when I was a youngun, we'd walk tree miles fer a belittlin', an' anudder fer an unfathomable an' baseless fear! You whippersnappers an' yer far more ambiguous an' amorphous neglect don't know how good ya got it, an' ya can keep it to yerselves wit' yer inability ta communicate--

It is clear that is not a transcript?

I have a problem with people who fully expect people to not only accommodate their issues but know about them in advance. Maybe I just keep happening to wander into super rich guy events where everyone is a paid actor/server who is in on all this

Well, perhaps, because that is what being rich buys you and always has. Nothing new there!

Also, "rejection is unbearable" is, in this instance, pretty clearly colloquial hyperbole. And yet, for all time, for some people it is.

Yeah, because rich guys really do set up massive, elaborate role playing events in random towns that random people are constantly wandering into--

Note: example=predicted outcome