Yes and no in the worst kinds of ways. I noticed at maybe a relatively young age in my mid to late 20s that there was a small number of references I actually literally just didn’t get, made by people I worked with in their early 20s. This scared me a little bit because out of some kind of fairly stupid snobbery I kind of privately prided myself on not knowing a lot of the stuff I felt was frivolous in modern pop culture as if that somehow made me superior. This more conscious habit of deliberately avoiding too much exposure to whole categories of art worked as intended however I would have to know about something to avoid it, so while I’d be ignorant of it by design, I could never be fully ignorant since it had to enter my orbit for me to reject it. This would mean I sorta knew at a very surface level what people were talking about when referencing things out there in the general zeitgeist so I never really felt “out of touch” so much as “too smart to care about this shit”. This meant that when I started encountering the first references that were actually truly foreign and completely unknown to me it was a rude shock. Who’d have thought actively making it your mission to close your ears and “lalalalala” much of modern culture to smuggly feel above it actually eventually is a self-fulfilling prophecy that makes you really become out of touch and feel old and weird potentially before you had to. I don’t say that to imply that one ought to make it a personal goal to stay up to date with it culture, or to imply that a lot of it isn’t banal and perhaps not worth your time, only to say that, deliberately trying not to know because you think it’s all stupid is well… stupid.

From there the natural progression of becoming old and just genuinely not encountering stuff without any need to consciously create that that ignorance took course and I now quite frequently don’t know what people younger than myself are talking about, which is to be expected, but still feels really surreal and strange and kind of sad. I’m sure that’s exactly how it felt to everyone older than myself when I was in my teens and in my 20s. I didn’t imagine myself being spared this fate, but somehow you can never prepare for the way that feels no matter how much you expect it and know that it’s coming - forewarned is not forearmed in this case.

As to the “No” part of this, I have in the past decade or so become less and less social, had fewer and fewer friends and generally just don’t really get out much. It took me by surprise recently to learn how much this has meant my life is increasingly lived online. I always kind of knew that was the case, because I was always an awkward nerd even in my youth but I have only recently begun to realise that when I do get out, if it’s not with other, similar, people of my own age and situation in life (people who also likely spend much of their time online), almost all I have to talk about, or almost all the ways in which I can relate when someone else has something to talk about, is in references to things that pretty much exclusively have their context online or in forums or as memes. This is upsetting to me because well, I’ve come across people like that before and I didn’t especially like being around them. I like to think my personality is a bit less off than them and the type of internet references I make are different, but nevertheless the thought that that’s probably what I look like is depressing. Existing in this mode is great when you’re online but it doesn’t translate very well to general conversation unless you’re literally occupying those same online spaces and don’t need to explain context. It kind of gives off neckbeard vibes and quite frequently people don’t know what I’m talking about which has me feeling awkward. It’s also kind of weird just how American I’ve become since I don’t even live there. I don’t know if others notice it but when I find myself over analysing all my recent interactions with people, as I often do, I can see that no one else seems to have absorbed Americana quite the same way and I don’t particularly like that either. So I both, don’t really keep up very well with modern pop-culture and I also seem to keep up with it better than others when that refers to a largely North American-centric internet bubble that I had kind of unthinkingly felt more people were in or at least around but as it turns out, really aren’t.

In my case not so much “lagging behind” as “stopped caring, ignoring, life’s too short for so much churn over nonessential filler”.

Our whole global pop culture has been fragmented now. Up until about 20 years ago, everyone the world over almost universally followed the same or similar pop culture because we all watched the same TV, the same movies, the same radio, the same music and knew the same biggest pop stars, movie stars and famous people. It was all mostly the same content from cable TV, satellite TV, broadcast radio, magazines and newspapers. We all read, watched and listened to the same stuff most of the time.

Now it’s completely fragmented. Everyone everywhere live in their own world, watch their own on demand TV … some like new stuff, some like old, some like regional, some like international, some like it all, some like only one niche corner. Not everyone follows the same patterns, shows, personalities or music.

I’m middle aged myself and I have no clue what anyone is doing or referencing most of the time and I no longer care. I like what I like and if I don’t understand or don’t get something, I move on until I find someone that can understand things that I understand.

Trash, the word you’re looking for is trash.

My dude, even when I was a young American woman in prime meme-consumption age, I couldn’t keep up with all of it. Keeping up would require so many hours online, it’s not something to be jealous of.

At least that’s what I tell my middle-aged self to cope with being old and slow.

Even as someone who grew up in the US, I always feel left out of the cultural landscape in a lot of ways. But that’s my own fault for walking to the beat of my own drum a lot of the time. I ain’t got time to learn shitty new slang or watch brain rotting videos or use most any social media out there (despite the fact I’m doing it more than ever thanks to Lemmy and Mastodon).

You ask me to make some old, outdated reference, I definitely can. “Paranoia Paranoia, everybody’s coming to get me! Just say you never met me!” ~ Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger

Or even one that’s probably even more obscure because it’s from a children’s songs CD. “2, 4, 6, 8, Sunny Skies All Day!” ~ What I Do In The Morning (from the “Hey! It’s Franklin!” CD)

But ask me anything about recent pop culture references and slang and I’ll draw a blank. Anything from Game of Thrones outside the popular memes like that “Winter is coming!” meme and I’m lost. That horrendous sk*bidi bullshit? Absolutely no clue other than it’s 200% garbage. Ask me the latest Internet trends and best I can say is AI filth and ruination most everywhere instead of any of the social media trends that people are actually asking about.

I know how you feel, I completely missed gossip=tea. Don’t even know where that came from, all of a sudden people are whispering about “spilling the tea” and I just had to nod politely.

I see this in a roommate and I kind of envy them. Sometimes I understand how a meme or reference works, but I don’t really want to share the cultural substrate required to explain it to them when they ask.

Is it maybe more social circles online… like Facebook people vs Lemmy vs Tiktok etc?