Yeah I have a lot of "kids these days" moments as well but this time I think that an over-reliance on technology to solve anything for you has permeated not just the young, but everyone. I was listening to a podcast the other day about how chaotic life would be for most people if we were to wake up one day and GPS just didn't work. Most people these days have no idea how to get from one place to the other and would probably just "shut down" as you say, if all of a sudden they needed to use a paper map and remember turns. I am sure you are old enough to remember those frustrating days, but you got it done in the end.

These days I get into an Uber type taxi and even though I presume the person does this for a living and I am going somewhere very common like a huge shopping mall, they turn EXACTLY where the GPS tells them to turn even if it is clearly not the best way of getting there. People have just become automatons because of tech. It's going to get worse before it gets better. Already almost everyone I know immediately goes to AI assistant anytime a question arises and I have to stop them and say something like "let's just talk about it for a bit first" to stop them from preventing anyone from actually thinking for a minute.

Back in my day (lol) we would get told some absolute nonsense by an aunt or uncle and we would spend the next several years just presuming it was true. My story about such a thing is when I was a child my Mom would play guitar and one of her songs was "Yellow Submarine." I lived the next, at least, 10 years of my life thinking that my Mom wrote that song because she told 4-year old me that she did because it probably would have invited a string of question from me if she had told me the truth. I wasn't a Beatles fan so it wasn't until I was in high school that I heard it on a friend's CD player and my mind was just blown.