trisected

Tag: next gen

  • Review of The Road to Red Restaurants List – Zetsumeshi Road

    I had this show on my NetFlix watch list, but I only started watching it because it was going away. The premise is simple: a salaryman has a wife and daughter who attend concerts every weekend. This gives him a weekend by himself, and he drives around the country and car camps at scenic locations. At the same time, he would sample “endangered food” around the area, from diners on the brink of closing down.

    I thoroughly enjoyed the journey I was brought through. Each episode gave me a big flashbacks to times when I’ve visited old diners and eateries.

    In Singapore, the idea of food going “extinct” because of a lack of succession is quite real. We have hawker centres, where a lot of local cuisine is made. Years ago, hawkers would park along the roadside and serve their customers. As Singapore progressed, the government made food centres, where a hawker would now own a storefront, and have seating for their diners. But also with progress, the hawkers wanted better lives for their families, and many younger generations were encouraged to further their studies and become professionals. In recent years, there has been a revival for younger hawkers, but the current rent for hawker centres are not cheap as well.

    The show, Zetsumeshi Road, connects this emotion: the presence of good food was made for the sake of making money, and if there was a choice, sometimes the chefs would not have even started the shop. But because it was necessary, they started it, and it would become successful. But that’s not the life they wanted in the first place.

    Not all the stories carried this same angle, but it does make me consider, how much of the world we currently live in now was made because previous generations didn’t want our generation to suffer? And in our current generation, would we even think that far ahead?

    Perhaps as I approach fatherhood, this is a thought for me to mull on: what I would do for the sake of my children after me?

    And also, they would be missing out on some really good food…

  • maybe it’s just that easy: understanding a next gen person

    There’s been a lot of talk and discussion about how to reach the next generation, or how will the young people come into the midst of the older ones, or how will we work with gen z’s and gen alpha’s in the years to come.

    Today, I’ve had a good prolonged interaction with a gen alpha, and guess what, they’re a human being just like us.

    I think it’s really strange sometimes the amount of labels we place on each other and analyze over and over again. Maybe it’s the fault of targeted marketing, and the way that the capitalist world has given specific markers for the existing markets, and now they don’t know how to produce something that this market would like.

    But guess what, they don’t either, because they’re kids still.

    When I was a kid, I would change my interests every other week maybe.

    Based on today’s marketing angles, can you imagine, the marketeers changing their plans every 2 weeks to fit the trends of young people? But that’s the consistent frantic speed that everyone is working towards now. And we keep thinking we don’t know how to talk to them, but the truth of it is: they’re as much of kids as we were. Just because they have the means of social media, doesn’t mean mental clarity to dictate what exactly they want to do. It doesn’t mean they know who they are, and that their identity is set in stone. Things change, and they will too.

    But what is hard is if the adults keep changing just to cater to their whims and fancies. From what I understand now, there’s so much a young person can push by saying or suggesting things. Talking about power to the people. Just a tiktok trend in a few people could start a whole new Shopee ad campaign. If someone starts watching a new TV show and shares about it, it spirals into a whole set of ideologies that YouTube picks up for more things.

    But at the heart of it, its just kids having fun. I remember having fun and doing these exact things, but without the medium of social media to boost this to the rest of the observing advertising eyes.

    So maybe the real deal is just to back off, and let kids be kids and have fun. These questions, these labels, and the ways and methods we think would “help us understand them better”, it’s just how we understand ourselves as humans better. We’re all the same, and I was definitely there once.

    my two cents worth. If you’re a gen z or a gen alpha, am I getting you wrong? are you not just having fun growing up? please let me know.