How to interpret and parse the expression "молодежь не та пошла"?

Question

Недаром все чаще и чаще слышится выражение: «молодежь не та пошла! » - извечный конфликт поколений. Разумеется, саму молодежь вполне устраивает то, какая она.

I'm wondering what this expression means.

Answer 1

пошла can be literally translated as has emerged, has become, turns out to be

The (the quality of) youth nowadays is not the same as the (the quality of) youth of the past. A classic rant of the older generation.

It can be used in other situations as well, when something has changed for the better or for the worse in comparison to the past (although the latter seems to be prevalent)

Первокурсники пошли уже не те! Вместо привычных гладиолусов в руках новомодные гаджеты. ^negative - The freshmen are not the same any longer / what they used to be. Instead of the usual bouquet of sword lilies holding fashionable gadgets.

Клиент (какой-то) бедный пошёл нынче, больше полкило не покупает. ^negative - Customers nowadays are kind of poor, don't buy more than half a kilogram.

Призывник сейчас хилый пошёл, 10 раз подтянуться не могут. ^negative - Conscripts are kind of feeble nowadays, can't do 10 pull-ups.

На днях созванивались с местными, сказали что щуки практически нет, но зато окунь очень крупный пошёл. ^positive - We recently got in touch with the locals, they said there's virtually no pike, but perch became very big.

Answer 2

I'll try to answer this by explaining the parts of the expression one by one.

• the word "молодежь" means "youth", no problem with this.
• the word "та" is a feminine (since "молодежь" is feminine in Russian) form of the word "тот", which means "that".
• "не та" is the negation of "та"

The word "пошла" is the most complicated in the expression, so I'll touch it separately. It is a feminine (since "молодежь" is feminine in Russian, of course) past form of the verb "пойти", "to move", "to go". In that case it literally means "to occur". In Russian, when we have a series something and we are encountering items from this series, we use the words "идти, пойти" to convey this:

• Сейчас идет интересный сериал по ТВ — Now an interesting TV series is on TV (although this can also mean that an episode is being on air right now, I'm talking about the situation when a series is on TV generally, not exactly at this moment). Literally that means that some series is currently going and some items (episodes in this example) occurred, some not.

The idea is that this is applicable to all series, "series" one can imagine.

So in the expression in question the meaning is literally this:

there is a series of "youthes" (like yesterday youth, youth in 1917 or whatever). And now, current "youthes" or a single current youth, which is occurring now, is different (the negation "не" conveys this) from the previous ones, which have occurred previously referred by ("та" — "feminine that"). The expression doesn't elaborate how it differs exactly.

If not literally, the expression means, that today's youth is not what it used to be previously. Sounds like a rebuke or condemnation in the expression, but not necessarily.

Some good examples were provided in the other answer, I just wanted to provide generalization for them.