I do not know what an rss feed, heard it a lot but never bothered to check it. Am I a normie? Did my earlier life go to waste?

It just means that you're young. RSS feeds allow you to read articles from different sources in a unified UI.

e.g. http://www.reddit.com/.rss

I use them a lot for many things, including film/TV series release, YouTube subscription, etc.

They were all the rage in the early to mid 2000s, then they died a death a bit. In the last year or two they're seeing somewhat of a resurgence.

Google Reader was a brilliant RSS aggregator. Instead of folding its functionality into Google+ when it came out, they decided to kill it. Then, when Google+ failed because of the disorganized nature of the Alphabet Company's constituent orgs fighting each other and not gracefully and elegantly integrating Google services into g+, the death of Reader was for nothing. It's the Google product I miss the most.

It's like a Google news feed but more robust as it's a protocol I think (edit: wrong, it's a kind of XML) and it doesn't collect personal information about your preferences.