Baby Boomers vs. Generation X vs. Millennials

fuck, I should have said zooming

lol

due to the protests i've recently been inundated with social media posts from 32-45 year olds exalting "gen z" and applying to them an essentialist laundry list of cartoonish personality traits and i don't think i can take another 10 years of this. it's just gonna keep happening over and over and over again, the same exact way and i don't want to be alive for it. at a certain point the exaltation becomes fetishistic, creepy - millennials applying traits that were bombastically attributed to them 5 years ago in a slightly more bombastic and self-assured manner. turns out zoomers are socially anxious (but it's funny), confrontational, woke, and they tip well - these have nothing to do with age, this is just how the standard twitter user with a commissioned fanart avi of themselves wants to be seen. stop projecting your idealized identity onto teenagers you weirdos! none of this is real you're just contributing to social media's drive to flatten humanity into a more flippable pancake

― ℺ ☽ ⋠ ⏎ (✖), Saturday, June 13, 2020 4:33 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

to be fair gen x did it to millennials first

and the zoomers will do it to the yoomers/xoomers/xillennials/zilent generation/generation pepsi/whatever we settle on in 8-10 years

what percentage of these posts include the line "the kids are alright"?

(17 year old e-girl makes a tik tok about communism)

35 year old leftist professor in bushwick: Methinks the kids are alright :) haha anybody know this girls age?

— Patrick (@lunch_enjoyer) October 31, 2019

Zoomer fetishism is weird because they’re also
heavily influenced by Nazi twitch gamers.

that doesn't represent the zoomers I know

a whole thread about disparaging people who aren't your age

the zoomers you know don't represent the zoomers you don't know

agree, but

I guess we're all thinking about general statements, I'm included

"Comparing generations is a very easy, very useful way to understand culture. Generations comprise vast swaths of people all similar enough to be safely lumped together and discussed as a mass, almost as if they constituted a single individual. You can speak of a generation's values and even its beliefs. Most importantly, you can blame them for things."

treeship's original post really said it all

Lotta "kids are alright" tweets tonight.

None of us really understand zoomers as a generality (including people who are parents to zoomers). Feel like you have to be of a gen to really fucking get it y'know. Like for all I hate and stereotype boomers and gen x and have grown up on their cultural products etc. I dont really know them and zoomers havent had the time to end up being the establishment, most of us wont live to see that

I thought this was the sourdough generation

to be fair gen x did it to millennials first

Not me I hate those guys every last one of them

Good morning Lorrie Moore has declared war??? pic.twitter.com/1dsb2yQHoF

— Stephen Piccarella (@spiccarella) July 15, 2020

i can see how the type of person who thinks BDSM was invented in 1983 would think these things

She said the term was invented in 1983, then expressed some doubt about the extent the practice of BDSM existed prior to that. The doubt was unmerited, but there's no reason to make her sound more clueless than what she actually said.

i don't think moore is a generally clueless person and i've enjoyed a story or two of hers in the past. the point is that, like nearly all discourse around cultural generations over the past oh 60 years, the scope of the supplied bitter generalizations doesn't even extend beyond a small, privileged class of straw people - upper/upper-middle class, white, and in this specific case, heterosexual to the point where leather bars are thought to be a fairly recent invention

if these are the only people that make up your world then sure go off i guess. what's the point in even reacting to this stuff, it's just kayfabe entertainment for a very specific brand of person

i do love the "millennials had harry potter boomers had old yeller" line - my boomer mom once told me that in high school every girl walked around with a copy of catcher in the rye and every boy walked around with a copy of lord of the rings

yeah this is ludicrous, I mean They seem like nice people. But not normal. is a wholly deranged thing to say about a whole "generation"

She's right about one thing though, millennial's music kinda sucks, if you're talking about the new music their generation likes. They do have excellent taste in old music, though.

Gen X musical taste is more offensive than either boomers or millennials

Gen Z who knows but 100 gecs are pretty cool

Gen X musical taste is more offensive than either boomers or millennials

Fair enough. Whatever the generation was that was making music in the '70s and early '80s. That was the best time for music.

Generations schmenerations but Lorrie Moore rules and her sentences are great whether true or false

100 gecs are pretty cool

This group is my "your taste is garbage - never talk to me about art or culture again" litmus test.

Lorrie Moore is kind of overrated IMHO. I read Alice Munro for my uptight boomer fiction

But yeah, she can go off all she wants and she'll be dead soon, and many of those who will ever care about what she did will soon follow. It's like great yr bitter that you lack understanding of contemporary culture, you could also shit the fuck up

This group is my "your taste is garbage - never talk to me about art or culture again" litmus test.

Don't break your hip, grandpa

money machine is one of the greatest songs/videos ever

Lorrie Moore is kind of overrated IMHO. I read Alice Munro for my uptight boomer fiction

― blue light or electric light (the table is the table), Friday, July 17, 2020 6:29 PM (thirty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm. i think who will run the frog hospital is great tho. her more annoying stylistic tics started outweighing the good stuff circa gate at the stairs imo, and i found bark nigh-unreadable

When I say Lorrie Moore is great I am not talking about "Gate at the Stairs" any more than when I say REM is great I am talking about "Reveal," and yes, Alice Munro is better, but if I didn't read anyone who wasn't as good as Alice Munro I would barely read

i have no idea who any of these people are -- except for REM and older generations' favorite young adult "climate activist Greta Thunberg" -- i remember seeing the movie of Old Yeller in 2nd grade on monthly movie day, the month after they showed us Free to Be You And Me ... this was a few years before FTBY&M star, and noteworthy Boomer, Michael Jackson became known as a pedophile ...

When I say Lorrie Moore is great I am not talking about "Gate at the Stairs"

ok but are we not talking about something lorrie moore wrote like recently. her sentences don't rule forever

Harry Potter also gave young millennials the idea that everyone has a superpower that only has to be discovered. Hence the rudderless waiting.

See, this is quite a good summary of my life, but I'm an xennial, too old for Potter to have been formative, so I'm p sure it doesn't come from there.

Also (as someone who hasn't read all the books so I may be way off here) isn't HP quite clear that Harry only has special powers because he is the special son of an unknowingly special lineage, and the boring normy kids don't get superpowers?

Boomers tended to blame their parents for only what their parents did and were [not what the Boomers did and were]

Hmm this does not fit with the things I've heard my parents' generation say about their upbringing at all at all

but OK, I'm bored of reading this now, whatever, I only liked the part that sounded like it was about me - generationally psychogeneralise that (ornate Japanese shrug emoji here)

the idea that 'i could secretly be a special person with superpowers' is kind of the whole conceit behind Star Wars too. And I guess most superhero comics too, so it goes for the Silent Generation. Trying to think of what the Boomer equivalent is

Matilda, the book, was also very impressionable on me as a kid in this respect

"my real father was the king but he hid me away for plot reasons" is hardly a new idea in storytelling

isn't HP quite clear that Harry only has special powers because he is the special son of an unknowingly special lineage, and the boring normy kids don't get superpowers?

not exactly - Hermione's parents being normy is an important point in the books iirc

we better not tell this person when the X-Men debuted

that article is stupid, and a majority of the people i know haven't read harry potter and don't know anything about it. born in 84.

I'm Oct 1980, so I fall bang in the Xennial hinterland. Always found it strange that Star Wars never impacted my social group as a kid, despite some current friends being agog at the idea that I only first watched them in their 1997 remixed forms. Seemed to be more of an 'older sibling' obession. As for HP, I read the first four books and watched the first four films, but it always felt more of a 'kid sister' thing than anything I can really call mine.

i was a snobby piece of shit even as a kid, so i refused all 'kid stuff' after about the age of twelve.

like, i've never seen The Lion King lol.

Obvious dearth of hakuna matata

"Harry Potter also gave young millennials the idea that everyone has a superpower that only has to be discovered. Hence the rudderless waiting."

and that superpower turns out to be the power to tell the author of your favorite books to go fuck herself

a majority of the people i know haven't read harry potter and don't know anything about it. born in 84.

'85 here. I don't know anyone who's read it either, although several of my friends have seen the films. I definitely felt too old for that shit when it came out and even as a longtime high fantasy enthusiast it was off-putting to me because its core cast of characters consists of kids. I didn't care for kid protagonists in these kinds of settings when I was a toddler so I obviously wasn't going to change my mind at the age of 12-13, which is when I first got wind of the franchise. Chalk one up for 'I never liked Rowling anyway' (I'm very good at living up to this particular cliché).