Baby Boomers vs. Generation X vs. Millennials

see this is a perfect example of being portrayed as a fucking dick

"please believe in this thing we made up, also we hate you"

it is definitely true that no generation has learned different lessons from the same event because it happened when they were in daycare at the time, instead of watching the same event happen as they got ready to start their first full-time job or go off to college.

we have been at war in Afghanistan for 17 years. this has had no substantially different effect on people whether they were born in 1980 or born in 2000. totally provable statement.

Obama would totally be the same person if he had been born during the 1930s. Makes no difference. People are all different and also the same! Shrug a lot and wave your hands around at the uselessness of trying to model anything with less than absolute precision.

But wait so what if Obama had been born with a Kuato, what if that

that makes him a gemini right? that makes the most sense

i'm upper mississippi and i'm on the go
my zodiac sign is the virgo

xxp - so many ilxors adore "angry goat on roof"

also the newspaper memes are all kinda like that

the uselessness of trying to model anything with less than absolute precision.

The difficulty is not that the models derived do not apply broadly to tens of millions of people in aggregate, but that they are often presented as saying something valuable about individuals within that aggregate. A statement such as 'Gen Xers want this, hate that, or view this other thing with suspicion' is so ill-formed that it is either without useful content or else simply a falsehood, depending on how you interpret it. A statement such as Gen Xers are 15% more likely than other cohorts to say they want this, hate that, or view this other thing with suspicion, has some value.

generations and astrology are both horseshit y'all fyi lol

TBF, so are most other means by which we aspire to condense the sum of a person or a people.

I am undescribible.

this is a board in which we are trying to settle on the exact definition of a "New Jersey," let people have their memes

New Jersey is a Virgo too :)

generational differences can include things like "before and after the polio vaccine," but I can understand how that might seem abstract to most people here

astrology is closest to the longitudinal "hey everybody acts like this if you watch them long enough" Saturn's Return dumbassery

but yes latitude and longitude same thing shrug lol

they're both just lines right

don't try to tell me any different i don't have time for your explanation i'm a goddamn moon in aries you son of a gun

okay so here's another mean meme

https://78.media.tumblr.com/04f6c3734e17535b66071d104422a7c1/tumblr_p5givgAp0T1x95nrqo1_1280.jpg

Slippery When Wet is a Leo just looked it up

The version of generational differences that (I think?) you're describing makes enough sense (I think?) if I read through the sarcasm but that's not really what I understand 'generational theory' to be. xp to Tombot

Or if it is, that's not what I take issue with.

that's true that e.g. people who go through a world war or depression together may have some major shared life-changing experience but I don't think there's enough like this to support the idea of 'Generation X', 'Millennials', and a generation that is being defined before it even has much life experience.

here's one for tauruses (notice free space in middle is food)

http://geekxgirls.com/images/_articles/zodiac-bingo-02.jpg

i'm upper mississippi and i'm on the go
my zodiac sign is the virgo

I respect ums' commitment to bringing hip hop back to its roots

what sign amongst us does not appreciate a robe, i ask

good ass eyebrows?

assbrows?

I recently interviewed a 19 year old who told me "I am an old soul, so I tend to identify with millennials."

— Liam Stack (@liamstack) September 14, 2018

oooooooof

👌

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=entVpj_IT6M

are people born in 1998 really self-identifying as millennials/gen-y'ers these days? is this the future Ella O'Connor fought and died to secure?

it's a good song (especially by youtube musician standards) though I don't think any of his concerns are unique to his generation except for the bit about climate change really hitting the fan

Does it still count as having millennial burnout if I've never come close to optimizing anything?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DxdPH_VV4AAyp9N.jpg:small

oh well, whatever, nevermind

https://pics.me.me/boomers-yelling-at-millenials-for-toast-millennials-yelling-at-boomers-39502162.png

A mistrust of science isn’t new — it’s been around since science really started picking up steam, and the thought that it’s definitive of our age is just wrong. Noticing that we should be skeptical of the thought that we are going through some particularly new and baleful moment in the history of ideas. We’re not: we’re just retracing arguments that humans seem, perhaps just as a matter of temperament, to be inclined to trace. The contemporary leftist who responds to those who want to use, e.g. blockchains for social good by pointing out bitcoin’s ecological cost, or who responds cynically to data about how fewer people are living in extreme poverty thanks to capitalism by pointing out that, well, thanks to capitalism, in not so long, fewer people will be living full stop thanks to climate change can, I think, be viewed as giving voice to the same sort of anti-progress viewpoint as Rousseau. It didn’t take Derridean differance to enable people to wonder about the negative effects that progress entrains.

https://medium.com/@mittmattmutt/millennials-as-romantics-not-postmodernists-b678818d84ad

Hat tip michael B for the link

Obviously it’s a super pop, super surface level example of intellectual history, but I think it’s more accurate than, for instance, jordan peterson’s fuming over “postmodern neo-marxists.” There is some truth to the observation that so-called social justice warriors are more interested in perspectives than facts, but this isn’t a point against them. We live in a period of uncertainty—the irrationality of our society is impossible to overlook at this point and there aren’t “pragmatic” answers to things like climate change, only revolutionary ones. In these condtions it makes sense for people to turn to ideologies that from the outside might seem factional or non-constructive to older generations.

It’s not a coincidence that Diogenes is one of the heroes of Jenny Odell’s buzzworthy book about “resisting in place.”

every moment has its same profile

i find the present moment is spoiled for choice in terms of language, and while the attendant imprecision can be difficult i appreciate the richness of, particularly, queer language.

you can call such people - they can call themselves - post-modernists or romantics or counter-enlightenment (this is _completely different_ from "dark enlightenment") or any number of other things; the words themselves are less important to me than the diversity of thought engendered thereby.

i find that when alt-right types use the trappings of rationalist, enlightenment discourse - when they attempt to affix concrete and immutable _meanings_ to words - this is often an attempt to create new epithets and slurs they can use against people they disagree with. when faced with people like peterson who so clearly show the limitations of rationalist thought, why should one attempt to rationally debate them? my refusal to rationally engage with these ideas and those who espouse them is not an opposition to reason, but merely the recognition that the preconditions for rational discourse do not exist. hence productive and useful activity requires alternatives to poisoned discourse, requires re-framing.

I think there's a differentiation between scientific realism and practical implementation that's hinted at but not realized in there. Very few people are going to fault Isaac Newton for publishing on a theoretical cannonball that's able to fire far enough to orbit the planet because it was technologically impossible at the time and purely a thought experiment. Comparing that to the blockchain, where the practical implementation is not only possible but the effects of popularization predictable in the near term, are two different matters.

You could counter that the tendency toward questioning social positions is a more hypothesis-centered approach in that social cause and effect are taken into account. I think claiming it's a romantic viewpoint blows past the stance that ethics have a role in the application of science, and so-called objective thought is often anything but. It's not vague forces that move from materials science to a glut of plastic objects floating in the ocean, and it's not "bad feelings" coming from racist ideologues that people are worried about. It's the adoption and unfettered growth of seemingly innocuous things far beyond their original scope, and you can make epistemic arguments showing exactly how these things have played out historically.

When people talk about a rationalistic worldview they don’t just mean a position that believes in science’s ability to answer questions about the material world. They mean the Enlightenment position that human reason is the tool can overcome all obstacles—so like Steven Pinker. It’s a normative view not an epistemological one, but it disguises itself as such.

Peterson is a weird example because he is a true reactionary—he doesn’t think we should “mess with” thing like the market or language, as this would be dangerous social engineering. But nevertheless he is interpreting the romantic or postmodernist tendencies of millennials as dangerous to civilization.

I think the main issue with JP is he has no idea what he's actually saying and just has a punchlist of things he thinks are bad while bumbling on about human reason

I agree with the author of the medium piece that we’re in an era of skepticism in america. People are more likely to describe social problems as intractable, or constitutive of our society in a way—a society that is wasteful and destructive in its essence, requiring new paradigms. This kind of structural critique used to be confined to academia or certain pockets of radicals or whatever but now it’s mainstream.

And it is a romantic outlook. It demands you stand apart from received values. It’s not especially new either—there was a wave of this kind of thinking after world war i and in other periods.

I haven't read the article yet (sorry) but I take issue with the equation 'postmodernism = Romanticism' (give or take a few qualia). While the latter has unquestionably informed the former, and not just chronologically, it doesn't ramp up suspicion towards metanarratives to the same self-defining extent, especially in the field of politics. Postmodernism has always been about embracing subversively blurred boundaries over and above urgent revolutionary impulses, deemed overly teleological in the then-dying wake of Marxism/Hegelianism. If we are to buy into the idea that the current generation is more neo-Romantic than not (and this thesis does hold some amount of water), I think it's equally safe to say that it too is a reaction to postmodernist playfulness and ambiguous (dis)engagement. Few things are as un-pomo as so-called 'identity' politics.

He’s not saying they’re the same. He’s saying the attitudes of millennials attributed to postmodernism could more aptly be tied to a deeper tendency—the outlook that people started calling romantic in the late 18th century.

It’s not a coincidence that Diogenes is one of the heroes of Jenny Odell’s buzzworthy book about “resisting in place.”

― Trϵϵship, Wednesday, May 15, 2019 5:16 AM (nine hours ago)

it's weird when someone on ilx namedrops someone I know personally

I thought you might know her! I think her book is really good—she articulated a lot of the concerns I have attempted to explain on ilx in a flailing fashion.

i do her taxes ... her bf is also cool and a writer ... he looks a little like you ... not like eerily similar, but kinda

Ha, this thread revive comes at an opportune time for me; see, at the beginning of the week I encountered a very young-looking paramedic and she just about made my month when she swore I didn't look a day over thirty. Considering I'm about a decade older than that and I'd worried my maternal bloodline's predilection for preserving their external youth beyond belief had passed me by, this was very heartening, not only because I'm an aging member of a cusp generation that doesn't exactly know where to slot ourselves (mine is the "Xennials", i.e. half-Generation X and half-Millennial) and am keenly aware of how comparatively superannuated I am to a great many people, it also enables me to effectively claim I can "pass" for a full member of a generation (the Millennials) and thus feel a sort of kinship with a specific generation, even if it's via artifice and sneaky trickery.

I'm not at all surprised the Gen X'ers won out in this poll considering the generational makeup of this forum; when I was more of a regular around these parts, there were a great many ILXors who were at least a handful of years older than me and thus more fully entrenched with "Generation X" and all that means. I suspect that legacy influenced the results of the voting back when this poll was first posted.

https://i.imgur.com/8qAN4wx.jpg