The trend I find hilarious is when people come into these threads and start yelling at people about how wrong they are to generalize a generation, etc. Frankly, I can’t imagine why people feel the need to defend others over this, it’s weird–and I imagine that none of them complained when people complained about Millenials.
Yeah. We did. And we used the same argument. It’s stupid to generalize a generation. However, I can point out the mockery of “millennials” was lazy and juvenile as the prejudice was aimed at anyone younger than the speaker without care for the facts, and the antics by “millennials” that garnered derision were by far the minority. Whereas the boomers are by majority conservative and guilty of failing to understand modern living and the changing times. Because racism, conformity, and getting a good paying job out of high school were facts of life for most of them.
I recently decided it’s unfair to judge them for how well they’re handling change, when they’ve gone through the most change in history. My parents grew up in the mud and died on the Internet.
Not really, though, the Boomers were the generation OF change. They went from giant radios that ran on vaccuum tubes to portable transistor radios and people walking on the moon, all within the period of roughly 10 years. They are the generation that saw plastics replace other products. They are one the generations to see the Internet come into being.
Boomers were primed for change from birth and only showed a distaste for it once they became middle aged.
Sadly, my own parents had no understanding that the world had changed between 1975 and when I graduated in the 1990s. They really believed that everything was exactly the same and all I needed was to work really hard at a part time job for a while. In reality, it took me 20 years to get even an approximation of the middle class, but I don’t really consider myself middle class.
Took me a solid 25 to make it to middle class. Got one of those expensive degrees for an industry with “high average pay”, however they don’t tell you you’re working for peanuts until you make it. Of course, 9/11 and all the economic downturns/recessions didn’t help.
Just looked it up on Wikipedia. He’s not really a boomer, neither a Gen X. He’s in that transitional few years between generations. In any case, you can make a good argument that he is a baby boomer, depending on where the cutoff dates are.
So, basically the whole reason everyone hates boomers is just because of ronald reagan, right? Like, that’s pretty much it? That seems like it would be the common denominator. Which is weird, because, while the older portion of that generation seems to have a maybe majority which voted for reagan, the last 2 years of that generation wasn’t even allowed to vote in the first reagen election. The younger voters voted for carter, the middle of the generation was split, and then the older portion of the generation, which seems to make up a larger portion of the voters in said generation, voted for reagan, pretty standard stuff. The real weird thing is in the next election, where basically every age range voted for his re-election, which is strange and something I don’t really understand. It even had a higher percentage of young voters, compared to the previous election. Did everyone just hate mondale or what’s up with that?
Which is all to say, I dunno. As a zoomer, I’m kind of just waiting until all the millenials die, because they’re now getting up into their 30’s, and I want to stop hearing about radiohead and all these dumbass musical artists. and hearing all these napoleon dynamite references, and I think superbad references, wouldn’t know haven’t seen it. I dunno, me? I hate the millennials for uhhhh. microplastics. and mark zuckerberg. and also Ipad parenting. and uhhhhhhh. ooh, I have a good one. I hate millennials for blaming everyone in an age cohort for the faults of a system which we know to be very centralized in it’s power, when in reality they should just be blaming that system and the environments that cultivated those attitudes, and they should realistically just be blaming all of the things they mean to actually blame instead of just blaming a bunch of random old people. That’s what I hate specifically millennials as an age cohort for. That seems like an incredibly specific thing, and not something that you could maybe blow up to be a general human tendency, yup, that seems fair.
Hating on old people is some boomer shit bro, what do you think is gonna happen in 20 years when you’re all 50 year old freaks, and I’m probably dead?
Hey maybe a bit close minded view there? I’m a millenial and I cheer for gen z (extinction rebellion, FFF) all the time. You have all the right to hate those who don’t see the multitude of extreme problems they left for you. I’m antinatalist, vegan and try to reduce, reuse, recycle. Degrowth all the way. Use my bike where I can. My car is barely moving now and I need to get rid of it. I listen to a lot of music from gen z artists. Since I’ve gone vegan my whole body is energized to the max and I’ll fight the cleptocracy on social networks where I can. I detest Zucks recent endeavours as a bull fharmer. Hang in there. We got your backs.
I wasn’t really directing anything at you, I was just sort of like, hating the world and shit, and specifically hating that subset of people that hate the boomers for boomering, because I see it as kind of just like. whining and bitching, kind of. like an unproductive thing. and then on social media, it tends to turn from potentially being like a therapeutic thing, right, where everyone is able to vent about how much things suck, and maybe come to a conclusion collectively about how to change it. and it changes from that into a kind of combination of a toxic echo chamber, where things get ramped up and everyone’s attention gets captured and directed towards some absolute nonsense, and also simultaneously you get some blowhard boomer who comes in and is like “what you say fuck me for fuck you guys” and then it turns into a pissing match where everyone tries to roast each other. I dunno I should probably not be posting when I’m hypercaffinated because it just ends up being me venting paragraphs at nobody in particular and doing the same shit I’m bitching at other people for doing.
I’m also like, shit man, I’m not sure you should have my generation’s backs. they’re just a bunch of dudes, I dunno. I’ve seen less victims of lead poisoning and horrible corporate propaganda for sure, compared to old people, they are more willing to be like. real and not horrible irony poisoned goblins, ironically. but I’ve also just seen a lot of chumps who are into like, basically white supremacist memes. I dunno the actual split on that though, it’s kind of hard to tell, I have some paragraph about that I could chunk up again for you.
It’s also fucking weird how I’m legally capable of drinking alcohol, right, but then some of my generation is apparently in like elementary school watching skibidi toilet and getting fucked up because the internet sucks now but the internet is also basically their parents since their parents are probably both at work full time and teachers are not on top of it. I’m like, those are just the kids bro, that’s gen alpha, “the culture” that doesn’t exist anymore is also just moving too fast for anyone to keep up with, the changes are too rapid, and you can’t really keep track of them with generational cohorts anymore, shit doesn’t work.
Ronald Reagan campaigned, like Trump, on hate and discrimination. Reagan SWEPT the electoral college on his first election and was voted in by every Boomer and every surviving member of the Golden and Silent generations. Reagan destroyed this country and we’ve never recovered from it.
In the end, Reagan was just the sign of bigger problems going on, and is a very good exemplar for that time period.
Also, the whole “I’m Gen Z and hate Millenial stuff” sounds as fake as you can possibly get.
Also, the whole “I’m Gen Z and hate Millennial stuff” sounds as fake as you can possibly get.
that’s cause it was. I am a zoomer, but I just think millennials hating all the boomers just sounds like a bunch of people who hate their parents or grandparents or whatever. I don’t actually give a shit about millennials. I do hate the constant pop culture references to a cultural collective which I was doomed to not be a part of, as I had been born after it had almost finished dissolving, but that’s mostly just an annoying thing, and I don’t really attribute that specifically to millennials but kind of a broader cultural fuckery.
I’m bitter because I’m a child of the 2010’s and that decade was fucking rough for like, shit that was good. I was in my first year of middle school when fnaf came out. The transformers movies and twilight franchise were formative media for me, and not like, things that I was invested in as a youth culture. Which is maybe what I think was happening for millennials, I don’t really know, that might be kind of an inbetween era of media, too young for millenials, too old for zoomers. The millennials had pokemon and digimon, I had like, sillybandz and those weird bracelets that everyone was like, this shit is a holographic bracelet that makes you stronger and even at the age of 10 or whatever I was like that shit is fake as fuck man.
I was just trying to make a point about how, eventually, we will all be old. Well, most of us, and by most of us I mean some of us, I dunno if like half of gen alpha is gonna make it to old age, at the rate we’re headed.
Also side note but like, millennials were right at the very tail age range of reagan, right? so it’s just sort of like, he was the president when all the millennials were just like toddlers and babies, basically. So I doubly kind of don’t understand the hate, right, in terms of like. I get it historically, he was a bad president, dissolved all the mental asylums which everyone knows they sucked but then he didn’t replace it with anything, dissolved all the social programs and whatever, and then you look at the police recruitment before and after him and it sucks omega hard yadda yadda. But that’s all like, stuff that happened for millennials as very young kids. did the 90’s and early 2000’s suck that much, for all the millennials?
Because I’m assuming that this is kind of like firsthand motivation for everyone, and not just purely historical bitterness, since I see historical bitterness as kind of more disconnected, and dispassionate, capable of like, step back analysis, which maybe pins the blame on reagan as more of like, he was the slammer in pogs. like in pogs how you have the slammer that slams the pogs and then they flip. that’s a millennial thing, right? I dunno, I just don’t understand it. It’s sort of like. I dunno, hating ronald mcdonald reagan and then kind of by extension the boomers is sort of like hating the wind, or something. I understand being bitter about it since all the job prospects are gone and everyone’s just working minimum wage garbage labor and nobody has any long term future plans and rent prices are horrible and where I live at least all my friends can deal with that by legal weed, but it’s sort of like, I dunno, blaming that on some old freaks is just sort of the same to me as blaming it on like. the old freaks that preceded them. blaming it on grug for inventing fire, which certainly, a lot of people will do.
I think you misinterpret. Everyone has always hated the boomers. The Silent and Golden generations called them the “Me Generation” because they were thought to be horrifically selfish people. Gen Xers (I’m transitional between Gen X and Millenial) had to suffer their intolerance and lack of awareness that the world had changed since they were in high school. My own parents worked part time at Sears making minimum wage and were able to afford an apartment with roommates and all of their college tuition and expenses. The very week I graduated high school, my parents demandeed that I pay rent, even though they had literally done nothing to help me prepare for anything more than just a minimum wage job in the suburbs–that’s the sort of people they were–they really believed that nothing had changed since 1975. Then Baby Boomers began to constantly insult and demean Millenials–for not having cars and houses, fewer children, and obviously avocado toast somehow without understanding that Boomers are the cause of all of this.
So yes, you’re a Zoomer and are lucky that Boomers for you will always be grandparent types. The rest of us suffered their generational narcissism.
In regards to your comment on aging, I fully agree. You can age without getting old. Being old is a mindset more than anything.
I always thought that like every generation since we invented generations was labelled the “Me Generation”, except for Gen Xers, because nobody really even bothered to ever even name them, which is something I kind of find more interesting than the whole boomer-millennial hate boner, but nobody’s ever willing to talk about. but also
So yes, you’re a Zoomer and are lucky that Boomers for you will always be grandparent types. The rest of us suffered their generational narcissism.
I mean I have grandparents that were extremely shitty to my parents, you know, you can see how that has damaged a person, as their kid, but I also have another set of grandparents that are kind of chill and are. you know, I mean, they’re old still, grandpa’s maybe a little too proud that he’s not racist, but then I kind of get that, when like everyone his age is also pretty extremely racist. Actually I just talked myself kind of into hating old people again because a shit ton of them are super omega racist, even relative to like the normal liberal baseline, which is a really low bar to have somehow passed underneath. it’s like if you beat a game of limbo by flying to austrailia.
When I graduated high school, one of the promises I made to myself is that I wouldn’t let myself get out of touch with reality. Working at a large university leading teams of undergrads has really helped me to hold on to that goal.
As I mentioned before, you can age without getting old. That, for me, is the goal. I have brothers who are literally millenials (like right on the edge of 1980) and can’t stop complaining about millenials and becomes offended if you point out that he is one. This same brother wouldn’t watch cartoons as a 10 year old because, according to him, cartoons are for children. He was born old and lacks the ability to see that he’s making the same complaints that people made about him.
I agree that battle of generations is silly, but there is still shared experience and trait in each generation. I used to think that the stereotype on boomers are greedy because they grew up in relative wealth is stupid, because my parents grew up poor in a third world country and did not benefit from Western wealth. However, they emigrated and travelled across the world and earning more than they would have in our home country.
Eventually, I realised that not all boomers are greedy, but some are materialistic. My parents are willing to share but they still have scarcity and hoarding mindset; even refusing to throw 20 year old clothes that are tattered.
Western boomers benefited from post-war economic boom and peace. Non-Westerners did not (post-colonial states in the mid to late 20th century suffered from constant sociopolitical strife) but the economic mobility afforded the third world citizens to migrate and move up the social ladder thanks to globalisation. However, the globalisation has, unfortunately, become not beneficial to younger generations because of outsourcing of traditional jobs and automation. And, unfortunately, this is leading to nativism and xenophobia.
Crazy that you’re the only person I’ve found in the thread that realizes this. Generational theory largely accepts that the concept of monolithic generations is reductive. Yes, people born in and around the same time can have shared cultural experiences, but the idea that those are what purely shape you ideologically or that you behave as a component of a monolith are ludicrous. And then there’s subgenerations, microgenerations, etc. Just look at the sociological research of Karl Mannheim for a very complex discussion on the topic.
Generalizing is fine and a useful tool in certain situations. In others, it’s not, and can in fact be very harmful. It’s also sometimes good to explain why you support one versus the other in a particular scenario. Y’know…because that’s how conversations work.
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