I'm at the age that Boomers were when their mid-life crises were so aggressively loud and obnoxious that they weren't just everywhere in public (leisure suits worn and convertibles driven by newly-divorced dads that just contemplated mortality for roughly the first time, often cruising to creep on people half their age), but were everywhere in media as well. TV shows, movies, stand-up comedians, comic strips, and much more from the 80s to the 90s were all there to either wail with anguish at the onset of middle age, or were there to provide Woody Allenesque creep-treats that constantly assured the Boomers that teenagers totally wanted to have sex with them. As one random example, City Slickers aged like milk doing that, where a central plot point is that one of the middle-aged protagonists impregnated a 20-year-old and the narrative presents his wife being upset about that as a neurotic, irrationally angry, and overall bad person. The standard Boomer "joke" about how they get older and their dates get younger escalates to the punchline "soon you'll be dating sperm!" :libertarian-alert:
Not all of it was sexual pathology, either. Some of the films made during that time were insufferably self-absorbed about Boomer identity, such as the "Thirtysomething" TV series, and some of the seeds of their chuddery can be seen all the way back then, such as the cognitive dissonance of its two main messages: "be yourself, you are the most important person in the world, all that matters is what pleases you" and "people that don't live exactly like affluent cliquish white people are worthy of contempt." :maybe-later-kiddo: :grillman:
Sure, most Millennials don't really have the means to purchase convertibles and creep on teenagers even if they wanted to, but I still commend most of the aging folks around me for handling the onset of middle age a lot better than our predecessors in the 80s and 90s. :stalin-approval:
The media also decided to ignore us after a relatively short pandering phase, where after that the nostalgia treats got decoupled from the kids that actually knew about them when they were new. Maybe that helped. I don't know. :shrug-outta-hecks:
Me going to religious school in the 2000s and realizing I'm gay: :this-is-fine:
Also just to add to it - I probably still would have been made to go to religious school, but if I had just had ANY queer person to look up to or any friends online (discord would have been nice back then), I would have just been open about it. But I didn't want to fight it alone, so I quietly kept it to myself
That is a sad thing to think back to 😢
I managed to avoid the religious angle, but even going through normie school was rough. Being aware of being gender nonconforming but with literally nothing other than drag as an even remotely positive example, at that time it's no wonder a lot of people ended up keeping to themselves.
Going to a relatively conservative college was a bad choice in hindsight, too :agony-soviet:
Yeah, it wasn't easy anywhere. I didn't go to a conservative college, but I did find it hard learning how to be me while also returning home and being more reserved and hiding myself again. Learning how to be a person in your 20s is hard. I can't imagine why anyone would want to be born in the 90s lol
I hope things have gotten better for you now and those shitty memories are far in the past
I'm doing really well now! Don't wanna dox myself but I ended up having a pretty successful career, good coping skills and a family that are supportive help a lot.
That's great to hear :)