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:
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We're not far out enough of the 2010s to figure out what the mainstream was yet. If I were to guess at it, it's hipster fashion and athleisure, slim fit suits (some of the suits they used to wear look hilarious today), no more rock influence in pop its more electronic and rap I guess, smartphones took over pretty early into it when they weren't a thing, there was way more cultural emphasis on dystopias like the Purge series or any popular YA series.
None of that feels all that different from today cause we haven't been separated long enough, you'll probably realize there was a difference in like 2026. At least that's when I was finally able to articulate the difference between 2000s and 2010s. Even in the early 00s it was hard to tell what "the 90s" were because that was still just the way everything was. Like the only HUGE thing is covid19 and how that warped everything, thatll clearly be the dividing line like 9/11 was for 90s to 00s.