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:
That idea had legs. We even see variants of it with the many versions of "my entertainment has zero effect on me, literally everything in society would happen exactly the same way with or without the endless propaganda in the entertainment, let people enjoy things, touch grass touch grass touch grass" seen across the internet, including here.
Maybe, but it isn't a choice. It's all there is, "there is no alternative." Its a feedback loop for sure, but our ideology is determined by our relationship to production. To think otherwise is probably idealistic
Maybe, but calling out the "if you don't have sports car and aren't creeping on people half your age, you're not normal" propaganda is better than not calling it out. To think otherwise is defeatist and fatalistic.
Yeah you're right about that, def call out bullshit in media. It is fatalistic to just accept it. But that's bourgeois media, it doesn't have anything to do with boomers. It sucks because they were the last generation where like original content was mainstream and lots was bad but a lot of it was pretty good too. Buy yeah, now pop culture is just remaking all the shit that the boomers made, every 20 years or whatever.
Anyway this is a place for venting so I get where you're coming from.
Millennials received some original content of their own that is now being rebooted and reimagined like all the rest.