This shit really shatters my fantasy of post gen x people fostering a genuinely more empathetic and moral culture.
Generations are an op to divide the working class and sell AI generated T shirts ripped from data mined Facebook profiles that say shit like "Do NOT f*ck with forklift operators born in Idaho in August 1987 who own German Shepherds and drive a cardinal red 2005 Dodge Neon"
That said that post was weapons grade cringe and should 100% be mocked, I hope it was at least some kind of Democratic Party operative and not someone doing it pro bono but who knows.
This, to be honest. Generations have vague separations but there's rarely any radical divide.
The amount of grouping people under almost arbitrary labels and 'other'ing them on the basis of vibes is nuts. Do some material analysis you nerds.
"Do NOT f*ck with forklift operators born in Idaho in August 1987 who own German Shepherds and drive a cardinal red 2005 Dodge Neon"
Ok, but if we ever get official Hexbear t-shirts, I want one that says this
I think generational divides are real, but the way people delineate them completely suck. The lines should be drawn based on huge historic moments like world wars or economic depressions, not just an arbitrary date or timeframe. It also has to consider offset between a person's birth and the cultural moment. Obviously, someone born a day before 9/11 shouldn't be categorized with people who grew up in a pre-9/11 world.
Just consider the US. There's essentially 4 youngish generations:
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People born too late to remember a Cold War world but born early enough to remember a pre-9/11 world. (Age: 27-37)
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People born too late to remember a pre-9/11 world but born early enough to remember a pre-Great Recession world. (Age: 20-27)
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People born too late to remember a pre-Great Recession world but born early enough to remember a pre-Covid world. (Age: 8-20)
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People born too late to remember a pre-Covid world. (Age: 0-8)
1 is millennials and 4 is gen alpha. But what of 2 and 3? Most people would lump them together as zoomers or lump 3 and 4 as gen alpha while keeping 2 as zoomers.
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If you want to have dreams and fantasies about a better world, I'm not sure why you would expect to find it on Reddit.
Yeah "empathetic and moral culture" is not what I think of when I think of ledditeurs
I think the pipeline of school->work alienation makes people stuck in their ways.
Also reddit is kind of a selection bias because no one cool uses reddit
Im a millenial who grew up w rush limbaugh propaganda and i became based as fuck, its all more complicated than that
Not trying to be a pick me ass millennial but holy shit the millennial generation has been a fucking appalling disappointment. So many terrified articles written by boomers when we were coming up in our early 20s about how much things were gonna get shaken up. Then seeing 95% of my cohort become clueless tepid shitlibs at absolute best who are constitutionally incapable of imagining even a slightly better world.
Anyway the idea that politics would naturally drift left with generational change was brutally murdered by first millennial presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg and his unbelievably crackertacular high high hopes dances.
The only piece of advice I would give younger people is don't listen to your elders, especially about politics. They are housebroken pieces of shit.
TBF Buttigieg was never popular with Millennials, he’s a vision of what the old farts in charge of the DNC wish Millennials were.
That being said, I do think you’re right that our generation suffers from endemic tepidness and hedge betting. Like historically the trope was generations get wealthier as they get older and thus more defensive of the status quo, but we’re buried under too much debt and CoL for that.
I think it stems from being the first standardized testing generation. It got so beaten into us that there’s four options here, fill in the right bubble or kiss your future goodbye. So there’s a combination of fear but also an inability to cope with a world that’s not a multiple choice test so it’s a lot of waffling because god help us if we get the answer wrong.
TBF Buttigieg was never popular with Millennials, he’s a vision of what the old farts in charge of the DNC wish Millennials were.
somebody on here called him Eddie Haskell
Though I am too disappointed by my cohort, millenials still have a relative overall left-slant, so a drift to the left absolutely isn't ruled out yet.
That’s what I think too. As millennials age theres still not that much to look forward to in terms of material help. For example millennials actually have a good chance of owning a house once their parents die, but how many of them are just going to sell their house so they can pay off their loans? They’re still going to be worse off and that’s going to have an effect on their future politics.
is a millennial? Something about him always made me think he was Gen X or something. Probably on the cusp if I'd guess.The only piece of advice I would give younger people is don't listen to your elders, especially about politics. They are housebroken pieces of shit.
Gotta disagree with this. The younger people should take some advice from those elders that are able to perceive the mistakes they made in their own time. Unfortunately, there seem to be few of those people among the millennial left.
Well yeah did you think redditors would be the vanguard?
Boomers are a real thing because in a general sense they did well out of capitalism, at least in the sense of being upwardly mobile. They have a vested interest in protecting the status quo. And so they’ve fallen prey to all kinds of media propaganda because it ultimately serves their interests. And - again in a general sense - they have enormously greater wealth than other generations, which is just an objective/statistically provable fact. So analysis based around Boomers is not automatically bullshit.
There is no real difference in my experience (real world at least) between Millenials and gen z apart from small incidental cultural differences, which mostly just relate to gen z having become too online at an earlier age than Millenials did.
In so far as a lot of Millenials remain disappointingly radlib/ non-Marxist socialists, well it’s probably just an effect of being so close to the most materially successful generation that capitalism ever produced. They imagined their lives would be even better, and many of them are still wedded to the idea that we can turn back the clock to the old 60s style social democracy and save capitalism from itself.that and many of us watched the Soviet Union collapse on TV and without context thus assuming "communism dead".
It's the U.S. any morality or empathy that you can develop in your teens and college is quickly and decisively stripped away from you by the universalized and all-pervasive corporate culture. People mistake it as a generational thing, and while some aspects are, contempt for the kids is consistent.
Every generation thinks they'll be so much different. They aren't.
Millennials are killing fantasies of empathetic and moral cultures.
Seriously, boomers were racist Reaganites at the same age. It is an objective measurable fact that boomers voted for and still support a lot of destructive shit and we're all living with it and trying to figure out how to get out of the hole. We have a genuinely more empathetic and moral culture right now. No, it's not good enough, but don't give up hope that it won't continue getting better. No generation is free of assholes and every generation has empathetic and tolerant people.
What's the matter with kids today is a sentiment that has been posted about and whined about for as far back as humanity has written records. It's not different just because we do it on phones
Yeah, but the boomers were worse than the generations before and after them, and the contention between the cinquedea generation and the Maximilian generation for wearing ruffs with to many folds doesn't compare.
the boomers were worse than the generations before and after them
This is part of the pattern that has been going on for all of recorded human history also
No Boomers are actually worse, like they were even worse when they WERE the new generation. Reagan won the youth vote, in terms of economics Boomers are actually more conservative than their parents. Generational politics is mostly bullshit, but for a variety of socio-economic reasons Boomers turned out to be shit at a somewhat higher rate than most other generations.
Boomers turned out to be shit at a somewhat higher rate than most other generations.
It was all the atmospheric lead.
Nah I think it was the silver spoon of the late-80s, early-90s economy being shoved up their ass.
The few based Boomers that exist are mostly early Boomers, the Boomers we got today are late Boomers who came up when it looked like the American dream was paying off.
Yeah Amerikkan boomers were born into probably the most uneven distribution of wealth in history. All of industrialized Europe was in rubble after the war and the US absorbed practically all of the old world empires.
To act like boomers aren't materially different from generations before and after is to deny reality.
I mean, is this true? "western" liberal society is pretty cynical and brutal towards children, but I don't think its fair to say this is a common feature across all humanity.
Reddit is like a honey pot for the most reactionary people. It's no shock these millennials behave the way they do.
Generations will always go "those darn kids"
It is literally unavoidable
Well, on the one hand, at least millennials tried to channel their politics into political movements instead of things like music subcultures (Because saying Maggie three times definitely made neoliberalism go away in Britain). Of course, it could just be that way because politics has replaced music subcultures for some people, myself included.
On the other hand though, millennials just ended up recapitulating and losing many of the same battles the Silents and Boomers fought during the New Left era without trying to learn from the failings of those movements. Even the turn towards foreign policy with "multipolarity" on everyone's tongue as a political panacea reflects a inability to affect politics at home that the Boomers faced in their own time.
I don't know that a single vector exists for someone developing shit/good politics in the US, but there is definitely some kind of trend where, as people age and [some] "buy in" to get the comforts and protections that buffer us from the grinding gears of capital, it seems like the will to radicalism tempers and/or withers into an aesthetic.
the people my age are mostly assholes. I was slow to the table and as a result, most of my cohort are 7-12 years younger than me.
there was a time we were all pissed at the corruption and wanted to live with compassion, integrity and authenticity, and I was the old head who was like "yeah, the olds have lost the plot." now little by little, people have gotten bought off, b'treated, mortgaged, HELOC'd, small business tyrants, new cars, conspicuous consumption, and repeating the lies of the meritocratic myth making to justify their rise above.
not everybody, but many. I prefer to be affable over insufferable (the 69th form of liberalism), so I hold my tongue. but it's lame to witness the shift.
I take comfort in the people I do know who pop up in every age group and keep to the same values of anti capitalism, anti imperialism, and universal human rights. we're out there and we look like anyone, though we're rarely in charge of anything lol.
as people age and [some] "buy in" to get the comforts and protections that buffer us from the grinding gears of capital, it seems like the will to radicalism tempers and/or withers into an aesthetic.
What seems to be happening for millenials I know is the addiction to money and treats. I hear a variation of "I hate my job, capitalism is terrible obviously but I've never made this much money before." They support radicalism and 'burning down the system' in the abstract but fear or attachment keeps them from actively resisting the structure.
But like you said I know plenty that foregoe those pleasures or use their job to attack the system of all ages, that gives me some optimism. Not everyone needs to take serious action, I don't really blame any individual for being scared or unsure.
