Yeah, it was that. Not the endless slew of articles about how millennials ruined this or that industry, or how they’re entitled hothouse flowers with no work ethic and no spine. It wasn’t “millennials can’t afford houses because they eat too much avocado toast”. It was “OK boomer”. Ay yi yi.
There are old people who've been arrested for pro climate actions, there are young people who are in charge of cutting down the rainforest. It's complicated, and reducing it to old men vs. young people only removes focus from the actual problems at hand.
The results of elections across USA and Europe are pretty much telling though: There's a big divide between older cohorts and younger cohorts about climate change, housing and other sustainability policies.
Do you really believe the article's premise that boomers don't believe in global warming? If so, is it all of them, or just some of them?
Of course another purpose of this "culture war," is to take the blame off the politicians who had a chance actually make the regulations and laws and lay it on a generation of citizens.
What has Generation Y and Z actually done to stop global warming? I don't see anything but talk. Does that mean Generation Y and Z doesn't care about global warming, or maybe it's back to the politicians who are in a position to pass regulations and laws.
I think that a much larger percentage of Gen Z believe in global warming than boomers do.
Of course, politicians are elected by people so if everyone believes in global warming and votes that way everything will work out.
GenY and GenZ tend to vote for more pro-climate policies, many more of them protest for the government to do something. Many more of them on environmental conscience.
The big thing you seem to be missing is governments should be doing the will of the people, and the will is there for GenZ, but not for the Boomers.
>The big thing you seem to be missing is governments should be doing the will of the people, and the will is there for GenZ, but not for the Boomers.
I think the main thing you seem to be missing is that's not how it actually works. The will is there for the energy companies but not the people because energy companies pay for campaigns. Do you think boomers really want ridiculously high health care costs? At their age? Or perhaps it's the insurance companies and the AMA pushing that? Do you think people like paying tax preparation companies every year, even though the government knows what most people owe, or do you think the tax preparation industry pays for that inaction? Do you think people like getting arrested for smoking pot, or the politicians are maybe being influenced by the police and prison unions to keep that sweet, sweet paycheck coming?
When the politicians ignore the will of the people during the your generation, are you going to lay the blame on your generation as well? Will that mean your generation doesn't believe in global warming, or maybe it's something else?
most boomers are on medicare.
I think there are some exceptions, but for the most part, the government does the will of the people. I think that most older people think smoking pot should get arrested (another thing that is changing, because of the will of the people...)
I don't even know what to say about the tax thing, I guess people vote about more important issues.
You don't what generation I am in, it's not GenZ
Boomers caused the end of Vietnam because of protest, GenZ is trying to do the same with climate change.
If nothing is done about climate change, it is because the voters didn't vote this way, I don't think it will be because they don't know. It is quite publicized these days. But, if GenZ spends there whole life not doing something about climate change it will be there fault.
The idea that climate change and financial inequality concerns are generational divided is ludicrous. To me this framing reeks as just another divisional front the promoters of identity politics, who btw are also not generational divided, would like to inflict on us all.
P.S. I'm not Gen Z by a long shot and deeply concerned about climate change and financial inequality.
No they are not. They have statistically differently skewed preferences, but that is a completely different thing.
Divided would mean that e.g. Millennials with few exceptions vote Democrat while Boomers with few exceptions vote Republican. You know their age, you know their vote with few exceptions.
The reality is that if you would 'accuse' a Boomer of having voted Republican you would be wrong 56% of the time, and if you would 'accuse' a Millennial of having voted Democrat you would be wrong 46% of the time.
This means that if you would start guessing DEM/REP voting purely based on cohort, you would on average be wrong 51% of the time! Yet somehow, this is spun as a generational divide? Do you think this warrants supporting a generational 'war' narrative?
You're just redefining "divide" to mean something more substantial than I am. Do you think this is so insignificant that it doesn't even warrant a conversation?
Then how should I interpret your 'Generations are ideologically divided'?
If it is merely the expression of slight shifts in political leanings correlated with age, we'd have to look whether this is a new thing or something that has always been the case [1].
The reason I point out in my response to you that the presumptions which you will find even in this tread, that there is a conflict between the generations that expresses itself as a principle component in voting behavior and justifies division and vilification of the 'opposite' age cohort, is blatantly false and a manufactured framework intent on dividing people and gaining economically and politically from that conflict rather than uniting and looking for solutions.
Look at politics today, though. The party that is speaking out vociferously against climate change and inequality is the Democratic party, whose voters are statistically much younger, more educated, more urban, less white, less religious, more female. Now look at the GOP, which handed out huge tax breaks to the rich/corporations, and who denies climate science...GOP voters (and the politicians themselves)_are older, whiter, more rural, more male, and much less likely to believe in climate change.
It's just simple demographic facts that Boomers are politically much, much more likely to not care about climate change and financial inequality. Yes, it sucks that older folks who do care are being painted with a broad brush, but that's the nature of quick and dirty articles.
That is not the nature of 'quick and dirty articles'.
That is precisely the nature of identity politics, which treats everyone not as an individual with a personal identity and personal believes and responsibilities, but as a generic instanced clone of some immutable class assigned by birth, all members of which need to prostrate to a perpetual divisive ideological war.
Identity politics is just a useful way to refer to groups of people. You can't really have (useful) politics without identity politics.
For example, how do you talk about helping homeless people, without using their shared identity (the fact that they are homeless)?
Obviously it's not always a useful thing, and grouping people by shared identities can be messy. I don't understand how it can be avoided though, unless you just want the world to stay exactly the same it is.
'Homeless people' are in the context of homelessness policy are not a 'shared identity' but an accurate identification of the (mutable) attribute the policy should target. It is the exact opposite of the (immutable) identity politics approach.
That doesn't really make much sense. Why should it matter if the identity is immutable or not? What matters is whether or not it is a useful way to talk about an issue and people.
It's immutable that a kid is a kid. It's immutable that some kids have cancer. What's so wrong to use identity politics to say we should help kids that have cancer?
> The idea that ... financial inequality concerns are generational divided is ludicrous.
Are facts "ludicrous" to you? Older people naturally tend to be wealthier through decades of debt retirement, salary increases, compounded investment returns, and so on. There was already a visible divide between the Me Generation (what "Baby Boomers" were once called and IMO still should be) and my own GenX. It seems the divide between us and Millennials/GenZ has gotten even larger. Student debt loads tend to be much larger as a percentage of income than mine were because inflation of college costs has significantly outpaced inflation generally (plus artificially increased demand). Changes in real estate and job markets have only exacerbated those differences. Maybe age-based inequality isn't as big an issue as race-based, but it's still an issue worthy of consideration.
I was talking about beingconcerned about financial inequality not being generational divided.
And financial inequality does transcend generations, kids from poorer parents on average stay poorer themselves, while kids from rich parents tend on average to to turn out richer, rather than divide them.
What is even worse is that the rising of economic inequality in the US, will also reflect itself in an even further decline of economic mobility as those two have been shown to be correlated [1].
Don't get caught up in these divisional doctrines. Some stand to benefit from fueling these narratives, and it is not going to be any of the people being pushed into the fires of identity wars.
Yup it’s as if kids didn’t have grandparents and if they do they hold them in contempt.
This is just an exaggeration of a pithy retort that people think is funny (and it is). But that doesn’t mean people “believe” in it any more than people believe wearing a LeBron jersey makes them into better players.
Some boomer should have some “OK SLACKER” t-shirts printed with the tag, “Have a productive day”
> Some boomer should have some “OK SLACKER” t-shirts
As part of Gen-X, I feel like that's appropriating from my culture. I was proudly on the "slackers" mailing list as an adult in the 90s when the millennials were being born. Give millennials a new pejorative, don't steal ours.
I didn't think it worked that way. After that, can I be the Silent/Greatest Generation?
Maybe the word "Boomer" will just get redefined to mean "old people with more money than me". Kind of the same way "meme" got redefined from "idea permeating society" to "cartoon or cat picture with sarcastic text", and how "troll" got redefined from "someone who tries to antagonize" to "someone who says things I don't agree with".
Actually this phrase started around October 15th on TikTok. The phrase’s use in related videos grew rapidly and had not existed before. It’s real sentiment.
The fault with this article is that it focuses on merchandise.
> Actually this phrase started around October 15th on TikTok.
I highly doubt this. I've seen this phrase for months on both Twitter and Discord. Searching one discord server I'm in yields several instances going back to April. It was just a meme in the beginning. Perhaps evolved from 4chan's "30 year old boomer"
I've seen similar sentiments about Boomers on the fediverse (Mastodon/Pleroma/etc.) for the past year. Maybe the specific phrase "OK, Boomer," might be recent, but the sentiment has been there for a bit .. and it's always been trolling, like any generational call out is (and has been .. since the 50s .. nothing has changed and you can always sell magazines, papers and books by blaming the youth .. or the elderly .. or however you want to draw a line to make a fake left-right divide).
Honestly this article screams of some fake viral TikTok marketing bullshit. Why are they everywhere now and stuff about this Chinese Snapchat/Vine clone making it everywhere? Are they secretly paying for this stuff? Can we stop voting up this spam? No one cares.
I appreciate the prior references but disagree this is fake viral TikTok bullshit.
Old Town Road was also around before it became a meme on TikTok, but it was undoubtedly what drove it to #1 on multiple categories on billboard.
I also disagree that no one cares. Otherwise the company wouldn’t be being investigated for national security issues and zuck talking about it in an all hands meeting.
TikTok is influencing art and culture. Regardless of the phrase’s use on discord or image boards, it’s emergence ok tt is important.
I think the point is that this phrase doesn’t mark any sort of new sentiment. Millennials and later have been hating on boomers for many years at this point on reddit etc.
The group that's first to offend is rarely aware of it. The same phenomenon is readily observable in race and gender relations where "everything's fine" until the "uppity" out-group starts fighting back. It's a form of privilege, and "old white guy" is like the trifecta with "old" in there for a reason.
This is pretty much it. My generation has been called entitled, lazy, selfish, etc, for wanting the same things our parents were given, like a living wage, affordable college, or career stability. In what world is that friendly?
Can't tell what point you're making, but when my brother left his job at Google our grandmother asked what that was going to do to his pension. As if companies paying pensions was still a thing.
These people grew up when a factory job could support a family of four, and companies hired people with no experience and then paid actual benefits.
Boomers benefited from very generous circumstances. To suggest they earned the postwar economic boom is laughably misguided.
My parents, I guess who were boomers, suffered from crushing debt, divorce, poverty, unstable work. Factory work killed two of my Grandfathers, COPD and asbestosis. But go on, tell us how Google ruined your Brother's future.
>But go on, tell us how Google ruined your Brother's future.
I didn't write or imply this in any way.
My point is that many boomers conveniently gloss over the fact that they benefited immensely from the economic climate of yesteryear, and the common refrain of millennials needing to just tug harder on their bootstraps isn't received well because of it.
Indeed. The labor movement in the early 20th century claimed a significant number of advantages for workers, and employers have been steadily chipping away at them ever since. The effect of this has been cumulative, with each generation both never seeing the benefits that were taken from their parents and having new ones taken from them personally. Pensions are long gone, unions are on life support, insurance is a debacle (though somewhat unrelated), wages have stagnated resulting in inflation-driven pay cuts, and the latest trend is to eschew employees altogether and treat everybody as an independent contractor (thus eliminating virtually all benefits).
I don’t think the boomer generation “earned” cheaper college. That was given to them either by circumstance or by the previous generations. Similarly, post-war prosperity wasn’t something they had earned or worked for.
The contention is that the world left by boomers has less opportunity than what the one provided to them. It’s not entirely true (if you’re black in America, the civil rights movement sure changes a lot for the better), but that’s the argument.
>I don’t think the boomer generation “earned” cheaper college.
Exactly. Later generations simply inherited expensive college after the devastation of Nixon.
If Nixon wasn't stopped, they would have continued until all Americans had been returned to lower opportunity levels equivalent to many minorities before Civil Rights, other than those whose significant capitalist privileges had already been well established before the early 1970's.
EDIT: more rapidly returned to lower opportunity levels
Edit: It's still too easy to underestimate Nixon Youth.
Our parents. Are you talking of Gen X? The boomer generation? In general, your statement seems to apply to Gen X. But not really the boomer generation - e.g. they didn't have affordable college like Gen X did. Gen X seems to have been at the crossroads of things shifting and kind of got the best of all worlds.
And for Millennials, some have it rough but some don't. College was cheap and affordable for some of them - certainly more affordable for them than the boomer generation. Keep in mind the generation spans to 1981. Some Millennials are almost 40 now.
Gen Z is in a whole other category of course. Lots of things going/have gone rapidly downhill. But boomers mostly aren't the parents of these people. It's Gen X/Millennials.
Yeah, I feel like a lot of the things Boomers and Millennials are blaming on each other, actually apply to Gen X (and I say this as a Gen-Xer myself). We got the best education deal before (admittedly Boomer-) politicians started to undermine education. We were the slacker generation. We're the generation that refused to grow up. We got jobs in the booming 1990s.
But sure, let Boomers and Millennials fight. We're happy to stay out of this (just know that I'm on your side, Millennials!)
I guess I was still in university back then. I'm late Gen X. I imagine early Gen X has a very different story. (I bet the same is true for every generation.)
That's funny, I'm GenX and I have very different memories. I remember high inflation ("stagflation"), high unemployment ("misery index"), multiple recessions during the first half of my career. Sure, college seemed pretty affordable compared to nowadays, but not compared to those before.
Also, a lot of the anger at Boomers is not just because of how they had it (that's mostly the doing of their Silent/Greatest predecessors) but because of how they made it. Boomers have dominated politics since those student-activist hippies got into it, largely because of sheer numbers. Thirty or forty years, depending on exactly which ones you count. GenX is finally making a dent, but mostly at the state level. At the federal level it's still heavily Boomer-dominated, regurgitating the same policies that got us into this mess. Ditto Wall Street etc.
If Boomers had enjoyed good times and then made some effort to prolong or repeat them, #okboomer wouldn't be a thing. It is a thing because so many Boomers are using their political power to keep selling everyone else's future for the sake of their own comfy retirement.
I'm not sure that's true about the boomers having access to affordable college. I had an ex whose boomer grandfather lectured us endlessly about how he worked hard all summer long to save up for college -- which, for him, meant a 40 hour work week during the summer, to afford a year of university, with room and board -- and why couldn't anyone else do the same these days?
No matter how often we pointed out that college is, in general, vastly more expensive, and summer jobs comparably less well-paying, he'd just repeat himself. "I just don't get it, you go work for the parks department, you work all summer long, why isn't that enough? It's your iphones, your cell phone plans, etc." when, you know, yeah we're paying $20 a month for cheap cell phone plans and five-year-old iphones, but the reality is that working three months at, say, $15 an hour, nets you what, $5-6k? That might cover a year's tuition at a community college if you live at home, not a year living at a state-run four-year university.
No, GenX didn't get the "best of all worlds". If you were too young to remember the period, the famous documentary "Slacker" (1990), describes the period well. We had the same frustrations that Millennials and now GenZ have in terms of lack of opportunity.
In defense of "the Boomers," and believe me I have plenty of gripes about trends within that generation, we Millenials aren't exactly above reproach.
I can agree that it's not nearly as easy for us as it was for the past few generations, but it's not nearly as grim as most make it out to be. To put it bluntly, I see a lot of the same "me me me" mentality that the Boomers have been criticized for.
There's the idea that life is just handed to us, so long as we "do the right things." It's perfectly possible to own a home, raise a family, what have you. You just might not get to work the job you want, study the degree program you want, or live in the neighborhood you want.
And the boomer generation were called entitled, lazy, selfish by their parent's generation too. Think about the attitudes of the war generation to the hippies, recreational drugs etc.
This shitting on the next generation thing has been going on for a long time.
There's solid evidence going back 150 years of older generations complaining about school kids being undisciplined, not respecting their teachers ("not like back when I was at school"), and some slightly more anecdotal evidence going back some 2000 years of the same.
We always find it hard to reconcile the negative aspects of our old behaviour with our current mindset, and it's way easier to just reduce in our minds the severity or scope of our actions. We learn from our mistakes, and try to make them seem as small as possible in our minds.
On a side note related to this idea, I wonder if Millenials overcompensated by going to the extreme on the opposite side of the triangle (quantity, price, quality). On Saturday I went to a beer/wine store that's in a predominately young professional/student neighborhood. When I lived in the area about 8 years ago there were maybe 20 craft beer brands. Beer came in 6-packs, and was priced at about $11-15.
Today, there's maybe 100 brands. Almost all come in 4-packs, and are priced between $15-$20.
Price increases may just be inflation and even 10 years ago you could find tons of craft beer stores with huge selections in cities big and small. (Beer is one of the easier small businesses to get into; still expensive but they tend to be less likely to fail if you get the consistency of batches right).
Maybe that store just decided to expand from a small selection to attract more craft beer people. That's a really freaking weird conclusion to draw over the history of one bottle shop.
I don't know about that. My millennial friends, when we're buying beer, go for the 24-pack of keystone light. The craft beer's always a treat, like something you might get a four-pack once a month.
> Really? i thought i ended when everyone was talking about how millennials are ruining companies by not buying affordable products.
I think it's important to differentiate between "media-driven narrative" and real-world relations, though that line is a bit blurry. It seems the former often creates the latter.
Right now I'm not sure that "Ok Boomer" is anything more than a meme.
Those were all divisive articles written by the same media companies trying to fill in ad space. They're playing both sides. Maybe it's time to stop taking many news articles at face value and realize they're trying to make a profit.
I often wonder if newspapers have a template for these sorts of articles that they can pull out every time one of the completely artificial and meaningless "generations" hits a certain milestone. For the last 5-10 years we've been in the cycle of articles where the current "generation" in their 20s and 30s are settling into career paths and shaking things up with their crazy new demands at work, or how they just aren't looking after their own futures like their elders did. And now that "Gen Z" has hit adulthood, it's time to write the articles where these crazy kids are pushing back on the complacency of their elders in a shockingly disrespectful way. In a few years we'll learn all about how new trends in advertising, fast food, and consumer marketing are all being shaken up by the 20-somethings who just aren't satisfied with the same-old patterns of doing business.
If you go back 20 years you'll find the same articles about millenials. Go back 20 more years and you'll find them about Gen X. Go back 20 more years and you'll find them about Baby Boomers. Go back to the 1920s and there are articles complaining about the Kids These Days, so lazy and disrespectful, taking all this newfangled technology for granted...
> Ms. O’Connor is far from the only one cashing in. Hundreds of “ok boomer” products are for sale through on-demand shopping sites like Redbubble and Spreadshirt, where many young people are selling “ok boomer” phone cases, bedsheets, stickers, pins and more.
I like how one of the first reflexes when criticizing a generation of ecological catastrophes is to over-consume. Reminds my of the boomers' "Che Guevara" merchandises.
Generational names have always been created by authors to sell books. Adam "Ruins Everything" Conover did a talk at a marking conference where he pulled up old copies of Time magazine talking about the entitled baby boomers from decades ago; almost identical to the same articles about every other generation.
Generational titles were NEVER used to lift anyone up. They were used to sell books, sell newspapers/magazines, blame everything on the youth who knew nothing of hardship or some other fake-rage bullshit. The age ranges are arbitrary and the names that stick are pure chance and/or marketing.
Why is NYT referencing a moronic TikTok video anyway? Is NYT now trying to compete with Buzzfeed?
That doesn't mean it's not a meaningful distinction. There are objective differences in the ways older people and younger people vote and think. You might not like the exact way it's discussed, but there are objective material realities experienced by a person who grew up in the 60s vs a person growing up now, and these things shape their ideology and voting habits.
The NYT has sections of serious news, and sections of ridiculous "trend" articles. The trend articles are easy to source, easy to write, and have a shot at making it to page 1 of HN. I tend not to read them, or at least not to believe them when I read them--Mithidratism from reading too many such articles long ago.
But then I'm an old bitter boomer, so what do I know?
133 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadhttps://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2017/08/26/a-society-gro...
The book is available to loan from the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/lifeweprize00true
Of course another purpose of this "culture war," is to take the blame off the politicians who had a chance actually make the regulations and laws and lay it on a generation of citizens.
What has Generation Y and Z actually done to stop global warming? I don't see anything but talk. Does that mean Generation Y and Z doesn't care about global warming, or maybe it's back to the politicians who are in a position to pass regulations and laws.
Of course, politicians are elected by people so if everyone believes in global warming and votes that way everything will work out.
GenY and GenZ tend to vote for more pro-climate policies, many more of them protest for the government to do something. Many more of them on environmental conscience.
The big thing you seem to be missing is governments should be doing the will of the people, and the will is there for GenZ, but not for the Boomers.
I think the main thing you seem to be missing is that's not how it actually works. The will is there for the energy companies but not the people because energy companies pay for campaigns. Do you think boomers really want ridiculously high health care costs? At their age? Or perhaps it's the insurance companies and the AMA pushing that? Do you think people like paying tax preparation companies every year, even though the government knows what most people owe, or do you think the tax preparation industry pays for that inaction? Do you think people like getting arrested for smoking pot, or the politicians are maybe being influenced by the police and prison unions to keep that sweet, sweet paycheck coming?
When the politicians ignore the will of the people during the your generation, are you going to lay the blame on your generation as well? Will that mean your generation doesn't believe in global warming, or maybe it's something else?
You don't what generation I am in, it's not GenZ
Boomers caused the end of Vietnam because of protest, GenZ is trying to do the same with climate change.
If nothing is done about climate change, it is because the voters didn't vote this way, I don't think it will be because they don't know. It is quite publicized these days. But, if GenZ spends there whole life not doing something about climate change it will be there fault.
P.S. I'm not Gen Z by a long shot and deeply concerned about climate change and financial inequality.
But in general I'd say that "Ok Boomer" works.
https://www.people-press.org/2018/03/01/the-generation-gap-i...
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/09/the-politic...
Divided would mean that e.g. Millennials with few exceptions vote Democrat while Boomers with few exceptions vote Republican. You know their age, you know their vote with few exceptions.
The reality is that if you would 'accuse' a Boomer of having voted Republican you would be wrong 56% of the time, and if you would 'accuse' a Millennial of having voted Democrat you would be wrong 46% of the time.
This means that if you would start guessing DEM/REP voting purely based on cohort, you would on average be wrong 51% of the time! Yet somehow, this is spun as a generational divide? Do you think this warrants supporting a generational 'war' narrative?
If it is merely the expression of slight shifts in political leanings correlated with age, we'd have to look whether this is a new thing or something that has always been the case [1].
The reason I point out in my response to you that the presumptions which you will find even in this tread, that there is a conflict between the generations that expresses itself as a principle component in voting behavior and justifies division and vilification of the 'opposite' age cohort, is blatantly false and a manufactured framework intent on dividing people and gaining economically and politically from that conflict rather than uniting and looking for solutions.
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/24/heart-head/
It's just simple demographic facts that Boomers are politically much, much more likely to not care about climate change and financial inequality. Yes, it sucks that older folks who do care are being painted with a broad brush, but that's the nature of quick and dirty articles.
That is precisely the nature of identity politics, which treats everyone not as an individual with a personal identity and personal believes and responsibilities, but as a generic instanced clone of some immutable class assigned by birth, all members of which need to prostrate to a perpetual divisive ideological war.
For example, how do you talk about helping homeless people, without using their shared identity (the fact that they are homeless)?
Obviously it's not always a useful thing, and grouping people by shared identities can be messy. I don't understand how it can be avoided though, unless you just want the world to stay exactly the same it is.
It's immutable that a kid is a kid. It's immutable that some kids have cancer. What's so wrong to use identity politics to say we should help kids that have cancer?
Are facts "ludicrous" to you? Older people naturally tend to be wealthier through decades of debt retirement, salary increases, compounded investment returns, and so on. There was already a visible divide between the Me Generation (what "Baby Boomers" were once called and IMO still should be) and my own GenX. It seems the divide between us and Millennials/GenZ has gotten even larger. Student debt loads tend to be much larger as a percentage of income than mine were because inflation of college costs has significantly outpaced inflation generally (plus artificially increased demand). Changes in real estate and job markets have only exacerbated those differences. Maybe age-based inequality isn't as big an issue as race-based, but it's still an issue worthy of consideration.
And financial inequality does transcend generations, kids from poorer parents on average stay poorer themselves, while kids from rich parents tend on average to to turn out richer, rather than divide them.
What is even worse is that the rising of economic inequality in the US, will also reflect itself in an even further decline of economic mobility as those two have been shown to be correlated [1].
Don't get caught up in these divisional doctrines. Some stand to benefit from fueling these narratives, and it is not going to be any of the people being pushed into the fires of identity wars.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Gatsby_curve
It's possible for that to be true and for there to be differences between generations. They're not mutually exclusive.
> Some stand to benefit from fueling these narratives
...and some stand to benefit from suppressing them. Attribution of motive - to unspecified people, even - is a non argument.
Drawing lines through society is the cheapest and easiest way to look wise without making any meaningful comment.
This is just an exaggeration of a pithy retort that people think is funny (and it is). But that doesn’t mean people “believe” in it any more than people believe wearing a LeBron jersey makes them into better players.
Some boomer should have some “OK SLACKER” t-shirts printed with the tag, “Have a productive day”
As part of Gen-X, I feel like that's appropriating from my culture. I was proudly on the "slackers" mailing list as an adult in the 90s when the millennials were being born. Give millennials a new pejorative, don't steal ours.
Maybe the word "Boomer" will just get redefined to mean "old people with more money than me". Kind of the same way "meme" got redefined from "idea permeating society" to "cartoon or cat picture with sarcastic text", and how "troll" got redefined from "someone who tries to antagonize" to "someone who says things I don't agree with".
The fault with this article is that it focuses on merchandise.
Edit: here’s the first video I saw it trend in comments: http://vm.tiktok.com/553g7w/
I highly doubt this. I've seen this phrase for months on both Twitter and Discord. Searching one discord server I'm in yields several instances going back to April. It was just a meme in the beginning. Perhaps evolved from 4chan's "30 year old boomer"
Honestly this article screams of some fake viral TikTok marketing bullshit. Why are they everywhere now and stuff about this Chinese Snapchat/Vine clone making it everywhere? Are they secretly paying for this stuff? Can we stop voting up this spam? No one cares.
Old Town Road was also around before it became a meme on TikTok, but it was undoubtedly what drove it to #1 on multiple categories on billboard.
I also disagree that no one cares. Otherwise the company wouldn’t be being investigated for national security issues and zuck talking about it in an all hands meeting.
TikTok is influencing art and culture. Regardless of the phrase’s use on discord or image boards, it’s emergence ok tt is important.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/1/20756701/mark-zuckerberg-...
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ok-boomer identifies it being used on Twitter as early as April 2018, with a surge in popularity in Jan 2019.
Many occurrences before October 15th. "Ok boomer" has been a phrase in internet culture for a while now.
Or saying millennials are poor because they like avocados. Or saying millennials are entitled for demanding a living wage.
These people grew up when a factory job could support a family of four, and companies hired people with no experience and then paid actual benefits.
Boomers benefited from very generous circumstances. To suggest they earned the postwar economic boom is laughably misguided.
I didn't write or imply this in any way.
My point is that many boomers conveniently gloss over the fact that they benefited immensely from the economic climate of yesteryear, and the common refrain of millennials needing to just tug harder on their bootstraps isn't received well because of it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Some of us would argue that is a garbage mentality at the root of the problem.
I would sooner wish to emulate the "Greatest Generation" than the Boomers.
The contention is that the world left by boomers has less opportunity than what the one provided to them. It’s not entirely true (if you’re black in America, the civil rights movement sure changes a lot for the better), but that’s the argument.
Exactly. Later generations simply inherited expensive college after the devastation of Nixon.
If Nixon wasn't stopped, they would have continued until all Americans had been returned to lower opportunity levels equivalent to many minorities before Civil Rights, other than those whose significant capitalist privileges had already been well established before the early 1970's.
EDIT: more rapidly returned to lower opportunity levels
Edit: It's still too easy to underestimate Nixon Youth.
And for Millennials, some have it rough but some don't. College was cheap and affordable for some of them - certainly more affordable for them than the boomer generation. Keep in mind the generation spans to 1981. Some Millennials are almost 40 now.
Gen Z is in a whole other category of course. Lots of things going/have gone rapidly downhill. But boomers mostly aren't the parents of these people. It's Gen X/Millennials.
But sure, let Boomers and Millennials fight. We're happy to stay out of this (just know that I'm on your side, Millennials!)
Also, a lot of the anger at Boomers is not just because of how they had it (that's mostly the doing of their Silent/Greatest predecessors) but because of how they made it. Boomers have dominated politics since those student-activist hippies got into it, largely because of sheer numbers. Thirty or forty years, depending on exactly which ones you count. GenX is finally making a dent, but mostly at the state level. At the federal level it's still heavily Boomer-dominated, regurgitating the same policies that got us into this mess. Ditto Wall Street etc.
If Boomers had enjoyed good times and then made some effort to prolong or repeat them, #okboomer wouldn't be a thing. It is a thing because so many Boomers are using their political power to keep selling everyone else's future for the sake of their own comfy retirement.
No matter how often we pointed out that college is, in general, vastly more expensive, and summer jobs comparably less well-paying, he'd just repeat himself. "I just don't get it, you go work for the parks department, you work all summer long, why isn't that enough? It's your iphones, your cell phone plans, etc." when, you know, yeah we're paying $20 a month for cheap cell phone plans and five-year-old iphones, but the reality is that working three months at, say, $15 an hour, nets you what, $5-6k? That might cover a year's tuition at a community college if you live at home, not a year living at a state-run four-year university.
I can agree that it's not nearly as easy for us as it was for the past few generations, but it's not nearly as grim as most make it out to be. To put it bluntly, I see a lot of the same "me me me" mentality that the Boomers have been criticized for.
There's the idea that life is just handed to us, so long as we "do the right things." It's perfectly possible to own a home, raise a family, what have you. You just might not get to work the job you want, study the degree program you want, or live in the neighborhood you want.
There never was a "turnkey" existence.
This shitting on the next generation thing has been going on for a long time.
There's solid evidence going back 150 years of older generations complaining about school kids being undisciplined, not respecting their teachers ("not like back when I was at school"), and some slightly more anecdotal evidence going back some 2000 years of the same.
We always find it hard to reconcile the negative aspects of our old behaviour with our current mindset, and it's way easier to just reduce in our minds the severity or scope of our actions. We learn from our mistakes, and try to make them seem as small as possible in our minds.
The above quote comes from ancient Greece.
There's some doubts to the veracity of that quote, which is why I opted for anecdotal when it came to older evidence :)
Today, there's maybe 100 brands. Almost all come in 4-packs, and are priced between $15-$20.
Price increases may just be inflation and even 10 years ago you could find tons of craft beer stores with huge selections in cities big and small. (Beer is one of the easier small businesses to get into; still expensive but they tend to be less likely to fail if you get the consistency of batches right).
Maybe that store just decided to expand from a small selection to attract more craft beer people. That's a really freaking weird conclusion to draw over the history of one bottle shop.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/may/15/austral...
I think it's important to differentiate between "media-driven narrative" and real-world relations, though that line is a bit blurry. It seems the former often creates the latter.
Right now I'm not sure that "Ok Boomer" is anything more than a meme.
Ok, Boomer
If you go back 20 years you'll find the same articles about millenials. Go back 20 more years and you'll find them about Gen X. Go back 20 more years and you'll find them about Baby Boomers. Go back to the 1920s and there are articles complaining about the Kids These Days, so lazy and disrespectful, taking all this newfangled technology for granted...
I like how one of the first reflexes when criticizing a generation of ecological catastrophes is to over-consume. Reminds my of the boomers' "Che Guevara" merchandises.
Generational titles were NEVER used to lift anyone up. They were used to sell books, sell newspapers/magazines, blame everything on the youth who knew nothing of hardship or some other fake-rage bullshit. The age ranges are arbitrary and the names that stick are pure chance and/or marketing.
Why is NYT referencing a moronic TikTok video anyway? Is NYT now trying to compete with Buzzfeed?
One of the articles is about gen z / millennials.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/author/taylorlorenz
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/taylorlorenz/millennial...
But then I'm an old bitter boomer, so what do I know?
Making generalizations about a year one was born is just a few turns less silly than astrology