Asklemmy

We're just waiting. See you soon.

We're still here.

Generation discourse honestly panders to the lowest common denominator intellect. People who constantly talk about boomers or millennials are usually pretty dumb.

The reason you don't hear much about Gen X is "we" didn't cause anything culturally significant in an enduring when "we" were in our 20s.

We're here, frantically paddling to keep up.

Probably still outside drinking water from the garden hose.

Nothing happened. The generational war another facet of culture war. It doesn't make sense because you have to ask what the fuck happened to Gen X? Why don't they fit into the picture? Why doesn't the data add up? That should tell you something. Your experiment is flawed. The culture war doesn't make sense.

Asshats who use the term "Boomer" don't seem to understand that it means people born about 10 years after WWII and use it for anyone older than they are, so MTV term "genX" gets swamped.

Never upgraded; decided to stay Gen-Twitter.

These whole rather arbitrary ages used are quite silly. Do you really think someone who is, for example, 45 will have a very different outlook than a 42 year old just because of the year they were born? There are decent people and wankers in every generation.

There is another theory I've heard that I like:

1. The parents of the millenials were the boomers. The parents of gen z was gen X. Millenials and boomers are fairly equally disliked, and gen alpha seems to be shaping up to follow that trend.
2. If you have been paying attention to legitimate complaints about each generation, you'll notice similarities between the kids and their parents. Both millenials and boomers get hate for being terrible parents and workaholics, and the hate gen z is currently getting for having no work ethic sounds very similar to the hate gen X got back when they were in their 20s for being supposedly lazy and stupid becuase of MTV.
3. This implies that we are seeing not one pendulum of overractions to generational trauma, but two. The Millenials and the Baby Boomers, if you trace it back, descended from the humbly named Greatest Generation which fought in WWII and set the wheels of modern American culture into their current tracks. Gen Z and Gen X descend from the Silent Generation, who were best known for being conformist and pretty much nothing else.

Here's the conjecture part of the theory: the Boomer lineage has been taught that what matters is what you do and if you don't achieve you have no value, whereas the Silent Generation lineage has been taught that good people are good to their family and community and being a workaholic is bad for that. The poop-throwing you're seeing online is simply an expression of a conflict between opposing values.

Gen X said "fuck it" quickly and lived relatively comfy, selfish lives from their boomer parents funding trips to Woodstock '99 - where they feigned a rebellion, but always with a credit card they didn't pay for in their pockets and the rent paid.

They pretended to be above or "so over" politics, but in reality that was just a way to forgive themselves the burden of maintaining a decent society. So they willingly let the fire burn and grow out of control so that the millenials would have to deal with it.

After being hit with one life altering tragedy after the next during their prime earning years, many millenials realized they would need to be the sacrificial bridge generation. They resigned to delay or deny a lot of personal happiness/excitement so that they could do everything they could to oppose the second bush (who isn't actually a nice, harmless man with candy) and get Obama elected.

As the millenials can't afford homes or children of their own (part of that mentioned sacrifice), the X parents then have the kids that are gen Z later in life. Those Z kids weren't given any civic direction, personal values or responsibility to community from their perpetually checked out and selfish X parents. So without any tools to build meaningful resistance or any need to serve other humans, they then dropped the ball this election (the ball that the millenials were sacrificing their own fulfilling lives to be able to hand off to them).

Z was handed the blueprint on a silver platter, so they could literally fix shit by just showing up and acknowledging that nazis are both real and bad. There was actually a point where republicans wouldn't have won another presidency around 2009 (and they were freaking the fuck out with changing demographic trends forecasted) - never again without a "trump" chaos desperation play emerging to lower the bar, shift the Overton window and generally suck the value out of words, concepts and law.

The Republicans are ultimately ever-hungry scoundrels and religious zealots though, they want it more, but really that's because some will literally go to prison if they aren't governing. Also, a successful left will never have that same ruthless hunger, but that's really just because the definition of the left's vision of success is that you should actually be able to slow down, enjoy living and let your guard down a bit, or else what's the fucking point? The Republicans are perpetual losers, but even when they "win" they don't. They aren't happy and all that means they are never slowed by legality or morality. So they got to work in earnest starting in 2010 (go watch a film called "slaying the dragon") and here we are.

Edit: Ha! Scrolled down and saw someone posted a comic that says about exactly what I was expressing, except the Z kid would need to be falling on his face.