On Boomers and Zoomers

Sunday, 13:29
Somewhere in Thule

Bickering between the generations is ridiculous… but also funny.

The boomer meme is getting as old as the boomers by now. With the zoomers blaming the decline of the West on the old geezers and their foolish ideas.

Some people, like Jim Goad, have pushed back, pointing out that “the boomers were 10x more masculine than you are”.

Can’t really argue with that.

But allow me to comment on the matter…

Today I saw a meme (or post, rather) that made me smile. It’s a joke, but it makes a good point.

My friend Gaddius correctly points out that the “bootstraps thing” is a good attitude in general. “Suck it up and get on with life.” Now that’s true, but there’s more to be said about this issue.

Being a diplomat, I want to say that both sides are right. It’s not so much that the boomers should be blamed, but they are out of touch with society as it is today.

Here’s what I mean:

There has obviously been a decline across generations. From boomers to gen x, from gen x to millennials, and from millennials to zoomers.

There’s no doubt that the boomers were “better”, in the sense that they had better values, more adaptive behaviour, and a healthier attitude toward life. They were the last products of a normal society, before that society was intentionally destroyed. (I’m not suggesting society was perfect in the ’40s or ’50s, but compared to the 2000s…)

Each new generation is more maladaptive than the previous.

I’ve often quoted Camille Paglia’s comments about Kurt Cobain to this effect:

He was a revealing symbol. He called himself passive-aggressive. There was self-pity, whining. There was a diminishment, a diminution. He was sitting there in his sweater, hunched over his guitar, looking like a little lost boy. Compare that with the great figures of my generation: Jimi Hendrix. Pete Townshend. Keith Richards. The great achievements of rock–of the Sixties, in fact–were done by assertion and energy. This is why I’m worried about the future.

Lower and lower energy in each new generation…

… until now. The current generation is so maladaptive that some of us have started to wonder if there will even be a next generation. I don’t know what percent of zoomers are homosexual or “trans”, but we’re obviously not moving in the right direction in the family department.

So yeah, the boomers were clearly better, less ruined human beings. But here’s the other side of the coin:

They were also more privileged.

Lovely word, I know — privileged. But it’s true.

Yes, they had to work hard. They weren’t born with silver spoons… etc. But at least they had work. At least they had a society they could live in. At least they were connected to something organic.

I think the core complaint of the zoomers against the boomers (which now refers to all older generations, not just the baby boomers) is that they’re out of touch. Their advice to “kids today” is invalid because the rules have changed. So they’re often seen as clueless old fools.

Because the zoomers never had a chance…

Not only did they not grow up in a normal society. They didn’t even grow up with people who did grow up in a normal society. They are more than two generations removed from anything normal.

At least with my generation… we grew up knowing our grandparents, who in turn did grow up in a normal society. So we had a feeling for what real people are like.

With the zoomers… even their grandparents are from a screwed up generation. They are completely cut off from traditional, organic, normal European society. Everything traditional is completely fictional in their world. It doesn’t exist. And as far as they’re concerned, it never existed.

And what curse could be worse than to be completely submerged in the Kali Yuga already when you’re born? Never get a chance to know fresh air.

How could they be different? They were thrown directly into Dystopia.

I’m from Scandinavia. A couple of generations ago, it was possible to go down to a harbour, get on a boat and start working immediately. “Just sign here.”

From there you could work your way up. Have a chance to buy a house and believe in the future.

Now that’s no longer possible. For the same kind of job today… first you have to come up with a few thousand euros/dollars to pay for some course upfront. Then you have to take the course. And if you pass… then you have to compete with low-salary workers from Asia before you even get a chance to work an hour in an entry-level job. And that’s just one example.

The point is that everything is 100x more complicated today. You have to get past a thousand hurdles in the dystopian bureaucracy. And the pay-off is only a fraction of what it once was.

This is the generation of “you will own nothing and you will be happy”. But they already own nothing and they’re not happy.

It’s not just the work situation that’s more complicated for the zoomers. They seem to suffer from social anxiety to a large extent, because they were raised on computers and social media. Artificial input 24/7. So they’ve started identifying as “incels” — involuntarily celibate — because they don’t know how to talk to women.

And if they do muster up courage to talk to a woman, they get accused of “metoo”. Because men are not supposed to show any male impulses in the current year. And if they get past that hurdle, chances are that the girl they find is a feminist who has an “onlyfans”…

(Of course, female zoomers face their own version of the same problems.)

The point is that I don’t envy the zoomers. I fully sympathize with them when they say that “bootstrap” advice is out of touch. The older generations don’t really understand what young folks are dealing with today. It’s a different world.

So while the boomers were “better”, less ruined people, they were also privileged. And the zoomers have legitimate grievances against the society that was handed to them at birth. They were betrayed from the start.

/ Fróði

P.S.

If you want to learn more about the glorious future of our society, you can still sign up for the Spring Conference.

We’ll discuss “The Year 2050” — trends, expectations, and visions for the coming decades. (I promise to give you some hope; it won’t be all doom and gloom.)

Go here to find out more.