That’s a good one for sure. I would submit that Repo Man is an overlooked gem that may have done one of the best jobs in capturing the zeitgeist of its time into one movie. Disaffected youth, working McJobs? Repo Man has got you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9k09WPpNeo
It also was skewering boomers back in 1984…put it on a plate, son, you’ll enjoy it more.
LOL, right? Have any of these people even met Gen X or watched some of the media aimed at Gen X?
It’s not like we invented disaffected youth, but it’s like plenty of music and movies captured that and made it an aesthetic for us. I recommend anyone thinking otherwise watch something like Repo Man.
I’m sure plenty of boomers in their youth had some of the same fuck you attitudes. They were the people that said “don’t trust anyone over 30” and “hope I die before I get old”?
Does anyone really think they were super bubbly in their teens and twenties while carrying out McJobs for The Man?
Also, hearing people talk about spending is wild. Especially when it comes to things like toast, Netflix subs, smart phones, and televisions.
https://www.cablecompare.com/blog/the-average-cost-of-a-tv-how-has-it-changed-over-time
Haha. Someone mentioned The Graduate in the comments on the article itself, too.
I’m sure there are lots of examples from earlier TV shows and movies…
Yup. That’s why I put this article in mild infuriating. It’s not all the way to enraging, but it’s low-level bullshit that you see all the time in these kinds of think pieces.
I’ve been seeing narratives much like this about Gen X when I was the target, then Gen Y, now Gen Z. And Adam Conover has a talk where he shows this kind of thing was aimed at boomers, too.
Yup, this. However, reading/watching something from the past 100 years does tend to bring it home in a more visceral way. People having a hard time connecting with the experiences of people that are still living (boomers, Silent generation) are going to really struggle connecting to ancient Sumerians.
Adam Conover has the perfect talk on the notion of “generations”…I honestly wish he’d expand on this talk and put together instances in a slide deck where he goes from Gen Z (or alpha) and these kinds of narratives all the way back to colonial times or whatever he has the energy for.
I think at some point, someone noticed there was a bit of markup on it when eating at restaurants, associated Gen Y with it, and then the narrative took off from there?
It reminds me of the same finger-wagging that seemed to be aimed at probably Gen X in the 90s over things like lattes. If people at that time and at that age were struggling financially, it was not because of the occasional latte.
Oh if we are talking about service workers, I’ve seen the bored vacant stare from people in a McJob since before I even entered the workforce. I noticed it as an observant child watching adolescents in such positions, and those kids were probably Generation Jones or maybe younger boomers.
Also, didn’t the protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye complain a lot about others being fake and so on?
LOL, Gen X here. We saw a lot of that kind hand-wringing about how we were a “slacker generation” that was not taking up ad campaigns in expected ways and/or playing video games too much and not being career-minded enough, etc. and how we thought there was “no future” because of things like the Cold War and nuclear annihilation, kids of broken homes and latchkey kids, homes needing to have two incomes to get by, and the dystopian movies we grew up on.
Then they mostly skipped over us because Gen X is not as large of a group as Gen Y.
That’s why when I see articles like this about Gen Y/Z/A, I just lauuuuuugh. It’s all so very unimaginative, but the people writing these galaxy-brained things seemingly have no fucking idea how recycled it all is.
I’d like to point that “expert” to watch something like The Graduate or read something like “Generation X” - or other novels from Coupland - where his characters agonize over things like McJobs. Ironically, I think Coupland is probably describing what is often called “The Jones Generation”.
The Graduate was before I was born, and Coupland’s work was not something I read until a few years out of college, but both managed to resonate with me.
Who the hell even writes articles like this? 🤣
Do people really think that people born between certain years invented…staring?
Seriously, you could change the dates on an article like this, make it about Gen X or Gen Y, and it would be the same thing. Or about boomers. Or fast forward a bit and it will be articles like this about Gen Alpha.
“The older people just don’t understand the ways of the younger people. It’s like this is a completely novel thing between these two generations.”
😒
Some companies cut employees as a basic threat and the implication is that others pick up the slack.
LOL, we had some gathering at our house a while ago and it was a mix of Gen Y and Gen X and the concept of a “party line” came up. Some of us Gen Xers knew of it (I distinctly remember we had one with several neighbors - possibly 3 others?) and had to explain the concept. Basically, if you lived in a rural area and are old enough, you likely had no other choice. (Just searched, and it apparently was finally phased out by the late 90s.)
I experienced it as a young kid for several years and it still boggles my mind. We had a bored elderly neighbor who seemed to have the hobby of hogging the line a lot and picking up and listening when others were making calls. I remember many times where my mom had to tell her to hang up the line because she had to make an important call.
The fear of making a non-local call was an ever-present concern for sure. I remember my mom quizzing me over and over if a new girlfriend I had was a local call, since she lived about 20 minutes away and it was another prefix, but same area code.
Also, you had to basically rent your phone and the choices of that hardware were rather limited…but built like a tank. Ma Bell and the baby bells had a lot of control.
People have a tendency to sometimes “freeze” their experiences and I could see how someone might really not understand how long distance is not really a thing.
I often wonder how people might cope if something like electricity/power went through something similar - where the abundance of solar and/or wind power backed by batteries and other improvements drove the cost down to such a point that younger generations will wonder why anyone ever rode the thermostat or agonized over leaving on lights…