Much has been written on this blog and others about generational theory and nostalgia. Counterculture writers have done extensive work showing how the old demographic models based on age have broken down in the face of accelerating social change. If your predictions are based on lumping folks who came of age before smartphones and 9-11 with kids who grew up extremely online, your accuracy will suffer.
The forgotten cohort Generation Y comes up frequently because it corrects many of the problems with those outdated models. Gen Y is like a missing variable that makes a stubborn equation work.
One of the foremost puzzles that plugging Gen Y into the equation solves is the lopsided nature of the nostalgia movement. American pop culture has been obsessively backward-looking for twenty years now. The biggest social controversies revolve around human cattle hired to look pretty in megacorp milkings of 1970s IPs insulting their audience or getting banished for insulting the megacorps.
The Millennial generation isn’t the primary driver of nostalgia-based outrage drama. They were brought up to anathematize anything that happened before they were born as regressive and evil. They also lack the economic power to significantly move the needle.
Gen Xers with fond memories of Big Brand X contribute to the nostalgia racket, but they’re not the prime movers. Being in the counterculture means noticing patterns. Most stereotypes are grounded in truth, and Xers’ jaded cynicism keeps them from getting worked up about Pop Cult eDrama in large numbers.
Here’s a story about a nostalgia bar that opened in Tampa, Florida a couple years back. The piece and the bar itself refer to Gen X, but their interior dĂ©cor is exclusively from the 80s and 90s.
See for yourself:
The bar specifically caters to patrons’ childhood nostalgia. But take a look at the memorabilia cluttering the walls. The average Gen Xer was already 18 when the Super Nintendo came out. He’d be graduating college when Friends premiered.
In reality, the Gen X Bar is a shrine to the Pop Cult. Bonus points for their version of The Last Supper featuring a grab bag of 80s franchise characters. Replacing Christ with E.T. is proof they knew what they were doing.
The Pop Cult is a Gen Y phenomenon. Its high priests leverage nostalgia for the “golden age” of the 80s and High 90s to funnel adherents into the Death Cult. Few Xers are nostalgia-dominated for the trick to work on them. Most Millennials are already Death Cultists. Gen Y is the reason the Pop Cult exists.
Another tell is that Pop Cult nostalgia has an expiration date. Take another look at that bar. What you don’t notice is anything postdating Cultural Ground Zero. The reason why is that opening a nostalgia bar for the following two decades would be an exercise in redundancy. An aughts and tens-themed bar would feature World of Warcraft, MCU posters, and Joe Biden political cartoons. Walking through the front door would be like stepping through a portal into the present.
If nothing else, the commodification of Gen Y’s childhood gives away the grift being run on them. Live in the now. Let go of dead IPs. Don’t pay people who hate you.
Gen Xers are well known for being into ’80s retro synth music and not alternative rock. Or is this another retcon I’m just supposed to shrug at? Gen Xers weren’t known as consumers; they were known as edgelord contrarians who staked their identity on being different from mom and dad. Consuming product wasn’t part of it. At least, not intentionally.
Also, tired of getting pushback for talking about Gen Y when the alternative has been the same room temperature takes from the media that I am either Gen X or Millennial (or “Xillennial” or “Centennial” or whatever this week’s term is) instead of what I was actually called at the time.
“Generation groups don’t exist, but you are definitely part of this group identity that didn’t exist at the time you grew up.”
I’m glad this is changing, but it’s not changing fast enough.
Gen Y denial is an NPC tell.
Millennials have no nostalgia, but the wealthier ones have plenty of fondness for a classic Nintendo console!
The one from “Ground Zero,” naturally:
https://consolevariations.com/storage/images/blogs/content/yWOrXlFPjVCDCdYkSTdl4AHzeB8BaIpoTbVqqZa1.jpeg
I saw a Millennial male from central casting at the store earlier. Not only was he wearing a pre-faded N64 tee shirt, he was one of the few shoppers wearing a mask.
Another place you can really see Gen Y is in online video game reviews that cover classic content. Gen X don’t really get into this (and when they do they go really old, like Atari 2600 games or vintage arcade games.) Generations past that just focus on whatever is new.
From AVGN, Ross, Civvie-11 etc. you’ll usually find these constants when they talk about their childhood:
-For consoles they will talk about playing the NES as a small child, but will usually have more nostalgia for the SNES or Genesis. The PSX or N64 might be talked about as something played later on.
-If they played FPS games, it will be a Doom or Build engine game.
-If they were more into strategy, expect Heroes of Might and Magic 3 or maybe Alpha Centauri.
-“Final Fantasy” will default to Final Fantasy 6 (though it is more likely to be called Final Fantasy 3)
All things which only make sense for someone who was born in the 80s.
That’s the pattern. Once you notice, you can’t unsee it.
Nostalgia is hardly a new drug. In the 1970’s, the 50’s were a big deal. We had Grease, American Graffiti, and Happy Days. Hell, even Sha Na Na had their own show.
The difference is we grew out of it because we had a culture that moved on to other things. Cultural ground zero removed that possibility for the next generations. Now it’s all death cult bingo (spoiler alert……..Robin is gay). I feel sorry for you (and us) all.
No period of art lasts forever. The creative bankruptcy in legacy media is likely a sign that it’s past time to close the book on the previous chapter and make something new.
The 70s had the 50s, the 80s attempted a callback to the 60s, and there was a brief, failed attempt at recalling the 70s in the very early 90s. Then, 80s nostalgia for a brief moment in 2000, before 9/11.
And then, the needle stuck on the record.
I don’t why but I Nostalgia for better times. The pre 2020 I would prefer to be in. During the 2019 I longed for the 2010s and sometimes for the late 90s and early 00s. Apart of it is the world itself seems to be getting worst and less optimistic. I love the early 00s (though prefer the consoles of the last generation n64 and playstation and the cartoons of the late 80s and early 90s) even with the fear of terrorist and terrorism from the 9/11. It was time that felt like well things might look bad but the world will keep getting better. This is before the 2007 to 2008 financial crisis. That was the great loss in both trust of the government (and some older generations) and of my optimism of the future.
On a related topic I was going through my cds and came across the Hackers soundtrack. It made me realize that (even though its depiction of hacking is ridiculous) the movie captured an essential part of the 90’s that you don’t even see an echo of in the desperate corporate attempts at “90’s nostalgia.” Bands like Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers and The Crystal Method were huge starting around the mid 90’s, accompanied by a dance scene that often mingled with the Phone Phreak descendant hacker scene.
But this has almost completely been erased from the perception of the 90’s, except for those who lived through it. It’s not hard to guess why either: that scene was tremendously anti-corporate (take how people interpreted “Music for the Jilted Generation” while movies like “Antitrust” nicely sum up how the techheads felt about big business.)
Is that why the utopians forgot that they hated big corporations?
I have always hated being called “millennial”. When I was a kid, they told me I was Gen Y, and that has always sounded better in my ears.
Not that long ago, it was commonly understood that folks who came of age in the 80s were Gen X, the following generation who grew up in the 90s were Gen Y, and the cohort after that, who came up around the turn of the millennium, were the Millennials.
It’s so logical that anyone who was gaslighted into buying the memory holing of Gen Y is almost certainly an NPC.