A Subtle Despair

Commenter Rudolph Harrier responds to Monday’s post with a meditation on Boomers’ noteworthy resistance to the black pill.

Some thoughts on why the boomers largely haven’t fallen to despair:

-Despite their constant complaints about kids being ruined by technology, the truth is that they have been raised by TV their whole lives. They may complain about younger generations being raised by TV/the internet, but it started with them. Even as a kid I noticed how at every gathering people from my parent’s generation would largely just watch TV (whether it was sports, news, movies, etc. the TV was at least on in the background.)

Add to this the fact that boomers have been catered to as a demographic in entertainment their whole lives (especially in comparison to Gen Jones and X, or Gen Y after childhood.) They didn’t randomly convince themselves that they were all civil rights champions who were responsible for reinventing music at woodstock and going to the moon. That’s the image that popular entertainment fed them.

-While consumerism is always hollow, you’re able to keep it going for longer if you actually get nice stuff. And the boomers did get nice stuff: nice houses, nice cars, quality movies and music, etc. And a functional (though declining) nation to enjoy it in. The millennials are the second most addicted to entertainment, but it doesn’t work as good as a distraction because the stuff they have is observably shoddier than the stuff the boomers had, and calling the nation functional has been a joke since the 00’s.

Boomers also got things for cheaper. It’s easier to write off college as “just some fun times” if you paid the tuition the Boomers got, rather than spending your entire working life paying it off like the millennials do. When you are spending your whole paycheck on debt, shoddy crap that falls apart from design, and subscription services for entertainment that is forgettable, it’s much harder to ignore how worthless all these material goods are in the grand scheme of things.

-I don’t fully understand why, but boomers have the lowest self-reflection skills of any generation. I think we’re all familiar with this phenomenon so I won’t elaborate on it.

-Outside of materialism, Boomers do have national pride. Now, it is usually a completely hollow pride completely detached from reality, and it doesn’t actually move them to protecting their nation. But they do at least like their nation, and as such they will also defend capitalism and democracy from a purely tribal perspective.

Around Gen X the education system started openly turning against the US and the west, and it was fully against it by the time the millennials and especially the zoomers went through it. As a result the younger generations have no pride or sense of belonging in their nation, their religion, their family, or anything beyond themselves alone (for those on the right) or their status in the woke hierarchy (for those on the left.) That is, even though a boomer will often in reality only live for his possessions and his consumption of entertainment, he can at least tell himself that he’s more than that. Starting with Gen X that becomes more difficult, and it is nearly impossible for Millennials and younger.

It’s easy to mistake most Boomers’ casual indifference to their posterity’s accelerating ruination as unwarranted optimism. On the contrary, the sloth that hinders much of that cohort from honest self-reflection and effective action is a subtle form of despair.

If you’re skeptical, consider the definitive Boomer movie Easy Rider.

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