On a recent trip to a local used video game store, a fellow Gen Y friend puzzled over the religious devotion lavished on 80s and 90s IPs by Ys.
As our generation enters middle age, many of us increasingly turn our natural religious impulse to Pop Cult relics. More and more, a whole generation makes idols of action figures, comic books, and video games. Corporations are selling our childhoods back to us, and we manically shop the nostalgia sale.
One common aspect of undue attachment is seeking an unhealthy substitute due to the absence or deficiency of some good. The beta male clings to his wife to make up for an absent or aloof mother. The paraphiliac indulges in perversion because he was deprived of rightly ordered sexuality by abuse. The drug addict chases the sense of wellbeing denied him by isolation and poverty.
The flip side of this false coin is that if you want to understand Gen Y’s attachment to the past, ask which genuine goods their nostalgia substitutes for.
In short, Ys make idols of their childhood IPs as a way to once again make manifest the goods robbed from them by the passing of their childhood.
And that childhood took place in a supermajority white, Christian country with intact families.
Generation Y is especially vulnerable to the Pop Cult’s siren song due to their upbringing in consumerist, materialistic households defined by transactional relationships. They may have gone to parochial schools Monday-Friday and church on Sunday. But their parents’ self-absorption, too often ending in divorce, scandalized them away from the one God who made them and who can make them happy.
As a result, many Ys are spiritual vagabonds, left to roam the strange landscape that replaced the world they were raised to survive in. They were never taught the self-mastery or courage needed to withstand Clown World, so they cling to scraps of driftwood from the shipwreck of Cultural Ground Zero.
That’s not to mock or belittle Gen Y. Remember that they are the Mugged by Reality generation, raised in gilded pleasure domes only to be cast out of paradise into Purgatory without the tools to adapt.
If you think that’s an exaggeration, consider that more than two close Gen Y friends recently gave me almost identical accounts of their rude coming-of-age. In both cases, their transaction-minded Boomer parents kicked them out of the house at 18. Both lived in vermin-infested flophouses which required them to walk for miles to dead-end fast food jobs to pay rent. They endured that loathsome existence for years.
Today, both are successful, with families of their own. Their parents pat themselves on the back and say, “See? The school of hard knocks did you good!”
Both of my friends disagree. What the school of hard knocks did was nearly destroy their ability to trust anyone–including God. In reality, they credit the friends who banded together to lend them a hand when their own flesh and blood turned their backs.
Not all Ys found their way back to healthy relationships and a place in society. Not all found their way back to God.
Helping them find their way again is up to us.
The Bible is the best place to start. To apply its universal wisdom to our generation’s particular challenges, consider my own humble offering.
I’m almost a bit curious where so many boomers got the idea that they should toss their young out of the nest like a bird or a lion, versus looking at their own family traditions for guidance. I doubt any of the boomers had the same done to them by silents or greatest.
Did they watch too many nature documentaries? Or is it just a further consequence of the blank slate myth that every American (or Westerner) has to start at the same place in life or else it’s unfair to immigrants and orphans?
Whenever it comes to boomers my working hypothesis until proven otherwise is that TV told them to do it. They were the first generation raised by TV, and they have been a prime demographic for TV for their entire lives.
One big place the line of “kids who stick with their parents after high school are losers” was sold hard was sitcoms.
It’s justification to get rid of their young so they could focus on themselves. No group in history were as desperate to get rid of family relationships and move away from them before the boomers. It’s the same as the “God helps those who help themselves” line that has nothing to do with Christianity. But Boomer Christians sure do love that phrase because it means they can do less for their neighbor guilt-free.
It reminds me of the old meme of the “Mid-life Crisis” that no one has mentioned in over two decades, because no other generation is affected by it. This was a cope to deal with their aging and rejection of growing old to be the elders they were meant to be but never became. So much of this nonsense is centered on baby boomers, because they have been the center of all of western society for over half a century by now.
By the same token, we have to remember that they were the most psy-oped generation of all time. That’s not any exaggeration when you see everything they were programmed with throughout all of media, relentlessly, through techniques no one really started to understand until the last two decades decade or so. While they are a generation that somehow gets more perplexing to understand as the years pass, the bigger issue is that they refuse to get out of the way even as they suffer dementia and defecate themselves in public over three decades after their parents retired at the same age. They are an abnormality, and future generations are going to think we are exaggerating everything when we explain what they went through and eventually became.
There is simply no way to make it sound plausible out of context. It just sounds insane.
Some bluecheck on Twitter was wagging her finger at college graduates who choose to put down roots in their hometowns, saying they “really need to move farther away from their parents.”
No reason was given. It’s just what the NPC programming dictates.
Brian,
Yeah, Alexander Hellene remarked why all the ‘good jobs’ were located in the big cities forcing them to move out and couldn’t continue staying rooted where they grew up.
In any case, the rise of remote work and the refusal of many workers to commute to the downtown office despite middle managers’ insistence indicated a return to some semblance of rootedness.
xavier
Don’t let the Greats and the older Silents off the hook for their lack of parenting skills and emotional unavailability. Their fortitude and endurance are absolutely admirable, they were brave, they survived the Depression, WWII, also fought in Korea and many cases in Vietnam, but the thing they were terrible at was parenting. In trying to save their Boomer children from misery they spoilt them, and their acculturation against dealing with the horror of war and poverty really damaged their ability for genuine human connection. I saw this in multiple generations of my own family.
The Boomers were also kicked out at 18. It’s how things were done mid-century. You were expected to get a job and maybe a few roommates, like my mother did a month after she graduated high school. Of course, by the time Gen Y came along, the job market (and rental market, for that matter) that had greeted the Boomers was already gone. The Boomers still don’t understand that.
I was genuinely shocked to hear that staying with your parents until you got married was normal in older generations. My mother is more understanding than most, but she still has trouble understanding how someone could possibly NOT want to live on their own, apart from their family, with their own car, etc. It seems like the idea of “independence” still has a strong hold on her mind. In reality, for most young people, that kind of “independence” means crushing financial burden, solitude, and a stressful, pointless life.
Diabolical American propaganda has done its evil work on Europe, I see.
Also, why has my name been changed to Mooney? I was pretty sure I entered it correctly, as Moloney. I’d heard of America making immigrants change their names, but this is ridiculous! :p
Oh, I see the website has auto-detected my other account this time. Well, that’s going to be a bit awkward to an outsider looking in.
This is more related to an earlier post, but I would just like to express how bewildering the neuroticism displayed by Millennials is. Talking with them is amazing, not because it’s exhausting (they appear too self-aware about their own issue) but because the sort of things they fret over are usually abstracts and non-material issues brought on due to thoughts they can’t process or understand. This is directly caused by how poor their spiritual and religious upbringing was, and it makes it harder for them to operate normally because of it. I think age and wisdom will help a lot, but I really think it’s only Ys and Xers that are the ones who can reach them. Boomers have already given up on them, confident they’ll just continue the gravy train until they’re gone.
After endowing Xers with nihilism, Ys with hedonism, and Mills with crippling depression, Boomers simply plow ahead, unware of the destruction left in their wake. We can all make it through this, as long as we stick together–basically doing the opposite of what the Baby Boomers preached.
The ’20s are going to be rough, but we already knew that.
Each day, I wonder more and more if 20-30 year olds have souls.
To be serious for a minute, the neuroticism, difficulty communicating, and general dysfunction you noted have become widespread and entrenched. It’s not just a generation gap. In the workplace, a Millennial who can follow instructions of moderate complexity is a unicorn. As is one who can reply to a simple question with a straight answer instead of playing a one-way word association game. It’s no help that they’ve been subjected to Death Cult indoctrination so long as to no longer use English, but a bastardized ritual cant glossolalia-English hodgepodge.
Old school culture warriors made dire predictions about the West’s fate if the cultural revolution wasn’t rolled back. It wasn’t, and we are now living in the resulting dark age.
The commentary on the family situation plays into something I’ve thought about for a long time: that the “Nuclear Family” is, much like “Judeo-Christian”, controlled opposition gaslighting.
The whole notion that two parents and their 2.1 children living under one roof is the norm and anything else is some bizarre state of affairs is part of a divide and conquer strategy. Families are a lot easier to undermine when it’s two parents and their kids than if some combination of grandparents, in-laws, aunts, uncles, and cousins live either under the same roof or close proximity.
Parents are also probably much more likely to have more than just one or two kids when there’s enough support structure in place to spread the burden of raising those kids. The “nuclear family” is de facto birth control, because a couple will (quite understandably) feel overwhelmed at the prospect of having a bunch of kids if they have no external help or support to raise their family.
– Go off to college.
– Sleep around, “find yourself”
– Get a job in some distant city from your family
– Marry someone there
– Cringe at the idea of having more than a kid or two
– Put kid(s) in day care because you and your spouse both work full-time to afford that house (or rent), and pay back those student loan debts, and there’s no family to watch them
– Kid(s) are catechized by the TV, social media, academic-indoctrination complex into NPC caricaturehood.
– Kid(s) are booted out of the house at the vulnerable stage of young adulthood because Muh Bootstraps.
See how this works?
Then conservative psyop coordinators get everyone who voted Bush to think that having bigger families under one roof/close proximity is some sketchy Mexican thing. “Here in AMURRICA, we have backyard barbecues with exactly one set of parents and no pesky relatives!”
The “Nuclear Family” is just one step down the staircase of the progressive divide-and-conquer strategy.
In my own case, my in-laws live in our basement. Having them around is absolutely invaluable for our kids.
The Conservative grift is to con people into owning the libz by embracing more dyscivic ideas than the libz.
For sure. We live within 15 minutes of grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins, and I don’t know what we’d do without them nearby. They’d say the same, I’m sure. Clans were/are big extended families; time we regained something of the clans.