A commenter on yesterday’s post writes:
I don’t quite know what to say. I’m a millennial, and one who has hardly heard a song from the 80s (That I was aware of) but when I heard that last song on your list I felt… Something. It wasn’t nostalgia, it was… Nice if that describes it. It felt like a glimpse into the past, of a better time compared to the present times, despite the fact I don’t know the first thing about the 80s.
It makes me think of old computer games like Command and Conquer, and the classic Civ games.
This comment filled in a missing piece of the Gen Y – Millennial gap.
As often happens, I was too close to the issue to get the full perspective. The commenter helped me see the forest for the trees.
Why are Ys & older so nostalgia-prone, while Millennials tend to dwell in Year Zero?
Here’s what that comment tells me …
Our Millennial said the 80s style song made him feel something – not nostalgia, but a sense of something better that he found pleasant.
If you grew up in the 80s or before, you’ve always known on some level that art is just supposed to do that.
I totally missed that someone who grew up after Cultural Ground 0 wouldn’t have that transcendent experience of mainstream art.
Back in the day, you could expect a blockbuster film or top 40 song to at least elevate your emotions by pointing to higher things.
That’s what we lost.
That’s why people born before 1990 tend to get lost in nostalgia & gripe about Current Year entertainment.
It’s not just that everything’s corporate product. It always was. It’s that corps don’t even grasp for any higher reality in their art anymore. They deny it outright.
Even a bubblegum mall rock tune or schlocky buddy cop movie could invite reflection on friendship, patriotism, family, etc.
Because despite the looming threat of nuclear Armageddon, we took heart & kept faith that it would all turn out OK tomorrow.
But now that the US is the only superpower with no peer-level threats, we’re coming apart over manufactured bogeymen.
Because keeping faith means having it 1st. & we ditched Christ the second we thought the danger had passed.
And that is why no cultural revival can take place without a Christian revival in the West.
A read that is not only interesting, but helpful
Hey brianniemeier can you talk much about generation differnces towards intermarriages (marriages between different races or cultures)?
I was looking at this article ‘Intermarriage in the U.S. 50 Years After Loving v. Virginia’ and surprise by it being almost 20% by 2015 (I suspect probably higher by 2020)
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/05/18/intermarriage-in-the-u-s-50-years-after-loving-v-virginia/
It also surprise me that whites were the lowest to intermarry and the highest were Asians. US study so don’t know if Middle Eastern people count as Asians. The biggest intermarriages are White with Hispanic partner at 42% of total intermarriages in the US. Follow by White and Asian partner at 15%.
Also the highest rates of intermarriages are the younger generations mostly 30 to 39 at 18%. Also younger generation when ask about the views 18 to 29 years old say it is a good thing at 54%. Of course by politics Dems are at 42% it is a good thing and 6% it is a bad thing. Republican’s are at 28% it is a good thing to 12% it is a bad thing.
Mr. Niemeier.
Some years ago I had a conversation with a cousin a few years younger than me where we were talking about reading older literature and we ended up talking about the Song of Roland. She mentioned that she hated it, which surprised me because that is one of the classic pieces of Literature that I have wanted to reread multiple times.
When I asked why, she couldn’t explain.
I realized some time later that the reason was simple; For many of my generation, both Millennials and Zoomers alike, reading is not a recreational thing that is done for enjoyment: it is stressful and mentally exhausting, as more often than not they are having to read complex literature on a tight schedule, wright a two page book report about said literature, and on top of that, they have to also do the rest of their homework and then get all of this done over the weekend, then bring it to school while not getting caught off guard by opportunistic bullies protected by the school system. Thus, this confusing story having seemingly bland characters and an off putting dialect, and using terminology that is utterly foreign to the modern mind, is completely irrelevant to them and thus, literature, and reading in general, becomes something utterly irrelevant.
When I realized that, I began to dig into communities that Millennials and Gen Z’ers would frequent, namely Minecraft Discord servers. the most active channels on these servers were primarily the channels dedicated to memes or Art, both of which were flooded nonstop. after scrolling through the meme channel for one hour, I concluded that was where brain cells would gather to die, and went to the art channels. What I found there was… Interesting from the standpoint of a cultural outsider. number one, anything monster from anything and anywhere in the worlds of fiction was inevitably turned into a wiafu, (For the sake of the few that don’t know what that is, know that ignorance is bliss and that you should continue to dwell in that bliss. Don’t throw that word around in casual conversation.) or that all of the people that were trying to come up with stories inevitably had their characters dressed in the exact same attire of jeans and a hoodie, or a tuxedo coat and a top hat.
Admittedly, that was something that I fully expected to see, as I was looking to see if there were any gems among the muck. But after browsing through it with little to no luck, I began to realize that my generation has created nothing that could be called Beautiful, and worse, were absolutely convinced that what they were creating was beautiful.
The problem was, it wasn’t. Not even marginally. It was the product of hundreds of people spending childhoods in a Nickelodeon Syndrome inducing echo chamber. To give them some slack, they’ve been told the majority of their lives that they should write or draw what they know best, and public school life only seems to be slouching scrawny and neglected teens in hoodies, or the Persona series.
Seeing this, I realized that I was looking at what my generations footprint on history, our legacy, and I was left wondering how we got to this point. Your delving into this topic helped greatly with figuring out the problem, and since then I’ve felt this desire to try to bring my generation out of the slog and swamp of present day, so that future generations when looking back could call the days of Gen Z and Millennials as the beginning of a new golden age, rather than what many today are predicting the coming days to be, which is an age of constant squalor and collapse.
Thank you for this trenchant testimonial. I am deeply stirred.
In the many years since high school lit assignments almost killed my love of reading, I’ve come to the related conclusions that a) homework is evil and b) it’s inflicted on kids out of malice.
I love reading (b. 1988) and I was homeschooled in high school, where I read interesting books like Watership Down and David Copperfield at a reasonable pace. I did not like most of what I read in middle school (at a private Christian school.) You might be on to something here.
I grew up homeschooled as well, which was why it was so perplexing to me that my cousin hated reading at first.
“That’s why people born before 1990 tend to get lost in nostalgia & gripe about Current Year entertainment.”
Yep. I’ve heard somewhere (maybe here, but not sure) that nostalgia feelings are really pining for innocence. That is, even if one didn’t believe in God, one was objectively closer to Him by virtue of innocence.
That’s St. John Henry Newman.
For me, it was Narnia – I was blessed enough to have a one-book compilation of all the Narnia books as a child, and even as a child I knew there was something in them that I wanted to reach somehow. When I later heard Lewis talk about “The Island” in The Pilgrim’s Regress, I instantly knew exactly what he meant.