Reader Rudolph Harrier comments on a previous post:
What makes things worse is that Zoomers have only learned how to deal with existing services. Music sites everywhere are littered with comments of “I heard a song I liked but it’s not on Spotify so how can I listen to it again?” They are so used to dealing with phones that concepts like opening a zip file or using the print screen function are beyond them.
Now I’m not blaming them, since they were raised in a world where they had little choice but to do that. Companies are heavily pushing lowest common denominator subscription services while simultaneously forcing you to go through them for all repairs. (Can ANYONE do anything beyond the most basic of maintenance on a new car?)
But this puts them in an extremely bad position when things break down. If your conception of getting food is to use UberEats, and UberEats is no more, what then? You see the same thing on the tech side where most tech jobs consist of using standardized tools, existing cloud services, with minor local or cosmetic differences. But if the basic architecture goes down, these skills are worthless.
The bright side is that the Zoomers who are self motivated enough to look into this stuff do tend to be pretty knowledgeable through self-teaching, but they are in the minority.
Millennials are also in a bad position, but this is more because they’ve intentionally allowed their survival skills to atrophy, rather than never learning them in the first place.
For Gen Y the question is whether we can figure out that things need to be fixed by replacing them with something new, rather than trying to clumsily reimplement the old broken system.
My comment:
Rudolph’s observations of the breakdown in progress harken back to my identification of Gen Y as an Artist-Adaptive generation.
The vision of our future we were raised to expect was living the Boomer dream of working a steady 9-5 and coming home to a raised ranch in the suburbs, but in a static 1990s Liberalism that extended forever.
As it turns out, the future had other plans. Everybody who isn’t hopelessly delusional knows it now.
All civilizations have to die, and the one we grew up in suffered a mortal wound sometime around 1997.
Most Ys want to cope with the implosion of the world they grew up in by hoarding Star Wars toys and running Back to the Future on a constant loop.
But that retrograde behavior isn’t serving anyone.
Like the last priests of Atlantis, history has chosen us to pass on some vestige of pre-collapse civilization.
We didn’t ask for the job, and most of us don’t want it, but that’s not our call. Fate has spoken.
And if we don’t speak to younger generations, they will live out their lives thinking that it has to be this way, because they’ll never know it ever was any other way.
You can talk to your kids, younger cousins, and even younger siblings about what it was like to just get on a plane without a strip search.
Or use a payphone.
Or compose a term paper on a typewriter.
Or socialize with friends without a prearranged playdate or an SMS planning session, but instead just going to the local hangout spot on a Saturday afternoon and seeing who showed up.
Remember when there were no commercials before movies – just trailers for other films you looked forward to seeing?
Remember when pretty much every business provided at least decent service, and every institution but the DMV could be counted on to perform its intended function?
It used to be that way, and therefore it can be that way.
Don’t let the world forget.
Pass it on.
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Lately, I’ve been noticing a destruction of public etiquette. People will leave their cars parked in driving lanes despite the fact that they’re adjacent to a parking lot, drivers don’t pay attention in parking lots and make it impossible to pass them while they’re waiting with their hazard lights on, and there’s endless amounts of jaywalking where people don’t even look before crossing and walk at a glacial pace.
I was at Costco the other day and someone left a pack of frozen shrimp on a random shelf instead of putting it back in the freezer which would’ve taken 10 seconds. People left their trash on the table instead of throwing it away. Customers open up packages of clothes to see what they look like but they don’t purchase them.
And don’t get me started about the panhandlers at every traffic light at an intersection.
No signs of these trends reversing anytime soon.
That kind of behavior indicates that the penalty for breaking the rules is lighter than the penalty for following them. And on some level, people are noticing.
“And if we don’t speak to younger generations, they will live out their lives thinking that it has to be this way, because they’ll never know it ever was any other way.”
Realized this when online a few Zoomers were asking me about random things from the late 90s and the early days of mainstream internet (the ’00s) and I just sort of assumed it was common knowledge. That was when it hit me that it’s not. It’s just something I took for granted, much like when I had to mostly discover 1950s rock music on my own because Boomers only wanted to discuss Beatlemania.
This is part of why I decided to write Y Signal and a lot of my Weekend Lounge posts are about simple things that were common back then that aren’t now. If I don’t talk about it, it will just disappear. Should I consider it important, and I do, then I simply have to talk about it. No one else will if we don’t.
I also think Gen Y is the generation for that. We are cursed with far too good a memory of times forgotten by even other generations who were there, and even obscure and strange things like the feeling of opening an N64 on Christmas Day up until what it was like to actually watch a commercial (remember those?) that had effort put behind it.
These are very simple things, but they did resonate, and there must be a reason why we are the ones to remember it beyond just nostalgia. It is almost as if we are supposed to be the ones who remember this stuff, and that makes it important.
I have to ask, what’s the most gob-smacking bit of 90s ephemera Zoomers have asked you about online?
To be honest, most Zoomers who actually ask me things tend to have dug into this stuff on their own. People like Jacob Calta have no problem digging into the past and finding what strikes them. The most I can do for them is fill in the gaps and add context.
The ones that don’t, however . . . well, it’s mostly the strangest things you can imagine. What is a Sega Genesis? Who is Jean Claude Van Damme? What’s Cannon Films? Who are the Kinks? What’s ska? Really just things that were obvious at the time that have been buried by the various industries refusing to do any preservation work.
The oddest thing has been the change in attitude to three different scandals from the 90s. That would be OJ Simpson, Princess Di, and Michael Jackson.
No one knows or cares about OJ anymore aside from people our age who remember Norm MacDonald’s jokes on SNL.
Princess Di is mostly forgotten, too, though there is a lot more skepticism around that whole psyop centered on worshiping her. This is a strange one because we all knew how we were TOLD to feel over her death, but no one actually felt that way. Fr. Longenecker wrote about it here: https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2023/11/england-red-rose-revolution-dwight-longenecker.html
Lastly, Michael Jackson was treated as 100% guilty by the media from day one. Constant jokes, constant hate, constant media dogpile. Despite that, I don’t recall anyone of my generation ever really believing he did it. Even then as the evidence came out, the media kept up the slander and libel, ignoring actual convicted criminals like R Kelly who were allowed to continue their careers unmolested. It was a strange time.
Now the only people who believe he is guilty are boomers who never looked into the charges and never even liked his music anyway, and pop cultists who always, miraculously, and without fail, actually listen to modern music and worship the industry as well as every new flame out that comes out every week.
There was that meme a few years ago about two halves of Zoomers, and I think there is something to that. One is the gayest generation that has ever lived and the other is the one looking to reconnect with what they know they’re missing. If we work with the half that cares then we are gold.
What I’d be a bit more worried about is the last generation / gen alpha. This is the first generation completely divorced from even the embers of the 20th century and live completely in post-modernity disconnected from anything resembling proper civilization. That’s the group that will need the most help.
Jackson is getting his posthumous revenge. Future historians will hail him as the greatest entertainer of the 20th century. His scandals will be reduced to spurious marginalia not discussed in polite company, and his detractors won’t even be footnotes.
Vox Day talked a while back about doing this a while back. Once I’m finished working on my current book, I think I might start writing down some memories from my childhood and adolescence.
Go for it!
“We didn’t ask for the job, and most of us don’t want it, but that’s not our call. Fate has spoken.”
There’s something about vocation as a whole which seems to boil down to God setting us to tasks we would rather not take up, or putting in roles we would sooner pass up, but which turn out to be a greater source of grace than we could possibly imagine. Even the callings we seek out, like marrying someone one actually does want to spend the rest of one’s life with, carry their fair share of “rather-not,” along with all the joys and triumphs we anticipate. We sign up “to have and to hold” ideally with the understanding the vocation called marriage isn’t a just promise to share “in health, for better, for richer” but also to sacrifice “in sickness, for worse, for poorer, til death do us part” because love doesn’t cut and run, ever.
Reminding folks how things were before the sky fell will probably also involve remembering people used to stay married their whole lives and how they managed it because divorce was not an option. We can do some of that by following the good examples we still have. My folks were born in ’55 and married in ’77, after Dad finished at West Point. They celebrated 46 years of marriage earlier this year. I am eternally grateful for their example.
To give credit to Zoomers, in my experience they tend to be good at digging into new things, once they are aware that they exist.
For a pop culture example, consider the task of getting people to read fiction written before 1980. Here’s what I’ve seen as the usual reactions from the younger generations:
Gen Y: But there weren’t Star Wars/Star Trek tie ins back then!
Millennial: That’s gotta be a bunch of racist obsolete garbage, why should I bother?
Zoomer: What is this stuff? Woah, this is pretty badass. Maybe I SHOULD give this a shot.
Or to take something more recent, hand them an SNES classic.
Gen Y: Ah, this brings back memories, but I’m pretty sure I only like this stuff because of nostalgia. I should check out the new AAA title instead.
Millennial: People actually played with ancient graphics like this? Pass.
Zoomer: Link to the Past is a pretty cool game.
Same thing with other skills. There’s a guy I know who knows more about retro technology than pretty much anyone else I know, and he was born at about the turn of the millennium. He just found something that interests him and went into it sincerely. A millennial would only do it ironically and a member of Gen Y would be guided by nostalgia.
Obviously these are generalizations and there are many exceptions in each generation. The point is, that Zoomers usually don’t dislike the past per se or try to avoid essential skills, they just aren’t aware that these things even exist. If you guide them to these things they’ll usually take them pretty seriously. The danger is that they can be guided to pretty much anything. They can easily fall into a pseudo-Gen Y style pop cult just by seeing that things like the old X-Men cartoon is at least better than the garbage they get now, and then obsessing about something like that instead of going back further to the roots (or coming up with something new and innovative.) And of course, they can get guided to woke stuff and become a pseudo-millennial who consciously blocks out everything outside the current Overton window. But Zoomers generally have a great potential to consider things from throughout all of history, and it is our job to guide them properly.
Of course this is all assuming that you break a Zoomer out of his media consumption rut to look at something new in the first place. Not always an easy task.
Still, your reports from the field are encouraging. Thanks for sharing.
I’m technically a Boomer but right at the very end of it, so more like early Gen X. A good part of my interests have involved learning to do things as the Victorians did them, mainly involving food, growing plants, learning how people managed with such low tech. It’s about time and actually using your muscles to get results. People today have the idea that manual work hurts and, yes, if you’re not used to using your body that way it does hurt to start with, but not for long. I worked on a working museum farm so learned to handle large animals, shovel shit and work the farm dairy. I watched and learned about what others there did, the stock men and farriers. It was good to learn that stuff and good to do the physical work. I read so many books about rural life in the late 1800s to early 1900s, what people did and how they managed. A lot of us will probably have to return to that level of tech at some point, so it makes sense that a few of us still know what to do and can pass on the know-how.