Regular readers know I’m always on the lookout for new cultural insights. To that effect, a recent Twitter thread just caught my eye.
This thread resonates with a post I wrote earlier this year about the same phenomenon. The only difference is the decade. If you want to gauge how far American society has declined, consider who pop culture presented as the biggest loser at various times in the past.
Let’s try the experiment.
Biggest Loser of the 70s
The aforementioned Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver fame personified the archetypal antisocial lowlife that vacationing Midwesterners feared crossing paths with in New York. Yet, as the OT points out, Travis had steady employment, a spacious apartment, and a girlfriend. He was living large by Millennial and Zoomer standards. But in the 70s being an oddball with a menial job was enough to qualify you for scumbag status.
Biggest Loser of the 80s
Like his 1970s predecessor, the Reagan era loser was telegraphed earlier in this post.
Rising affluence also raised the bar on loserdom in the 80s. We’ve already established that Travis Bickle was a success story compared to young adults today. But a mere decade later, 80s loser Al Bundy already made Travis look like gutter trash. Al had a wife, two kids, his own car, and a house now valued at half a million dollars. But like Travis, Al had a low-end job–even more of a kiss of death to one’s social status in the 80s.
Biggest Loser of the 90s
Homer Simpson‘s sad sack status looks so ridiculous in retrospect that they did a whole episode lampshading it. That episode coincided with Cultural Ground Zero, for what it’s worth.
Homer’s prosperity and social standing continue the progression we’ve seen with Travis and Al. He has a loving wife and three kids, owns two cars, and lives in a palatial house in a good neighborhood. Unlike his service and retail industry predecessors, Homer has a respectable tech job in the energy sector. He’s branded a loser solely because the writers say so.
The Simpsons brings us full circle to Ground Zero. Millennials born when the show first aired are now approaching Homer’s age. Yet they’ve seen their marriage and home ownership rates and overall net worth take a nosedive.
We now live in an age when Homer Simpson’s lifestyle looks unattainable to most young adults. Travis Bickle’s seamy urban existence is the best many of them can aspire to.
The last two decades’ biggest losers are collectively Millennials and Zoomers. Which raises the question, who won?
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My only zoomer friend moved back to Europe, married a beautiful woman, and earned decent money by working remotely for his American employers. He’s a winner winner kielbasa dinner!
“Winning” Gen Ys that I’ve seen all basically live like Boomers in worse houses, more hours, no religion, no more than one or two kids, no sociability beyond pop cult, and unhealthier exercise and eating habits. They’re trying to be Boomers because they think it’s normal to be one, but don’t understand that they can’t ever be that. It’s unsettling to watch.
Whoever is winning, it isn’t my generation.
Can confirm. Meanwhile, Millennials think they’re winning by living like Boomers, but in yuppie apartments they work 2 jobs to afford while being divorced or never married, having no kids, fawning over bugman scientism, and chasing every diet & fitness fad just to be almost fat.
I think notable losers from cartoon sitcoms in the ’00s show the trend wrapping back around on itself. Philip J Fry is a pizza delivery guy who doesn’t even have a place of his own, which puts him farther down the ladder than Travis Bickle. Peter Griffin is married, with kids and a house, but he’s also a blithering idiot with a relatively menial job in a factory.
It doesn’t seem like a coincidence to me that Gen Y, Millenials, and Zoomers have lower rates of marriage and home ownership, and fewer kids, after seeing the dream of productive husbandry lampooned for so long. The economy and the boomer debt-bubble make those things hard to achieve, of course, but the desire has to come first. If a kid and all his friends come from broken homes, and every married father and homeowner they see on TV is a pathetic joke, it would take a miracle to come to the conclusion that a good job, a good marriage, a happy family, and a home of one’s own is feasible or desirable.
You’re right that desire has to come first. Plus, it has to be strong enough to overcome the serious relationship hazards of Clown World.
MGTOW types rightly get a lot of flack, but they’re not wrong about how feminized society disincentivizes men from marriage and procreation. It takes almost fanatical desire to knowingly enter an arrangement where you have a coin flip chance of being permanently ruined.
Video games and porn effectively dampen that desire for many young men.
I think the winners of gen Z are going to be the ones who manage to carve out a decent life out on the fringes of society. They won’t live in huge houses, they will be poor, and will be seen as backwards/evil/dumb/etc. by the mainstream society. However, they will have healthier families and stronger connections with God.
True. Because the fringes of society will be the only places where living decent lives will be possible.
Speaking of cultural observations, here’s something a bit unrelated that I’ve observed both from in life acquaintances and online commenters (though my sample size is still low and I could be wrong!)
Ask a millennial about The Lord of the Rings and you will be told that Frodo and Sam are blatantly a homosexual couple.
Zoomers will instead say “everyone should have a friend as good as Sam” without hinting at the idea of homosexuality.
Not really sure why this happens, but it’s something I’ve seen happen more than a few times.
That’s surprising, since according to survey data, Zoomers are the gayest generation ever.
There’s being gay, and then there’s throwing Trigglypuff-style tantrums that everyone else isn’t. The Zoomers may yet be saved through regular appeals to the queen of Heaven.
According to survey data, the oceans boiled away ten years ago, because climate change, and Biden won the election, because democracy.
I’m basing this on a sampling of around 10 or so zoomers and millennials so I might not be catching onto anything real. But if this is an actual pattern, I have two guesses as to why it might be happening (which aren’t mutually exclusive.)
The first is that millennials see homosexuality as something that needs to be pushed for, and so are proactive in trying to find it in fiction. Zoomers are more apathetic about such things generally, and see homosexuality as just something that’s out there rather than something anyone needs to crusade for.
The second is that zoomers largely don’t have any close friends. At all. But at the same time they are inundated with talk of sexual relations, pornography, etc. So when they see Frodo and Sam’s relationship they experience longing for something that they know they are missing and can recognize that they really don’t want sex, they just want someone to support them. Millennials on the other hand at least had friends growing up and as such don’t realize its value as much.