Last week’s post on Xennial Odyssey’s review of the Gen Y anthology evoked fresh accusations that Ys are just Millennials in denial.
This comment from a while back by Generation Y co-author JD Cowan sums up the key differences between Xers, Ys, and Millennials and suggests reasons for those differences.
I do wonder if the children of the Boomers react so differently towards each other because of these vastly different views of what love actually is.
Gen X saw the love of their parents as false and rejected it wholesale, pledging to devote their existence to always Do The Opposite of them and be left alone. Gen Y saw the love of their parents as transactional and when, inexplicably, the transaction stopped they fell into despair and a tailspin into materialism–the only place where transactions work as intended. It helps explain why libertarianism is only popular with these two generations and is a complete non-starter with anyone else.
While this isn’t a political post, JD’s insight about Libertarians deserves a few words. They say Libertarianism is an ideology for people without children. Relative to their elders, that description fits Gens X and Y to a T.
Meanwhile, Millennials were molded to just be Boomers, complete with nonsensical emotionalism, a hate for everything that came before, and a promise of Paradise once the obstacles are ground into dust. These are the children they always wanted to begin with, which is why they appreciate and support them the most, though it is a narcissistic affection that is expended whenever the Millennial needs aid dealing with reality (student debt) or questioning the programming even slightly.
JD’s on the money here, too. Some people find the Boomers’ love-hate relationship with Millennials confusing. But it makes perfect sense when you understand that Boomers set out to make generational clones of themselves, succeeded, and saw themselves reflected accurately.
So Millennials are to Boomers what mirrors are to Freddy Krueger.
Why don’t Gen Ys like being grouped in Millennials? Because they are part of two different worlds. You might as well question why they aren’t grouped with Gen X. They have just many differences with them.
That right there is what makes attempts to lump Gen Y in with the Millennials so suspect. Ys are a lot more like Xers than Millennials – or any other generation. Yes, there are real differences between Xers and Ys, but they are differences of degree that represent alternate coping strategies.
On the other hand, the divisions between Gen Y and the Millennials are differences of kind. Which is what you’d expect when two generations come of age on opposite sides of a major societal paradigm shift.
As our other esteemed co-author David V. Stewart points out, Ys had analog childhoods and now have digital adulthoods. Millennials have no memories of a pre-digital world. And no memories of a pre-9/11 world, either. Raising kids under such different sets of circumstances is going to get you different outcomes.
But the current thing is to conflate Ys and Millennials, which is how you know it’s a Madison Avenue psyop.
Speaking of which …
Keep in mind, these are all children of the same generation, and yet they are all so vastly different. If you need any proof that Boomers were the most psyop’d group to ever walk the planet, this should be enough.
The other day, a close relation asked me why the Boomers are the way they are.
My reply went along the lines of “Imagine your dad went off to war as a teenager and saw such horrors that he just wanted to live in a Truman Show like simulation of the American Dream. And everybody was so grateful he’d saved the world that they all agreed to reorder society to make him comfortable. ‘You want a cushy middle manager job? OK, we’ll invent it. You want free college to pay for the MBA we just invented as a qualification for the plum job we invented? You got it! You want a doting housewife who’ll have a gin and tonic waiting when you get home and dinner on the table after you unwind? OK, Rosie will hang up her rivet gun.’
“And the last thing those triumphant GIs wanted intruding on their emotional isolation bubble was a bunch of screaming kids. But American ingenuity fixed that, too! Here comes TV to raise your kids for you.
“So imagine you have a dad who’s pretty much checked out, and instead you’re given a shiny, glowing friend who tells you how awesome you are every waking hour.
“And then when you hit adolescence and you’re confused because your dad never inducted you into manhood, he tries the same wide-scale social engineering that soothed him to placate you.”
The latter half of the 20th century till now has been a vicious cycle of parents not bothering to – or not knowing how to – raise their own kids turning to technical solutions.
And due credit to the Libertarians we roasted earlier, one thing they’ve been proven right about is state-mandated schooling.
Don’t let state schools raise your kids.
Don’t let TV or YouTube raise your kids.
And don’t pay people who hate you.
“So imagine you have a dad who’s pretty much checked out, and instead you’re given a shiny, glowing friend who tells you how awesome you are every waking hour.”
A not-so-subtle hint of this is in the stepdad Bill from The Sandlot (touchstone movie for X and Y). My wife (Y) and I (X) both assume Bill is a war vet who’s seen some serious things he doesn’t want to talk about. He can’t relate to Smalls because 1) stepson and 2) emotionally distant and the Greatest tendency to compartmentalize and lock it away.
There’s a lot going on below the surface in that movie.
As an early Y, I use the Sandlot to show what I recall life was like growing up in 80’s suburbia. When some of my friends’ kids…Zoomers…watch said film, they are bothered by how different it is from what they experienced….and how quickly it had changed too.
That’s a hopeful sign.
And good on you for showing them that film. Our generation’s task is to keep the memory of a more normal America alive.
I heard an interesting comment from a Zoomer about why they go in for 80’s/90’s nostalgia movies (as opposed to Millennials, who only get into that when corporations tell them to.)
He said: “All we know is that the present is wrong. We’re not sure if the way out is the future or the past. That’s why we especially like 80’s sci-fi, because it’s both the future and the past at the same time.”
That is an incredible quote that pretty much nails it.
Smalls’ dad liked baseball enough to grab a Babe Ruth autograph. Why did his son have to learn about baseball from the neighbors?
It’s almost an inversion od Field of Dreams.
The Sandlot is a perfect distillation of what late 20th century childhood was like, which is why it was so popular among every generation that grew up in that time span. Smalls was basically everyone in some aspect.
The “learning about life solely through your daily experiences with your friends because Mom and Dad are busy” genre is one bleed over from Gen X to Y. This is a hallmark of even such things as Goosebumps and Are You Afraid of the Dark? and was a common trope up until the back half of the ’90s. If you’re doing a Gen X/Y story like my own Y Signal, this aspect is unavoidable to making it ring true.
By the time of the Millennials you actually see parents heavily involved in these stories, but usually to an obsessive and harmful degree.
As for Zoomers, well, I’ve yet to see anything made specifically for them. They’re growing up on nothing but endless revisions and reboots of properties made nearly half a century before they were born. And with the current Last Generation growing up in post-lockdown world I can’t even imagine what could ring true to them.
That was one aspect of “Y Signal” I caught onto right away. It resonated hard.
Thank you for coming up with the Gen Y. I have talked to many Millennials and find it hard to relate. They don’t know and don’t care what came before.
For example, when you talk about 9/11 they have no emotions on the topic and don’t know the significant of the attack. One has trouble explaining the importance of cash vs relaying on digital, or why we should be worry about things like the national debt, mass immigration wars and especially giving up rights to the government.
One has no trouble with at least explaining any of these topics with Gen X or Y but baby boomers and millennials their beliefs that the old sucks and processing is the way forward is frustrating. Hopefully the price increasing will shape Gen Z to rejecting to the cultural garbage that Millennials are embracing and turn them to the Lord Jesus
That turning of Gen Z is already happening to a large extent. While Left-Wing Zs are frighteningly left-wing, a large and growing contingent is turning hard right (there are a good deal more conservative Zoomers now than there were conservative Boomers in the 60s and 70s, for instance). Not only that, they’re generally going much harder right than earlier generations would have contemplated. Zoomer men are much more likely to take a hardline stance against feminism, for instance, outright rejecting it instead of rejecting only the most recent, most radical wave of it. Zoomers are also far more negative about democracy as a whole than any prior generation, which makes sense since given that they’ve seen what remains of the American system fall to pieces around them, but still is a big change from prior generations.
Glad you find the category helpful. I can’t take credit for it. All I’m doing is recovering a once-common idea that was cynically memory holed.
Here’s a question that separates the two generations (similar to your observations):
-How did you feel when you learned that corporations and the government track your purchases and nearly all of your online activity?
Gen Y: It completely changed my worldview. I’m still having trouble accepting the idea.
Millennial: What do you mean learn? Everyone knows that’s just how the world works.