With "OK boomer," millennials are killing intergenerational resentment

[doctorow]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/30/get-off-my-lawn.html

…

[Purplecat]

@doctorow

our enemy is oligarchy, not demographics

Truth.

[anon61833566]

the guy is complaining that millennial and young people want all these big dreamy child like ideological “un-realities”…says the generation of “Make America Great Again”.

Fucking irony.

[deepeyes]

My husband (boomer) hates when I (Gen X) call him that, so I save it for special occasions.

[bl0tt0]

I dunno, I just can’t get behind the phrase. Can’t quite put my finger on why…

aha, there it is.

[anon21100188]

I’d be willing to bet that there are 5-10 Gen X and older people discussing “OK boomer” for every millennial and younger.

[cannibalpeas]

Unrelated to the content, but the rise of Tik Tok doesn’t surprise me in the least. A few years ago my 13 yo kids and their peers discovered Vine and I was really struck at how big a gap was left when Twitter shuttered it.

[dragonfrog]

Us uncool old folks will shortly defang this particular rejoinder, as we ruin everything, by taking it up and using it in our uncool and subtly incorrect ways.

[KathyPartdeux]

“I’m sympathetic to this snappy rejoinder, but also mindful of Yves Smith’s rebuttal that it supposes that “a 75-year-old Walmart greeter and a 75-year-old billionaire are more alike than different.””

75 year olds are Silent Generation. Apparently - quite silent.

edit:

"And so Ms. Kasman and other teenagers selling merch say that monetizing the boomer backlash is their own little form of protest against a system they feel is rigged. “

Also - teenagers aren’t Millenials - Millenials are young adults to middle aged people now.

Time Marches On!

edit edit:
From Pew:

“Anyone born between 1981 and 1996 ( ages 23 to 38 in 2019) is considered a Millennial , and anyone born from 1997 onward is part of a new generation.Jan 17, 2019”

That’s nearly a year ago - so M’s are 24 to 39 now. The oldest being up to 3x older than a teenager.

[DonatellaNobody]

@doctorow

I’m sympathetic to this snappy rejoinder, but also mindful of Yves Smith’s rebuttal that it supposes that “a 75-year-old Walmart greeter and a 75-year-old billionaire are more alike than different.”

Maybe the 75-year-old Walmart greeter sees himself as a temporarily embarrased 75-year-old billionaire.

[ugh]

@doctorow

I’m sympathetic to this snappy rejoinder, but also mindful of Yves Smith’s rebuttal that it supposes that “a 75-year-old Walmart greeter and a 75-year-old billionaire are more alike than different.”

…

our enemy is oligarchy, not demographics. “OK boomer” is a snappy comeback for generalizations about so-called generations, but like all slogans, it fails to capture some very important nuance.

I don’t think it fails to capture the nuance, it just doesn’t make the nuance explicit: I believe the joke hinges on the fact that that it’s frequently the 75 year-old Trump-voting Walmart greeter who doesn’t recognize that the enemy isn’t demographics but oligarchy.

The slogan is sarcastically expressing “Oh yeah, sure, it’s my demographic that’s the problem, not late-stage capitalism. Riiiight…Just leave me alone, dude.” It’s not blaming boomers for society’s ills, rather it’s rebuking those boomers who don’t realize who is actually responsible for the world’s problems.

[HMSGoose]

@doctorow

The phrase’s origin is apparently in responses to a viral Tiktok clip showing an old white man denouncing youngsters, which spawned thousands of creative, sarcastic responses centered around the phrase “OK boomer.”

which I will never see, because I am old* and still don’t really know how to go back and consume a “point-in-time” modern social media phenomenon. I truly do appreciate the articles and know-your-meme’s that summarize it for those of us in the cheap seats.

*am literally a millennial (on the cusp, '81) with literal grey in my literal beard…

[anon61833566]

You came to post that just because you don’t like Boomer Esiason?

[MrWoods]

I wish YTMND.com would have won that space

[bobtato]

For handy reference, here is a list of people for whom talking about utterly arbitrary “generations” is actually useful, and not just a festival of cretinism:

• Marketers

[cahutchins]

@doctorow

I’m sympathetic to this snappy rejoinder, but also mindful of Yves Smith’s rebuttal that it supposes that “a 75-year-old Walmart greeter and a 75-year-old billionaire are more alike than different.”

In my experience the 75-year-old Walmart greeter is far more likely to blame immigrants and young people for their plight than to blame the billionaires of their cohort. They’re more likely to believe that a border wall would improve their lives than to believe that social safety net reform would help them.

I’m sympathetic to the situation that the left-behind-Boomers find themselves in, but I’m not sympathetic to how they perceive their situation.

[anon36081309]

Possibly, but if he’s always been in that economic bracket, he probably has done less damage to the world than a 30 year old millionaire, unless he’s a Trump voter, too.

[Melz2]

@cahutchins

In my experience the 75-year-old Walmart greeter is far more likely to blame immigrants and young people for their plight than to blame the billionaires of their cohort.

Just add the qualifiers “White, male, cisgender, able-bodied and straight” to your description and I fully agree with you.

The ‘older generations’ all have one thing in common; hating on and criticizing the younger posterity that themselves they created and raised.

[bl0tt0]

Eh, I don’t really feel one way or the other about Boomer Esaison, but that’s been where my mind has been going every time I see the “OK boomer” rejoinder reiterated. Guess it’s just me.

[TheirFeldspars]

Is it OK to prejudge all the members of a particular cohort?