With "OK boomer," millennials are killing intergenerational resentment

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

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Truth.

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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.

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

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

aha, there it is.

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

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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

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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.

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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…

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

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I wish YTMND.com would have won that space

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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
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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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

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