Huge difference in colleges today is that all of students AND administration AND faculty are willing censor and punish the non-woke. I'm sure there are anti-woke folk teaching, and studying - but they're smart enough to be quiet, or to lie. You're sort of not allowed to not give a shit.
This upcoming "woke generation" will have anti-woke and don't care folks, too.
Can confirm about the trifecta of college wokism, it's really weird they are all on the same page. And when I say 'all' I don't mean everyone in each group. Students are probably the most saturated, being very primed for such nonsense. Faculty are not far behind, mostly due to wanting solidarity with their students causes. Then Admin, the least fanatical bunch but holding most of the bureaucratic power.
One thing that is not mentioned much, but is a rather large contributing factor, is the economics of modern universities. Gone are the days of healthy public funding, and what's filled the gap are two things mostly: increased tuition and corporate grants.
The increased tuition means competition for parental dollars is now very fierce. That means most universities simply can't afford to turn many away, and thus are very unwilling to piss off any students. Most students think it's their unerring righteousness that is making them invulnerable to backlash from wokism, but it has little to do with that. It's mostly because the admin doesn't want to lose their tuition money.
Corporate grants are now a fully normalized and expected revenue stream for universities. As such, corporations and businesses now have a lot of power to demand their money gets used in a certain way. And since we all know most companies are going whole hog on this social justice stuff (because they too don't want to lose any revenue), they can demand certain SJ stipulations in their grants. Mostly this is light window-dressing, but it both insulates the corp. from most negative criticism, as well as letting the university use it for marketing purposes.
This woke stuff may have started with 90's academic theory-crafting, but it's staying power right now, at least at colleges, has a lot to do with an old and simple concept: greed.
Weird. By a strange coincidence just this morning I was thinking that all of the non-stop pressure to "change the world" that is heaped on whoever is young at the moment produces anxiety immediately and frustration and/or rage when nothing much changes. Does that contribute to the poisonous political environment?
The other thing is that all the Millennial hatred for the Boomers seems ironic given that the Boomers are the Woodstock generation. Was there anything more revolutionary given the context of the times than the hippies? By contrast the changes from Millennials and Gen Z are far less consequential.
The sexual revolution? The protest movements? The revolt against prior cultural norms as evidenced by massive changes in music, film, fashion, literature, etc.?
I'm not trying to suggest that these changes were deliberate. Plus a lot of the side effects (like probably a massive crime wave) were negative. But in terms of what society looked like before and after how can you deny that the Boomers/hippies/counter-culture types were transformational?
Interesting you bring that up. I was just rereading “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” last night and nothing, IMO, illuminates better how primed the hippie generation was to become Trumpers than Didion’s title essay: a bunch of self involved, conspiracy minded, “mainstream” media-distrustful, education-skeptical kids grew up to be adults who were the same.
Of course, which is why we shouldn’t be surprised when every generation ends up the same way. Can you imaging what millenials will be like as the oldest generation? All of their worst instincts (or maybe best instincts, doesn’t matter) channeled into what serves their interests as retirees rather than people just embarking on life?
Enlightened self interest is a constant I think. But the conspiracy minded distrust of authority that seems to have infected pretty much every generation since the Boomers? Yet another mark of their legacy.
I actually think a lot is ascribed to the Boomers that should be ascribed the the Silent Generation. Most of the big names of the 60s were born in the 30s - Abby Hoffman, Bobby Seale, Gloria Steinem.
Yeah, the social and cultural changes that occurred in the 60s are not to be understated - it was genuinely a big bang and 1959 and 1969 look like different universes. But similar things happened across the world and I think you can see the changes in the context of 'an enormous demographic of young people were entering a post-war world with a level of broad prosperity new to human history'. The boomers were people who happened to be born in that context, the millennials are people who were born in another context, gen z yet another. These are not teams that need to be scored for change-the-world points.
I am not trying to argue that the Boomers should get credit for anything--it's not like they had a five year, ten point plan and executed on it. Demographic change is just a massive tidal wave and individual humans are just picked up and swept along with it. But I think that dovetails nicely with Mr. deBoer has written: change is largely outside the sphere of human volition.
our general discourse about generations could be so 1000x more sensible if we rediscovered the distinction between "generation" and "age."
i long for the days of discourse about "teens," "twenty-somethings," "thirty-somethings," etc. i don't really understand why so many ~culture writers~ dropped those in favor of "Zoomer," "Millennial," "Gen Xer," "Boomer," etc. well, I mean, I do; the latter terms have a powerful sense of branding about them. but still, it's stupid and leads us in analytical circles such as you describe.
I don't have any real evidence for this, but it seems to me to reflect the more current ideas around identitarianism: categorize everything, and make that category a part of its essential definition, then use a ridiculous and false overgeneralization of that category for a political or rhetorical purpose.
You're referring to the distinction between one's birth year and one's age. Each can affect you in its own way. Demographers refer to the effects of the first as cohort effects. And to the effects of the second as life-cycle effects. Because my birth year was a long time ago, I remember guys who quit high school as soon as it was legal for them to do so (at age 16) and went to work in the paper mills in benefitted jobs that paid more than $50,000 a year in 2021 dollars. Because of my age, my back hurts and I'm going to pop a fat-acting Tylenol right now.
Teens, twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings are much narrower ranges than zoomer, millenial, gen Xer and boomer though. That's why the generation labels stay, because they're broader. If you use ages then you're talking about when early-forty-somethings-to-late-fifty-somethings were early-twenty-somethings-to-late-thirty-somethings and that's just inconvenient and confusing.
what's so "inconvenient and confusing" exactly? i can imagine conversations where we want to distinguish between e.g. the twenty-somethings of one generation vs the twenty-somethings of another generation. but a lot of conversations don't actually require that distinction -- bc the scope of the analysis just isn't that comprehensive — and in fact those conversations suffer from an over-determination to draw it where history or reality don't quite support it. over broadness can be confusing, too.
Regarding Gen X and generational differences: FB served up a discussion to me a while back where a Millennial writer was arguing that Gen X shouldn't get a pass, that they were just as guilty of the Boomers of squandering their opportunity to change the world. Somebody, presumably an X-er, responded with "Awwww, that's so cute that they think that we give a fuck what they think". And that was the end of that.
That response warms my heart. And this is why, despite being arbitrarily designated a Millennial (albeit an older one), I'll always be a Gen-X'er on the inside.
Most of us are imitating our parents even when we think we are in open rebellion against them. Pretty much everyone post WWII has been reenacting the late 60s hippie "don't trust anyone over 30" youth radicalism and failings in the exact same ways. Every subsequent radical youth movement has merely been variations on that theme. It's a little like that often repeated Marx quote "First as tragedy, then as farce." We still live on the world the Boomers made, are still playing by their rules and understand things in their terms whether we admit it or not.
Everything iny experience of the current left is that they have no actionable plans to run society differently, and just have radical slogans and obnoxious, pious posturing instead. Everyone just humors them long enough to get them to shut up and then just tries to quietly get on with their lives, correctly understanding, I think, that eventually it will all burn itself out and go away.
The focus on the saving power of a given generation/minority has also smacked of "no, it's the people who are wrong" to me.
Is your political movement failing? Well, obviously it's because the country has the wrong sort of people. It's definitely not because you failed to explain your ideas, or failed to account for the needs of diverse stakeholders, or failed to strategize and compromise to gain allies, or just flat-out ran a bad campaign--no, no! It's because *those people* suck. They're selfish assholes. But good news! They'll all be dead soon, or outbred by Hispanics, or whatever.
There's an unpleasant eliminationist flavor to it. While I think it's likely a universal human desire to want your (perceived) political rivals to simply go away, shit like "the boomers will be dead soon and then we'll make utopia" is not the sort of sentiment that ought to be tolerated in polite company.
The nicest way I ever heard to put it was: the kind of people who talk about revolutionary generations have never gotten over the failure of 1968, and refuse to even think that maybe the attempted "revolutions" of 1968 just had bad politics. You can't even talk to them about 1917 or 1945 without it all turning into a damned LARP.
The 60's are also massively exaggerated. Most of the people out protesting had older brothers or cousins or whatever who stayed in their towns and then voted for Nixon. It wasn't like all of that generation was in on it.
As a GenXer (aka the forgotten generation—who grew up hearing about Boomers, Boomers, Boomers, until the constant media drumbeat changed to Millennials, Millennials, Millennials, which only faded once everyone agreed that they were hopelessly out of style with their side-parts and their skinny jeans: join the club of aging and therefore irrelevant and worthless women, ladies!) of course I had to click — but it turns out not to be about us at all, really! ;)
Even so, great point. Yes, no generation was ever going to save us, and especially the Zoomers aren’t coming to save us. Not only are the Zoomers not coming to save us — the Zoomers barely leave their homes to mingle among themselves, to learn to drive, to sneak off to get drunk or high, to have sex — all the things that earlier generations did for fun, before fizzling out into middle age. We have kept these kids so sheltered and infantilized that we send them off to college now like so many 10-year-olds. They conduct very busy social lives on their phones, punctuated with occasional get-togethers where they all announce how “awkward” they are. A bunch of middle schoolers in adult bodies.
They appear to be, at once, both the most acutely unhappy and the most passive generation. It may be a stereotype that describes only a few (as the hippies or the WTO disrupters or the Occupyers described only a few) but Zoomers have a tendency to embrace the safetyism of their youth, to wait to be told when and where to go, to appeal to authority to save them, to want to be saved from discomfort or “being triggered.” You will see them spurred to action, not as previous generations who hoped to improve the lot of the masses, but when they have a complaint to lodge on their own behalf.
Or maybe I’ve just become a very uncharitable old lady, made more so by the fact that her generation never had its moment in the media sun.
Coming next week: a diatribe on why you should all get off my lawn.
PS I don’t hate or blame the Zoomers. I love them, feel sorry for them, and think my generation adopted some
particularly shitty (though well-intentioned) parenting practices, and the terrible parenting (hovering, over scheduling, infantilizing) was made worse by smartphones, which tended to make the Zoomers more passive and tame.
" Not only are the Zoomers not coming to save us — the Zoomers barely leave their homes to mingle among themselves, to learn to drive, to sneak off to get drunk or high, to have sex — all the things that earlier generations did for fun, before fizzling out into middle age. We have kept these kids so sheltered and infantilized that we send them off to college now like so many 10-year-olds. They conduct very busy social lives on their phones, punctuated with occasional get-togethers where they all announce how “awkward” they are. A bunch of middle schoolers in adult bodies."
I hope that we can get a discussion going here about this precise thing. I read this all the time, and it makes total sense to me. I can see how teens and twenty-somethings could totally end up like that. The thing is I'm not sure I know anyone who is actually like that.
There's the giant caveat that I don't know any teens or twenty-somethings, not really. They're all either distant family members or some of the kids of older friends (my kids are very young). But from what I observe from a distance and through hearing about their lives is that they seem to be doing more or less the same shit that I'd expect. There's a much larger focus on video games among the boys and social media among the girls than there used to be, but they're going to bars, and meeting people, and getting set up on dates, and internet dating continues not to work so they give up on it. Just anecdotally I don't see these problems - actually, come to think of it, the 20-something set I know of are getting married YOUNGER than my generation, which seems like a good thing.
I guess I'm saying that I'd like to get an idea of how much this is actually happening, compared to what it looks like when we interpret a graph, if that makes sense. It's believable, but I just haven't seen it.
The Zoomers (and to some extent the younger Millennials) do seem much “younger” to me, more infantilized than the earlier generations of kids, but I could just be seeing that through the lens of getting older myself. But… I think there’s something real here.
Of course “kids today” do all the same things we did, but less so. Of course they still date— but they date less and the number of people I see in any kind of serious /meaningful relationship has decreased. I don’t mean that teenagers and college kids used to find their life partners, far from it. But they used to pair up and try out relationships, instead of just texting, hanging out, and hooking up and being dissatisfied.
The idea of FWB which popped up about 20 years ago, and which I was sure would immediately go away, has persisted, and while I tend to be closer to the girls/women in my extended family than the boys/men, so I can’t say what it’s been like for the guys, this has had a negative effect overall on girls/women. There’s nothing “morally wrong” with casual sex but there’s something that seems (to the girls/women I’ve talked to) really unsatisfying about it (and maybe it has to do with the fact that sexual satisfaction is easier for women if they have a partner who’s taken the time to learn what they like?) There’s also the issue of the effect of ubiquitous (often violent/degrading) porn being how guys think sex “is” or should be. I’ve heard stories that shock me, and I’m not too shockable.
Maybe not unrelated to all that: Kids talk a lot less about “being in love”— which was always a sweet thing kids did, even if most relationships broke up. They still go on outings and party —but definitely go on outings and party less. Some still drive—but fewer do. I definitely haven’t noticed the early marriage thing you mentioned. I even see the younger Millennials less likely to have successful dating/marriage relationships.
Then there’s research on trends, which also says these things are happening— less in-person interaction, less drinking, fewer relationships, less sex.
A significant decrease does not mean “no one is doing any of these things anymore” but I do think it’s enough to be noticeable and that in itself is a big enough change to be alarming (in my view).
Could just be my POV and who I know. My POV comes from a large multigenerational family (and their friends) with people of all ages, and just watching this stuff evolve and change over time.
Part of the prolonged childhood and dependency is how we’re raising them differently now. Part of it is the convenience of electronics. (If God forbid I ever had to date again, I’d be online too no doubt. It’s the environment, not anything different about the kids themselves.) And part of it is they don’t have the easy tools to make an independent life for themselves. Jobs with good wages aren’t guaranteed even if you go to college. (You need a certain amount of money to save up and get a beater car, to buy beer, to get your own place.)
To hang out with peers with any kind of privacy, the kids in my generation had to be more independent and go places where the adults weren’t. Now they can sit in their own living rooms and have a private conversation. But something is lost.
This makes me gloomy, because it's definitely believable. One thing that I didn't think to mention is this "hanging out virtually" thing is HUGE and seems to me like a disaster waiting to happen. Teenage children, particularly the boys, seem to do this way more than hanging out together physically. They play video games for hours, which fine, we did that too, but we did it in the same room along with beer and pot and a car outside and girls coming by sometimes. Now it's way more sterile; "convenient" in a bad way.
Yes, the hanging out, but not in real life, it's very different -- and here's another thing! (Wow I'm loving the conversation but I need to go do some work after this. I'm leaving, I swear.)
Another thing -- all the gender identity stuff is definitely ...DEFinitely reinforced by the fact that you can be anyone you want online. People see they get different kinds of attention depending on how they present themselves -- not just with gender, but on a variety of dimensions. So for kids the temptation is strong: why not just "make it up" so you get the sort of reactions and attention you want? That's very, very alluring to people who haven't decided who they really are yet. I think a lot of them come to prefer their "false self" -- their online persona -- to their real self. And they haven't even lived yet. It's just sad. Real people are good enough, but they don't know it, because they're competing in their minds with online personas, many of which are false, or if not false, not fully dimensional. I feel pretty strongly about this.
So it's true -- the boys are playing video games and not getting "out there" -- but also they're finding ways to be likeable that might not even be possible in real life. It probably makes them like themselves less. Then it becomes a self-perpetuating thing, to stay online where it's easier and nicer.
I know I've said this before (somewhere on here) -- but I had a male avatar on Twitter for many years, and wow, I see in retrospect how much "he" was treated with respect, politeness, and deference. I just thought it was because I made sense (ha ha), or that people liked what I had to say (ha ha). Then when I decided to create a substack as a woman (which I am, and I always thought that was super-obvious, even when I had a male avatar), I created a female Twitter avatar to go along with it, and wow, the number of nasty rude comments "she" has received in a couple months (and the number of creepy DMs, and for gosh sakes, it's an avatar of freakin' Mme de Pompadour, who turned 300 years old on December 29!) is more than I ever received as a man in years and years. I received few rude or dismissive comments, none of the "shut up"s, none of the personal insults, and zero creepy DMs as a man.
I get it. In real life I’m a nightmare, not the charming polymath y’all have come to know and love.
My teen has a close trans friend and a close non-binary friend. I worry that the very online-ness of the teen/young adult life is leading to more complex disassociations from our real human bodies and interactions. Today’s post by Rhyd Wildermuth was painful but important. https://rhyd.substack.com/p/trapped-in-the-woke-ideal
Edited to add: it’s important to get how truly online the roots of this is; when I asked my kid if there’s any bullying or anything he says “no. Nobody really cares.” The bullying is mostly internal, of the self. Reinforced by like minded online “communities.”
Millennials and zoomers lose their virginity at a much later age compared to Xers and Boomers. They also have fewer sexual partners at a comparable age. They do less drinking and drugging and they are far less likely to move for work.
You can still get laid in the back seat of your car. And all you need for a kegger is some dark patch of the woods where the cops won't bother you.
But what you really, really need is friends that won't take pictures of you when you're wasted and plaster them all over FB/Instagram/whatever. That's the part that worries me.
My connection to the Zoomer world is my sister, almost a decade younger than me. (*Technically* we’re both Millennials, her on the very youngest end, but it absolutely feels like there’s a generation gap between us.) I also have friends older than me with teenage kids, in several different parts of the country. Some of the differences do just feel like another way of saying “younger people are in a different stage of their lives than people older than them,” and I agree with you that the stereotype doesn’t pan out in individual reality.
I do feel I’ve observed in Zoomers a lack of will to disconnect from the family home and parental oversight/control, in a way that stands out to me. That doesn’t always translate into being a helicoptered recluse - my sister is in med school, has an involved dating life and always had a wide social circle, and most teens I know are totally out and about with their actual friends all the time. But it feels like they’re more comfortable being under parental
observation all the time, that they willingly self-report to their parents everything going on in their lives and expect their parents to be, if not stepping in for them, emotionally invested in all their issues. Think teens confiding in their moms every detail of their dating lives (a thought that makes the memory of my teenage self physically recoil in horror), twenty-somethings being expected to hang out with their parents and their parents’ friends and actually wanting to do this, feeling more comfortable relying financially on parents longer rather than having the “I’d rather live on bread and water in a rat hole for five years than not feel independent!” mentality that felt to me more normal growing up.
This isn’t always incompatible with having an independent life and normal maturity - I don’t think it necessarily makes them childish, even if to my mind much of it is associated with childishness and foreign to my experience. I can’t draw any sweeping conclusions about what this means for their political engagement; mostly they all just uncritically share the politics that float around in the water they swim in and don’t question them or how they got there. But I agree that reports of their helplessness are in some cases overstated, and maybe sometimes misdirected.
-- but not about cancel culture theme. More that -- this young woman has a yearning for romantic connection that she's able to describe, publicly, in a way that I found disarming. I root for her and her quest for companionship, and hope that someone encourages her to keep seeking that out, because career gets old, fast.
But it also felt very ... young. Like, when I watch PCU or Swingers or some other seminal coming-of-age film, from a decade or two ago, everyone's doing older stuff. They seem older, they connect in a more mature way, they have harder problems. Even Honey I Shrunk the Kids, which I watched last week. Amy and Russ Jr. have the cadence of a much older couple. And my younger cousins -- 16, 18, 23 -- all remarkably close to their mother, oversharers, all, to an extent that would have been unbelievable 20 years ago. I'm not sure what to attribute this to, exactly.
Thanks for finally prompting me to learn who West Elm Caleb is, I was starting to think I should keep track of how long I managed to live in ignorance.
I do think The Kids are way, WAY more comfortable with vulnerability and emotional sharing than Millennials are (though I think my generation both picked some of it up from them and maybe were the influence that made it stronger in them in the first place). To me, my sister’s friend groups don’t just feel close, they feel like they’re in constant therapy with each other, and they absolutely expect that of each other. What younger people in my workplace are comfortable sharing about their feelings and personal lives among coworkers occasionally makes my hair stand on end. It flies in the face of my opposing sense that they’re more disconnected from each other - physically, maybe, sometimes, but emotionally? They’re always in each other’s pockets. The idea of *not* sharing something the instant it happens is unthinkable. They hold
conference calls about all of their everyday struggles.
I don’t even think their connections with each other are necessarily bad, just very different from mine; that way of engaging is not appealing to me. But then, my older German relatives find it deeply embarrassing when their 35-year-old coworkers use informal pronouns and first names with each other, so. In terms of a cause, I think it’s too pat to just say “social media,” but I do think that’s a major factor in the language they speak with each other, especially the proliferation of therapeutic language to frame all human interactions. But I don’t think it’s the sole cause - maybe just an amplifier for a tendency that existed as a result of something else.
I would agree that social media is both part of the cause and an amplifier, but not the only factor. Authors like Haidt and Lukianoff claim 'safetyism' in childhood is another huge factor, which I tend to agree. But certainly there are more? I'd be interested to hear what you think those may be.
Unless of course we're all suffering from that age-old 'back in my day' mentality, but I highly doubt it. I mean, everyone older than 40 can't all be having the same bad dream, can we?
Man, I’ve been turning this over all afternoon. I’m understanding the question as, “Why does it feel like adults are, in some nebulous way, younger now?”, as articulated by Sean.
I’m inclined to say that the push for universal college attendance, and the incentives it creates for colleges, is another big factor, though again not the only one. I think college directly after high school, in the form college now takes for most middle-class-and-up kids, extends adolescence. I loved college and did great at it, and I think it extended *my* adolescence. When I moved right from undergrad to law school, for genuinely the first time in my life I was expected to work with people who had actually been in the workforce. The difference between a professional-school student who’s moving into a new career and one who’s never had a career, even if they’re close in age, is enormous. And it’s not that there were zero people coming in from prior careers at my state school, but they mostly studied on different tracks - undergrad programs are mainly tailored to adolescent post-high-school students, there’s greater separation than in law school, where you’re all in the same pot. Even if they work hard in college, I think a ton of kids who do the academic track with no pauses do not look outside their bubble to a life defined by non-academic demands until much later than kids have historically.
I think the greater ubiquity of the experience of working toward going to college, not for college’s own sake but because you *have* to, has had a big effect on culture, but not really for any reason having to do with culture on campuses. To go to most colleges, American kids have to accept greater financial dependence on their parents for longer, whether because they’re helping pay their way or they’re taking on debt. The perks the colleges add to draw students are tailored toward fun, comfort, and convenience. And kids start learning that their life is pointing toward that milestone, that thing they *have* to do, starting in about sixth grade. It unites a class of kid, the assumption they’re going to go to college, and the accompanying knowledge of what behavior will ensure and what will endanger their ability to do it, as handed down by their parents.
I’m a middle-class suburbanite and all the Youths I know are, too. I’d love to know if the cultural shifts we’ve all been talking about here apply to less wealthy kids, those who go to community college for associates’ degrees or vocational training, or who put off college entirely until they can pay their own way or never go at all.
I am actually an older “zoomer” myself and I can kind of see this with me, though I am more of an introvert personally. Can’t speak for anyone else though.
I remember when social media was a new thing and people were fretting about what would happen to kids that passed out drunk at some party and were subsequently photographed. Those pictures would survive on the internet forever, available for inspection by future employers, colleges, etc.
It appears that for young people of a certain socio economic class the solution is to just avoid drunken keggers and premarital sex. I am not sure if that is a positive development.
I mean, I'm sure the vast majority of people aren't like me? I think so at least.
Hot take, but I think this has something to do with a lot of the weird sexual identity stuff. People aren't dating/having sex, so they get in their own made and say they actually have this really strange sexuality/gender situation. I pulled this nonsense for a bit, earnestly telling people I was "asexual." That was a cope.
I think if you infantilize a generation of kids and prevent them from unsupervised life (and I mean not just drinking and sleeping around as teens and young adults, but unsupervised play from a young age, or walking to the store by themselves) then you derail some developmental stuff in unhelpful ways.
I definitely think the hyperfocus on gender/sexuality is in some way a means to compensate for the fact that kids are not living life in certain ways like they used to.
And part of the gender /sexuality thing comes from kids being exposed to porn and information about sex at really _young_ ages and feeling pressured to know “what they are” —as when literal middle schoolers are declaring their genders or sexualities— like: you might wait a bit, kids, and find out through trial and error— oh except you’ll never be out from under your parents’ watchful eye till you leave home.
Once gender/sexuality enters the convo, it becomes orders of magnitude more complicated to figure out what is happening and why. But it’s messed up.
That's true, I was also thinking of it this way. I'm a weight lifter. I consider myself a weight lifter because I lift weights. I don't consider myself a runner because I don't run anymore. Weight lifter and runner aren't identities, they're something I physically do (or don't do) in the material world.
If you're a man dating a woman, you might say, oh I'm straight. I'm straight because I'm a man dating a women. Another man might be dating a man. He would say, I'm gay because I'm a man dating a man, etc.
But if there's no material reality; if no one is actually *doing* any of the sex/dating stuff, it just becomes something you can make up in your head.
I finished a book the other day, Fiona and Jane, about two Taiwanese American friends and their coming of age/struggles with relationships - your basic stuff. One of the women was depicted as dating both women and men. A complaint I saw in the goodreads reviews I read of the book was that Jane, the woman who dated men and women, never described herself as bi- or pansexual. In fact, the label and word used on herself seemed MORE important to them in representation than the actual depiction of a woman who slept with both women and men. Here’s a specific quote:
“Another thing that annoyed me was how the author depicts queerness. I do not like the avoidance of words such as bi/pan/and queer. These are not bad words.”
No they are not bad words, but they are re not magic words either, that sanctify the character being described. I found it interesting that a person would struggle to relate to a character who is living her life in a clearly “non-straight” way because she did not label herself using specific words.
I think you've got this backwards. I was gay long before I touched another man's dick, while there is nothing inherent to one's person that identifies one as a weight-lifter.
You're a man dating a woman because you're straight. You're not straight because you're a man dating a woman.
One of the hosts of the Wider Lens podcast once suggested that for many of her teenage therapy clients dealing with gender/sexuality, declaring an identity was the first real pushback against their parents they ever managed. I think about that a lot - I wonder sometimes if the encouragement in the culture for parents to unquestioningly accept any identity will eventually lead to it being “uncool”. If it’s not getting you laid and it’s not actually helping you create a sense of self outside your family’s expectations, why bother?
Yes I remember hearing that exact thing! (I also listen to that podcast.) It's an interesting thought, and possibly true. Although for a lot of the rah-rah very accepting and affirming parents, their kids are going down a medical pathway as quickly as (or even more quickly than) some kids whose parents refuse to agree to medicalization.
If it is true, at least for some kids, it's a way to assert independence and autonomy ("no one but me knows my gender; I am who I say I am; I want these medical interventions"), then it puts parents in a difficult position, especially those parents who are familiar with the lack of evidence that this medicalization is a good idea, and a growing amount of evidence that it's a bad idea. If you keep your kid unmedicalized till 18, thinking / hoping they'll grow out of it, they'll just march into the nearest Planned Parenthood (which should be renamed Genderz R Us) or their university's clinic, the minute they turn 18. That'll really show mom and dad what's what.
It's a huge problem -- and the gender issue in particular is made much worse and harder to grapple with because all of society bought into it at once, on the premise that trans is the new gay, and they are the most oppressed ever, and the thing to do is encourage people to "explore gender" -- which would be great if it weren't all tied up in expensive health-compromising, sometimes irreversible medical and surgical treatments. So the media, schools, and general public are buying into a narrative that leads to bad physical and mental health outcomes for a lot of kids.
"I pulled this nonsense for a bit, earnestly telling people I was "asexual." That was a cope."
I pulled a bit of the same nonsense cynically, as "ace" was more efficient for fending off advances than "well ackshully, my religious philosophy is..." People are motivated to "prove" they're so desirable they can overcome your religious inhibitions. They're less keen to attempt inflaming the desire of someone who presumably doesn't have any.
That said, if I had a choice between losing sexual sensation and losing my hearing — or heck, even my ability to do basic calculus — I'd choose losing sexual sensation. I'm happily married and wouldn't want to doom my spouse to a loveless marriage, but at the individual level, sex just isn't that important to who I am or how I express passion. I don't *feel* like this makes me all that weird, but perhaps it does.
I guess one could argue that the positive drive to make “visible” and “normalize” people with “nonstandard” identities has contributed to the labeling of the sexual kaleidoscope down to its component atoms. It’s probably not all that uncommon for sexually mature adults to be less obsessed with performing their sexuality, because for most of us sex *isn’t* the most important relational thing once we’re partnered up.
So true. The Boomers just dominated everything until one day it was all about Millennials. Our time in the sun was like ten minutes long and I must have been still asleep.
One of the most impactful qualities that makes for a great parent and a shitty revolutionary: stability. When people inevitably give in to the desire to have a family (a lives-in-the-same-house, multigenerational family, not a framily of comrades) they start to see the merits of middle class life, even lower middle class.
Yeah my paternal grandma is a mess and if she lived with my parents they’d all be dead from some kind of murder suicide situation (though I can’t pinpoint who would be who in that scenario.) I hope she doesn’t read this newsletter comments section.
We live on the same block as my wife's parents - 5 min walk away is great. But leaving home requires the young adult to become more independent & self-sufficient, and more able, in practice, to take care of themselves. Our first and third kids were more independent. Our second is still a student, living at home, getting a PhD (in nuclear engineering).
Leaving for college can contrast with the kids living at home.
Now I think of "Captain Jack" by Billy Joel:
"Well you're twenty-one and still your mother makes your bed.
It's worth noting why exactly that is. Money and a relatively deregulated labor market. I'm not sure all those Greek multi-generational houses would survive American or Swiss affluence.
It's hard to overstate how nice having your own space is.
I've even been searching for a house where my mom could move in with me if she wants/needs, but where we'd still have our own space. They're not cheap.
My wife's parents are fantastic grandparents and go above and beyond the call of duty. While we don't live with or next to them, we live close enough that we have that extended support group. But my kids would never have had that kind of support from my parents.
It’s so true. I protested in my 20s, but once I became a parent, it was over. We took the baby to one protest early in the Trump administration (protesting family separation at the border) and he got overheated, and we couldn’t stay long. In 2020, there was no way I’d take a toddler to those protests. My child needs me to be at home, just like he needs me to work so we can afford rent and his future tuition. Now when I feel moved to contribute to some cause, I just send money.
Yes! It’s a definite shift that happens. Trying to remember if I brought my kids to any protest… I think no. I made them sit through a few political speeches though. Probably turned them off politics forever.
Same. I’ve never taken my kids to a Jars of Clay concert, which used to be my form of protest. Now we just watch Cardi B music videos on YouTube. At home, as a family.
I'll be very interested to see Freddie's writing evolve if he ever gets responsible enough to be married and have kids. (I have 4, 1+3/4 grandkids, due in March). Revolution and burning everything down is terrible, terrible for kids.
Even ending a marriage is terrible for kids - and too many still do it. Tho the rate is going down. Tho the rate of unmarried parents is going up - it seems an unhappy marriage that endures causes fewer problems than divorce.
You talkin' EUGENICS? Freddie posted about that just last week.
"all human behavior is ultimately boiled down to genetics." Absolutely not.
There IS a huge genetic influence, and especially limits. Fast XX women swimmers are NOT able to swim as fast as a fast XY trans q'woman. But that's at the extreme. If you don't practice swimming, most who do practice will be faster than you.
Maybe, probably, genetics has an influence on how much you enjoy swimming, or studying. But what you choose to do, like read & comment on cool rude blogs, is what you practice. Including sex. You know that married folk practice sex a lot more than unmarried folk, right?
"we unfortunately get to view the behaviors that are being selected against" - This is very, very true.
Still, it's not clear that highly intelligent, hard working college grad women who have no children are behaving and contributing optimally to the next generation.
Hmm, I'm not sure why you think having children is an essential aspect of supporting their community/nation, or even of modern life. Having children, at least in these modern times, is *not* a requirement for anyone. It's an option.
The world population growth is showing little sign of slowing down, and this is despite this not being the case in some wealthy democracies (like Germany and Japan). But not only that, the world itself is becoming just plain overpopulated. And by proxy, world resources are only becoming harder to attain and maintain.
I have no idea what you mean by children 'honoring' their parents up there. Are you saying that women (and men mind you, it takes two to tango) should have kids because it somehow makes them better validate their own womanhood? If so...holy shit man. Women are not defined by their reproductive value. Their value, along with men and everyone in between, is their basic humanity itself.
I'll never understand this almost religious zeal to produce offspring. The world is practically bursting at the seams with all of us swarming masses, and somehow we're all supposed to just keep pushing them out? It makes no sense.
The obnoxious Gen X'ers I went to school with were not very political, but when they were activists they were engaged in hard left shenanigans that just annoyed everyone else. They were somewhat arrogant, typically pretentious, self-satisfied, and had a tendency to scream at and condemn anyone who disagreed. People didn't so much disagree with them as shrug and depart in disgust. They turned people off by their very existence. That was why they lost.
They “lost” in part because 9/11, and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq totally changing the psychological landscape in the US. Arguably they lost when Gore lost (“inconvenient truth”). When the Nader campaign into which they poured so much, acted as a spoiler for the election (I think it’s still debated, but there was an impact in the upper Midwest IIRC.) But they didn’t lose in all the universities. That tactic remained with the conclusions it was supposed to cause. It just continued to stew in academia, where many of the GenX radicals now worked.
Not sure, but I think a sizable chunk of the more effective GenX politicos went to international NGOs, Planned Parenthood and federal and state government. Not only did they settle down, they went to make change inside the system, and what progress we have on climate change and sustainability we can thank them for.
Some anarchists never left the Pacific Northwest. Portland has taken decades to build.
"Because the rhetoric and rage, the street protests, the idealism, the claims that this time, it’s for real - we’ve seen it all before."
We have, and each time, I would argue that it moves us in a direction. "Victories" like the one in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Act are exceedingly rare. But each generation's movement can push things in a direction, a form of generational incrementalism. In GenX we had political correctness. It didn't revolutionize the world, but it gained a foothold. Millennials and Zoomers have grown the ideas that developed roots in the late 80s / early 90s, and they are now blooming in whatever it is we are calling wokeness. I'm not sure any of this is possible without Gen X's "revolutionary" period.
It seems like each generation pushes us toward greater social equality, so that women and racial minorities and queer people can be included in the existing system, but progress on economic issues is rare and fleeting.
I'm grateful for the progress, don't get me wrong. I'm in a same-sex, interracial marriage. But we have boring, traditional lives and six-figure student loan debt.
I don't think each generation necessarily pushes us towards greater social equality (though it certainly has most of the time); I'd argue that the most recent generation is doing the opposite.
On economics, I think I agree with Jackie Blitz's point above, and Erin E.'s point below, that basically stability and relative affluence make economic change far more incremental and far less consistent. Even our rage at the horrific irresponsibility that led to the late aughts financial crisis was insufficient to have *any* significant impact, something that still dismays and disgusts me.
Since the late 1960s, there has been an increase in social equality, as you say. At the same time, there has been a measured DEcrease in the degree of income equality.
Am I the only one that thinks that race relations have actually gotten worse in the last 5-10 years? And I would argue that prior to that there was actually grounds for optimism.
I believe race relations are getting more toxic and weird in woke pockets of the world, but continue to improve among normies. Interracial marriages have been steadily increasing, and kids grow up seeing diverse casts on their favorite shows. The neurotic elites are the minority.
It's always nice to hang out with normal people and realize 90% of people don't say "black bodies" or "pregnant people", even among the very liberal and left wing
Gen Xer here. I agree with the fundamentals of the piece (that "radical" youth are trotted out by the radical media every few radical years to explain how they are going to radically change radicalism, not like those weak-willed faux-radicals from a few years ago who ended up being full of shit even after the New Yorker told them how to be radical, can you believe it?)
I will say, though, that while I agree that the WTO protests were bigger, better organized, and more serious than a lot of what came after, I never actually saw much political consciousness in my generation. Wesleyan might have been an exception. Otherwise we were pretty much stoned grunge folks, intentionally apathetic. Actually we were mostly perfectly normal human beings NOT being stoned or listening to grunge and just trying to get jobs and careers and spouses and babies, but why talk about vast majorities? The important stuff was on magazine covers.
That said, and while I agree that there's usually a lot of sound and fury in the analysis of the next generation that looks suspiciously similar to the sound and fury in the analysis of the previous generation, there DOES seem to be a lot more potency in the wokeness movement than there ever was in the PC movement of my generation. Just personally, we relentlessly made fun of the PC crowd at the time it was happening, and there was no retribution; there couldn't have been, the movement wasn't anywhere near powerful enough for that. Is that true for the Woke? What does everyone think of this argument that the Woke revolution has some legs under it (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/no-the-revolution-isnt-over) as compared to Freddie's argument that it's another cycle in leftist impotence (if I'm characterizing you right, Freddie)?
Agree, though, that the socialist, climate change, gun control, foreign policy change (???), etc. movements are utterly dead in the water, and mostly never really got going. Maybe not climate change, actually. That's got real life to it, just not in the radical "everyone but me will have to do with less electricity and fuel" crowd. But the incrementalism crowd seems to be successful.
I think the woke movement is a dead man walking. Who killed off the last PC movement? Bill Clinton. Why? Because he and a bunch of other D centrists were sick of losing. Absent Covid Trump would have been re-elected and the reckoning would have been swift as moderates moved to purge left wing progressives. With Covid Trump lost but that only postponed the day of reckoning. Consider Virginia, where no R has won statewide office in a decade but which just elected a GOP governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general. (Plus if I am not mistaken one chamber of the state legislature flipped.)
The universities will always be PC hubs--the only variable is whether or not society at large pays any attention to their crazy politics. In the face of massive electoral losses the leadership of the Democratic Party will decide that being tied to speech codes and claims of structural racism is simply unacceptable.
I think, at the end of the day, it's hard for annoying shit to last. Being woke or being adjacent to woke is just fucking miserable. Eventually people will want to eat sushi without worrying about committing cultural appropriation.
Dude, remember when we had to thank the troops for their service? Or pretend to be super into America? Your comment made me think of that early-mid 00s patriotism revival. That was only mildly annoying in comparison and had a much wider base of support and it still faded. I can't imagine corporations will be doing land acknowledgements when I'm 60.
Even (especially?) as a Christian I found that shit so annoying. I remember when Daily Kos a) mattered and b) created an entire Christian version because a bunch of people thought the way for Democrats to win was learning about Jesus. Peak cringe.
Sadly, as long as entities like Blackrock are in the driver’s seat, you’ll be doing land acknowledgments and featuring pronouns in your email signature until the day you die.
In general, if another white person tells me something is offensive, I ignore them. I have had a straight person get offended on my behalf as a gay man and holy shit is that annoying. It's just another form of paternalism. Which is probably another word that will be canceled soon as it's not inclusive of female-presenting people.
Fuck that. You can't have a mode of political economy that constantly concentrates power in the professional-managerial class while also having the PMC's site of class reproduction serve as an ever-intensifying incubator for a deeply authoritarian and unpopular anarcho-liberal ideology.
Probably a series of purges imposed by angry state and local governments on the colleges' boards of trustees, or a general lashing-out of the voting public against the NPIC.
I think it just requires people to shift politics depending on their level of material attainment. Once you make it you can pay lip service to whatever while investing in a $400 coffee maker.
The more likely outcome IMHO is just that "the academy" completely implodes. Which it's arguably on the precipice of doing anyway. Big Tech has been working on developing tests for a decade or so now which will correlate more with job performance than academic achievement. Once this is done, the empty credentialing portion of going to college will evaporate within short order. All that will be left after that will be finishing school for the wealthy, along with the people who genuinely want to go to college to learn.
Way back when I ran into an amazing statistic that a sizable percentage of DBA's (who have always been on the higher earning end of the IT wage spectrum) didn't have a college degree. It was something like 40%.
Tech is one of the few fields where you can earn a great salary without a college degree or with one in a non-related field, like history or French. And it's been that way for decades.
In the current system, we spend 4-5 years, and $50,000-$200,000, to get a spangle on our resume which is basically the equivalent of saying we scored at least 115 on an IQ test.
Studies have shown that college is only about as worthwhile as six months to two years of on-the-job experience. I think outside of an engineering degree, college is probably close to worthless when it comes to training you for a specific job. And I'm sure engineering will eventually shift to "must have a graduate degree" like all other professional-class jobs, given the course load tends to be inordinately high.
With regards to engineers it is well known that an engineer straight out of college is useless and will require a couple of years of on the job experience to become proficient.
> What does everyone think of this argument that the Woke revolution has some legs under it (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/no-the-revolution-isnt-over) as compared to Freddie's argument that it's another cycle in leftist impotence (if I'm characterizing you right, Freddie)?
Can't speak for Freddie. For my part, I am of two minds.
In the long term, Wokeness will fail. This isn't a radical statement. Far greater powers have been lost entirely to time. The only end of history will be the end of humanity.
But the long term doesn't help here. We're talking about the short term. Some time ago, I came up with a rule of thumb for when I would confidently bet the Woke moment was over: when the rats start jumping ship. When I start seeing Wokism's most aggressively cowardly and self-aggrandizing supporters claiming they were never really a part of the movement, they were bullied or pressured into it, while downplaying their own contributions to its power and cruelty? Not out of principle, but because they fear being seen as Woke more than the Woke themselves? That's when I'll know Wokism has lost its power to punish.
We aren't there yet, I don't think. The undemocratic, bureaucratic roots from which Wokism grows remain unharmed. That said, the Right could well start slamming universities and companies with civil rights lawsuits. They don't have to be solid, they don't have to win, they just have to be expensive enough that the apolitical, heads-down types are more scared of them than the Wokies in their own organization.
I'm not sure, but that was certainly an interesting piece by the Upheaval.
That's actually a good metric.
I agree that wokeness will end, at the very least, in about a decade a younger cohort will replace it with something else, in an argument about how they are better than previous generations.
Though it wasn't as explicit in my head, this is internally the metric I've been using too. If the cynical, weathervane opportunists are exiting, that's when we'll know Woke's power is on the decline. Until then, buckle up, bitches...
Fantastic write up Freddie. I think there's a dirty little secret your piece is picking at: there's no great revolution brewing because life is pretty damn good in America*. The millennials weren't financially fucked, and no modern generation growing up in the most prosperous country in world history is. Wealth inequality isn't inherently evil or necessarily a bad thing at all if the majority of the population is relatively wealthy and healthy and moving up the ladder. This is a major reason why asian and latino voters aren't as reliably left leaning as dems had hoped-- why vote for dramatic change when the status quo helped you find a better job and buy a bigger house. Racism hasn't magically disappeared of course, but the US has made incredible progress on civil rights and today it is effectively career and social suicide to espouse racist or homophobic beliefs. So the fact that each generation grows out of their radical revolutionary phase doesn't mean they're a failed generation, but rather that they were lucky enough to be born during a time when revolution wasn't necessary.
Of course the youth are coming to save us, as far as we will ever be saved. As it was, ever shall it be. There will always be young people to take a stab at saving society, young people to insist on change, and to keep alive the possibility of things being different. And there will always be middle aged people to do the work of holding society together and raising the next crop of youthful visionaries, and the old to provide the wisdom and memory and needed judgmental grumbling. What’s going on now, or in 1990 or in 1968 doesn’t seem to be much different than it was during any generational high point, except that we are in a strange moment where many grown adults seem to have abdicated their own role in this pageant to worship and idolize the young and we’ve completely given into bashing and denigrating the older generation, which people somehow see as an enlightened way to behave, but I tend to see as a convenient excuse to just hate on old people. Do Boomers suck? Sure, but not uniquely. Surely not more than Gen X, the Bezos generation, or millenials, the Zuckerberg generation. The best we can do is take advantage of the endlessly renewing cohort of 20-something’s who still have energy and hope, temper it with the reality of the adult grind of holding it together and enacting g the change demanded, and to not forget that the old people really do know a thing or two that we might not, and then just cross our fingers we live in normally turbulent times and not the worst of times.
This is why teaching history is so important. And I mean human history, not just American.
But you understand that this supports my point rather than undermines, right? Tell me you understand that.
Huge difference in colleges today is that all of students AND administration AND faculty are willing censor and punish the non-woke. I'm sure there are anti-woke folk teaching, and studying - but they're smart enough to be quiet, or to lie. You're sort of not allowed to not give a shit.
This upcoming "woke generation" will have anti-woke and don't care folks, too.
Can confirm about the trifecta of college wokism, it's really weird they are all on the same page. And when I say 'all' I don't mean everyone in each group. Students are probably the most saturated, being very primed for such nonsense. Faculty are not far behind, mostly due to wanting solidarity with their students causes. Then Admin, the least fanatical bunch but holding most of the bureaucratic power.
One thing that is not mentioned much, but is a rather large contributing factor, is the economics of modern universities. Gone are the days of healthy public funding, and what's filled the gap are two things mostly: increased tuition and corporate grants.
The increased tuition means competition for parental dollars is now very fierce. That means most universities simply can't afford to turn many away, and thus are very unwilling to piss off any students. Most students think it's their unerring righteousness that is making them invulnerable to backlash from wokism, but it has little to do with that. It's mostly because the admin doesn't want to lose their tuition money.
Corporate grants are now a fully normalized and expected revenue stream for universities. As such, corporations and businesses now have a lot of power to demand their money gets used in a certain way. And since we all know most companies are going whole hog on this social justice stuff (because they too don't want to lose any revenue), they can demand certain SJ stipulations in their grants. Mostly this is light window-dressing, but it both insulates the corp. from most negative criticism, as well as letting the university use it for marketing purposes.
This woke stuff may have started with 90's academic theory-crafting, but it's staying power right now, at least at colleges, has a lot to do with an old and simple concept: greed.
I hate claims that <insert your preferred group here> will save us. It's a gross abdication of responsibility. Let's fucking save ourselves.
Weird. By a strange coincidence just this morning I was thinking that all of the non-stop pressure to "change the world" that is heaped on whoever is young at the moment produces anxiety immediately and frustration and/or rage when nothing much changes. Does that contribute to the poisonous political environment?
The other thing is that all the Millennial hatred for the Boomers seems ironic given that the Boomers are the Woodstock generation. Was there anything more revolutionary given the context of the times than the hippies? By contrast the changes from Millennials and Gen Z are far less consequential.
What changes? What exactly did the boomers accomplish, to justify all the subsequent decades of self-sucking?
The sexual revolution? The protest movements? The revolt against prior cultural norms as evidenced by massive changes in music, film, fashion, literature, etc.?
I'm not trying to suggest that these changes were deliberate. Plus a lot of the side effects (like probably a massive crime wave) were negative. But in terms of what society looked like before and after how can you deny that the Boomers/hippies/counter-culture types were transformational?
Maybe if they’d *stayed* at Woodstock. But they all eventually went home. And started paying bills and having children (gross!).
Interesting you bring that up. I was just rereading “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” last night and nothing, IMO, illuminates better how primed the hippie generation was to become Trumpers than Didion’s title essay: a bunch of self involved, conspiracy minded, “mainstream” media-distrustful, education-skeptical kids grew up to be adults who were the same.
That seems to me to be an accurate description of every American generation since the 1960's.
Of course, which is why we shouldn’t be surprised when every generation ends up the same way. Can you imaging what millenials will be like as the oldest generation? All of their worst instincts (or maybe best instincts, doesn’t matter) channeled into what serves their interests as retirees rather than people just embarking on life?
Enlightened self interest is a constant I think. But the conspiracy minded distrust of authority that seems to have infected pretty much every generation since the Boomers? Yet another mark of their legacy.
I actually think a lot is ascribed to the Boomers that should be ascribed the the Silent Generation. Most of the big names of the 60s were born in the 30s - Abby Hoffman, Bobby Seale, Gloria Steinem.
Ken Kesey. A lot of the leaders of the so-called youth movement were in their 30's and 40's. I think that's pretty typical actually.
Neoliberalism. Neoliberalism never changes.
That old chestnut, eh?
Yeah, the social and cultural changes that occurred in the 60s are not to be understated - it was genuinely a big bang and 1959 and 1969 look like different universes. But similar things happened across the world and I think you can see the changes in the context of 'an enormous demographic of young people were entering a post-war world with a level of broad prosperity new to human history'. The boomers were people who happened to be born in that context, the millennials are people who were born in another context, gen z yet another. These are not teams that need to be scored for change-the-world points.
I am not trying to argue that the Boomers should get credit for anything--it's not like they had a five year, ten point plan and executed on it. Demographic change is just a massive tidal wave and individual humans are just picked up and swept along with it. But I think that dovetails nicely with Mr. deBoer has written: change is largely outside the sphere of human volition.
Boomers bought us our Beanie Babies and American Eagle sandal clogs in the 90s so you better watch your tone buddy.
> Was there anything more revolutionary given the context of the times than the hippies?
Literally any and every trade union.
I am looking forward to May 1968 round 2, brought to you by TikTok. It won't amount to anything but the discourse will be fierce.
our general discourse about generations could be so 1000x more sensible if we rediscovered the distinction between "generation" and "age."
i long for the days of discourse about "teens," "twenty-somethings," "thirty-somethings," etc. i don't really understand why so many ~culture writers~ dropped those in favor of "Zoomer," "Millennial," "Gen Xer," "Boomer," etc. well, I mean, I do; the latter terms have a powerful sense of branding about them. but still, it's stupid and leads us in analytical circles such as you describe.
“This once-young cohort of people is now older”—yes!
I don't have any real evidence for this, but it seems to me to reflect the more current ideas around identitarianism: categorize everything, and make that category a part of its essential definition, then use a ridiculous and false overgeneralization of that category for a political or rhetorical purpose.
Probably has to do with marketing. Easier to sell ads to people when you can pin an identity on them.
I once read someone day "you're not being represented, you're being marketed to"
Right. You're either the customer or you're the product.
Hey look a materialist explanation! We’ll make a Marxist out of you yet ;)
You're referring to the distinction between one's birth year and one's age. Each can affect you in its own way. Demographers refer to the effects of the first as cohort effects. And to the effects of the second as life-cycle effects. Because my birth year was a long time ago, I remember guys who quit high school as soon as it was legal for them to do so (at age 16) and went to work in the paper mills in benefitted jobs that paid more than $50,000 a year in 2021 dollars. Because of my age, my back hurts and I'm going to pop a fat-acting Tylenol right now.
Teens, twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings are much narrower ranges than zoomer, millenial, gen Xer and boomer though. That's why the generation labels stay, because they're broader. If you use ages then you're talking about when early-forty-somethings-to-late-fifty-somethings were early-twenty-somethings-to-late-thirty-somethings and that's just inconvenient and confusing.
what's so "inconvenient and confusing" exactly? i can imagine conversations where we want to distinguish between e.g. the twenty-somethings of one generation vs the twenty-somethings of another generation. but a lot of conversations don't actually require that distinction -- bc the scope of the analysis just isn't that comprehensive — and in fact those conversations suffer from an over-determination to draw it where history or reality don't quite support it. over broadness can be confusing, too.
Regarding Gen X and generational differences: FB served up a discussion to me a while back where a Millennial writer was arguing that Gen X shouldn't get a pass, that they were just as guilty of the Boomers of squandering their opportunity to change the world. Somebody, presumably an X-er, responded with "Awwww, that's so cute that they think that we give a fuck what they think". And that was the end of that.
That response warms my heart. And this is why, despite being arbitrarily designated a Millennial (albeit an older one), I'll always be a Gen-X'er on the inside.
Most of us are imitating our parents even when we think we are in open rebellion against them. Pretty much everyone post WWII has been reenacting the late 60s hippie "don't trust anyone over 30" youth radicalism and failings in the exact same ways. Every subsequent radical youth movement has merely been variations on that theme. It's a little like that often repeated Marx quote "First as tragedy, then as farce." We still live on the world the Boomers made, are still playing by their rules and understand things in their terms whether we admit it or not.
Everything iny experience of the current left is that they have no actionable plans to run society differently, and just have radical slogans and obnoxious, pious posturing instead. Everyone just humors them long enough to get them to shut up and then just tries to quietly get on with their lives, correctly understanding, I think, that eventually it will all burn itself out and go away.
The focus on the saving power of a given generation/minority has also smacked of "no, it's the people who are wrong" to me.
Is your political movement failing? Well, obviously it's because the country has the wrong sort of people. It's definitely not because you failed to explain your ideas, or failed to account for the needs of diverse stakeholders, or failed to strategize and compromise to gain allies, or just flat-out ran a bad campaign--no, no! It's because *those people* suck. They're selfish assholes. But good news! They'll all be dead soon, or outbred by Hispanics, or whatever.
There's an unpleasant eliminationist flavor to it. While I think it's likely a universal human desire to want your (perceived) political rivals to simply go away, shit like "the boomers will be dead soon and then we'll make utopia" is not the sort of sentiment that ought to be tolerated in polite company.
The nicest way I ever heard to put it was: the kind of people who talk about revolutionary generations have never gotten over the failure of 1968, and refuse to even think that maybe the attempted "revolutions" of 1968 just had bad politics. You can't even talk to them about 1917 or 1945 without it all turning into a damned LARP.
The 60's are also massively exaggerated. Most of the people out protesting had older brothers or cousins or whatever who stayed in their towns and then voted for Nixon. It wasn't like all of that generation was in on it.
As a GenXer (aka the forgotten generation—who grew up hearing about Boomers, Boomers, Boomers, until the constant media drumbeat changed to Millennials, Millennials, Millennials, which only faded once everyone agreed that they were hopelessly out of style with their side-parts and their skinny jeans: join the club of aging and therefore irrelevant and worthless women, ladies!) of course I had to click — but it turns out not to be about us at all, really! ;)
Even so, great point. Yes, no generation was ever going to save us, and especially the Zoomers aren’t coming to save us. Not only are the Zoomers not coming to save us — the Zoomers barely leave their homes to mingle among themselves, to learn to drive, to sneak off to get drunk or high, to have sex — all the things that earlier generations did for fun, before fizzling out into middle age. We have kept these kids so sheltered and infantilized that we send them off to college now like so many 10-year-olds. They conduct very busy social lives on their phones, punctuated with occasional get-togethers where they all announce how “awkward” they are. A bunch of middle schoolers in adult bodies.
They appear to be, at once, both the most acutely unhappy and the most passive generation. It may be a stereotype that describes only a few (as the hippies or the WTO disrupters or the Occupyers described only a few) but Zoomers have a tendency to embrace the safetyism of their youth, to wait to be told when and where to go, to appeal to authority to save them, to want to be saved from discomfort or “being triggered.” You will see them spurred to action, not as previous generations who hoped to improve the lot of the masses, but when they have a complaint to lodge on their own behalf.
Or maybe I’ve just become a very uncharitable old lady, made more so by the fact that her generation never had its moment in the media sun.
Coming next week: a diatribe on why you should all get off my lawn.
PS I don’t hate or blame the Zoomers. I love them, feel sorry for them, and think my generation adopted some
particularly shitty (though well-intentioned) parenting practices, and the terrible parenting (hovering, over scheduling, infantilizing) was made worse by smartphones, which tended to make the Zoomers more passive and tame.
" Not only are the Zoomers not coming to save us — the Zoomers barely leave their homes to mingle among themselves, to learn to drive, to sneak off to get drunk or high, to have sex — all the things that earlier generations did for fun, before fizzling out into middle age. We have kept these kids so sheltered and infantilized that we send them off to college now like so many 10-year-olds. They conduct very busy social lives on their phones, punctuated with occasional get-togethers where they all announce how “awkward” they are. A bunch of middle schoolers in adult bodies."
I hope that we can get a discussion going here about this precise thing. I read this all the time, and it makes total sense to me. I can see how teens and twenty-somethings could totally end up like that. The thing is I'm not sure I know anyone who is actually like that.
There's the giant caveat that I don't know any teens or twenty-somethings, not really. They're all either distant family members or some of the kids of older friends (my kids are very young). But from what I observe from a distance and through hearing about their lives is that they seem to be doing more or less the same shit that I'd expect. There's a much larger focus on video games among the boys and social media among the girls than there used to be, but they're going to bars, and meeting people, and getting set up on dates, and internet dating continues not to work so they give up on it. Just anecdotally I don't see these problems - actually, come to think of it, the 20-something set I know of are getting married YOUNGER than my generation, which seems like a good thing.
I guess I'm saying that I'd like to get an idea of how much this is actually happening, compared to what it looks like when we interpret a graph, if that makes sense. It's believable, but I just haven't seen it.
The Zoomers (and to some extent the younger Millennials) do seem much “younger” to me, more infantilized than the earlier generations of kids, but I could just be seeing that through the lens of getting older myself. But… I think there’s something real here.
Of course “kids today” do all the same things we did, but less so. Of course they still date— but they date less and the number of people I see in any kind of serious /meaningful relationship has decreased. I don’t mean that teenagers and college kids used to find their life partners, far from it. But they used to pair up and try out relationships, instead of just texting, hanging out, and hooking up and being dissatisfied.
The idea of FWB which popped up about 20 years ago, and which I was sure would immediately go away, has persisted, and while I tend to be closer to the girls/women in my extended family than the boys/men, so I can’t say what it’s been like for the guys, this has had a negative effect overall on girls/women. There’s nothing “morally wrong” with casual sex but there’s something that seems (to the girls/women I’ve talked to) really unsatisfying about it (and maybe it has to do with the fact that sexual satisfaction is easier for women if they have a partner who’s taken the time to learn what they like?) There’s also the issue of the effect of ubiquitous (often violent/degrading) porn being how guys think sex “is” or should be. I’ve heard stories that shock me, and I’m not too shockable.
Maybe not unrelated to all that: Kids talk a lot less about “being in love”— which was always a sweet thing kids did, even if most relationships broke up. They still go on outings and party —but definitely go on outings and party less. Some still drive—but fewer do. I definitely haven’t noticed the early marriage thing you mentioned. I even see the younger Millennials less likely to have successful dating/marriage relationships.
Then there’s research on trends, which also says these things are happening— less in-person interaction, less drinking, fewer relationships, less sex.
A significant decrease does not mean “no one is doing any of these things anymore” but I do think it’s enough to be noticeable and that in itself is a big enough change to be alarming (in my view).
Could just be my POV and who I know. My POV comes from a large multigenerational family (and their friends) with people of all ages, and just watching this stuff evolve and change over time.
Part of the prolonged childhood and dependency is how we’re raising them differently now. Part of it is the convenience of electronics. (If God forbid I ever had to date again, I’d be online too no doubt. It’s the environment, not anything different about the kids themselves.) And part of it is they don’t have the easy tools to make an independent life for themselves. Jobs with good wages aren’t guaranteed even if you go to college. (You need a certain amount of money to save up and get a beater car, to buy beer, to get your own place.)
To hang out with peers with any kind of privacy, the kids in my generation had to be more independent and go places where the adults weren’t. Now they can sit in their own living rooms and have a private conversation. But something is lost.
This makes me gloomy, because it's definitely believable. One thing that I didn't think to mention is this "hanging out virtually" thing is HUGE and seems to me like a disaster waiting to happen. Teenage children, particularly the boys, seem to do this way more than hanging out together physically. They play video games for hours, which fine, we did that too, but we did it in the same room along with beer and pot and a car outside and girls coming by sometimes. Now it's way more sterile; "convenient" in a bad way.
I'll start dropping some j's around my 13yo's room for his next D&D session.
Throw some Playboy's in there too for the authentic juvenile male experience.
Except the poor kid's probably seen hard-core kink since age 10, because they all do. :/
Yes, the hanging out, but not in real life, it's very different -- and here's another thing! (Wow I'm loving the conversation but I need to go do some work after this. I'm leaving, I swear.)
Another thing -- all the gender identity stuff is definitely ...DEFinitely reinforced by the fact that you can be anyone you want online. People see they get different kinds of attention depending on how they present themselves -- not just with gender, but on a variety of dimensions. So for kids the temptation is strong: why not just "make it up" so you get the sort of reactions and attention you want? That's very, very alluring to people who haven't decided who they really are yet. I think a lot of them come to prefer their "false self" -- their online persona -- to their real self. And they haven't even lived yet. It's just sad. Real people are good enough, but they don't know it, because they're competing in their minds with online personas, many of which are false, or if not false, not fully dimensional. I feel pretty strongly about this.
So it's true -- the boys are playing video games and not getting "out there" -- but also they're finding ways to be likeable that might not even be possible in real life. It probably makes them like themselves less. Then it becomes a self-perpetuating thing, to stay online where it's easier and nicer.
I know I've said this before (somewhere on here) -- but I had a male avatar on Twitter for many years, and wow, I see in retrospect how much "he" was treated with respect, politeness, and deference. I just thought it was because I made sense (ha ha), or that people liked what I had to say (ha ha). Then when I decided to create a substack as a woman (which I am, and I always thought that was super-obvious, even when I had a male avatar), I created a female Twitter avatar to go along with it, and wow, the number of nasty rude comments "she" has received in a couple months (and the number of creepy DMs, and for gosh sakes, it's an avatar of freakin' Mme de Pompadour, who turned 300 years old on December 29!) is more than I ever received as a man in years and years. I received few rude or dismissive comments, none of the "shut up"s, none of the personal insults, and zero creepy DMs as a man.
You can see why people retreat online.
Edited because I can't type.
I get it. In real life I’m a nightmare, not the charming polymath y’all have come to know and love.
My teen has a close trans friend and a close non-binary friend. I worry that the very online-ness of the teen/young adult life is leading to more complex disassociations from our real human bodies and interactions. Today’s post by Rhyd Wildermuth was painful but important. https://rhyd.substack.com/p/trapped-in-the-woke-ideal
Edited to add: it’s important to get how truly online the roots of this is; when I asked my kid if there’s any bullying or anything he says “no. Nobody really cares.” The bullying is mostly internal, of the self. Reinforced by like minded online “communities.”
Millennials and zoomers lose their virginity at a much later age compared to Xers and Boomers. They also have fewer sexual partners at a comparable age. They do less drinking and drugging and they are far less likely to move for work.
So basically, more Millennials and Zoomers are stuck living with their parents.
You can still get laid in the back seat of your car. And all you need for a kegger is some dark patch of the woods where the cops won't bother you.
But what you really, really need is friends that won't take pictures of you when you're wasted and plaster them all over FB/Instagram/whatever. That's the part that worries me.
That’s almost exclusively where I get laid.
The internet is like a drug that keeps you at home by yourself. Every part of the internet cuts out one avenue for human interaction.
My connection to the Zoomer world is my sister, almost a decade younger than me. (*Technically* we’re both Millennials, her on the very youngest end, but it absolutely feels like there’s a generation gap between us.) I also have friends older than me with teenage kids, in several different parts of the country. Some of the differences do just feel like another way of saying “younger people are in a different stage of their lives than people older than them,” and I agree with you that the stereotype doesn’t pan out in individual reality.
I do feel I’ve observed in Zoomers a lack of will to disconnect from the family home and parental oversight/control, in a way that stands out to me. That doesn’t always translate into being a helicoptered recluse - my sister is in med school, has an involved dating life and always had a wide social circle, and most teens I know are totally out and about with their actual friends all the time. But it feels like they’re more comfortable being under parental
observation all the time, that they willingly self-report to their parents everything going on in their lives and expect their parents to be, if not stepping in for them, emotionally invested in all their issues. Think teens confiding in their moms every detail of their dating lives (a thought that makes the memory of my teenage self physically recoil in horror), twenty-somethings being expected to hang out with their parents and their parents’ friends and actually wanting to do this, feeling more comfortable relying financially on parents longer rather than having the “I’d rather live on bread and water in a rat hole for five years than not feel independent!” mentality that felt to me more normal growing up.
This isn’t always incompatible with having an independent life and normal maturity - I don’t think it necessarily makes them childish, even if to my mind much of it is associated with childishness and foreign to my experience. I can’t draw any sweeping conclusions about what this means for their political engagement; mostly they all just uncritically share the politics that float around in the water they swim in and don’t question them or how they got there. But I agree that reports of their helplessness are in some cases overstated, and maybe sometimes misdirected.
A characteristically brilliant set of observations (you/Carina/ErinE == my FDB commentariat royalty), in particular this:
> I do feel I’ve observed in Zoomers a lack of will to disconnect from the family home and parental oversight/control, in a way that stands out to me.
I'm relatedly curious about what you make of this story here --
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22716772/west-elm-caleb-couch-guy-tiktok-cancel
-- but not about cancel culture theme. More that -- this young woman has a yearning for romantic connection that she's able to describe, publicly, in a way that I found disarming. I root for her and her quest for companionship, and hope that someone encourages her to keep seeking that out, because career gets old, fast.
But it also felt very ... young. Like, when I watch PCU or Swingers or some other seminal coming-of-age film, from a decade or two ago, everyone's doing older stuff. They seem older, they connect in a more mature way, they have harder problems. Even Honey I Shrunk the Kids, which I watched last week. Amy and Russ Jr. have the cadence of a much older couple. And my younger cousins -- 16, 18, 23 -- all remarkably close to their mother, oversharers, all, to an extent that would have been unbelievable 20 years ago. I'm not sure what to attribute this to, exactly.
Thanks for finally prompting me to learn who West Elm Caleb is, I was starting to think I should keep track of how long I managed to live in ignorance.
I do think The Kids are way, WAY more comfortable with vulnerability and emotional sharing than Millennials are (though I think my generation both picked some of it up from them and maybe were the influence that made it stronger in them in the first place). To me, my sister’s friend groups don’t just feel close, they feel like they’re in constant therapy with each other, and they absolutely expect that of each other. What younger people in my workplace are comfortable sharing about their feelings and personal lives among coworkers occasionally makes my hair stand on end. It flies in the face of my opposing sense that they’re more disconnected from each other - physically, maybe, sometimes, but emotionally? They’re always in each other’s pockets. The idea of *not* sharing something the instant it happens is unthinkable. They hold
conference calls about all of their everyday struggles.
I don’t even think their connections with each other are necessarily bad, just very different from mine; that way of engaging is not appealing to me. But then, my older German relatives find it deeply embarrassing when their 35-year-old coworkers use informal pronouns and first names with each other, so. In terms of a cause, I think it’s too pat to just say “social media,” but I do think that’s a major factor in the language they speak with each other, especially the proliferation of therapeutic language to frame all human interactions. But I don’t think it’s the sole cause - maybe just an amplifier for a tendency that existed as a result of something else.
I would agree that social media is both part of the cause and an amplifier, but not the only factor. Authors like Haidt and Lukianoff claim 'safetyism' in childhood is another huge factor, which I tend to agree. But certainly there are more? I'd be interested to hear what you think those may be.
Unless of course we're all suffering from that age-old 'back in my day' mentality, but I highly doubt it. I mean, everyone older than 40 can't all be having the same bad dream, can we?
Man, I’ve been turning this over all afternoon. I’m understanding the question as, “Why does it feel like adults are, in some nebulous way, younger now?”, as articulated by Sean.
I’m inclined to say that the push for universal college attendance, and the incentives it creates for colleges, is another big factor, though again not the only one. I think college directly after high school, in the form college now takes for most middle-class-and-up kids, extends adolescence. I loved college and did great at it, and I think it extended *my* adolescence. When I moved right from undergrad to law school, for genuinely the first time in my life I was expected to work with people who had actually been in the workforce. The difference between a professional-school student who’s moving into a new career and one who’s never had a career, even if they’re close in age, is enormous. And it’s not that there were zero people coming in from prior careers at my state school, but they mostly studied on different tracks - undergrad programs are mainly tailored to adolescent post-high-school students, there’s greater separation than in law school, where you’re all in the same pot. Even if they work hard in college, I think a ton of kids who do the academic track with no pauses do not look outside their bubble to a life defined by non-academic demands until much later than kids have historically.
I think the greater ubiquity of the experience of working toward going to college, not for college’s own sake but because you *have* to, has had a big effect on culture, but not really for any reason having to do with culture on campuses. To go to most colleges, American kids have to accept greater financial dependence on their parents for longer, whether because they’re helping pay their way or they’re taking on debt. The perks the colleges add to draw students are tailored toward fun, comfort, and convenience. And kids start learning that their life is pointing toward that milestone, that thing they *have* to do, starting in about sixth grade. It unites a class of kid, the assumption they’re going to go to college, and the accompanying knowledge of what behavior will ensure and what will endanger their ability to do it, as handed down by their parents.
I’m a middle-class suburbanite and all the Youths I know are, too. I’d love to know if the cultural shifts we’ve all been talking about here apply to less wealthy kids, those who go to community college for associates’ degrees or vocational training, or who put off college entirely until they can pay their own way or never go at all.
I am actually an older “zoomer” myself and I can kind of see this with me, though I am more of an introvert personally. Can’t speak for anyone else though.
I remember when social media was a new thing and people were fretting about what would happen to kids that passed out drunk at some party and were subsequently photographed. Those pictures would survive on the internet forever, available for inspection by future employers, colleges, etc.
It appears that for young people of a certain socio economic class the solution is to just avoid drunken keggers and premarital sex. I am not sure if that is a positive development.
Quite a good point.
Yeah the Zoomer stuff you mention describes me pretty well, though I guess I'm technically a millenial.
I think it applies to younger millennials too. I just would hate, hate, hate to be a young person now.
I mean, I'm sure the vast majority of people aren't like me? I think so at least.
Hot take, but I think this has something to do with a lot of the weird sexual identity stuff. People aren't dating/having sex, so they get in their own made and say they actually have this really strange sexuality/gender situation. I pulled this nonsense for a bit, earnestly telling people I was "asexual." That was a cope.
I think if you infantilize a generation of kids and prevent them from unsupervised life (and I mean not just drinking and sleeping around as teens and young adults, but unsupervised play from a young age, or walking to the store by themselves) then you derail some developmental stuff in unhelpful ways.
I definitely think the hyperfocus on gender/sexuality is in some way a means to compensate for the fact that kids are not living life in certain ways like they used to.
And part of the gender /sexuality thing comes from kids being exposed to porn and information about sex at really _young_ ages and feeling pressured to know “what they are” —as when literal middle schoolers are declaring their genders or sexualities— like: you might wait a bit, kids, and find out through trial and error— oh except you’ll never be out from under your parents’ watchful eye till you leave home.
Once gender/sexuality enters the convo, it becomes orders of magnitude more complicated to figure out what is happening and why. But it’s messed up.
Can you explain why the fully developed at 25 line is wrong?
OMG the thing about "brain being developed at 25" thing just drives me nuts.
That's true, I was also thinking of it this way. I'm a weight lifter. I consider myself a weight lifter because I lift weights. I don't consider myself a runner because I don't run anymore. Weight lifter and runner aren't identities, they're something I physically do (or don't do) in the material world.
If you're a man dating a woman, you might say, oh I'm straight. I'm straight because I'm a man dating a women. Another man might be dating a man. He would say, I'm gay because I'm a man dating a man, etc.
But if there's no material reality; if no one is actually *doing* any of the sex/dating stuff, it just becomes something you can make up in your head.
I finished a book the other day, Fiona and Jane, about two Taiwanese American friends and their coming of age/struggles with relationships - your basic stuff. One of the women was depicted as dating both women and men. A complaint I saw in the goodreads reviews I read of the book was that Jane, the woman who dated men and women, never described herself as bi- or pansexual. In fact, the label and word used on herself seemed MORE important to them in representation than the actual depiction of a woman who slept with both women and men. Here’s a specific quote:
“Another thing that annoyed me was how the author depicts queerness. I do not like the avoidance of words such as bi/pan/and queer. These are not bad words.”
No they are not bad words, but they are re not magic words either, that sanctify the character being described. I found it interesting that a person would struggle to relate to a character who is living her life in a clearly “non-straight” way because she did not label herself using specific words.
"The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you." http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
Yes exactly, and the more (the argument could potentially be made) those labels matter, if you don't have the real-world backup for them.
I think you've got this backwards. I was gay long before I touched another man's dick, while there is nothing inherent to one's person that identifies one as a weight-lifter.
You're a man dating a woman because you're straight. You're not straight because you're a man dating a woman.
One of the hosts of the Wider Lens podcast once suggested that for many of her teenage therapy clients dealing with gender/sexuality, declaring an identity was the first real pushback against their parents they ever managed. I think about that a lot - I wonder sometimes if the encouragement in the culture for parents to unquestioningly accept any identity will eventually lead to it being “uncool”. If it’s not getting you laid and it’s not actually helping you create a sense of self outside your family’s expectations, why bother?
Yes I remember hearing that exact thing! (I also listen to that podcast.) It's an interesting thought, and possibly true. Although for a lot of the rah-rah very accepting and affirming parents, their kids are going down a medical pathway as quickly as (or even more quickly than) some kids whose parents refuse to agree to medicalization.
If it is true, at least for some kids, it's a way to assert independence and autonomy ("no one but me knows my gender; I am who I say I am; I want these medical interventions"), then it puts parents in a difficult position, especially those parents who are familiar with the lack of evidence that this medicalization is a good idea, and a growing amount of evidence that it's a bad idea. If you keep your kid unmedicalized till 18, thinking / hoping they'll grow out of it, they'll just march into the nearest Planned Parenthood (which should be renamed Genderz R Us) or their university's clinic, the minute they turn 18. That'll really show mom and dad what's what.
It's a huge problem -- and the gender issue in particular is made much worse and harder to grapple with because all of society bought into it at once, on the premise that trans is the new gay, and they are the most oppressed ever, and the thing to do is encourage people to "explore gender" -- which would be great if it weren't all tied up in expensive health-compromising, sometimes irreversible medical and surgical treatments. So the media, schools, and general public are buying into a narrative that leads to bad physical and mental health outcomes for a lot of kids.
"I pulled this nonsense for a bit, earnestly telling people I was "asexual." That was a cope."
I pulled a bit of the same nonsense cynically, as "ace" was more efficient for fending off advances than "well ackshully, my religious philosophy is..." People are motivated to "prove" they're so desirable they can overcome your religious inhibitions. They're less keen to attempt inflaming the desire of someone who presumably doesn't have any.
That said, if I had a choice between losing sexual sensation and losing my hearing — or heck, even my ability to do basic calculus — I'd choose losing sexual sensation. I'm happily married and wouldn't want to doom my spouse to a loveless marriage, but at the individual level, sex just isn't that important to who I am or how I express passion. I don't *feel* like this makes me all that weird, but perhaps it does.
I guess one could argue that the positive drive to make “visible” and “normalize” people with “nonstandard” identities has contributed to the labeling of the sexual kaleidoscope down to its component atoms. It’s probably not all that uncommon for sexually mature adults to be less obsessed with performing their sexuality, because for most of us sex *isn’t* the most important relational thing once we’re partnered up.
"Coming next week: a diatribe on why you should all get off my lawn."
How about "You rotten kids need to go out and get wasted in the woods and make out. That's what I was doing when I was your age."
That's what I tell the kids. I wasn't actually doing that when I was their age, but I damn well should have been. Made up for it in college.
Yes. Preferably whilst waving my cane.
So true. The Boomers just dominated everything until one day it was all about Millennials. Our time in the sun was like ten minutes long and I must have been still asleep.
We din' even get the ten minutes, I'm pretty sure. There was a brief mention of "oh slackers" and it was done.
One of the most impactful qualities that makes for a great parent and a shitty revolutionary: stability. When people inevitably give in to the desire to have a family (a lives-in-the-same-house, multigenerational family, not a framily of comrades) they start to see the merits of middle class life, even lower middle class.
I’m glad somebody gets what I’m saying.
My maternal grandmother lived with my family from I was age 5 on. But in this case I meant parent-child generational differences specifically.
Its only awesome if you have good parents. If I lived with my parents I'd just have two more children to take care of - mostly emotional labor.
Yeah my paternal grandma is a mess and if she lived with my parents they’d all be dead from some kind of murder suicide situation (though I can’t pinpoint who would be who in that scenario.) I hope she doesn’t read this newsletter comments section.
We live on the same block as my wife's parents - 5 min walk away is great. But leaving home requires the young adult to become more independent & self-sufficient, and more able, in practice, to take care of themselves. Our first and third kids were more independent. Our second is still a student, living at home, getting a PhD (in nuclear engineering).
Leaving for college can contrast with the kids living at home.
Now I think of "Captain Jack" by Billy Joel:
"Well you're twenty-one and still your mother makes your bed.
And that's too long."
We don't want no Hikikomori.
It's worth noting why exactly that is. Money and a relatively deregulated labor market. I'm not sure all those Greek multi-generational houses would survive American or Swiss affluence.
It's hard to overstate how nice having your own space is.
I've even been searching for a house where my mom could move in with me if she wants/needs, but where we'd still have our own space. They're not cheap.
My wife's parents are fantastic grandparents and go above and beyond the call of duty. While we don't live with or next to them, we live close enough that we have that extended support group. But my kids would never have had that kind of support from my parents.
It’s so true. I protested in my 20s, but once I became a parent, it was over. We took the baby to one protest early in the Trump administration (protesting family separation at the border) and he got overheated, and we couldn’t stay long. In 2020, there was no way I’d take a toddler to those protests. My child needs me to be at home, just like he needs me to work so we can afford rent and his future tuition. Now when I feel moved to contribute to some cause, I just send money.
Yes! It’s a definite shift that happens. Trying to remember if I brought my kids to any protest… I think no. I made them sit through a few political speeches though. Probably turned them off politics forever.
Same. I’ve never taken my kids to a Jars of Clay concert, which used to be my form of protest. Now we just watch Cardi B music videos on YouTube. At home, as a family.
Very true. And it always happens eventually.
I'll be very interested to see Freddie's writing evolve if he ever gets responsible enough to be married and have kids. (I have 4, 1+3/4 grandkids, due in March). Revolution and burning everything down is terrible, terrible for kids.
Even ending a marriage is terrible for kids - and too many still do it. Tho the rate is going down. Tho the rate of unmarried parents is going up - it seems an unhappy marriage that endures causes fewer problems than divorce.
You talkin' EUGENICS? Freddie posted about that just last week.
"all human behavior is ultimately boiled down to genetics." Absolutely not.
There IS a huge genetic influence, and especially limits. Fast XX women swimmers are NOT able to swim as fast as a fast XY trans q'woman. But that's at the extreme. If you don't practice swimming, most who do practice will be faster than you.
Maybe, probably, genetics has an influence on how much you enjoy swimming, or studying. But what you choose to do, like read & comment on cool rude blogs, is what you practice. Including sex. You know that married folk practice sex a lot more than unmarried folk, right?
"we unfortunately get to view the behaviors that are being selected against" - This is very, very true.
Still, it's not clear that highly intelligent, hard working college grad women who have no children are behaving and contributing optimally to the next generation.
YES - number of offspring ... who have offspring.
Demographics is destiny.
The pro-life folk have more kids than the pro-choice (abortion) folk. (They're seldom pro-choice on Vax, or on school choice...)
As I said: "Maybe, probably, genetics has an influence..." on the predispositions to all tastes, including taking action or not.
I agreed with all of this, except the very last part. Was that sarcasm? If not, what do you mean by that?
highly intelligent, hard working college grad women who have no children --will NOT have children which honor them nor support their civilization.
I want them to be smart enough in practice to get married and have 2+ kids.
As User01 sort of says, the species is evolving towards those traits which result in more kids.
Hmm, I'm not sure why you think having children is an essential aspect of supporting their community/nation, or even of modern life. Having children, at least in these modern times, is *not* a requirement for anyone. It's an option.
The world population growth is showing little sign of slowing down, and this is despite this not being the case in some wealthy democracies (like Germany and Japan). But not only that, the world itself is becoming just plain overpopulated. And by proxy, world resources are only becoming harder to attain and maintain.
I have no idea what you mean by children 'honoring' their parents up there. Are you saying that women (and men mind you, it takes two to tango) should have kids because it somehow makes them better validate their own womanhood? If so...holy shit man. Women are not defined by their reproductive value. Their value, along with men and everyone in between, is their basic humanity itself.
I'll never understand this almost religious zeal to produce offspring. The world is practically bursting at the seams with all of us swarming masses, and somehow we're all supposed to just keep pushing them out? It makes no sense.
He’s plenty responsible. I’m talking about the “revolutionaries” who do experiments like CHAZ or campus activism.
The obnoxious Gen X'ers I went to school with were not very political, but when they were activists they were engaged in hard left shenanigans that just annoyed everyone else. They were somewhat arrogant, typically pretentious, self-satisfied, and had a tendency to scream at and condemn anyone who disagreed. People didn't so much disagree with them as shrug and depart in disgust. They turned people off by their very existence. That was why they lost.
They “lost” in part because 9/11, and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq totally changing the psychological landscape in the US. Arguably they lost when Gore lost (“inconvenient truth”). When the Nader campaign into which they poured so much, acted as a spoiler for the election (I think it’s still debated, but there was an impact in the upper Midwest IIRC.) But they didn’t lose in all the universities. That tactic remained with the conclusions it was supposed to cause. It just continued to stew in academia, where many of the GenX radicals now worked.
Not sure, but I think a sizable chunk of the more effective GenX politicos went to international NGOs, Planned Parenthood and federal and state government. Not only did they settle down, they went to make change inside the system, and what progress we have on climate change and sustainability we can thank them for.
Some anarchists never left the Pacific Northwest. Portland has taken decades to build.
"Because the rhetoric and rage, the street protests, the idealism, the claims that this time, it’s for real - we’ve seen it all before."
We have, and each time, I would argue that it moves us in a direction. "Victories" like the one in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Act are exceedingly rare. But each generation's movement can push things in a direction, a form of generational incrementalism. In GenX we had political correctness. It didn't revolutionize the world, but it gained a foothold. Millennials and Zoomers have grown the ideas that developed roots in the late 80s / early 90s, and they are now blooming in whatever it is we are calling wokeness. I'm not sure any of this is possible without Gen X's "revolutionary" period.
It seems like each generation pushes us toward greater social equality, so that women and racial minorities and queer people can be included in the existing system, but progress on economic issues is rare and fleeting.
I'm grateful for the progress, don't get me wrong. I'm in a same-sex, interracial marriage. But we have boring, traditional lives and six-figure student loan debt.
I don't think each generation necessarily pushes us towards greater social equality (though it certainly has most of the time); I'd argue that the most recent generation is doing the opposite.
On economics, I think I agree with Jackie Blitz's point above, and Erin E.'s point below, that basically stability and relative affluence make economic change far more incremental and far less consistent. Even our rage at the horrific irresponsibility that led to the late aughts financial crisis was insufficient to have *any* significant impact, something that still dismays and disgusts me.
Since the late 1960s, there has been an increase in social equality, as you say. At the same time, there has been a measured DEcrease in the degree of income equality.
Am I the only one that thinks that race relations have actually gotten worse in the last 5-10 years? And I would argue that prior to that there was actually grounds for optimism.
You're not; I made a similar argument below.
I believe race relations are getting more toxic and weird in woke pockets of the world, but continue to improve among normies. Interracial marriages have been steadily increasing, and kids grow up seeing diverse casts on their favorite shows. The neurotic elites are the minority.
It's always nice to hang out with normal people and realize 90% of people don't say "black bodies" or "pregnant people", even among the very liberal and left wing
More like 99%
Gen Xer here. I agree with the fundamentals of the piece (that "radical" youth are trotted out by the radical media every few radical years to explain how they are going to radically change radicalism, not like those weak-willed faux-radicals from a few years ago who ended up being full of shit even after the New Yorker told them how to be radical, can you believe it?)
I will say, though, that while I agree that the WTO protests were bigger, better organized, and more serious than a lot of what came after, I never actually saw much political consciousness in my generation. Wesleyan might have been an exception. Otherwise we were pretty much stoned grunge folks, intentionally apathetic. Actually we were mostly perfectly normal human beings NOT being stoned or listening to grunge and just trying to get jobs and careers and spouses and babies, but why talk about vast majorities? The important stuff was on magazine covers.
That said, and while I agree that there's usually a lot of sound and fury in the analysis of the next generation that looks suspiciously similar to the sound and fury in the analysis of the previous generation, there DOES seem to be a lot more potency in the wokeness movement than there ever was in the PC movement of my generation. Just personally, we relentlessly made fun of the PC crowd at the time it was happening, and there was no retribution; there couldn't have been, the movement wasn't anywhere near powerful enough for that. Is that true for the Woke? What does everyone think of this argument that the Woke revolution has some legs under it (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/no-the-revolution-isnt-over) as compared to Freddie's argument that it's another cycle in leftist impotence (if I'm characterizing you right, Freddie)?
Agree, though, that the socialist, climate change, gun control, foreign policy change (???), etc. movements are utterly dead in the water, and mostly never really got going. Maybe not climate change, actually. That's got real life to it, just not in the radical "everyone but me will have to do with less electricity and fuel" crowd. But the incrementalism crowd seems to be successful.
I think the woke movement is a dead man walking. Who killed off the last PC movement? Bill Clinton. Why? Because he and a bunch of other D centrists were sick of losing. Absent Covid Trump would have been re-elected and the reckoning would have been swift as moderates moved to purge left wing progressives. With Covid Trump lost but that only postponed the day of reckoning. Consider Virginia, where no R has won statewide office in a decade but which just elected a GOP governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general. (Plus if I am not mistaken one chamber of the state legislature flipped.)
The universities will always be PC hubs--the only variable is whether or not society at large pays any attention to their crazy politics. In the face of massive electoral losses the leadership of the Democratic Party will decide that being tied to speech codes and claims of structural racism is simply unacceptable.
I think, at the end of the day, it's hard for annoying shit to last. Being woke or being adjacent to woke is just fucking miserable. Eventually people will want to eat sushi without worrying about committing cultural appropriation.
Dude, remember when we had to thank the troops for their service? Or pretend to be super into America? Your comment made me think of that early-mid 00s patriotism revival. That was only mildly annoying in comparison and had a much wider base of support and it still faded. I can't imagine corporations will be doing land acknowledgements when I'm 60.
I still call them freedom fries.
As any decent American does.
This is why you're the voice of our generation.
Yup, or the Christian nonsense thereafter. Remember McCain, Obama, etc all pretending they gave a shit about Jesus? Thank god that's dissipated a bit.
Even (especially?) as a Christian I found that shit so annoying. I remember when Daily Kos a) mattered and b) created an entire Christian version because a bunch of people thought the way for Democrats to win was learning about Jesus. Peak cringe.
Sadly, as long as entities like Blackrock are in the driver’s seat, you’ll be doing land acknowledgments and featuring pronouns in your email signature until the day you die.
In general, if another white person tells me something is offensive, I ignore them. I have had a straight person get offended on my behalf as a gay man and holy shit is that annoying. It's just another form of paternalism. Which is probably another word that will be canceled soon as it's not inclusive of female-presenting people.
>The universities will always be PC hubs
Fuck that. You can't have a mode of political economy that constantly concentrates power in the professional-managerial class while also having the PMC's site of class reproduction serve as an ever-intensifying incubator for a deeply authoritarian and unpopular anarcho-liberal ideology.
What do you think could lead to colleges being un-woked?
Probably a series of purges imposed by angry state and local governments on the colleges' boards of trustees, or a general lashing-out of the voting public against the NPIC.
I think it just requires people to shift politics depending on their level of material attainment. Once you make it you can pay lip service to whatever while investing in a $400 coffee maker.
The more likely outcome IMHO is just that "the academy" completely implodes. Which it's arguably on the precipice of doing anyway. Big Tech has been working on developing tests for a decade or so now which will correlate more with job performance than academic achievement. Once this is done, the empty credentialing portion of going to college will evaporate within short order. All that will be left after that will be finishing school for the wealthy, along with the people who genuinely want to go to college to learn.
>Big Tech has been working on developing tests for a decade or so now which will correlate more with job performance than academic achievement.
Is 0.01 more than 0.00? I would almost trust a bigco predictive analytics engine *less* than a university degree.
Way back when I ran into an amazing statistic that a sizable percentage of DBA's (who have always been on the higher earning end of the IT wage spectrum) didn't have a college degree. It was something like 40%.
Tech is one of the few fields where you can earn a great salary without a college degree or with one in a non-related field, like history or French. And it's been that way for decades.
In the current system, we spend 4-5 years, and $50,000-$200,000, to get a spangle on our resume which is basically the equivalent of saying we scored at least 115 on an IQ test.
Studies have shown that college is only about as worthwhile as six months to two years of on-the-job experience. I think outside of an engineering degree, college is probably close to worthless when it comes to training you for a specific job. And I'm sure engineering will eventually shift to "must have a graduate degree" like all other professional-class jobs, given the course load tends to be inordinately high.
With regards to engineers it is well known that an engineer straight out of college is useless and will require a couple of years of on the job experience to become proficient.
> What does everyone think of this argument that the Woke revolution has some legs under it (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/no-the-revolution-isnt-over) as compared to Freddie's argument that it's another cycle in leftist impotence (if I'm characterizing you right, Freddie)?
Can't speak for Freddie. For my part, I am of two minds.
In the long term, Wokeness will fail. This isn't a radical statement. Far greater powers have been lost entirely to time. The only end of history will be the end of humanity.
But the long term doesn't help here. We're talking about the short term. Some time ago, I came up with a rule of thumb for when I would confidently bet the Woke moment was over: when the rats start jumping ship. When I start seeing Wokism's most aggressively cowardly and self-aggrandizing supporters claiming they were never really a part of the movement, they were bullied or pressured into it, while downplaying their own contributions to its power and cruelty? Not out of principle, but because they fear being seen as Woke more than the Woke themselves? That's when I'll know Wokism has lost its power to punish.
We aren't there yet, I don't think. The undemocratic, bureaucratic roots from which Wokism grows remain unharmed. That said, the Right could well start slamming universities and companies with civil rights lawsuits. They don't have to be solid, they don't have to win, they just have to be expensive enough that the apolitical, heads-down types are more scared of them than the Wokies in their own organization.
I'm not sure, but that was certainly an interesting piece by the Upheaval.
That's actually a good metric.
I agree that wokeness will end, at the very least, in about a decade a younger cohort will replace it with something else, in an argument about how they are better than previous generations.
Though it wasn't as explicit in my head, this is internally the metric I've been using too. If the cynical, weathervane opportunists are exiting, that's when we'll know Woke's power is on the decline. Until then, buckle up, bitches...
Fantastic write up Freddie. I think there's a dirty little secret your piece is picking at: there's no great revolution brewing because life is pretty damn good in America*. The millennials weren't financially fucked, and no modern generation growing up in the most prosperous country in world history is. Wealth inequality isn't inherently evil or necessarily a bad thing at all if the majority of the population is relatively wealthy and healthy and moving up the ladder. This is a major reason why asian and latino voters aren't as reliably left leaning as dems had hoped-- why vote for dramatic change when the status quo helped you find a better job and buy a bigger house. Racism hasn't magically disappeared of course, but the US has made incredible progress on civil rights and today it is effectively career and social suicide to espouse racist or homophobic beliefs. So the fact that each generation grows out of their radical revolutionary phase doesn't mean they're a failed generation, but rather that they were lucky enough to be born during a time when revolution wasn't necessary.
*Obviously there are still lots of problems to solve around energy, climate change, housing, etc, but I tend to think our best chance at these is going to be through something like Derek Thompson's proposed "Abundance Agenda" which will be achieved via modern capitalism (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/scarcity-crisis-college-housing-health-care/621221/)
Of course the youth are coming to save us, as far as we will ever be saved. As it was, ever shall it be. There will always be young people to take a stab at saving society, young people to insist on change, and to keep alive the possibility of things being different. And there will always be middle aged people to do the work of holding society together and raising the next crop of youthful visionaries, and the old to provide the wisdom and memory and needed judgmental grumbling. What’s going on now, or in 1990 or in 1968 doesn’t seem to be much different than it was during any generational high point, except that we are in a strange moment where many grown adults seem to have abdicated their own role in this pageant to worship and idolize the young and we’ve completely given into bashing and denigrating the older generation, which people somehow see as an enlightened way to behave, but I tend to see as a convenient excuse to just hate on old people. Do Boomers suck? Sure, but not uniquely. Surely not more than Gen X, the Bezos generation, or millenials, the Zuckerberg generation. The best we can do is take advantage of the endlessly renewing cohort of 20-something’s who still have energy and hope, temper it with the reality of the adult grind of holding it together and enacting g the change demanded, and to not forget that the old people really do know a thing or two that we might not, and then just cross our fingers we live in normally turbulent times and not the worst of times.