Snowflakes and screens… June 22, 2019
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
Younger people feel a strong sense of injustice. Home ownership seems a pipe dream, even for the relatively well off. Secure employment can be elusive for them too, despite many being far better qualified than their parents and grandparents.
But our survey suggests they shouldn’t hope for sympathy. Many in the older generation dismiss them as “liberal snowflakes” who waste cash on “avocado toast and flat whites”, then waste away weekends “watching screens”. Seventy-eight per cent of over-45s and 82% of those over 65 believe British values are in decline, and many see young people as the cause: “They just don’t have the same values we do – or the respect that we had.”
Huh, waste away weekends watching screens? So unlike many (not saying necessarily most or all) in older cohorts like, gulp the over-45s, who of course would never watch (television) screens. I’m not usually one to bother too much about supposed intergenerational conflict, but this for some reason irritates me – the smug certainty that when younger people do something it is intrinsically worse than when older people do.
Talk to the GF Kelly next time she’s in Ireland (probably Oct/Nov, I’ll let you know). She’s 35, so the oldest of the millenial cohort.
The millenial generation of people (whatever their flaws) have been handed a shit sandwich. Saddled with student loans they’ll never repay (imagine having to dig up $400 or $500 a month for life, and no job to show for it), and graduating into an economy where job after job is being automated! Real estate racing away like a runaway train in engineered bubble after engineered bubble. Let’s not even get started on the environment! Raised by paranoid parents in a plastic bubble, denied access to a normal childhood, plonked down in front of a screen, with every second of playtime supervised by adults. No wonder so many of them have neuroses and worse.
Then to be told, on top of this, that it’s their own fault because they eat too many avocados. You’d think that generation emerged ex nihilo and raised themselves!
On the subject of hating a generation of people for their essential characteristics: the American Baby Boomer generation have to be the smuggest cohort ever to live, and the luckiest. If I never see that Boomer shit-eating grin again it’ll be too soon. Seriously, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It’s the smirk equivalent of goatse bob. What’s the German word for “a face in need of a good punch”?
Backpfeifengesicht
Some similarities to their equivalents in the UK.
This is a must-read: an article written ‘To the young, and their parents’, moaning in true ivy league high hand about the awful youngsters and how horrid they are:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1975/02/a-letter-to-the-young-and-to-their-parents/304096/
Written in 1975. One type of comment I hate is the “it was ever thus” crap. Because it wasn’t! The boomers criticised here were different from those before – the middle class ones were the lucky sperms (vietnam notwithstanding). They rode the post war / energy boom like no other group of people ever will. That article describes them, in 75, as a generation of slackers, and they were! Nothing wrong with that, we need more slack. However, those boomers were able to do something that today’s young won’t: they were able to SELL OUT AND VOTE FOR REAGAN. And a good many of them did likewise in the UK and voted for Thatcher. They snagged jobs in the corporate system they pretended to hate in the 60s and 70s. Got mortgages, watched ‘Family Ties’ and ‘Wonder Years’, and got lulled into the ‘Morning in America’ phantasm, and Tory equivalent.
“CLIMB THE LADDER. KICK OUT THE RUNGS”.
Now these same fucking sellouts want to wag their fingers, like the Patrician who wrote the 75 Atlantic article? Screw them.
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Yep. There’s a huge disconnect in attitudes to those in their 20s and 30s and the reality about their lives. So – for example co-living is seen as a sustainable option, though it’s not something those in older cohorts ever experienced, etc, etc. As you say hardly ‘it was ever thus’. And throw in a class angle as well – I’ve mentioned it before how I’ve heard people fret about housing ‘because middle class people can’t get it’ an attitude that can as easily flip into contempt for those and all people in that position.
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