• AlicePraxis [any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    every time I hear about “gen alpha” it makes me wince. we’re really just perpetuating a harmful cycle by stereotyping and categorizing people into arbitrary groups while they’re still children, it’s not right

    and don’t even get me started on the “waiting for the boomers to die” bullshit

    generational warfare only serves to detract from what we should be focusing on, which is class warfare

    • anarchoilluminati [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I couldn’t agree more. This generational conflict shit and forcing people into arbitrary generations is the ageist component of the culture war that distracts from reality.

      I rail against it and even people who are accused of these idiotic stereotypes by virtue of being ‘millenials’ still defend it and reinforce it. People really bought this propaganda, I’m surprised they’re “retiring” it.

        • anarchoilluminati [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          The Boomer generation across the world threw down in Leftist revolutionary and anti-colonial struggle, too, and many of them are not as well-off as they age either.

          You’re not wrong, but it isn’t purely a generational question. Younger generations are also already terribly lib, grind mindset oriented, and could very well get reactionary as it ages. Once all Boomers leave us, our problems won’t magically be resolved and we won’t have global Communism. Some of us may just not have parents around to witness the rise of the new elite class, that’s it.

  • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    It was marketing bullshit to begin with for the most part, though there is something conspicuously wrong with most people I know from the 45-75 age range and it does line up with the supposed boomer stereotypes but that could just be a low chance but possible coincidence. grillman

    • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Besides the lead poisoning, i think that the material conditions boomers experienced are so unique that it can explain why they’re like that. It was the absolute gravy train of history. They reaped all the benefits that labor movements fought for, they lived through a relative “peace” they didn’t fight for, they got every concession that the ruling class was ever going ro hand out because they were afraid of the Soviet Union and revolution. They lived their whole lives in a kind of prosperity mankind has never known, and they took it completely for granted. In fact they took it as a given, that it was completely normal.

      They have 0 ability to concieve of their lives in the context in which they occured. Which is what i find hard to understand, but its clearly true. This isn’t a defense of boomers. I was raised by they so i hate them lol. But, ultimately grillman was formed by material conditions, including a dash of lead poisoning.

  • Kaplya@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Generational gap comes from this:

    As you can see, there is no way that millennials (collectively less than 5-8%), let alone Gen Z, will ever catch up to the wealth owned by boomers and Gen X.

    • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Hmmmm its almost as if wealth and ones relationship to capital is the most important factor to understanding classes of people. I wonder if the struggle between these classes could possibly be the basis for all hitherto existing history. three-heads-thinking

    • ryepunk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Now remove the outliers from the millennial group (basically Zuckerberg who has fully half of all the millennial groups wealth) and the line is even worse.

  • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    They want to stop doing polls where it shows 80% of over 55s enjoy all the terrible shit that nobody is supposed to admit to enjoying. Things like wealth inequality, 14 hour days for children and immigrants, the gender pay gap, racism, lack of healthcare for the poors, Israel. They know it’s a bad look.

  • pezhore@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    So how long before we get a headline, “Millennials killed generational framing”?

  • invo_rt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    “We’re tired of people seeing how much worse off Millennials and Gen Z are doing compared to their parents so we’ll just not talk about it at all anymore.”

    harold-manic

    • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I dunno, polls show that older people are consistently more conservative than younger people in a way that you’d be very hard-pressed to chalk up to statistical noise.

      • mittens [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        I think (white) boomers did have a significantly different experience compared to every other generation irt to access to material wealth, but I believe this is strictly US phenomena lol (Mexico doesn’t have this overwhelming conservative slant among old people, at least not in electoral terms). Then again, it is significant enough as to not be a completely useless I suppose.

      • TheOldRazzleDazzle@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        The stupid lines are that as a liberal when you get older you become conservative or when you get money you become conservative because you are afraid the younger generation wants to take it away from you like you wanted to take it away from others when you were young.

        It’s the dumbest fucking excuse for greed.

      • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        Recent polling is showing that the shift to conservatism that happens as people age isn’t panning out for millennials, so the republican party is going to have to shift tactics in the next 10-20 years if that trend continues for younger folks too

  • mittens [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    yeah they noticed there wasn’t a significant difference between zoomers and millenials, which why would it exist, they’re on average a decade apart, it really isn’t a huge unsurmountable gap. spongebob has been on the air for far longer than this, so we mostly consumed the same cultural artifacts during our formative years. i’m not as cynic as to say it is completely useless, but the gaps between generations are arbitrarily short and thus they become meaningless

    • WayeeCool [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Other than class interests being the biggest contributor to why Millennials and Gen Z are generally on the same page…

      I have to wonder if the whole monoculture phenomenon that internet and social media has taken to a new level might make this trend continue with future generations. Since the early 2000s there has been a sort of flattening of culture, especially since the major social media platforms started actively trying to force all users to see the same content in an effort to stop what they perceive as echo chambers. Between 1950 and 1990 there was a type of monoculture formed by nationally syndicated media but it was carefully curated to be inoffensive or at least relevant in all markets. For example, national evening news tried to stick to reporting on events or issues relevant to all viewers tuning in rather than everyone getting everyone else’s local news all at once all the time. Cultural trends now happen everywhere all at once, even slag and vernacular has become homogenized.

      • SerLava [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        There’s also an interesting artifact of Cable TV, where Millennials watched way more reruns than anyone else in history, so they know a lot of old shows. When cable TV appeared, there literally wasn’t enough content to fill a year of 24/7 TV, so every TV channel had to fill the gap by buying old catalogs of TV from the late 40’s through the 80’s.

        I remember one time when my grandpa said something about Looney Tunes, and paused and started explaining what that was. He couldn’t imagine that I watched the same cartoons growing up as he did.

        When the Internet took over a lot of video watching, people were suddenly almost never watching any old content, so Zoomers don’t know what the fuck Happy Days is or whatever.

        • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          My pet theory for a lot of this is that ubiquitous recorded media has given most commercial media an extremely long shelf life, and ubiquitous recorded media didn’t really become a thing until about the 70s, so 70s music and TV has simply had more mindshare than anything before it.

          The amount of media that continues to be popular today with people born after the media was created is directly related to how easily consumers could access recordings to rewatch/reslisten to the media, so while you might be able to name a couple of silent film stars from the end of the silent era, most people can’t name the stars from 10 years earlier in the film industry. And every decade there’s more iconic media until the explosion of iconic media with significant staging power from the 60s, 70s and 80s, a time when many Zoomer’s grandparents were growing up

    • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      I think there was a Hexbear thread on this last week. But from the other way round. I.e. boomers. It covers a massive time span, relatively speaking. As well as a ‘cultural’ decade and it’s own ‘countercultural’ decade.