‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Drawing lines through society is the cheapest and easiest way to look wise without making any meaningful comment.
This is just an exaggeration of a pithy retort that people think is funny (and it is). But that doesn’t mean people “believe” in it any more than people believe wearing a LeBron jersey makes them into better players.
Some boomer should have some “OK SLACKER” t-shirts printed with the tag, “Have a productive day”
As part of Gen-X, I feel like that's appropriating from my culture. I was proudly on the "slackers" mailing list as an adult in the 90s when the millennials were being born. Give millennials a new pejorative, don't steal ours.
Maybe the word "Boomer" will just get redefined to mean "old people with more money than me". Kind of the same way "meme" got redefined from "idea permeating society" to "cartoon or cat picture with sarcastic text", and how "troll" got redefined from "someone who tries to antagonize" to "someone who says things I don't agree with".
The fault with this article is that it focuses on merchandise.
Edit: here’s the first video I saw it trend in comments: http://vm.tiktok.com/553g7w/
I highly doubt this. I've seen this phrase for months on both Twitter and Discord. Searching one discord server I'm in yields several instances going back to April. It was just a meme in the beginning. Perhaps evolved from 4chan's "30 year old boomer"
Honestly this article screams of some fake viral TikTok marketing bullshit. Why are they everywhere now and stuff about this Chinese Snapchat/Vine clone making it everywhere? Are they secretly paying for this stuff? Can we stop voting up this spam? No one cares.
Old Town Road was also around before it became a meme on TikTok, but it was undoubtedly what drove it to #1 on multiple categories on billboard.
I also disagree that no one cares. Otherwise the company wouldn’t be being investigated for national security issues and zuck talking about it in an all hands meeting.
TikTok is influencing art and culture. Regardless of the phrase’s use on discord or image boards, it’s emergence ok tt is important.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/1/20756701/mark-zuckerberg-...
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ok-boomer identifies it being used on Twitter as early as April 2018, with a surge in popularity in Jan 2019.
Many occurrences before October 15th. "Ok boomer" has been a phrase in internet culture for a while now.
P.S. I'm not Gen Z by a long shot and deeply concerned about climate change and financial inequality.
But in general I'd say that "Ok Boomer" works.
Divided would mean that e.g. Millennials with few exceptions vote Democrat while Boomers with few exceptions vote Republican. You know their age, you know their vote with few exceptions.
The reality is that if you would 'accuse' a Boomer of having voted Republican you would be wrong 56% of the time, and if you would 'accuse' a Millennial of having voted Democrat you would be wrong 46% of the time.
This means that if you would start guessing DEM/REP voting purely based on cohort, you would on average be wrong 51% of the time! Yet somehow, this is spun as a generational divide? Do you think this warrants supporting a generational 'war' narrative?
If it is merely the expression of slight shifts in political leanings correlated with age, we'd have to look whether this is a new thing or something that has always been the case [1].
The reason I point out in my response to you that the presumptions which you will find even in this tread, that there is a conflict between the generations that expresses itself as a principle component in voting behavior and justifies division and vilification of the 'opposite' age cohort, is blatantly false and a manufactured framework intent on dividing people and gaining economically and politically from that conflict rather than uniting and looking for solutions.
It's just simple demographic facts that Boomers are politically much, much more likely to not care about climate change and financial inequality. Yes, it sucks that older folks who do care are being painted with a broad brush, but that's the nature of quick and dirty articles.
That is precisely the nature of identity politics, which treats everyone not as an individual with a personal identity and personal believes and responsibilities, but as a generic instanced clone of some immutable class assigned by birth, all members of which need to prostrate to a perpetual divisive ideological war.
For example, how do you talk about helping homeless people, without using their shared identity (the fact that they are homeless)?
Obviously it's not always a useful thing, and grouping people by shared identities can be messy. I don't understand how it can be avoided though, unless you just want the world to stay exactly the same it is.
It's immutable that a kid is a kid. It's immutable that some kids have cancer. What's so wrong to use identity politics to say we should help kids that have cancer?
Are facts "ludicrous" to you? Older people naturally tend to be wealthier through decades of debt retirement, salary increases, compounded investment returns, and so on. There was already a visible divide between the Me Generation (what "Baby Boomers" were once called and IMO still should be) and my own GenX. It seems the divide between us and Millennials/GenZ has gotten even larger. Student debt loads tend to be much larger as a percentage of income than mine were because inflation of college costs has significantly outpaced inflation generally (plus artificially increased demand). Changes in real estate and job markets have only exacerbated those differences. Maybe age-based inequality isn't as big an issue as race-based, but it's still an issue worthy of consideration.
And financial inequality does transcend generations, kids from poorer parents on average stay poorer themselves, while kids from rich parents tend on average to to turn out richer, rather than divide them.
What is even worse is that the rising of economic inequality in the US, will also reflect itself in an even further decline of economic mobility as those two have been shown to be correlated [1].
Don't get caught up in these divisional doctrines. Some stand to benefit from fueling these narratives, and it is not going to be any of the people being pushed into the fires of identity wars.
It's possible for that to be true and for there to be differences between generations. They're not mutually exclusive.
> Some stand to benefit from fueling these narratives
...and some stand to benefit from suppressing them. Attribution of motive - to unspecified people, even - is a non argument.
If you go back 20 years you'll find the same articles about millenials. Go back 20 more years and you'll find them about Gen X. Go back 20 more years and you'll find them about Baby Boomers. Go back to the 1920s and there are articles complaining about the Kids These Days, so lazy and disrespectful, taking all this newfangled technology for granted...
https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2017/08/26/a-society-gro...
The book is available to loan from the Internet Archive:
Generational titles were NEVER used to lift anyone up. They were used to sell books, sell newspapers/magazines, blame everything on the youth who knew nothing of hardship or some other fake-rage bullshit. The age ranges are arbitrary and the names that stick are pure chance and/or marketing.
Why is NYT referencing a moronic TikTok video anyway? Is NYT now trying to compete with Buzzfeed?
One of the articles is about gen z / millennials.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/author/taylorlorenz
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/taylorlorenz/millennial...
But then I'm an old bitter boomer, so what do I know?
Of course another purpose of this "culture war," is to take the blame off the politicians who had a chance actually make the regulations and laws and lay it on a generation of citizens.
What has Generation Y and Z actually done to stop global warming? I don't see anything but talk. Does that mean Generation Y and Z doesn't care about global warming, or maybe it's back to the politicians who are in a position to pass regulations and laws.
Of course, politicians are elected by people so if everyone believes in global warming and votes that way everything will work out.
GenY and GenZ tend to vote for more pro-climate policies, many more of them protest for the government to do something. Many more of them on environmental conscience.
The big thing you seem to be missing is governments should be doing the will of the people, and the will is there for GenZ, but not for the Boomers.
I think the main thing you seem to be missing is that's not how it actually works. The will is there for the energy companies but not the people because energy companies pay for campaigns. Do you think boomers really want ridiculously high health care costs? At their age? Or perhaps it's the insurance companies and the AMA pushing that? Do you think people like paying tax preparation companies every year, even though the government knows what most people owe, or do you think the tax preparation industry pays for that inaction? Do you think people like getting arrested for smoking pot, or the politicians are maybe being influenced by the police and prison unions to keep that sweet, sweet paycheck coming?
When the politicians ignore the will of the people during the your generation, are you going to lay the blame on your generation as well? Will that mean your generation doesn't believe in global warming, or maybe it's something else?
You don't what generation I am in, it's not GenZ
Boomers caused the end of Vietnam because of protest, GenZ is trying to do the same with climate change.
If nothing is done about climate change, it is because the voters didn't vote this way, I don't think it will be because they don't know. It is quite publicized these days. But, if GenZ spends there whole life not doing something about climate change it will be there fault.
I like how one of the first reflexes when criticizing a generation of ecological catastrophes is to over-consume. Reminds my of the boomers' "Che Guevara" merchandises.
It is partially an ironic revenge against the "are millenials killing the economy?" type sentiments, and more generally used to say that the target has an old fashioned and self absorbed worldview: resisting social change, blaming younger generations for societal issues or trivializing their problems. This is nothing new, the "crazy uncle/racist grandma at christmas dinner" is a very much a thing people already talked about years ago.
So the behaviour against the younger generation was already unfriendly (and has been so since forever [1]), and the only thing that has changed for the older generation is that someone says "okay" to them and proceeds to ignore them. That is hardly "the End of Friendly Generational Relations".
[1] https://historyhustle.com/2500-years-of-people-complaining-a...
Making generalizations about a year one was born is just a few turns less silly than astrology
Thinking you need to get a college education is the real big Scam you can thank previous generations for.
It will be fun to watch more and more of them wake up and refuse two other big scams which are marriage and male gender role (women woke to this one decades ago).
Ok, Boomer
Or saying millennials are poor because they like avocados. Or saying millennials are entitled for demanding a living wage.
And for Millennials, some have it rough but some don't. College was cheap and affordable for some of them - certainly more affordable for them than the boomer generation. Keep in mind the generation spans to 1981. Some Millennials are almost 40 now.
Gen Z is in a whole other category of course. Lots of things going/have gone rapidly downhill. But boomers mostly aren't the parents of these people. It's Gen X/Millennials.
But sure, let Boomers and Millennials fight. We're happy to stay out of this (just know that I'm on your side, Millennials!)
Also, a lot of the anger at Boomers is not just because of how they had it (that's mostly the doing of their Silent/Greatest predecessors) but because of how they made it. Boomers have dominated politics since those student-activist hippies got into it, largely because of sheer numbers. Thirty or forty years, depending on exactly which ones you count. GenX is finally making a dent, but mostly at the state level. At the federal level it's still heavily Boomer-dominated, regurgitating the same policies that got us into this mess. Ditto Wall Street etc.
If Boomers had enjoyed good times and then made some effort to prolong or repeat them, #okboomer wouldn't be a thing. It is a thing because so many Boomers are using their political power to keep selling everyone else's future for the sake of their own comfy retirement.
No matter how often we pointed out that college is, in general, vastly more expensive, and summer jobs comparably less well-paying, he'd just repeat himself. "I just don't get it, you go work for the parks department, you work all summer long, why isn't that enough? It's your iphones, your cell phone plans, etc." when, you know, yeah we're paying $20 a month for cheap cell phone plans and five-year-old iphones, but the reality is that working three months at, say, $15 an hour, nets you what, $5-6k? That might cover a year's tuition at a community college if you live at home, not a year living at a state-run four-year university.
I can agree that it's not nearly as easy for us as it was for the past few generations, but it's not nearly as grim as most make it out to be. To put it bluntly, I see a lot of the same "me me me" mentality that the Boomers have been criticized for.
There's the idea that life is just handed to us, so long as we "do the right things." It's perfectly possible to own a home, raise a family, what have you. You just might not get to work the job you want, study the degree program you want, or live in the neighborhood you want.
There never was a "turnkey" existence.
This shitting on the next generation thing has been going on for a long time.
There's solid evidence going back 150 years of older generations complaining about school kids being undisciplined, not respecting their teachers ("not like back when I was at school"), and some slightly more anecdotal evidence going back some 2000 years of the same.
We always find it hard to reconcile the negative aspects of our old behaviour with our current mindset, and it's way easier to just reduce in our minds the severity or scope of our actions. We learn from our mistakes, and try to make them seem as small as possible in our minds.
The above quote comes from ancient Greece.
There's some doubts to the veracity of that quote, which is why I opted for anecdotal when it came to older evidence :)
Today, there's maybe 100 brands. Almost all come in 4-packs, and are priced between $15-$20.
Price increases may just be inflation and even 10 years ago you could find tons of craft beer stores with huge selections in cities big and small. (Beer is one of the easier small businesses to get into; still expensive but they tend to be less likely to fail if you get the consistency of batches right).
Maybe that store just decided to expand from a small selection to attract more craft beer people. That's a really freaking weird conclusion to draw over the history of one bottle shop.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/may/15/austral...
I think it's important to differentiate between "media-driven narrative" and real-world relations, though that line is a bit blurry. It seems the former often creates the latter.
Right now I'm not sure that "Ok Boomer" is anything more than a meme.