First, they came for the boomers. (The boomers came for the silents.)

August 9, 2022 9:43 AM

Kate Lindsay writes in a newsletter for The Atlantic about how Gen Zers (and some generational traitors) have been identifying and skewering the online practices of millenials: “Are You Sure You’re Not Guilty of the ‘Millennial Pause’?”

After hitting “Record,” I wait a split second before I start speaking, just to make sure that TikTok is actually recording. Last year, @nisipisa, a 28-year-old YouTuber and TikToker who lives in Boston, coined the term in a TikTok about how even Taylor Swift can’t avoid the cringey pause in her videos.

posted by Going To Maine (143 comments total)

Wait, what?
posted by srboisvert at 9:47 AM on August 9, 2022 [10 favorites]

I think "not care if your choices make you seem old" is the only reasonable approach. Your choices will always make you seem old and eventually keeping up will get boring.

Like, I - a clotheshorse! - had a moment the other day when I did not care about getting new pants in a new fit. "I live in the provinces," I thought. "Everyone I see regularly has defaulted to workwear or aging-punk wear, why should I keep up". I cannot tell you how out of character this is for me. It was really the first breath from the tomb.

You're old for a long time, since you really significantly start aging out of youth culture in your late twenties.

But happy is he who in his youth is young; the kids need to have the old people around to define themselves against. Without old people being old, "young" just means "not ready for Carousel yet".
posted by Frowner at 9:55 AM on August 9, 2022 [78 favorites]

This story is perfect for the middle-aged+ crowd that is now Metafilter. I'm so grateful there are now two factions of The Young People to fight it out. I'll just stay comfortably in my GenX, being ignored as usual.
posted by Nelson at 9:58 AM on August 9, 2022 [88 favorites]

*Obligatory reminder that essentially all content about generational divides is clickbait designed to make people feel angry, victimized, smug, or preferably all three at once*
posted by cubeb at 9:58 AM on August 9, 2022 [117 favorites]

I have definitely crossed over this line and it was not as traumatic as I thought it'd be. I don't give a damn about streamers, and frankly if zoomers are going to roast my generation for clinging onto Harry Potter and not speaking at the start of the video we're getting off lightly. We made "boomer" into an epithet.
posted by Merus at 10:00 AM on August 9, 2022 [13 favorites]

I found it kind of hilarious that GenXers are apparently exempted from mockery because we just don’t care.

Whatever. Never mind.
posted by DiscourseMarker at 10:01 AM on August 9, 2022 [88 favorites]

What makes me feel old is when I click a link, see it's a tiktok with no transcript that could have been 2 sentences of text, and I move on without ever knowing what it was about :)
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 10:02 AM on August 9, 2022 [58 favorites]

Most millennials I know have already abandoned social media. We have careers, kids, mortgages, medical bills, and the looming belief that the world is getting worse and the best years of our lives are behind us. We just want to share something with our friends, not "build a Tiktok following", and we know that social media is not there for our benefit.
posted by meowzilla at 10:03 AM on August 9, 2022 [26 favorites]

Honestly, the last thing any of us should care about is what someone on TikTok thinks about us. Go dance about it or whatever.
posted by gc at 10:03 AM on August 9, 2022 [17 favorites]

I found it kind of hilarious that GenXers are apparently exempted from mockery because we just don’t care.

I think we're self-aware enough to realise that Gen X making a big deal about how terrible it is to be a sell-out, and then all sell out en masse, suggests that maybe we shouldn't mock you too loudly about being hypocrites thanks to basic pattern recognition

also we don't post on Usenet so most of you won't see our roasts
posted by Merus at 10:07 AM on August 9, 2022 [28 favorites]

Caring what teenagers think enough to change your presentation for them (unless you are like, getting paid to do that) is what's really cringy.
posted by subdee at 10:09 AM on August 9, 2022 [24 favorites]

To consider a "split second" "cringey" (or something to write an article about) requires a hyperfocus on pointless minutiae that is unappealing in anyone of any age. Or as cubeb rightly pointed out, clickbait, which is equally unattractive.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:10 AM on August 9, 2022 [29 favorites]

One way in which adults have been culturally left behind is in terms of having to use video for everything. You can't do tiktok while you're working. You can't livestream while you're parenting. It's ridiculous.

It will pass, though. About a decade ago we watched this happen on tumblr: all the goofy high school and college students grew up and got jobs, and suddenly they didn't have time to be homestucks or whatever. All of a sudden tumblr was dead! And as long as "completely overrun with hormonal teens" is the metric for success, anything else will always be a failure. The communities will continue, of course, but the VCs won't care. Which is for the best.
posted by phooky at 10:11 AM on August 9, 2022 [15 favorites]

I think a good complement to the Atlantic article is this recent video essay by Errant Signal (a millennial himself), who tried out Tiktok and tries to explain what it is, it's impact, and what his thoughts on it are.
posted by FJT at 10:13 AM on August 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

To consider a “split second” “cringey” (or something to write an article about) requires a hyperfocus on pointless minutiae that is unappealing in anyone of any age

I suppose I must push back on this a smidge as it’s my post. I think it’s honestly a bit fascinating that a split-second pause brought on by lack of trust that a device is actually recording can serve as an instant signifier about how comfortable one is with modern technology.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:14 AM on August 9, 2022 [48 favorites]

I found it kind of hilarious that GenXers are apparently exempted from mockery because we just don’t care.

GenXers aren't exempt, The Kids just assume they're young boomers.
posted by uncleozzy at 10:16 AM on August 9, 2022 [44 favorites]

99.9% of what is put on the internet about "generational divides," a dubious and hazy concept to begin with, is lazy ugly bullshit. It's all heat and no light. You're supposed to feel attacked, you're supposed to feel misunderstood, you're supposed to feel mischaracterized, you're supposed to feel self pity, you're supposed to feel self righteous indignation, you're supposed to feel sanctimonious, you're supposed to feel angry at THEM for how WRONG they are and how UNFAIR it is that you've been maligned. It's meaningless anger sprayed in every direction.

Truly and sincerely, I think the world -- and this website, by extension -- would be slightly better places if we all tried to ignore this junk.
posted by cubeb at 10:17 AM on August 9, 2022 [32 favorites]

I think "not care if your choices make you seem old" is the only reasonable approach. Your choices will always make you seem old and eventually keeping up will get boring.

You're old for a long time, since you really significantly start aging out of youth culture in your late twenties.

I turn 46 this year (another Gen Xer here) and it is absolutely wild and refreshing to realize that I am defining what my middle age looks like. Any template from my mom's generation for being/acting/looking 45 is alien to me as mine will be to my nieces and nephew when they reach my age. Sometimes I worry that my everyday summer shorts are too short for a 45 year old and then realize why should I care if people might care. Or that maybe I should cover my plentiful tattoos because maybe women my age shouldn't flaunt their ink, and then I'm like, "I'm in the business of making me happy in my own skin and after years of self-doubt, I don't want to go back."

I am still not good at TikTok or even IG stories, but you know what? It's okay.
posted by Kitteh at 10:17 AM on August 9, 2022 [42 favorites]

I don't think Millennials pause to confirm recording, and I don't think Gen Zers launch right in because they trust their phones. Millennials pause because "this is a thing I have prepared and now am commencing it." Gen Z doesn't pause because "why would I pause, I have 40,000 tik toks just living in my brain and ready to come out at any second, none of this is a presentation, this is just how I live."
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:18 AM on August 9, 2022 [33 favorites]

Wat.

I mean, every news show starts the same way - transitions need room to breathe. You gotta move your hand back, you gotta refocus. I challenge the position that this is all about.. making sure a button did something?

As a randomly selected example, the CBS This Morning Late Edition show from September 6, 2021. You get just over 2 minutes of intros and fast paced headlines, then at 2:09 the transition back to the anchors. There's a pause, a double pen tap on the table, and then talking. Gotta have transitions.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 10:19 AM on August 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

The Kids just assume they're young boomers.

Gasp! The only thing that actually riles us up!
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 10:20 AM on August 9, 2022 [56 favorites]

I found it kind of hilarious that GenXers are apparently exempted from mockery because we just don’t care.

They generally just consider us Boomers unless we do something that seems cool, in which case they'll try to crazy math us into "Xennial" or whatever.
posted by thivaia at 10:21 AM on August 9, 2022 [18 favorites]

I turn 46 this year (another Gen Xer here) and it is absolutely wild and refreshing to realize that I am defining what my middle age looks like. Any template from my mom's generation for being/acting/looking 45 is alien to me as mine will be to my nieces and nephew when they reach my age.

When my youngest child was 5 I realized I was the same age as my mother was at my wedding.

Anyways, I have the GenX pause, which kicks in before I put any content on TikTok and then I...don't.
posted by warriorqueen at 10:23 AM on August 9, 2022 [32 favorites]

Making sure you’re rolling is just good practice.
If you’re self-conscious about it, you can clean it up in the edit.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 10:27 AM on August 9, 2022 [15 favorites]

I found it kind of hilarious that GenXers are apparently exempted from mockery because we just don’t care.

Who do you think they're calling Boomers? The whole point is attaching it to X-ers for betraying their purported (and merchandised, and mythologized) disaffection to turn into horrible bosses and checkstand Karens. Calling an actual Boomer a 'Boomer' is not a jibe, it's an observation.

(And so far as recycling goes, it's the 80s punks complaining about hippies turning into yuppies)
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:30 AM on August 9, 2022 [10 favorites]

Those Gen Zers are going to be soooooo embarrassed when they rediscover audio cassettes and can't stop clipping the first few seconds off their recordings by not waiting for the tape leader to pass.

So. very. embarrassed.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 10:36 AM on August 9, 2022 [35 favorites]

I am defining what my middle age looks like. Any template from my mom's generation for being/acting/looking 45 is alien to me as mine will be to my nieces and nephew when they reach my age

I do think there's also a been fundamental change in the adult relationship with youth (and its visible trappings, but also the performance of youth). The boomer ideas of "adulthood" became unavailable to young people so long ago that younger Xers and all Millennials have grown up in a world where there's a real blur between adult-stuff and youth-stuff.

(Also I just want to say that I realized last week that I need to enjoy whatever remaining kid-years I have with my daughter, who is somehow not yet embarrassed to be seen in public with me wearing matching checkerboard Vans.)
posted by uncleozzy at 10:37 AM on August 9, 2022 [18 favorites]

I think it is helpful to remember that there are a lot of benefits to different life phases, just like there's a lot of benefits to different life experiences. Kids Today make fun of the Olds but Kids Today also like having some Olds around - officially "oh they can't give good life advice" and "they don't understand what it's like", but unofficially I have observed that the Kids like to talk to older people about stuff. Similarly, hey, I am an Old, but I like to talk to people who are Even Older and am kind of relieved to have some friends who are my parents' age. I also like to talk to the Youngs - some of that Youth stuff that they do is all right.

If anything, cubeb is kind of correct - generation discourse is about interposing an extremely motivated discourse between us and what we actually experience. It's like watching how judgmental and horrible people can be on twitter and assuming that people are that way when confronted with an actual human.
posted by Frowner at 10:37 AM on August 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

I found it kind of hilarious that GenXers are apparently exempted from mockery because we just don’t care.

IMO this is gentle criticism of what seems like important but fairly minor changes in culture. If I had to build a Gen-X version, it would be 'remember when MTV used to play music videos?'
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:40 AM on August 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Last night, I was talking to an old friend - we are both 50 - and he was ranting and raving about the millennials he works with, making one broad brush condemnation after another (we were attending an outdoor concert at a place we've been going for decades, and there were a lot of young people there - hence a conversation about "the kids".) Anyhow, it struck me very forcibly, or more so than usual, just how sad, reductive, and deeply boring that is as a topic of conversation. So I excused myself and went to get some softserve from the ice cream truck.
posted by ryanshepard at 10:43 AM on August 9, 2022 [19 favorites]

"the same way that Millennials groan when their Boomer parents try to navigate an Apple TV"

Uh ha yeah ok so I thought us lazy slacker Gen Xers were the ones with Boomer parents?

The whole generational definition thing is bullshit anyway. Gen X is Gen X not because there's no easy definition, but because no one bothered to try and figure out what defined the generation, so yeah why not genericize us all, and yep let's tack Gen Y onto the next group and then ignore them, Millennials was easy because the century changed, what next? Let's back up to the stupid lazy categorization and do Gen Z next, and of course when THEY have kids what the fuck, might as well embrace our corporate job spreadsheet reality and call 'em Gen AA

Or maybe - just MAYBE - grouping people into arbitrary decade-or-so-chunks is not the easiest way to decide how people might act or what defines people to begin with?

Anyway (...pauses before recording...) Hello, I am 48 years old, and I own a lawn. Kindly get off of it.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:45 AM on August 9, 2022 [8 favorites]

Uh ha yeah ok so I thought us lazy slacker Gen Xers were the ones with Boomer parents?

Millennial with boomer parents here, sorry my parents were old I guess? What are you even saying here?
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:49 AM on August 9, 2022 [8 favorites]

The boomer ideas of "adulthood" became unavailable to young people so long ago that younger Xers and all Millennials have grown up in a world where there's a real blur between adult-stuff and youth-stuff.

It’s worth noting, I think, that people use to style themselves in “older” ways. If you ever watch an old episode of Seinfeld or Friends, think about how those characters are supposed to be in their twenties and early thirties. They don’t dress that way, though - they will forever look older.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:51 AM on August 9, 2022 [13 favorites]

Generation Discourse* seems to have some really poisonous philosophy built into it. In Generation Discourse, "generations" are really, really obviously distinct at all levels in broadly similar ways, so a Young from a rich family has more in common with a Young from a poor family than either does with their class peers, etc. In Generation Discourse, generations are assumed to be opposed to each other and to have radically different material interests, again trumping class, race, gender, etc. Lurking in the background is the idea that it is best to be young and bad to grow old.

Generation Discourse is usually focused on the trivial - clothes and pauses and how we use cell phones, etc, but this is supposed to be extremely significant.

And critically there is the idea that things are Getting Better All The Time and that it is kind of dumb to want to know about the past. The only people who know about the past are the Olds, and that's just because they like to complain.

So the only reason to say "it was different in 1995" is either to say "and it was boring and stupid and SO CRINGE" or else to say "and the kids today are so much lazier and look at their phones all the time". There's no space in Generation Discourse for talking about why and how it was different and how we got to where we are.

Generation Discourse is the opposite of having a useful approach to the past, basically, and therefore it shores up both the appalling bits of the past and the appalling bits of the present.


*I'm not counting "gentle ribbing about pauses when making videos" or "the Youth need to differentiate themselves from their parents".
posted by Frowner at 10:53 AM on August 9, 2022 [30 favorites]

Of all the cringy things on TikTok, a split-second pause is pretty low in the rankings. The highest of TikTok cringe would be the little lip-synched skits young fundamentalists did imagining themselves being martyred because they refused to get the COVID vaccine.
posted by LindsayIrene at 10:55 AM on August 9, 2022 [8 favorites]

It’s worth noting, I think, that people use to style themselves in “older” ways. If you ever watch an old episode of Seinfeld or Friends, think about how those characters are supposed to be in their twenties and early thirties. They don’t dress that way, though - they will forever look older.

I mean, that's just how people dressed, though. It probably looked slovenly to their parents, who woudln't leave the house without a sport shirt tucked into slacks.

And now adult men walk around in like, basketball shorts and Adidas slides in public. (And they still look old because kids don't dress like that.)
posted by uncleozzy at 11:01 AM on August 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

> Truly and sincerely, I think the world -- and this website, by extension -- would be slightly better places if we all tried to ignore this junk.

flagged as fantastic
posted by glonous keming at 11:05 AM on August 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

Gen X'ers definitely pause before hitting record -- I mean you have to wait for the screen saver to unload and the disk defragmenter to pause.
posted by credulous at 11:08 AM on August 9, 2022 [18 favorites]

Going To Maine: "It’s worth noting, I think, that people use to style themselves in “older” ways. If you ever watch an old episode of Seinfeld or Friends, think about how those characters are supposed to be in their twenties and early thirties. They don’t dress that way, though - they will forever look older."

There was an interesting Vsauce video on exactly this phenomenon.
posted by adamrice at 11:09 AM on August 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

The whole generational definition thing is bullshit anyway

I mean, yes and no? The baby boom was so called because there was a very real, very obvious spike in birth rates in the US immediately after WWII (I have no idea if the same phenomenon happened elsewhere in the world). And that huge influx of young people coinciding with the post-war economic growth did have a lot of very specific impacts on the culture, and did last about 20 years, so it tracked with the traditional concept of "generation = 20 years". But definitely it's harder to map "generations" as time moves on because the birth rates don't provide the same nice patterns and the media evolution from TV>Cable>Internet>Social Media means that culture cycles so sooo much faster now and these labels feel more and more arbitrary.

But really, I just thought the particular way this article just wrote off GenXers as boring was funny, because usually we don't even rate a mention. No larger commentary than that.

But don't call me a boomer. ::shudders::
posted by DiscourseMarker at 11:28 AM on August 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

I saw that video; it was fascinating. People wanted to look adult in the past. They didn't necessarily want to look older, especially for women (who "expired" even faster than we're said to today), but they didn't want to look like teenagers or college students. Big chonky jewelry, foamy perms, shoulder pads -- women from 18 to 60 would wear them. In fact I wore all three as a kid, at one time or another, because looking like a grownup was what you wanted.

Nobody wants that now. Well, why should they. Fashion fetishizes youth, down to the finest texture of skin, while society makes it harder and harder to achieve anything but the pejorative markers of adulthood (that is, a bountiful harvest of ageism). The only winning move is not to play, but just leaving the house puts you in the game somehow.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:28 AM on August 9, 2022 [23 favorites]

Came to make a really clever boomer joke, so embarrassing...
posted by sammyo at 11:28 AM on August 9, 2022

The boomer ideas of "adulthood" became unavailable to young people so long ago that younger Xers and all Millennials have grown up in a world where there's a real blur between adult-stuff and youth-stuff...

...If you ever watch an old episode of Seinfeld or Friends, think about how those characters are supposed to be in their twenties and early thirties....

Even my idealized perception of what adult life should be life is so far removed from the para-realism of 1990s sitcoms that I don't even recognize it as being a thing to aspire to.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:30 AM on August 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Millennial with boomer parents here, sorry my parents were old I guess? What are you even saying here?

Just pointing out that if we’re supposed to be tracking generations, you don’t get to arbitrarily skip one entirely. Which is another reason the categorization is bullshit. I mean, my sister is 8 years younger than me. She’s either a Gen Yer or a Gen Xer or a Millennial, depending on who you ask and how you define it; who knows, even though we grew up in the same house with the same parents. A ten to 15 year defining block is both too broad and entirely too narrow to use as a measuring rod.

The breakdowns are dumb, inconsistent, and in a lot of ways meaningless.
posted by caution live frogs at 11:32 AM on August 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

This Atlantic article about Millennials and Gen Z is probably as accurate as that NYT style and opinion piece about how the Catholic Church is the hottest club right now.
posted by AlSweigart at 11:33 AM on August 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

I grew up in a country where the whole generational divide thing wasn't even talked about. To me, it seems as quaint and astrological as claiming kinship through birth month, birth year or blood type. For a while I tried to make (your age in days)%1000 a kinship thing because it was so arbitrary, but the first few people who got the concept kind of wanted to make a religion of it, so I stopped.

There are about 10 seconds of recognizably recorded me in the world. I'd like to keep it that way. Not merely would I pause before recording, the first five seconds would feature prominent nose hairs plus a huge index finger tapping the camera while I yell IS THIS THING ON YET?
posted by scruss at 11:38 AM on August 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

METAFILTER: designed to make people feel angry, victimized, smug, or preferably all three at once
posted by philip-random at 11:42 AM on August 9, 2022 [15 favorites]

I think as you get older you're more prone to pause to gather your thoughts and not just blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. I don't think it has much to do with "is this dadgummed contraption even on, and where are my reading glasses?" or what have you.
posted by xigxag at 11:46 AM on August 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

Does this fall into the same basket as "can you see my screen?" when doing a presentation on zoom?

The only winning move is not to play, but just leaving the house puts you in the game somehow.

My agoraphobia keeps winning.
posted by simmering octagon at 11:49 AM on August 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

prone to pause to
... think where you are and what the topic is even about..
posted by sammyo at 11:49 AM on August 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

If you ever watch an old episode of Seinfeld or Friends, think about how those characters are supposed to be in their twenties and early thirties. They don’t dress that way, though - they will forever look older.

I actually always felt that was one of the odder aspects of Seinfeld, even as a Gen-Xer; they all dress and act like alte kackers in 30s bodies (at least as their background/default selves when not doing plots). Elaine as a beautiful young woman in her late 20s/early 30s with the main recreational activity of...hanging out in a coffee shop on the UWS! (Oh, yeah, occasionally taking in a movie.) That grandma apartment of hers, with the big armoir! Even I wasn't that much of a dork.
posted by praemunire at 11:53 AM on August 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

Anyway, I think that pause reflects the gap that healthy people put between themselves and their public self-presentation. I am generally pro-the Youths, but I do find the way they have been trained to butcher up and vend their souls for clicks/clout/monetization distressing and alienating. Of course, it was the boomers who created the economic structure to coerce that, so...
posted by praemunire at 11:55 AM on August 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

Ask not for whom the clock on the VCR blinks 12:00; it blinks for thee.
posted by bartleby at 11:57 AM on August 9, 2022 [39 favorites]

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause...
posted by paper chromatographologist at 12:06 PM on August 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Came to make a really clever boomer joke, so embarrassing...

You hesitated a split second too long!
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:08 PM on August 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

You can change your hair color. You can change your body's shape. You can change your face. You can change your opinions. You can change your gender.

You can change your underwear, or who your friends are, or your job, or what you do for fun.

The one thing you cannot change is your age. Of all the things that make a person, it (along with race) is one of the two-ish things that can't be adapted.

Which means of all of a person's traits, their age should be the most sacred. Nobody should make fun of someone because of their age, young or old. Nobody should turn their nose up at what people do just because they're a certain age. You can have expectations of people based on their age, but the whole "haha millennials pause before starting a tiktok" smacks of "ha ha black people drive like this amirite?"
posted by nushustu at 12:08 PM on August 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

On one hand, I hate The Atlantic because they continue to publish Caitlin Flanagan, but on the other hand, this is some beautiful clickbait trolling that is perfectly engineered to get Millennials yelling at each other about inconsequential behaviour on an app they don't even use.

And then bringing it to MetaFilter -- might as well toss in a golden apple with for the least cringey written on it.
posted by betweenthebars at 12:15 PM on August 9, 2022 [13 favorites]

a split-second pause brought on by lack of trust that a device is actually recording

Okay, sorry, I have to push back on this. "Having complete trust that your phone is instantly recording" really just means "you have a phone that is less than one year old". The parade of constant updates makes older phones slow and unpredictable. It's not just an age thing. It's a class thing.
posted by phooky at 12:24 PM on August 9, 2022 [10 favorites]

#get:::offthelawn
posted by clavdivs at 12:25 PM on August 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

The Boomers and I guess the Silents / Greatests? had their own discourse about the Generation Gap, so it's not new.

People have been doing These Kids Today since 'All want do is look at fire, stay in cave, make paintings on wall. In our day, we go outside! Hunt wooly mammoth with spear!'

The media technology angle has some interest though. As things accelerate, not being temporally native to a a certain Era makes skills look quaint or obsolete.

What once was childish penmanship, became two-finger typing, having 'a good telephone manner', becomes they double space after a period, phone video in landscape mode, became why do they send a whole email just text me, becomes omg they cant even edit video

What's the old 'everything new that happens up til you're 30 is the way things have always been; everything new from 30 to 60 is something you have to learn; everything new after 60 is scary and bad and against the natural order'?
Twas always thus.

The new thing is the monolithic and non-descriptive age-cohort nomenclature. And that 'how much of the 1900s do you personally remember' is not that weird a question.
posted by bartleby at 12:26 PM on August 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

She’s either a Gen Yer or a Gen Xer or a Millennial

I'm in no way disputing the point about the arbitrariness and general uselessness of generation labels, but "Gen Y" and "Millennial" are synonyms. And the concept of labeling generations didn't originate with the Baby Boomers, it predates them. As a non-expert, it seems to me like the more influential version of generation theory may be a post-Boomer phenomenon (1980s), and at least according to Wikipedia owes something to noted Baby Boomer politician Al Gore for its popularization. Anyway, the pull quote in the Wikipedia intro section from someone calling it "an elaborate historical horoscope that will never withstand scholarly scrutiny" seems to say it all to me.

Generation theory and labeling seems like one of those ideas that is probably valuable for sociologists and demographers to help anchor their analyses, but never should have escaped into the wild where people will apply it bluntly without nuance.
posted by biogeo at 12:37 PM on August 9, 2022 [9 favorites]

bartleby: "Ask not for whom the clock on the VCR blinks 12:00; it blinks for thee."

Joke's on you. It's my laserdisc player blinking 12:00.
posted by adamrice at 12:38 PM on August 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

adamrice: Joke's on you. It's my laserdisc player blinking 12:00.

Joke's on you. I pay a guy to walk round every five minutes with a bell and shout "twelve o'clock and all's well!"
posted by scruss at 12:42 PM on August 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

What's a "clock"?
posted by biogeo at 1:02 PM on August 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

What's a "clock"?
posted by biogeo at 3:02 PM on August 9 [+] [!]

$20, same as in town
posted by gc at 1:06 PM on August 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

You've got to wait for the tape to get up to speed.
posted by RobotHero at 1:07 PM on August 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

What's a "clock"?

Related: Why are you wearing a watch? Who still wears watches? Boomers!? This one doesn't (my cell phone's been my watch for a long time, now).
posted by Rash at 1:08 PM on August 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

I still wear a watch, but I'm about to turn 50 and have been comfortably settling into being an Old for a while now and happily dressing that way, still get most of my news from the newspaper delivered to my front door in the morning or the radio, have a landline, and while I have a cellphone I have never bothered upgrading to a smartphone -- too expensive and too much bother to figure out, all I want to do is make some damn phone calls and send the occasional text (which I write in full sentences with punctuation).

I find this thread is highly entertaining, even though I have nothing pertinent to add.

And get off my damn lawn
posted by fimbulvetr at 1:18 PM on August 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

That said, I was not happy with the sign at a local store that said "Boomer Tuesday Deals (50+)". They can fuck right off with that noise.
posted by fimbulvetr at 1:19 PM on August 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

My problem with Tiktok is that 99% of them are bad and I reflexively refuse to watch them now because I've been burned way too many times.

They're always some 24 year old going "whoa did you know that windows open?" Yes, I do--I have a mortgage.
posted by rhymedirective at 1:19 PM on August 9, 2022 [8 favorites]

when they rediscover audio cassettes

I am actually pretty sure (like, for real) that that particular revival is already on the wane.
posted by soundguy99 at 1:21 PM on August 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Why are you wearing a watch? Who still wears watches? Boomers!? This one doesn't (my cell phone's been my watch for a long time, now).

I do for a couple reasons.

1. I am in my late 40's and feel naked without one.

2. I work in weekends in a theme park. You aren't allowed to have your phone out around the guests. This means that the younger ones wind up getting watches because they get tired of asking us old folks what time it is.

I also still put two spaces after a period out of habit. I keep doing it on my iPhone because it translates a double space into a period and a single space, so it speeds things up.
posted by Badgermann at 1:31 PM on August 9, 2022

Ask not for whom the clock on the VCR blinks 12:00; it blinks for thee.
posted by bartleby

I would prefer not to.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 1:34 PM on August 9, 2022 [8 favorites]

I only wear a watch to events, so I can discreetly see when it's time to leave.
posted by freakazoid at 1:39 PM on August 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

To consider a "split second" "cringey" (or something to write an article about) requires a hyperfocus on pointless minutiae that is unappealing in anyone of any age.

Just wanted to note that this descriptor came up about an hour before Seinfeld was invoked by name.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:45 PM on August 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

I wear a watch - I'm still attracted to the mechanical object, automatic watches are pretty neat little bits of engineering. In the same sense I like having a multi component hi-fi stereo... there's a lot of interesting engineered design that I appreciate over most all-in-one digital solutions.

It's explicitly NOT about something convenient or condensed it's goddam old-timey klunky but works.
posted by djseafood at 1:46 PM on August 9, 2022

Oh, you Olds, with your lawns, and your mortgages, and your butler servants or whatever.

Just a joke, I'm lucky enough to own a house for the moment, thanks solely to help from my Gen X brother.

But seriously, one of the few actually legitimate things about generation analysis is the observation that people from the cohort we label as Millennials have been hit by the worst economic hardship at the worst possible times in our lives, multiple times, caused almost entirely by poor decisions made by people 10-50 years older than us. Many of us will never own lawns or mortgages, despite coming from socioeconomic backgrounds where that would have been expected. At a demographic/sociological level, that fact of downward socioeconomic mobility is essential for understanding the health outcomes, economic outlook, and politics of people in that cohort, as a general category. People born during the years we label "Gen Z" and younger, of course, have their own even rawer deal in store, as they'll be spending their entire lives dealing with the effects of the climate catastrophe caused by the poor decisions made by people 20+ years older than them. Those are the only meaningful types of facts that characterize "generations," young people talking about the "cringe" of older people's behaviors with technology and older people tutting about the life choices of younger people is just same-as-it-ever-was distraction.
posted by biogeo at 1:48 PM on August 9, 2022 [11 favorites]

I have nice watches, but most of the time wear a cheap, plastic, Casio digital watch. It tells the time, can take a beating, is waterproof, and I don't care if it gets damaged. Pulling a phone out of your pocket to tell time, especially in the glare of bright sunlight, is much less convenient than looking at a watch on my wrist.
posted by fimbulvetr at 1:51 PM on August 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

Twenty-five years ago, I would regularly pause after hitting the record button...



...on my answering machine, when I was recording an outgoing message.

I'd explain what an answering machine is, but evidence suggests that there aren't many Gen Zers on MeFi.
posted by Slothrup at 1:51 PM on August 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

I still have an answering machine on my landline. I love my answering machine. It keeps the people I know away from me.
posted by fimbulvetr at 1:54 PM on August 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

Through waves and waves of social media services, starting with Friendster a little after college, I tried and tried to participate, never quite getting it but persevering through peer pressure and a darker more existential pressure: that looming fear that I must fight against becoming my uncle, the guy who needed the all of his emails printed out for him.

By 40, twitter posts reflecting in rapid fire on my new bifocals, my aging frontal cortex audibly straining under the load. I knew the end was nigh for me. Was "my family needs to see these pictures of my dog and kids" enough of an excuse anymore? Or was that just one tortured gasp, a paper thin justification, just trying to hang on? No, I knew I soon would need to choose my own time to leave it all or I would be forced out through embarrassment. One by one my accounts were deleted (except this one I guess?)

TikTok gaining universal prominence, I took one look at that and sighed with relief. I knew I had chosen wisely in breaking the chain when I did. Because boy do I not know what's happening there. Freedom at last, just me and my Aubrey-Maturin books and various lawn tools.
posted by gordie at 1:55 PM on August 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

This Atlantic article about Millennials and Gen Z is probably as accurate as that NYT style and opinion piece about how the Catholic Church is the hottest club right now.


I read that this morning. Observed to a friend, "I feel like this space would have been better filled with just a list of fart noises."
posted by thivaia at 2:10 PM on August 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

This Atlantic article about Millennials and Gen Z is probably as accurate as that NYT style and opinion piece about how the Catholic Church is the hottest club right now.

Oh my god it actually contains the line "This is not your grandmother’s church".

Unfortunately, the article lacks the dimwitted zest of the Style section and Dimes Square is basically a fake scene that Peter Thiel is funding to make tradcath memes.
posted by betweenthebars at 2:25 PM on August 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

I only wear a watch to events

Interestingly, this is precisely why I got my cheapo smartwatch — the alarm function is purely haptic and silent, so I can tell when “it’s getting to be time” without being seen to check the clock! Plus I can set up multiple different alarms to track where I stand, and I can silence them with a fairly subtle movement.

…well, I think it’s interesting anyway. It ended up being less useful than I expected due to lockdowns.
posted by aramaic at 2:42 PM on August 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Millennials have been hit by the worst economic hardship at the worst possible times in our lives, multiple times, caused almost entirely by poor decisions made by people 10-50 years older than us.

Eh, I'm a millennial, and none of the hardship in my life has resulted from "The boomers got rid of free college!" or whatever. People are suffering, and I don't want to dismiss that, but I get a bit tired of constantly hearing about how "Millennials" have suffered more than any previous generation in human history.
posted by cinchona at 3:23 PM on August 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm pretty sure I just saw a friend's kid do the "Millennial Pause" at the beginning of a Tok. How can we be sure "Gen Z knows not to pause at the beginning of videos" isn't anecdotal bullshit? Show me the data! (See, I'm skeptical because I'm from #GenX and my generation is skeptical of authority because of punk rock.)
posted by The Tensor at 3:50 PM on August 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

86 comments and I'm the first to note that the word "parody" is in the URL
posted by naju at 3:54 PM on August 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's an article about a Zoomer making a parody video of Millennials.
posted by straight at 4:08 PM on August 9, 2022

Michael Stevens, a 24-year-old TikTok creator...His impressions of Millennials ... include starting videos with a sigh, doing dramatic zooms into their own faces for emphasis, and using phrases popularized on Twitter and Tumblr—like “doggo” and “I can’t even”—in real life. “My husband just went to the new Trader Joe’s next to our house and I think it wins the internet for the day,” Stevens says in a Millennial parody from July. “If this is adulting, sign me up.”

I think the whole Generation A is like this but Generation B is like that is nonsense.

But I can't deny that seeing dumb stuff younger people do getting made fun of by even younger people is delicious.
posted by straight at 4:12 PM on August 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

This boomer would probably pause at the beginning of a video but he's never actually recorded one.
posted by octothorpe at 4:22 PM on August 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

the worst economic hardship at the worst possible times in our lives, multiple times, caused almost entirely by poor decisions made by people 10-50 years older than us

If you zoom out a bit: my grandmother, for example, born in the US to recent immigrants from eastern Europe, literally had to work as a migrant farm worker harvesting tobacco to help her family survive when she was a teenager during the great depression, along with the rest of her siblings.

Who should she have blamed for poor decisions leading to the depression? The idea that entire generations could have enough collective agency to allow collective blame seems maybe limited to US elites during the era of post-war US hegemony and prosperity, if it has any reality at all. But although I feel extremely lucky to be a GenXer, I would never credit that to the virtues of my grandmother’s generation, who after all also raised the Boomers, ruined millions of lives with war and intrigue in other countries, included the likes of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, etc.
posted by mubba at 4:45 PM on August 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

The generational dividing is speeding up. My teenage students tell me they are worried about what's happening to their younger siblings on social media and college students are shaking their heads at high school students. It's something to see.
posted by subdee at 4:46 PM on August 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

I regularly have variants of the conversation about how awesome the youth of today are with my similarity mid to late thirties friends, especially after I've been hanging out with my (much much younger - late teens) siblings and their friends. We were less sensible, coherent, intelligent, and with it than they are when we were their age. Hell, we were less together nearly ten years on. They already feel and come across as at least as grown up as we did say the end of our twenties, it's like it's only a matter of time before we look like the immature kids by comparison.
posted by Dysk at 4:47 PM on August 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

Is this thing on?
posted by chavenet at 5:07 PM on August 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

There's plenty to disagree on here, but I think I can confidently speak for us all when I propose swift and brutal death for the next thinkpiece author to use the phrase "generational traitor."
posted by Mayor West at 5:35 PM on August 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

The infuriating thing about the generational descriptors is that young people don't know it's a thing and just call everyone older than themselves "boomer" which definitely touched a nerve with millennial teacher me when it happened!

(Same thing calling all young people Millennials)

In reality though I agree that labelling generations isn't really useful!
posted by freethefeet at 5:46 PM on August 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Generational cultural identity is ultimately a product of and directed at marketing, although it does tend to reify itself through those processes. Reaction to its expressions is nonetheless a meaningful shibboleth.

There is a harder and more uncomfortable aspect; Medicare solvency and Social Security benefits (protected in full now despite the implications for the future) being its third rail, in the US context.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:06 PM on August 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

young people don't know it's a thing and just call everyone older than themselves "boomer"

language is always going to language. If Boomer becomes an all purpose dismissal of "olders" who aren't just out of touch with the now but rather proud of it (making stupid fun of various fashion or music or other trends) -- I'm all for it.

Couldn't happen to a more deserving generation.

Signed a Boomer, though really only technically. Born at the absolute peak of the baby boom up here in Canada (1959) but came late to the party in terms of key cultural signifiers (Beatles broke up before I turned eleven, was a twenty something when Thirty Something was all the rage, etc)
posted by philip-random at 6:23 PM on August 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

If Boomer becomes an all purpose dismissal of "olders" who aren't just out of touch with the now but rather proud of it

This is emphatically the dominant usage with 'OK Boomer' -- with some more literal spillover mostly confined to home prices, college tuition and job opportunities (for white men, on the last point) in the mid 70s to mid 80s.

(See the Stavros joke about how, for literal Boomers, looking someone in the eye and giving them a firm handshake led to being a VP at Target [which I would link to were I not such a Boomer])
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:42 PM on August 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

(The Literal Boomers do react very badly to the post Big Chill strutural criticisms leveled at them, as they always have; and they are particularly thin-skinned about being attacked from the left by younger people around either gender [which they link to 'free love' -- but for who?] or the opportunity structure [that they can't afford to alter too radically now, being invested in it structurally if not personally.])
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:50 PM on August 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Make that any, in reality; vs. either, as construed.
Apologies for the multipost.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:58 PM on August 9, 2022

As an old Millenial who feels like a lot of us got dealt a pretty rough hand (I graduated college right after 9/11 and when my career was picking up, the great recession happened. I have a good job now & no debt but I still live in a basement I rent), I'm all for Gen Z making fun of us all they want. That's how it should be. I hope things are better for them. I wish we could've done more to make sure it was.
posted by edencosmic at 6:59 PM on August 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

we're getting off lightly. We made "boomer" into an epithet.

Oh, it's still early days yet.
posted by rpfields at 7:05 PM on August 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

Obviously you all don't play enough Bethesda games. As we all know, Boomers are in fact a reclusive and xenophobic sect who live in the hills outside of Vegas, revering pre-war tech and hoping desperately to raise a sunken B-29 bomber from the depths of Lake Mead.
posted by Mayor West at 7:35 PM on August 9, 2022 [8 favorites]

The Zillennial experience is not having a Millennial pause, which means the first few words of all of your recorded lectures are cut off because the creaky old software your university uses sucks and actually does not start recording until a few seconds after you hit record.
posted by brook horse at 7:55 PM on August 9, 2022 [8 favorites]

irst part is dispensable anyway.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 8:40 PM on August 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

... raise a sunken B-29 bomber from the depths of Lake Mead.

It's pretty obvious now that all they really needed to do is wait.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:47 PM on August 9, 2022 [9 favorites]

Question for non US people.
Is this generation labelling a thing where you are? From over here it seems like a very US thing. Although people who use them don't seem to be aware of that, and use them as if they are universal?
posted by Zumbador at 8:51 PM on August 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

Question for non US people.

Australia also had a post-WWII baby boom. We naturally copy the marketing designations of the US (like everything else), so we have these same daft characterisations.
posted by pompomtom at 9:30 PM on August 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

After hitting “Record,” I wait a split second before I start speaking, just to make sure that TikTok is actually recording. Last year, @nisipisa, a 28-year-old YouTuber and TikToker who lives in Boston, coined the term in a TikTok about how even Taylor Swift can’t avoid the cringey pause in her videos.

I realise that the article is not actually about this, but this concept seems totally asinine? Yes, you start recording, and then you speak. How else are you meant to do it?
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 10:19 PM on August 9, 2022

young people don't know it's a thing and just call everyone older than themselves "boomer"

This actually explains a lot to me.

Kind of a spectrum, really; from that 'King of the Hill' character extending now all the way to "everyone older than them."

Don't trust anyone over thirty, kids.
posted by Rash at 10:22 PM on August 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

I feel angry, victimized, and smug, all at once.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:35 PM on August 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

Question for non US people.

Not really in Pakistan. It is a bit now, thanks to US pop/internet culture taking over the world. When I was growing up there was a divide between people who remembered and lived through the trauma of Partition, people who remembered the swinging 60s and 70s, being on the hippy trail and Hollywood stars coming to visit, and my generation, which only knew the Islamisation that intensified with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. So it was more a recognition of growing up in different social/ cultural environments.
posted by tavegyl at 10:37 PM on August 9, 2022 [13 favorites]

When I was growing up there was a divide between people who remembered and lived through the trauma of Partition, people who remembered the swinging 60s and 70s, being on the hippy trail and Hollywood stars coming to visit, and my generation, which only knew the Islamisation that intensified with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Fascinating! That makes total sense. For a while here in South Africa we had a thing about "born frees", that is, people who are too young to remember living under Apartheid.

I don't really hear that so much anymore. It's like the idea of that particular generational label just isn't useful anymore.

I've read that in China there's a similar thing around people who are too young to remember the cultural revolution.
posted by Zumbador at 10:45 PM on August 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

The labels and exact timings differ a little, and what the various generations stand for our are characterised by, but it is still a thing in Denmark.
posted by Dysk at 11:54 PM on August 9, 2022

The Millenial Pause started in the movie Sex, Lies and Videotapes. Itself spawned pretty much all the early Vice/American Apparel fashion spreads.
posted by geoff. at 11:56 PM on August 9, 2022

Is this generation labelling a thing where you are? From over here it seems like a very US thing

Yes and no, in Ireland. It is definitely an imported US thing, but still gets applied sometimes. For Millennials and GenZ it sort of makes sense, as the internet and social media have meant that those generations are closer at least culturally to their US counterparts. The earlier labels don't really make sense (there was no post-WW2 baby boom in Ireland for example), and the "generations" don't really match up, but sometimes get used more as age markers.

There have been attempts to create labels for Irish generations (as someone in their early 40s I'm allegedly part of the "Pope's Children", which, well yeah, no...) but none of them have really stuck. You do have the "peace babies" in Northern Ireland, referring to the people who were born just before, and after the Good Friday Agreement, and I think that's more of a coherent generation than anything really in Ireland.
posted by scorbet at 1:55 AM on August 10, 2022 [5 favorites]

Question for non US people.
Is this generation labelling a thing where you are?

Generation X was written by a Canadian, although it is set in the US with largely American characters.
posted by warriorqueen at 3:26 AM on August 10, 2022 [3 favorites]

The label's older than that book, and one source was British, rather than Canadian: "Generation X, (later known as Gen X) were an English punk rock band, formed in London in 1976." Where Billy Idol began; "Dancing With Myself" was originally their song.
posted by Rash at 3:46 AM on August 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

What makes me feel old is when I click a link, see it's a tiktok with no transcript that could have been 2 sentences of text, and I move on without ever knowing what it was about :)
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 1:02 PM on August 9

I had to record one of these for work 'not tiktok but like tiktok' and how painful it was. The GenZer in the group had a catchy song and no content on the content, and as a GenX, mine sounded like the Iran-Contra hearings...
posted by Nanukthedog at 3:49 AM on August 10, 2022 [5 favorites]

True, Rash, but the book is still credited with popularizing the term. I didn't say it defined it. Douglas Coupland himself got pretty fed up with with.
posted by warriorqueen at 4:25 AM on August 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

Americans are notoriously afraid of Death. They are a youth oriented culture. The age divides are only one way America is divided. Race, politics and a myriad other ways of division. I wonder why we are called the United States when in fact we are not.
posted by DJZouke at 5:17 AM on August 10, 2022

Someone told me about Generation Jones, the description for those of us in-between The Baby Boom and GenX and it fits me so well:

The name "Generation Jones" has several connotations, including a large anonymous generation, a "keeping up with the Joneses" competitiveness and the slang word "jones" or "jonesing", meaning a yearning or craving.[15][16][17] Pontell suggests that Jonesers inherited an optimistic outlook as children in the 1960s, but were then confronted with a different reality as they entered the workforce during Reaganomics and the shift from a manufacturing to a service economy, which ushered in a long period of mass unemployment. Mortgage interest rates increased to above 12 percent in the mid-eighties,[18] making it virtually impossible anymore for starters to buy a house from a single income. De-industrialization arrived full force in the mid-late 1970s and 1980s; wages would be stagnant for decades, and 401Ks replaced pensions, leaving them with a certain abiding "jonesing" quality for the more prosperous days of the past.

Generation Jones is noted for coming of age after a huge swath of their older brothers and sisters in the earlier portion of the Baby Boomer population had; thus, many note that there was a paucity of resources and privileges available to them that were seemingly abundant to older Boomers. Therefore, there is a certain level of bitterness and "jonesing" for the level of doting and affluence granted to older Boomers but denied to them.

posted by octothorpe at 5:45 AM on August 10, 2022 [6 favorites]

The pause is just us checking that our computing setup hasn't irradiated or otherwise killed us.
posted by sebastienbailard at 6:49 AM on August 10, 2022 [3 favorites]

Question for non US people.
Is this generation labelling a thing where you are?

Generation X was written by a Canadian,

in my sixty plus years of being Canadian, I think it's safe to say that we're generally more like Americans in our customs etc than not. In fact, we are Americans -- North Americans. We say and do a few things differently (Zed vs Zee for the last letter of the alphabet, our football [not to be confused with soccer] has three downs not four, we have two official languages) but overall, the similarities tend to tip the scale. Often as not, we laugh at the same jokes.

So yeah, we too had a baby boom after WW2 so we have a plethora boomers, way too many of whom are smug idiots. And speaking of Generation Jones, Doug Coupland (who wrote Generation X) is technically a boomer -- born in 1961, the actual peak of the boom up here. But (as noted) all of the upsides of being a boomer generally don't apply to those born later in the boom. Everything was just more crowded by the time we came along -- jobs harder to get, schools more packed, inflation kicking into serious overdrive by the time we graduated high school, worst economy since the Great Depression by the time we graduated university (until the events of 2008 though by some metrics, it seems the 80s one was worse).

So yes, our cultural touchstones were not be the same as those of our older brothers and sisters. They had Woodstock. We had ... way more TV channels. They dreamed and spoke aloud of a revolution that would change the world. We had Happy fucking Days, which was their nostalgic (already) bullshit regurgitated and force fed to us complete with raucous studio audience cheering on lame shark jumping.

Blah Blah Blah. At least we had punk rock.

Long story short. If you find yourself generalizing about generations, even if there's something to the demographic data, you're probably doing it wrong.
posted by philip-random at 8:30 AM on August 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

MetaFilter: this space would have been better filled with just a list of fart noises.
posted by scruss at 8:32 AM on August 10, 2022 [4 favorites]

@pewresearch: Changes in the teen social media landscape since 2014-15 extend beyond TikTok’s rise and Facebook’s fall. Growing shares of teens say they are using Instagram and Snapchat since 2014-15, while Twitter and Tumblr saw decline. “Teens, Social Media and Technology 2022”

% of teens who say they use the following apps and sites

Site      |  2014/15  2022  Delta
YouTube   |       --    95
TikTok    |       --    67
Instagram |       52    62    +10
Snapchat  |       41    59    +18
Facebook  |       71    32    -39
Twitter   |       33    23    -10
Twitch    |       --    20
WhatsApp  |       --    17
Reddit    |       --    14
Tumblr    |       14     5     -9

posted by Going To Maine at 1:46 PM on August 10, 2022 [3 favorites]

Born in late 1979, never felt like the generational generalizations accurately applied to me, but something I do that absolutely dates me is the way I read letters and numbers out loud into the phone when interacting with voice recognition. I *know* that I can speak at a regular cadence, and modern transcription tools can interpret what I say with startling accuracy, but when I'm on an automated phone system, I maintain a monotone and read. Each. Number. Or. Letter. Separately. And. Evenly.

No one ever hears this except my wife because I'm only ever on these calls when I'm at home or in the car, but one day it dawned on me that this - this is how I'm old.
posted by Leviathant at 4:08 PM on August 10, 2022

Without old people being old, "young" just means "not ready for Carousel yet".

Get off my astroturf doormat.
posted by y2karl at 4:27 PM on August 10, 2022

The fun bit about Generation X being the band Billy Idol was in, was that after he left, the rest of them became Sigue Sigue Sputnik, the output of which I far prefer.
posted by pompomtom at 5:55 PM on August 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

The name "Generation Jones" has several connotations, including a large anonymous generation, a "keeping up with the Joneses" competitiveness

In the spirit of the Douglas Coupland/Billy Idol digressions above, this seems as opportune a moment as any to point out that the term "keeping up with the Joneses" originates with an early-20th-century newspaper comic strip of that title.
posted by non canadian guy at 7:37 PM on August 10, 2022 [3 favorites]

I'm of The Oregon Trail Generation.
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:20 AM on August 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

Is this generation labelling a thing where you are? From over here it seems like a very US thing

it can be. i know in korea the groups can probably be broken down into 4-5 generations, but the only one whose name i can recall with specificity is the 386 generation.

- you have the ones who came of age during the end of the occupation, saw liberation, the war, and the founding of the nation and are now pushing, what, 80+ish?
- you have the ones who were born in the late 50s/60s, got really politically active in the protests of the 80s, and when the term was invented in the 90s they were in their 30s at the time (thus: 3 8 6, also a reference to the intel chip)
- you have the ones born in the late 70s/80s and came of age in the late 90s/00s, which i guess are millennials, but while there's some similarities to western millennials, there are a lot of other differences; i've heard them also referred to as X. they're the ones who saw the first fruits of korea's miracle on on the han, the way internet impacted society
- there's are the ones who came of age in the late 00s/10s, the new generation.
posted by i used to be someone else at 9:57 AM on August 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

listen i wear socks with my sandals idgaf
posted by joannemerriam at 11:10 AM on August 11, 2022

I found this TikTok very illuminating about what's perhaps going on here. Definitely watch it if you're interested in the topic.
posted by chaz at 11:23 AM on August 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

> The one thing you cannot change is your age.

A coworker's brother did! He worked in the music industry, and felt he needed to be younger for professional reasons. He told his close friends and family that he was going to take 10 years off his age and asked them to back him up.

OK, a lot of people lie about their age, but I was impressed by how straightforward he was about it.
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:22 PM on August 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

If he dies 10 years later than he would have otherwise, then I'll be impressed!
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:42 PM on August 11, 2022 [4 favorites]

I was an affected hipster in my youth, but by the time I was, like, 26, I no longer knew what the fuck someone who was 20 was talking about. You adjust, and either relate to people outside of your generational cohort on more important and less fleeting levels than whatever the cool song is that week, or you don't. Generally, a person who can't relate to others on deeper levels than that isn't someone you're missing out on if you don't connect.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:31 AM on August 12, 2022

listen I wear socks with my sandals idgaf

Thus speaks the true revolutionary of this or any other era.
posted by virago at 6:15 AM on August 12, 2022

but by the time I was, like, 26, I no longer knew what the fuck someone who was 20 was talking about.

it took me a while but what works for me in this regard is to pretty much stop caring what anybody between the ages of say twelve and twenty-one is getting all wound up about, culturally speaking. Because what I slowly figured out was that once reasonably adjusted humans are into their early twenties, I can relate to them fairly easily. The slang and whatnot is fading fast. The high school bullshit is in the rearview. They're coming my way, maturing. Which isn't to dismiss all the fabulous stuff that "youngs" do get all passionate about, because some of it is always amazing, essential. But the bulk of it? Nah. It's just passing adolescent drama (and comedy) that they'll be over with long before I could get a handle on it anyway.
posted by philip-random at 7:50 AM on August 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

til idgafk
posted by y2karl at 11:29 AM on August 14, 2022

I would like to amend my recent comment as follows:

listen I wear socks with my sandals idgaf

Thus speaks the true revolutionary of this or any other era. I like it.
posted by virago at 12:43 PM on August 14, 2022

I grow old, I grow old

I wear my Tevas golden-toed*


*not yet
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:51 PM on August 15, 2022 [1 favorite]