Yep, and we’re the perfect age to understand technology for what it is and how it affects society. The younger generation doesn’t know what life is like without it, and the older generations got radicalized by it, which is now infecting our kids.
I was just thinking about this today. I realized I'm exactly the right age to remember a time when people were still exposed to basically the same daily news, even though I've been online most of my life. People 5 or 10 years younger don't even know what a shared information ecosystem looks like.
Same. I came in at the tail-end of GenX. Seems like by the time I started college the illusion of the American Dream was still intact, then it started going to shit right when I graduated.
Elder millennial myself and same, I've long argued that if I were born in the 90s I'd have been radicalised by online gaming culture warriors and YouTube algorithmic recommendations (and joke that I'm "I got radicalised by Iraq instead" years old)
(As my spelling shows, I'm British rather than American, so the specifics of this are a little different, but absolutely the same broad strokes. And I grew up in a right-leaning area with a Silent grandparent as my father figure, so teenage conservatism was Very A Thing for me until then...)
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and then I start to go down the rabbit hole of "was coverage of important events always this vacuous and we just didn't know?"
I’m convinced the next good generation will be the betas. I mean how can they not with that name? And they’ll hate their zoomer parents, so there’s that.
The didn't create the internet but we had to navigate the Wild West that it was, on our own, with no real help and very little protection. That experience molded us. We learned how to research and parse information for truth. This ability keeps us liberal. We can find out way out of the Right's BS
I suspect when you stack this against the within-generational wealth gap chart, you can see some of why. The rich millennials have probably swung right, but they're vastly outnumbered (but do comprise the Tates of this world 🤢)
Getting more conservative was never about age, it was about wealth. The millennials are the first generation that aren't getting wealthier as they get older the same way that previous generations did.
Eh, I doubt that influenced people in the UK all that much. Myself for example, I'm a very non-conservative millenial from Europe, and I only have vague ideas about what Bush did (beyond the war he started), because I was too young at the time to care. It definitely did not influence me.
There was a separate thread the other day any what radicalised you, and I think UK millennials were really forged when they skipped school to attend the largest protests the country had ever seen (against the Iraq war) and Blair didn't even blink.
Many millennials grew up around hate to where it was accepted of LGBTQ+ slurs, racism and everything and many of us fought back. At least I did, my wife, sister in law and many other people I know. 35 years old about to be 36, I haven't talked to many relatives in years because of their hate.
I remember this DC book I had, it implied these girls were a couple. I asked bio father about it because I didn't really think anything of it but I was just curious. He screamed and cussed and asked where I heard about that and went on a hateful hour rant about gays.
Also it happened when I was outside playing with flowers, he was asking me if I was gay and making fun of me. I never forgot those moments as I got older I hated him more and more and social media talked to everyone from LGBTQ+ it just made me hate their anti LGBTQ+ hate even more.
I won't let that man have anything to do with us, we have no pictures of him or anything, it's like he doesn't exist for us and it's better that way. So literally their hate even if years later I didn't realize is what made me a democrat voter, Trump 2016 made me want to become a voter.
Younger millennial here, never voted right-wing.
My elder zoomer younger sis did though...
Been told for a long time Gen Z is the most progressive gen, but after what just happened in America I'm struggling to believe that notion...
They started off that way. Overall I don't think they actually were progressive though. My theory is that they were never the most progressive generation but the most programmable generation.
One must respect the millennials, born after the right wing Reagan Revolution that started the USA on the path to supporting anti-democracy fascism, never really subjected to the heyday, the period of overwhelming rhetorical dominance, of anti-democracy bad economics in the conservative style.
I guess being the generation that was duped into going to college was a great thing after all.
We may have thousands of dollars of debt without the benefit of getting better jobs because of our degrees, but we were exposed to more people from different backgrounds & learned to think critically.
It's more like a half-pound hamburger generation, though: We're bigger than both X and Z, because we're children of both halves of the Boomer generations.
100% you are! Someone on Twitter posted a great thread about Gen-X and how we tell ourselves we're the flannel and slacker generation, but in fact, those characters in our movies were the outcasts. The majority of Gen Xers are not Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink; they're James Spader.
Really, Silent and Boomer are the only generations to reliably grow conservative as they age. Anything before that was either stagnant or progressive; just look at the sheer number of progressive policies to come out of Europe during the late 1800s and early 1900s.
I’m the last year of the Boomers. I am also one of the last to experience the largesse of state, post WW2. I got highly subsidized higher education. We’re talking peanuts for a four year engineering degree! I graduated owing zilch. It went south fast. Older boomers fucked everything.
I agree with the sentiment, but it seems like there were a fair amount of younger folks helping hoist that ladder to the boomers. Pretty inexplicable country we’re living in right now. I’ve never imagined so many would vote against their self interests. Sigh
Yeah, I'm leaning that way, too: After all, we were the generation that was "killing" a bunch of industries, but it was just that we didn't (in aggregate) have enough disposable income to deliver the purchasing rate they expected as previous customers aged out.
The current problem is that as Gen Z fully shifts into voting age, these more left leaning values aren't inherently being passed down. Far right grifters and influencers have radicalized many young men who reject social values as a waste of time, in favor of "economic" values.
Time will tell if that radicalization stays in effect or if our little brother generation can course correct, but if Gen Z doesn't swing left with us, I'm afraid we may be limited in what we can do if we're generationally trapped between Boomers and New Boomers.
Dude, they showed up massively for Palestine. Worldwide. Politics doesn't end at your decrepit system that's barely more democratic than the roman republic was 2000 years ago.
This has been the most consequential election in our lives ... so far!
(Actually, at this point, that's both an expression of fatigue and one of hope that a future one will turn back the tide.)
The majority of millennials’ political socialization (1998-2016) was while Clinton ended with high approval ratings, GWB had temporarily high but ultimately very low ratings, and Obama high then mixed. There’s a theory that presidential approval during this time shapes lifelong voting patterns.
In which case both Trump and Biden have had terrible approval ratings, so I wonder if gen-alpha is likely to be less engaged and more cynical, and neither particularly left or right?
Ah, in 2010, I was a high school freshman, but the logic is the same.
Something coffee, toast something.
having coffee is not going to solve the fact that rent is 60% of my monthly income in one shot
the only digital native generation to have been Online before the algorithmic walled garden era (I don't think it's a surprise that bluesky is basically all 38 year olds)
Gonna just add my two cents as the end of Gen X. A lot of who would be the liberal gen X folks didn't live past the 90s. Think of how many gay men died in the 80's. How many black gen Xers were put in prison in the 90s and beyond. We aren't conservative, it's all the liberal Gen X died young.
I'm a Boomer and have gotten progressively more liberal (or liberally more progressive?) since, I don't know, about 2016 or so, and so I am claiming an unoffered young-at-heart award
And were also all told that going to college, any college for any reason, would immediately give us all fulfilling careers and bountiful wealth, yeah we know it's expensive but it's worth it.
My Boomer dad In 2011: you need to go to college to be successful
My Boomer dad in 2024: Holy shit my generation fucking failed you by pushing you all into college thinking you needed it to be successful. This shit is too expensive and we saddled you with a ton of debt.
Well, you're one of the lucky ones. Despite being reliably liberal, my mother, who never made more than $20,000/year in her working life, still believes that I could have bought a house and paid off my student loans if only I were willing to work longer hours at menial jobs.
If I'm remembering correctly, in a nutshell: Gen Z men are trending more fascistic thanks to the influence of social media, a lack of parental influence, and low-quality education, while Gen Z women are trending more progressive as a result of their treatment at the hands of their male peers.
Careful now! Y’all are just at the point that my shit generation made a sudden and hard right turn. I really believed GenX was going to buck the trend, but we failed bigly
I'm 41 and I've had the internet since I was 12, please don't tell me what millennials did or didn't have. We did not have the manosphere beating hate into our heads 24/7 in our 20s. The worst was Tom Lykus and Maxim magazine
I listened to Leykis at a delivery job in my early 20s and from what I understand of the modern manosphere even he didn't come close to what everyone in Gen z is exposed to these days
I love how those Nirvana boomers (aka. Gen-x) are now equally as or even more right-wing than boomers were at that time.
And yet they always claim to be different.
We call that a zillennial, the micro-generation that's technically gen Z but grew up like a millennial.
If you didn't have internet as a kid and/or had dial-up you're in that group (like me!)
If we can make it with our democracy intact and the world not on fire, by the time Millennials are in the position Boomers are in now we might be alright
Comments
My elder zoomer younger sis did though...
Been told for a long time Gen Z is the most progressive gen, but after what just happened in America I'm struggling to believe that notion...
We may have thousands of dollars of debt without the benefit of getting better jobs because of our degrees, but we were exposed to more people from different backgrounds & learned to think critically.
Or, in the UK, for Farage.
Fuck me, I didn’t realize at the time it would include fighting fascism and hiding people from pogroms.
In polls conducted between 2022-23, only +/-30% of X were GOP/Tory.
The reason, at least in the UK, that Tory policies target Boomer and Older X very specifically; without that vote they're irrelevant.
Not just the crypto bros
And thinking about it being the two generations that staunchly opposed Nazis and fascism it makes sense
The ones who voted might lean right but the generation as a whole does not.
In fact, I think most of us didn't start taking elections seriously until AFTER the 2016 election, which was far too late at that point for us...
(Actually, at this point, that's both an expression of fatigue and one of hope that a future one will turn back the tide.)
Such an easy bar to clear yet all these guys think the odds are so stacked against them that they should opt for total upheaval instead.
How can you spend when you have no money????
Something coffee, toast something.
having coffee is not going to solve the fact that rent is 60% of my monthly income in one shot
Boomer parents in 2009: What, you think just because you went to college you're too good to flip burgers for a living?!
My Boomer dad in 2024: Holy shit my generation fucking failed you by pushing you all into college thinking you needed it to be successful. This shit is too expensive and we saddled you with a ton of debt.
It wasn't quite the same social media as today, but it's closer than none
And yet they always claim to be different.
Is the election going to change this chart?
If you didn't have internet as a kid and/or had dial-up you're in that group (like me!)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zillennials