My occasional posts on the various generations inhabiting Clown World draw a lot of comment. Somebody always expresses confusion over my tendency to eschew more common generational labels, which shift at the Boomers’ convenience.
Here’s a helpful rundown of my preferred dates and definitions for each generation. Spend some time with that post, and you’ll quickly see the delineations aren’t arbitrary. Nor are they designed to massage anyone’s ego. There’s a strong case that the lines I’ve drawn are real.
Generation Y is a perfect case in point. People over 35 will remember “Gen Y” as the once-standard label for the cohort following Generation X. It was everywhere in the mass media throughout the 80s and early 90s. Then one day, the word came down to retire the term.
Why was the Gen Y label phased out? Simple. The Millennial generation’s defining personality traits started broaching the public consciousness in the late 90s. Their much stronger and more obnoxious group identity gave the Boomers a better foil, so Gen Y was forgotten.
Due to being airbrushed out of the picture, Gen Y is harder for mainstream media-educated folks to grok than any other–Generation Jones comes a close second. But Ys really did have markedly different formative experiences and now have a different outlook than Xers and Millennials.
Allow me to illustrate. Remember: Gen Xers graduated college between 1990 and 2000. Ys graduated between 2001 and 2011. Millennials started graduating in 2012.
Tuition rose from roughly $3000 to $7000 while Gen X was in college. It rose from over $5,000 to almost $13,000 while Ys attended. These are just the state school numbers.
Most members of Gen X graduated during a massive upswing in real median wages. Gen Y entered the workforce during a protracted downward trend.
This graph breaks down age groups almost exactly according to my ranges for each generation. Here we have Millennials, Ys, Xers, Jonesers, and Boomers helpfully represented by color-coded lines indicating changes in home ownership. Ys and Xers both fare poorly, but Ys take the shit cake.
Now, this is not a contest to see which generation got screwed over the worst. The Zoomers win that trophy hands down.
The point is that Gen Y experienced the brunt of America’s collapse into Clown World during adolescence. Gen X was into adulthood and able to snag some Boomer scraps by 1997-2001.
Millennials know only post-America and revel in it.
Gen Y grew up in the golden window of the 80s and early 90s, got fed the same Boomer prosperity gospel as the Xers, but then had the rug pulled out from under them just when they thought they were going to collect.
This generational blueballing has produced some characteristic effects. Most Ys crawled inside the blue pill bottle circa 2005 and are still waiting quietly for a promised future that will never come.
The few Gen Ys that do wake up to their betrayal come in two general types. I’d like to offer a prominent example of each type in the form of online personalities with whom my readers are likely familiar.
The Doom Chronicler
Internet prankster, archivist of forbidden digital lore, and intransigent agent of chaos, the entity best known as Jim belongs to Generation Y based on his dubious doxx and his “Goodbye, Carl” response to Sargon of Akkad.
The little we know of Jim fits with the typical Gen Y experience. He fondly remembers attending Sunday church services with his family before falling away from the faith in adolescence. He cherishes memories of the internet as a wide open free-for-all where anything could happen.
That nostalgia for the internet’s Wild West days defines Jim’s online persona, whereby he chronicles web ephemera which he finds entertaining, retarded, or angering. He’ll showcase underwater hamster objectivism one day, mock an eceleb the next, and follow up by exposing a pedophile.
An air of melancholy hangs over Jim’s impish escapades. He’s painfully aware that the internet he loved is gone forever, and it will only get worse. His work resembles an attempt to create a time capsule of the free internet’s last days.
Don’t turn to Jim for answers. He offers no solutions, holds out no hope, and he is not your friend. Ask him what’s to be done about EU directives 11 and 13, and he’ll laugh and call you a fag, if he responds at all.
This is “One bad day” theory applied to Gen Y. When confronted with the monumental farce of his pillaged life, the redpilled Y may embrace his sheer helplessness, grab a bucket of popcorn, and pick out a good seat to watch the world burn.
Owing to his title and dignity as Internet Aristocrat, Jim has the best seat.
The Augustinian Convert
Roosh V‘s early adult life resembles that of the narrator from Fight Club. A child of divorce, he got a STEM degree, got a well-paying job, and embarked on the search for a woman. “A woman” ended up being “myriad women” in Roosh’s case.
Roosh describes his life’s journey as a progression from the blue pill to the red pill, during which he traveled extensively and authored a series of books offering sex advice to men. It would be accurate to describe Roosh as a cad and a pickup artist during his red pill phase.
Events took a strange turn when Roosh attracted the notice of people in high places. They coined the rhetorically loaded but nonsensical epithet “rape apologist” for him and used it as a pretext to ban him from multiple countries, all because he sought to bring young men together to share ideas.
This unpersoning by the powers that be culminated in several of Roosh’s books getting banned by Amazon.
Like Jim, Roosh came to realize his helplessness in the face of the overwhelming forces seeking to destroy his life. Yet he recognized this black pill stage as a necessary dark night of the soul and embraced the desolation to purify himself.
The result has been a dramatic Augustinian conversion, whereby Roosh has left materialist atheism for his childhood Armenian Orthodox faith. He has renounced hedonism while acknowledging the spiritual lessons imparted by the shallowness and despair of his carnal pursuits.
Roosh is convinced that God has allowed him to suffer privation and desolation to prepare him for a personal calling. His pigeon story, starting around the four-minute mark, is a better homily than any I’ve heard at church this decade.
Here we have a sterling example of the special role members of Generation Y can fill if they reject worldliness and despair. Younger generations, especially Zoomers, can learn from our experiences and mistakes. We can impart knowledge that, and why, the world was better.
The most important lesson of all is that faith in Jesus Christ is indispensable. Lacking faith, the best one can do is build a captivating yet lifeless shrine to a bygone moment.
But faith promises hope, and the expectation of receiving what is hoped for. And it teaches us what is worthy of hope.
Roosh correctly stated that no one can stay blackpilled forever. Constantly raging against Commies, Boomers, and Jews ultimately achieves nothing. One either retreats back to the red pill for ever-higher doses of self-medication, or one finally takes the God pill.
This is the hurdle that dissident atheists cannot surmount. Society is not going back to a late 80s combination of demographics and relative permissiveness where you can indulge your vices hassle-free.
We will burn down the corrupt edifice of Modernism and usher in a new era in line with nature devoted to the good.
Atheists who only want low taxes and freely available porn, i.e. a permanent retreat to the red pill, are going to be faced with a choice. They will either join the Christ or His enemy. Generation Y has one foot in each world. They would do well to choose carefully.