Last week’s post on Xennial Odyssey’s review of the Gen Y anthology evoked fresh accusations that Ys are just Millennials in denial.
This comment from a while back by Generation Y co-author JD Cowan sums up the key differences between Xers, Ys, and Millennials and suggests reasons for those differences.
I do wonder if the children of the Boomers react so differently towards each other because of these vastly different views of what love actually is.
Gen X saw the love of their parents as false and rejected it wholesale, pledging to devote their existence to always Do The Opposite of them and be left alone. Gen Y saw the love of their parents as transactional and when, inexplicably, the transaction stopped they fell into despair and a tailspin into materialism–the only place where transactions work as intended. It helps explain why libertarianism is only popular with these two generations and is a complete non-starter with anyone else.
While this isn’t a political post, JD’s insight about Libertarians deserves a few words. They say Libertarianism is an ideology for people without children. Relative to their elders, that description fits Gens X and Y to a T.
Meanwhile, Millennials were molded to just be Boomers, complete with nonsensical emotionalism, a hate for everything that came before, and a promise of Paradise once the obstacles are ground into dust. These are the children they always wanted to begin with, which is why they appreciate and support them the most, though it is a narcissistic affection that is expended whenever the Millennial needs aid dealing with reality (student debt) or questioning the programming even slightly.
JD’s on the money here, too. Some people find the Boomers’ love-hate relationship with Millennials confusing. But it makes perfect sense when you understand that Boomers set out to make generational clones of themselves, succeeded, and saw themselves reflected accurately.
So Millennials are to Boomers what mirrors are to Freddy Krueger.
Why don’t Gen Ys like being grouped in Millennials? Because they are part of two different worlds. You might as well question why they aren’t grouped with Gen X. They have just many differences with them.
That right there is what makes attempts to lump Gen Y in with the Millennials so suspect. Ys are a lot more like Xers than Millennials – or any other generation. Yes, there are real differences between Xers and Ys, but they are differences of degree that represent alternate coping strategies.
On the other hand, the divisions between Gen Y and the Millennials are differences of kind. Which is what you’d expect when two generations come of age on opposite sides of a major societal paradigm shift.
As our other esteemed co-author David V. Stewart points out, Ys had analog childhoods and now have digital adulthoods. Millennials have no memories of a pre-digital world. And no memories of a pre-9/11 world, either. Raising kids under such different sets of circumstances is going to get you different outcomes.
But the current thing is to conflate Ys and Millennials, which is how you know it’s a Madison Avenue psyop.
Speaking of which …
Keep in mind, these are all children of the same generation, and yet they are all so vastly different. If you need any proof that Boomers were the most psyop’d group to ever walk the planet, this should be enough.
The other day, a close relation asked me why the Boomers are the way they are.
My reply went along the lines of “Imagine your dad went off to war as a teenager and saw such horrors that he just wanted to live in a Truman Show like simulation of the American Dream. And everybody was so grateful he’d saved the world that they all agreed to reorder society to make him comfortable. ‘You want a cushy middle manager job? OK, we’ll invent it. You want free college to pay for the MBA we just invented as a qualification for the plum job we invented? You got it! You want a doting housewife who’ll have a gin and tonic waiting when you get home and dinner on the table after you unwind? OK, Rosie will hang up her rivet gun.’
“And the last thing those triumphant GIs wanted intruding on their emotional isolation bubble was a bunch of screaming kids. But American ingenuity fixed that, too! Here comes TV to raise your kids for you.
“So imagine you have a dad who’s pretty much checked out, and instead you’re given a shiny, glowing friend who tells you how awesome you are every waking hour.
“And then when you hit adolescence and you’re confused because your dad never inducted you into manhood, he tries the same wide-scale social engineering that soothed him to placate you.”
The latter half of the 20th century till now has been a vicious cycle of parents not bothering to – or not knowing how to – raise their own kids turning to technical solutions.
And due credit to the Libertarians we roasted earlier, one thing they’ve been proven right about is state-mandated schooling.
Don’t let state schools raise your kids.
Don’t let TV or YouTube raise your kids.
And don’t pay people who hate you.
