A series of comments on yesterday’s post by neopatron Bayou Bomber struck a chord with multiple readers.
In the interest of giving the people what they want, here are his insights on the successive deaths of hipsterism and nerdery, slightly rearranged for ease of reading.
A couple of thoughts:
1) “I was dragged to some fashion-world event in the Bowery in New York: the room was full of cool young people there to be seen, and they were listening to a playlist of Top-40 pop music curated for them by a proprietary mathematical equation. As someone who had grown up in the hipster age, all these people seemed incredibly lame. The world had been given over to the nerds.”I’ve worked in the restaurants and been in enough retail stores to know how lame and frustrating the music selection is. Kid you not, went on a trip to the beach with some friends and every radio station was playing the same 6 to 8 songs. We’d swap from one station to another just to escape a specific song(s) only to hear it soon after swapping stations. The distribution industry for music (and entertainment as a whole) is broken.
Related: Did Nerds Destroy Hipsters?
The songs on the radio I hear all the time date back from 2006-2012, depending on the station.
It’s an odd phenomenon that zoomers have latched onto the 90’s as their decade of choice to build an identity around. I had some as subordinates and they threw a fit if the 90’s station wasn’t on. I have a zoomer office aid now who plays the game of “have you head of this word or phrase?” thinking I’m too old to know what it is. Sometimes I won’t, but other times I laugh because it’s just an old 90’s word or phrase being recycled in the current year.
2) A good theme for everything now is “inflation”. Financially we are inflated, morally inflated, politically inflated, culturally inflated. It never sat right with me that nerd stuff like comic books and anime got huge. I think 20- years ago, it was at a fine size, just large enough to warrant shelf space in a book store, but not large enough to occupy a whole wall. It flew a bit under the radar, sure most people would see it, but they wouldn’t think much of it. Now everyone knows about it and wants to jump on the bandwagon – inflation.
I don’t think it will all come crashing down like people think think it will, I just see a nicely paced deflation, bringing us back to a healthy equilibrium.
The inflation is a product of the bankruptcy. “We don’t have enough of the valuable thing so we need to [make] more of that thing!”
At least with bankruptcy, assets are seized to try and balance the books. But what will be taken from this inflation? Nothing of value. At least with our current cultural deflation, we will see all the waste get flushed and it will allow the opportunity for something better to take its place.
And what of the generation that presided over all the fake money shenanigans?
The clock is ticking for Boomers. Each day we make it forward, is another day closer they are to the grave or nursing home or irrelevancy. It’s a small bit, but deflation is happening now. Just give it some more time.
My comment:
It’s a sad but true fact of life that change happens one funeral and retirement party at a time.
That dynamic holds true across every field of human endeavor. The theory of plate techtonics didn’t gain dominance until all the geologists who opposed it exited the stage.
Some say that intergenerational conflicts waste time. But it can’t be denied that the social upheavals that ushered in Clown World occurred during the rise of the Baby Boomers. And they’ve perpetuated the cultural degeneration even since.
That’s not even to blame most of them. Old habits die hard, and neuroplasticity decreases with age. That’s why you always have to wait for the old boss to bow out before the fresh blood can effect any real changes.
Right now, the Boomers are in the middle of their less-than-graceful exit. And we’re already seeing signs of a major correction. That’s especially true in the Church.
- Eucharistic processions are drawing record crowds during a heat wave
- Millennial priests are more doctrinally conservative than Silent Generation priests.
- Traditional Catholic universities are full to the rafters with new students.
The era of guitar masses, felt banners, and self-worship is coming to its end.
Catholic live streamer Pinesap documents more of the Boomer-abetted crisis and represents the dawning renewal in his recent tour de force against Modernism.
Watch it here:
All I can say after watching that stream is we’re getting a confessional integralist state, and there’s nothing the Death Cult can do to stop it.
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