So you know those news stories about how Millennials don’t buy enough breakfast cereal or paperback books or homes or whatever the hell that Boomers are complaining that “kids these days” don’t spend money on? And y’all are like “LOL, no cash my pal”?
I think there’s something more insidious going on. You see, they thought they had you. Forget the Saturday morning cartoons of my childhood, they had Disney Channel and Nickelodeon feeding you ads all day long. Your generation got advertising in your schools. Your parents took you to prosperity doctrine spewing MegaChurches (it’s Mega so it’s gotta impress the kids, right?).
They thought you were going to be their generation of super-consumers.
You are generations distant from the great depression, and the 1979 energy crisis. Boomers want to pretend that the 2008 housing bubble wouldn’t affect the little kids. And plus, we had grown past the era of Yankee thrift and hippie DIY frugality. Right? And there was no mopey Kurt Cobain glamorizing thrift-store flannel shirts. You guys were going to out-consume the Boomer generation. They were sure of it.
Those think pieces? They’re Boomer disappointment that you have found value in something other than your place as a mindless consumer.
And yeah, I’m not going to pretend that y’all have more cash than you do. It was fucking idiotic to think they were going to raise a consumer generation without having to pay them the money they would need to buy even life’s necessities. And I could write a book about how my generation was complicit in destroying the old values around work and loyalty that left your generation screwed. Really, I’m genuinely sorry for the mistakes we made.
But you guys have given a big middle finger to the generation who thought that they could manipulate you from birth into manipulable-money-spending-machines. And I’m way fucking proud of you for that.
This exactly. We were all raised during the triumph of capitalism to be the ultimate mercenaries; all bonds of community, family, and love were to be experienced by consumerism; we were taught to view all interactions with other people as transactional. Our childhoods were overprogrammed with activities that would one day allegedly look good on our college applications/resumes. Even the much poo-pooed “participation trophies” were really just a way to bribe us. And then fast forward a quarter of a century, and everyone is unaccountably surprised to find that we’re hyper-individuated and don’t even have sentimental attachments to anything they hold dear. What the hell did they expect?
