I am not a member of Generation Z (or a "Zoomer," as they are delightfully called), so the retort "Okay, Boomer" does not belong to me. But the first time I saw it, it filled me with the type of unbridled joy that I rarely feel on the internet anymore, because it spoke to a seething resentment I've been feeling for over a decade, and with particular intensity since the election of Donald Trump.
I immediately told my wife about it, and she was less into it because she's a better person than me. "Isn't it kind of ageist?" she asked.
I tried to jump to its defense (mostly by attacking the Joe Bidens of the world who just. don't. fucking. get it.), but I think I failed, because she is still lukewarm about it, and the two times I have had to explain it to anyone who is older than a Millennial, I have gotten the sense that they have walked away slightly miffed.
I am a Millennial, so obviously I have an unnecessary Master's degree that I earned in the early 2010's while "waiting for the economy to improve." The degree was in Human Rights, and for my dissertation, I used an academic technique called Critical Discourse Analysis to look into the right-wing American media's rhetoric around the children of undocumented immigrants. The technique is designed to analyze how language either reinforces or pushes back against power structures within a society. I focused on the terms "anchor baby" and "DREAMer." It was one of the more fulfilling parts of earning my degree.
Naturally, I haven't used the technique since. No Millennial ever uses anything they learned in their Master's program. Master's programs are what the overseers use to rope you into indebted serfdom in the dark Satanic content mills that dot the 21st century landscape.
It seems fitting, then, that here, on this blog that exists solely so I can shout into the void, "I'M NOT A CONTENT CREATOR, I'M A HUMAN BEING!" I should be afforded the opportunity to again apply Critical Discourse Analysis in the service of explaining "Okay, Boomer" to people who don't get "Okay, Boomer."
The Psychosocial and Economic Implications of "Okay, Boomer": An Abstract
"Okay, Boomer" is directed not at a particular generation, but at a class structure and the people who defend it, who are often members of the Baby Boomer generation.
The Boomer mindset is one that offers unsolicited or bad advice to younger people that is based on an economic context that has not been in place for over four decades. The new economic context, in which "work hard and pay off your loans" or "just find a job with healthcare" are absurd things to say, is the outcome of the core political project of the Baby Boomer generation.
This advice is often offered as a condescending or dismissive parry to the personal grievances of Millennials or Zoomers that have arisen from the current economic context.
For a long time, the only rebuttal a Millennial or Zoomer could offer was a long explanation as to why "that's not how it works anymore." This response, usually heartfelt and born of frustration, almost always fell on deaf ears, because:
the Millennial/Zoomer economic struggles are a direct result of popular Boomer policies, and the only policy programs that could serve as a corrective to these policies would be the center-left wealth redistribution programs that are popular in the modern Democratic Socialist movement,
Boomers grew up in a Cold War context which made the vague menace of "socialism" the existential, atom-bomb-is-coming enemy for most of their lives. This childhood fear has been effectively weaponized by the right, who declares any social program to be indistinguishable from Stalinist purges,
Boomers, as opposed to Millennials or Zoomers, are far more likely to be in the "from" rather than "towards" category of wealth redistribution, and
The arguing parties are, usually, children and their parents (or older family members), meaning that the arguments will almost always be tinged with parent/child power dynamics, which means they get easily derailed because the child doesn't feel seen by the parent and the parent doesn't feel appreciated by the child.
"Okay, Boomer," is the first retaliatory response to the bad advice given by Boomers that is effectively the same in both content and form. It is reductive, dismissive, condescending, and designed to end conversation rather than start it. Boomers -- particularly the leftists who have actually been fighting the current economic context since the 60's and 70's -- could recognize in "Okay, Boomer," the spirit of their own youth zeitgeist:
For 60's Boomers, it was articulated by Bob Dylan:
"Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly aging
Please get outta' the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'."
And for 70's Boomers, it was David Bowie:
"And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're goin' through."
In conclusion, "Okay, Boomer" is a (slightly more concise than usual) iteration of the type of dialectical weapon that always appears in intergenerational warfare.
I'm angry at my Mom and Dad: A case study
There was a wonderful little moment on Twitter last week that illustrated the "Okay, Boomer" fight perfectly. The Tweet is by Aren Le Brun, a leftist and Democratic political consultant:
He followed it nearly an hour later with this:
The central, inescapable stupidity of every book, every article, every single glib statement about Boomers or Gen-X or Millennials or Zoomers is that it treats an enormous number of people who were born within an arbitrarily marked span of time as a monolithic mass of people, when in reality, they are as diverse and different as any huge population. The Boomer Generation contains both Angela Davis and Mike Fucking Pence (his real middle name, look it up). Any category that contains both of those names is so broad as to be completely meaningless.
Which means that the amorphous generational demonym "Boomer" is going to be given shape in our minds by one or two real life examples, and those examples are probably going to be our parents or grandparents.
This is, in short, all just "fuck you, Mom/Dad!" framed as a culture war.
I say this as a person who is working through some parental anger issues himself. Don't get me wrong: my parents are great. Neither of them voted for Donald Trump, thank god. But I'm a new father, the future looks dark, and I'd always been told during political fights with my parents that I would understand when I became a parent. I'd become more conservative in my old age.
Now, at age 33, I am a parent, and this rightward drift has not transpired.
My parents were both Reagan supporters and conservatives until they both started shifting leftward in the George W. Bush era, in large part because all three of their kids abandoned conservative politics pretty much the instant they came of political age, and instigated fights almost constantly. When I've confronted them about their earlier support of conservative causes, their response has often been, "We didn't know,” (about death squads in Central America, about racist dog-whistle politics, about environmental destruction) or “It was a different time."
To which my response is often, "Yeah, well, some people knew, and they were doing something about it, where the fuck were you?"
I have to imagine it is not pleasant hearing this, because I know full well where they were: they were in suburban Cincinnati, driving my bratty difficult ass to soccer practice. Dad was running a travel agency in the era of September 11th, the Internet, and the recession, figuring out how to pay his three kid's way through college, as well as playing catch, taking us out boating, hiking, and traveling with us whenever he could. And Mom was running all of the household errands, cooking all of our meals, starting her own small business, working with the PTA, and whistleblowing to the press that our creepy Catholic priest was embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from our local parish.
They were never greedy; they were, in fact, excellent parents. What’s more, the personal ideologies that they lived by held my family together. Because of them, my family was a stable, loving, only occasionally dysfunctional place. It was this ideology that allowed them, as upper-middle-class white people, to build an idyllic world for their kids. The tax cuts they were voting for were, in their minds, “fiscally responsible.” They were not “dismantling the social safety net and destroying the environment at the expense of minorities and future generations for their own personal short-term gain.”
Now, 30 years on, all of the things they believed in — Patriotism, Catholicism, Conservatism, Capitalism — have become things that I (and to differing degrees, my sisters) have violently rejected in adulthood.
To them, this could conceivably be felt as a wholesale rejection of their lives and identities, which were largely constructed in the service of us, their kids. That, I imagine, might really hurt. I am now a father myself and I love my daughter so much that the idea of her judging me this harshly is brutal.
At the same time, I see how the conservative America I grew up in has led to the mess that my daughter is inheriting. Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, said, when asked about preserving nature for future generations, "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns."
The economic boom times of the Reagan years — which young me benefitted from — were checks cashed from my daughter's bank account. The deregulation mania, the cutting of social services, and the gutting of civil society that Republicans started and Democrats tacitly went along with from the 80's till now is going to make my daughter's and my unborn son's life very difficult.
The people in power, of course, were not my parents. I suspect that if they had been in power, they would've done things differently. For most people, the massive political and economic systems that we live in do not feel like structures that are built and reinforced by humans, but unstoppable forces of nature that the average person can do little about. For Boomers especially, these forces could conceivably have felt inevitable. They had, after all, staged a massive political and cultural uprising in the '60's and early '70's, and the bastards had still won out in the end.
It was said best, as it so often is, by Kurt Vonnegut:
“During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”
To someone caught in this current, to someone too busy with the work of everyday life to pay attention to the inhumanly immense forces of history, it would be tempting to assume that the direction we were headed was inevitable. The best mindset to adopt — the easiest to live with — was that this was a good thing, God would provide, all would work out. Temporary material advantages -- lower gas prices, lower taxes, economic booms -- would seem to confirm that this New World Order was, indeed, a blessing.
The tragedy of our time is that the blessing the Boomers thought they were giving to their kids was in fact a curse, and the Millennials and Zoomers, particularly the ones whose parents weren't the radicals who never believed in any of this, now have to figure out if they can cast that curse aside without breaking their parents' hearts.
I have written this article no less than five times since Donald Trump was elected, since it became clear things were going to get much worse before they got better. If they get better. And I’ve never published it out of nervousness that my parents will read it. Because I love them, and I don’t want to hurt them. “Okay, Boomer” gives me a bit of cover to hide those feelings in. I hid the first iteration of this article in a Facebook comment. Because it’s the internet, it got copied, pasted, and shared a lot, and I’m getting emails from strangers now, so I feel the need to elaborate. I hide it again here under a boring title. It’s easier to passive-aggressively blame an entire generation than it is to tell my parents that I feel betrayed by their earlier political selves, that the world they built for me to flourish in has, instead, deeply hurt me.
Taking the power back
My daughter has shifted things, just not in the way my parents expected it to. I can no longer protect my elder’s feelings at the expense of my daughter’s very existence. I can no longer be a depressed, resigned little drop in the current. I have to at least try to change things for the better. And this means taking power away from the people who are making things worse.
"Okay, Boomer," is shitty, but it's necessarily shitty. Arguments made from a context that no longer exists should not be taken seriously and should be derided. It's not a perfect weapon, and it will have collateral damage. The hand-wringing and #NotAllBoomers thinkpieces that will inevitably appear on the New York Times Op-Ed pages will, at least to some extent, come from a place of genuine hurt.
But the youngest Boomers are now 55. If the worst case scenario with climate change comes to pass, most of them will be dead about a decade before our civilization collapses. It is not their world any more, and yet, thanks to their age, their socioeconomic status, and the demographic bulge that gave them their name, they still hold an immense amount of political and economic power. If we let them, they will keep cashing checks on our future. They will keep up the neoliberal project, keep hoping, increasingly crazed and red-eyed, that things will work out and the blessing will still be a blessing. Their political stances will continue to service their retirement portfolios, and this short-term material gain will once again confirm the blessing.
The mindset that would do this has to be harshly rejected, and the power held by those who buy into this mindset must be wrested away from them. It is unfair to say that all of them are Boomers, it is unfair to say all Boomers are them, and it is unfair to say that this war is a war between the generations and not a war between the classes.
But hey: Life's unfair. It's time to grow up.