Generational Grievance

Your favorite band sucks. To someone. We’ll get back to that in a bit.

There are no significant human individuals in much the same way there are no significant water molecules. It’s only the amount of them, the relationship between them, and the container they’re in that make humans or water molecules remotely powerful. One of the built-in features of being human is our need to organize into tribes. We need this down to our genetic code. It’s more important than our own bodily needs. We need tribes. The problem comes from the fact that the brain doesn’t really care what TYPE of tribe it achieves. Could be Mensa. Could be MAGA. Could be Hello Kitty/Thundercats crossover erotic fan fiction subreddits. We just need a tribe. And the easiest tribe to belong to is the one you did absolutely nothing to join, with no requirements for entry other than a live human birth. I’m talking about the ridiculous notion of “generations.”

Of course, by any biological, anthropological, or mathematical measurement, generations do not exist. They are a social construct. A shorthand we use to tell stories about whole swaths of people without having to narrow down the “they” in the pejorative statement. And let’s face it, it’s almost always pejorative, isn’t it? The word generation was originally a way to describe different writing styles in polite society, but was adopted by European intellectuals as a way to group people into 30 year windows assuming they’d share similar values, attitudes, and behaviors. Even by outdated Victorian era standards, this is a gross simplification.

And yet, here we are, self-sorting into generations and oddly proud of our affiliation. Silent Generation, Baby Boomer, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, Gen A. We absolutely LOVE sorting ourselves into tribes and the most obvious one is when you were born, but the inevitable thing about tribes in intertribal conflict. By the act of self-sorting into generations, it becomes inevitable that those generations will fight. We fight for limited resources, political power, cultural significance, but mostly we like to make blanket pronouncements about other generations so we can feel good about something we had absolutely no control over and then prance around going neener neener and pretending that other generations suck compared to ours.

This is stupid. If this is what you do, stop. It’s stupid.

There are enough problems already in the world with our self-sorting into toxic divisions. We don’t need to lob insults and accusations just to make ourselves feel a little better. “Your” music is not better than “Their” music. It’s different. Your mode of transportation, your method of communication, your cultural milieu, your clothing styles, none of this is superior to any other so-called generation, but it does make you FEEL superior to point out how much better yours is, doesn’t it?

Pride in one’s accomplishments is a perfectly valid emotion. Pride in other people’s accomplishments is a little weird, but we do it all the time. When your local sports franchise beats someone else’s local sports franchise in simulated ball-based combat, we feel pride despite doing absolutely nothing to deserve that pride. But fine, professional sports, collegiate sports, fine, that pride is okay, I just don’t understand it. Pride isn’t the problem. The other side of the pride coin is disgust. Not just pride in one’s tribe, but disgust in someone else’s.

If you’ve ever mentally yelled at a young man to “pull up your pants” because he wore them sagging, congratulations, you’ve experienced generational disgust. What you probably didn’t know are the reasons why that fashion began, the cultural significance of our prison system and how it changes father/son relationships, our concepts of manhood, the very real threats of gang violence and how projecting positions of strength to potential competitors, the chances are you knew none of that when you looked at a young man with sagging jeans and his underwear peeking out and thought “pull up your pants!” Because if you did know the whole story and still said it, that says more about you and your dismissal of our school-to-prison pipeline for young Black men and the physical threats they face. See? And you just thought some other generation had dumb fashion trends. Well, they do, but so did yours.

The point is simple: if you find yourself feeling the need to degrade, denigrate, belittle, besmirch, or otherwise shit on other people because of the window of time they were born into, don’t. The tiny hit of dopamine you’ll get for the few social Likes and the inevitable comment of “THIS!!!” are nothing compared to the moral damage it causes by ripping people apart in a time when we desperately need relationships to mend. It’s on us to police ourselves. If you’re older and feel superior to the music and fashion and technology of young people, I don’t know, maybe go meet a real young person. You’ll be surprised. The whole “they’re all lazy!” thing was a media trick to get you to click on a decade of misleading headlines blaming the ills of capitalism on a generation raised on global crisis. It’s just not true. No blanket statement shitting on all the people of a group is true. It just feels good to say it because we put ourselves outside that group and for a brief moment, we get to feel superior to others and that feels good. And even though that feeling evolved in our brains for some reason, we should be ashamed of having it. You should feel ashamed of feeling superior to someone else based on the generation you were born into. Full stop.

We have plenty of real issues to deal with. We don’t need to add to those by piling on generational grievance for the brief moment of neurochemical elation after someone online agrees with you that your outdated entertainment was superior to today’s offerings. Learn to spot that undeserved pride and unearned disgust in your own mind and then take action to quell it in others. We need to create a new cultural milieu. A new generation, if you will.