I’ve hated being a Millennial ever since the stupid avocado toast days. I’ve been pretty vocal about my dislike of profiling generations, I know everyone is probably getting tired of me ranting about it. I see it as useful for knowing what environment people have likely grown up in and that’s about it. It’s very obviously often weaponised as a way to divide people and I’ve always tried to ignore the discourse (despite probably annoying you all by ranting about it constantly in a “Jesus Dort just get off the internet and go get some help” kind of way)
But now Millennials are getting older and it feel like we’re only getting more and more hate. We’re being remembered by everyone, young and old, as failures who accomplished nothing. Nothing we did mattered, and nothing we do now will ever be acknowledged as ours because in the eyes of society our time is over. It feels like the world is like “Oh thank god those losers don’t matter any more, see how much better at life the next generation is? Zoomers are directing Hollywood hits at age 20!” like I want to be happy for them but at the same time I can’t help but feel like when my generation did/does shit like that no one went/goes “Wow! Look at what Millennials accomplished!” I feel like the only time anyone ever spoke/speaks about us is to complain about how much we suck. Anything good we do/did gets ignored and only our flaws ever get acknowledged.
It really gets me down for some reason, maybe it’s RSD, a mid-life crisis, maybe I’m just weak, who knows? I feel like we weren’t given the chances others were and given yet we’re judged for it like it was our fault.
Anyway this is the last I’ll ever say about it because it’s embarrassing to be whining like a victim in my 30s and this site isn’t a mental health service. I just feel like I’m part of a generation whose life is over before it got a chance to begin and I never got a say in it. Like nothing I do now matters.
Posting this in the neurodiverse comm because I’m pretty sure my feelings are the result of… something, whether it’s the aforementioned RSD from my AuDHD, some kind of trauma or just middle age around the corner making me existential, I don’t know. Maybe all three.
Fully understand if mods decide to delete this for being too much
On the one hand,
On the other, GenXers reading this like
In 20 years, Zoomers will be going through this when Gen Ligma or whatever is calling them out for being cringe. You’re probably on to something about RSD making you more susceptible to falling into these rumination/doom-spiral patterns; it’s hard to break out of once you let it become a habit, and I have no real advice for that. I can definitely commiserate, though; I have a tendency to hyperfixate on things that I know I really shouldn’t, and it’s always hard to snap out of it.
As someone who is technically part of both the flannel slacker generation and the avocado toast latte failure generation, I guess my coping strategy has been to keep myself distracted from it all as much as possible. Sometimes it even works! …but I really do feel like an impostor most of the time. Too young for the GenX greybeards to accept me even as I chitter away about “hey guys, remember the Commodore 64? Oh, you had the PET? What about the VIC-20?” and just old enough that the Millennials know something is a little bit off because I remember slightly too much of The World Before The Internet, I can talk at length about going to the post office to take out money orders to buy NES games from mail order catalogs, and I wasn’t in preschool during the Challenger shuttle disaster. (And yet some of my Zoomer coworkers love those archaic tech stories because they have this romanticized ideal of Matthew Broderick hooking an analog modem up to his rotary phone.) If the generational stuff weren’t enough, I present as too masc for the cis women to do anything but politely give the pained “oh, hun” smile, and even while boymoding, I’m too fem to not be off-putting to male coworkers who haven’t yet decided that I’m just some specimen of “80’s guy” that was recently thawed from a glacier. Middle age is going great. I don’t know how the fuck I’m keeping it together over here.
Yeah I feel bad for the perpetually forgotten Gen X. Hell a lot of the good parts of the early nerd culture I love is thanks to them.
Uuuugh see I hate that it makes us sound like brunch loving libs and that’s totally not me at all!
See I came after the Commodore 64 but I know a lot about 80s culture regardless because of all the cool passionate GenXs that shared all their interests with me growing up. Never once did I feel a need to shit on them.
Don’t feel bad for us. We’re happy to be left out of this. Also, it’s like, whatever dude.