'OK Boomer' and the Fiction of Generations

By Crispin Sartwell

 

One strategy for melting down prejudices is to try to show that the categories in play are fictional or imaginary. For example, it turns out that we're not going to be able to give a biological definition of race, and it turns out also that the things that people regard as races form a random grab-bag of human groupings. 'Latinx' or 'Hispanic' for example, cannot refer to a race of the sort allegedly in play in the black-white split: ask a black Brazilian or Cuban. Well, I'm not sure what the effects of a general dispersion of skepticism about the whole concept of race might have; at a minimum it might make the discussion more complex and truer.

(We might, as it were, take a similar stab at gender.)

The resentment of 'millennials,' members of 'Gen Z,' and whomever is coming along after them toward their ageing ancestors such as myself (born 1958) has recently been crystallized in the phrase "OK boomer." We are, it is said, leaving our descendants a warming world, and we often advocate freedom of expression, which later arrivals to this plane of being see clearly to be an unadulterated evil. When I first heard the phrase, I went all defensive and started howling that I'm not really responsible for everything that's gone wrong. I have the funny feeling that you younguns are no better overall than we are, I found myself almost saying, because people in general kind of suck. (In my head, a chirpy yet somehow sullen young voice responded "OK boomer.")

But my defense of my generation, such as it might be, will have to await a clarification of the concept of generations, which is just a sad slice of superstitious gobbledygook. Scientific studies seem to suggest that, across a population, people reproduce continuously, not all at once every twenty years in a sexual conflagration. To say that one's personality is fixed by one's birth year, or to treat the entire reproductive output of the species over decades as though it were a single individual with personality characteristics - boomers are narcissistic and promiscuous or whatever it may be - is the merest horoscopy. But the Zodiac and the Chinese style of personality-assessment by birth year are relatively refined compared to the primitive superstition that treats millions of people as though they constituted exactly five different personalities.

I hear you saying that the whole thing turns on shared experiences. We boomers were inspired by the election of John F. Kennedy (I was 2). Our ideals died when Kennedy was shot (it's tough to lose your ideals in kindergarten). We all met at Woodstock (I was 10 and didn't know it was happening). It's true I watched the moonshot on television. I'm not sure that had a particularly profound effect on my personality, or I'm trying to figure out what its effect on me really was. There may well have been other factors, local factors, personal factors, that made me the thing I am today.

It's true that once you separate people into generations you can detect trends or commonalities. This would be true no matter where you sliced the years, and though there was a notable population bubble after WWII, every other slice has been demographically arbitrary. Indeed you would find commonalities if you counted boomers and Gen Z as a single group and contrasted them with millenials, or if you made a generation fifty years, or fifty minutes. The procedure is entirely indefensible, though it is sort of entertaining in a divining-by-Tarot sort of way.

To be fair (like many members of my generation, I am widely celebrated for my fairness), the bigotry runs both ways. You Z wretches won't even look up from your cell phone long enough to see my withering stare. You live to take pictures of yourself, which strikes me as unlikely to provide you with a sense of meaning in the long run. A nasty Tweet directed at you causes you a dangerous psychological collapse, addressed by adding another medication to your chemistry-soaked brain. You...well, I've got no more idea of who I'm talking to or about than you do.

 

[true, i am kind of self-plagiarizing from this splicetoday piece]