#Phonepunk#
Banned
So we all know the "Ok, boomer" meme. But has anyone considered:
Why is there a generational divide at all?
If you look at traditional cultures, pre-commercial/industrial, the children do not dress differently and listen to different music than their parents. They don't work drastically in different careers. In fact they probably carry on their family's work, learning the skills directly from them. They may even live their entire lives with their parents.
Yet when you consider the modern pop culture, it is seen as shameful to live with your parents. "You live in your mother's basement" is a common insult. The idea is that living with your family is wrong. Each generation is out for themselves. Materialist individualism is presented as diametrically opposed to the traditional family structure.
Why is this? IMO it seems to be driven by a number of factors, largely cultural. First there is pop culture and consumerism, wherein demographics are aggressively targeted. This involves alienating people and turning them against one another. In marketing, the young, sexy person of roughly 20s-30s age is the ideal. Middle age people are tolerated and elderly people are openly belittled and told "We can't wait until you die off". This generational divide involves dehumanization on a vast scale.
What turns generations against themselves? It is largely an anti-family attitude. The family must be shunned in order that the individual can find worth in their consumer identity. There is not a popular consumer identity where living with your parents is cool. These days we have coupled this generation clash with political issues, leading many people to hyperbolically declare entire generations as Nazis or whatever. More dehumanization.
Where does it come from? School is place where anti-family behavior is encouraged. The state demands that you send your children to be raised by other people, away from the home, by strangers, for a large chunk of the day. There they will learn the values of the state and their peers, rather than of the family that raised them. The demands of capitalism force parents to be at work all day anyways, cut off from their children, so it is seen as a convenience, a sort of free government-run daycare. At school, it is survival of the fittest, it is social darwinism. In order to fit in to a group, to gain protection from bullying or further alientation, you may need to dress a certain way, listen to certain music, etc. to hang out with certain people. These cliques are invariably not the kind of clubs your parents could ever join.
So yeah, i dunno where I'm going with this. Just a lot of thoughts. I have been noticing pop culture lean more and more on this generational divide, pushing anti-family messaging across franchises. All you need to do is look at the pre-eminent pop mythology Star Wars, where nobody has a functioning adult relationship, all marriages inevitably split up, nobody has an intact family, and in fact the only person who "find family" finds it after all the people in that family are literally dead. This is a pattern repeated across media, that you have to "kill the past to become what you are", that people are not allowed any more to find their identity through traditional family. Consumerism requires alienation, IMO this is why this theme is pushed so hard.
What yall think?
Why is there a generational divide at all?
If you look at traditional cultures, pre-commercial/industrial, the children do not dress differently and listen to different music than their parents. They don't work drastically in different careers. In fact they probably carry on their family's work, learning the skills directly from them. They may even live their entire lives with their parents.
Yet when you consider the modern pop culture, it is seen as shameful to live with your parents. "You live in your mother's basement" is a common insult. The idea is that living with your family is wrong. Each generation is out for themselves. Materialist individualism is presented as diametrically opposed to the traditional family structure.
Why is this? IMO it seems to be driven by a number of factors, largely cultural. First there is pop culture and consumerism, wherein demographics are aggressively targeted. This involves alienating people and turning them against one another. In marketing, the young, sexy person of roughly 20s-30s age is the ideal. Middle age people are tolerated and elderly people are openly belittled and told "We can't wait until you die off". This generational divide involves dehumanization on a vast scale.
What turns generations against themselves? It is largely an anti-family attitude. The family must be shunned in order that the individual can find worth in their consumer identity. There is not a popular consumer identity where living with your parents is cool. These days we have coupled this generation clash with political issues, leading many people to hyperbolically declare entire generations as Nazis or whatever. More dehumanization.
Where does it come from? School is place where anti-family behavior is encouraged. The state demands that you send your children to be raised by other people, away from the home, by strangers, for a large chunk of the day. There they will learn the values of the state and their peers, rather than of the family that raised them. The demands of capitalism force parents to be at work all day anyways, cut off from their children, so it is seen as a convenience, a sort of free government-run daycare. At school, it is survival of the fittest, it is social darwinism. In order to fit in to a group, to gain protection from bullying or further alientation, you may need to dress a certain way, listen to certain music, etc. to hang out with certain people. These cliques are invariably not the kind of clubs your parents could ever join.
So yeah, i dunno where I'm going with this. Just a lot of thoughts. I have been noticing pop culture lean more and more on this generational divide, pushing anti-family messaging across franchises. All you need to do is look at the pre-eminent pop mythology Star Wars, where nobody has a functioning adult relationship, all marriages inevitably split up, nobody has an intact family, and in fact the only person who "find family" finds it after all the people in that family are literally dead. This is a pattern repeated across media, that you have to "kill the past to become what you are", that people are not allowed any more to find their identity through traditional family. Consumerism requires alienation, IMO this is why this theme is pushed so hard.
What yall think?
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