Comic Strips

I’m a 1982 “elder millennial” and I used to rail against generational divides but honestly I do see a change even from people born a couple years before me. I had digital everything as it came out, my lunch card was a bar code, we had computers everywhere in elementary school. But we also remember the very last of the old world, analog was still everywhere, parenting was much looser.

So now I have become a little protective of the millennial grouping because they feel like my people.

I hear the same from the Gen Z folks who were in HS and college when COVID hit, absolutely. Shared experiences build camaraderie.

Older generations gained their experiences in a monoculture, so maybe it kinda worked in the past. But with social media becoming a dominant force in culture, there is no longer any monoculture. A Gen Z person brainwashed by the "manoshpere" internet culture has a completely different way of understanding the world from someone brainwashed by the "leftist" internet culture.

Also older generations aren't exactly frozen in time. When I was a teenager I laughed at the jokes at the end of Ace Ventura. In the decades since I learned some things and one of the things I learned was that trans people are people and those jokes were really mean. Others may not have learned that. Social media has caused algorithmic divisions in all generations, so thinking of things in terms of "this generation thinks this way and that generation thinks that way" is completely false. It's just a way to make someone in Gen Z think "the other generations don't think the way my generation does" which compartmentalizes people into left wing Gen Z vs. right wing Gen Z AND right wing millennials AND right wing boomers.

Kinda ironic that Gen X, the generation that first used the internet and watched all of it go down a dark path, is just being ignored completely in all of this.