Millennial Woes


Posted On: Wednesday - June 15th 2022 8:11PM MST
In Topics: 
  General Stupidity  Muh Generation

Peak Stupidity complies fully with the FCC's Fairness Doctrine, at least.



Woe is me, sometimes when talking to these people. If we have any people of this generation in question reading Peak Stupidity, well, first of all, NO, I don't care how it looks on your damned phone! Just stop reading now, because this isn't going to get any better for you.

It's probably the way the government schools teach them, and then those parents of whatever-the-hell screwed up generation THEY are in... Nah, OK, we need SOME readers left, so that's why I put it, mostly rightfully on the schools. I've taught young adults 10 years ago who told me they needed a rubric to do study for the test, when all I know about is Rubic's cube. Rubric? No, just no. Think for yourself.

I don't really mean all of this generation, I guess, but when I do have problems it often boils down to this same thing. They don't want to think for themselves or use common sense. I guess they feel they aren't supposed to - it's so much of a far cry from the "Question Authority" attitude of the 1960s and '70s.

You don't have to go that far though. Look, I was just trying to get a tasty sandwich at the sub shop. For a tuna fish sub, which I had a hankering for, it seems like you don't want all the usual stuff on it. "OK, just some pickles, some olives, and some tomatoes." She put only 4 measly scrawny tomato slices on the foot-long* sub. "How about a few more tomatoes?" Two more measly scrawny pieces went on. Then when I brought up that they were kinda scrawny there, she told me she's got to charge extra, you know, for the 2 more scrawny pieces. "OK, take 'em back off then. Never mind."

See now, I'd passed up a bunch of veggies and condiments that cost money too. So, for 2 measly slices of tomato, couldn't you call it even? Nah, I guess that's not proper procedure. Common sense is not company policy.


* Hey, maybe I should bring a ruler next time. I wonder if they are still 1 ft. long.

Comments:
Moderator
Sunday - June 19th 2022 4:26PM MST
PS: In case you're still reading, Dieter, yes that Rubic's Cube solver/juggler was AMAZING!
Moderator
Sunday - June 19th 2022 4:25PM MST
PS: Mr. Hail, first of all I should admit that I wasn't sure where I'd heard that phrase from, "Millennial woes". Now, the youtuber/blogger/whatever who you gave the biographical sketch on rings a bell.

I am familiar with the Strauss & Howe* definitions of generations in America. I agree with your idea of the buffers between them, but more than that, I don't think one can ascribe certain personality types to people born in certain periods that well, or especially political views . That sounds like a contradiction to this post and others, but this is just curmudgeonry, as in "these damn young people today!", out of me.

Really, I think I'm talking about the Zoomers some of the time, as the oldest of them would be nearly 25 y/o. "Millennials", however, is kind of the more known term, just as "Boomers" is, for those who have not followed Strauss & Howe or other writings that purport to defined generations. I.e. if you said "those Silent guys are always like that", would anyone know what you mean?

I wrote a post on this too, Mr. Hail and Sam, but I do agree that the Zoomers and Millennials have grown, or are growing up in, much worse economic and social times. My complaints aren't about their attitudes there, though. I am still not used to the type of people that can't think for themselves and seem to want to follow a script on everything. I'm seeing a lot of that, just based on dumb looks I get, when I ask a simple question.

I have not really filled up this topic key, as i added it recently, but there are 6 other posts in the "Muh Generation" topic key:

https://www.peakstupidity.com/index.php?tkid=106


* Whose books ("Generations" and "The Forth Turning", the latter just being a focus on this one example of their theory) I keep meaning to reveiw here.
Sam J.
Sunday - June 19th 2022 5:40AM MST
PS

"..."Generation Z," those currently teenagers and up to age 25 or so, have MANY more people adrift and lost, and active social participation rates among core-males are the lowest ever. It doesn't seem helpful to blame these people for what smacks of a clear systemic problem..."

I also totally agree with this. I find that people who blame younger people for the horrible straits they are in really have no idea what has been going on. You can take perfectly good people and really fuck them up if you put them in bad circumstances. I also take to task those that would blame all the boomers for every single thing that has gone wrong. Vox is wrong about this. He's smart about some things but a bit dense on others. This country didn’t just slowly meander itself into this position, it was murdered. It was deliberately murdered and it continues. Maybe, I hate to think about it, but it appears if they think they can get away with it they might really try to create a world like the Georgia Guidestones.
Sam J.
Sunday - June 19th 2022 5:21AM MST
PS

@Hail
I think you're right on with your chart of the generations.
Hail
Saturday - June 18th 2022 8:26PM MST
PS

On the question of What is a Millennial:

I believe the best generational-scheme, which makes most sense to me, is something about this:

- b.1907?: to b.1923: WWII / Great Depression Generation
- b.1924 to b.1926: transitional
- b.1927 to b.1939: Silent Generation
- b.1940 to b.1942: transitional
- b.1942 to b.1959: The Boomers
- b.1960 to b.1964: transitional
- b.1965 to b.1979: Generation X
- b.1980 to b.1984: transitional
- b.1985 to b.1997?: Millennials (Generation Y)
- b.1998? to b.2000?: transition
- b.2001 onward: Generation Z (sometimes now being called "Zoomers")

Those in a "transitional" age-bracket will be groupable with one or the other blocs on either side of them. Which side an individual falls really depends on family origin, region of upbringing, degree of conservativism in upbringing or personal beliefs, religion, personality tendencies, and other factors. If we know those factors for an individual, we could probably guess what generational-type the person resembles with good accuracy. The occasional odd-man-out does not disprove the rule. I think a very large majority of those raised in US culture fit this model and share some important characteristics based on life-experience.

To me the defining feature of the "Millennial generation" is that they lived through the transition from analog to digital. The youngest of the core-group of Millennials I would put as born in 1997 (today age 24/25); with the transitional group, as late as born-2000. But the important thing is they formed a basically analog worldview and saw the digital transformation as part of their own early-life socialization.

The "Zoomers" by contrast knew nothing but the digitized world (pity them!). "Zoomers" may be surprised to hear from their immediate elders that even as late as the 2000s---and definitely so in the 1990s!---the culture (that is to say, life) was MUCH more "analog" than what it rapidly became in the 2010s, in very important ways. (And that is, as many of have come to conclude, a key reason why the Corona-Panic happened in 2020 but never came close in 2009 or any other time some group of flu-fanatics may have wanted to push lockdowns and masks and immoral vaccine-mandates and blacklisting of dissenters, the Panic was borne of a digitized world we hardly understand even now.)

There is more to the story than just that. US Millennials inherited a worse-off social-cultural-political situation than any generation (of Whites in North America) since the 18th century at least, and probably the 17th century. It begins really with Generation X, and those "X'ers" who came up in places in which the 'rot' of managed-decline, displacement, "replacement," High-Low Coalition dominance, and powerful-entrenched hostile-elitism was more advanced, their situation is not so different than the main-line of the Millennials.

How have these two generations (some of 'X,' most or perhaps all of 'Y'/Millennials) coped with the major negative reversals in their prospects?

I'm reminded of an old country song somebody once sung to the effect that they're "more to be pitied than scolded."
Hail
Saturday - June 18th 2022 7:44PM MST
PS

From the title, I assumed this would be about the Scottish Alt-Right Youtuber "Millennial Woes." In the 2010s he gained a loyal following, in the thousands and then tens of thousands, before being life-banned. He 'Youtubed' under the name "Millennial Woes," despite being born in 1980, I think, which is not core Millennial by anyone's definition.

Given the nature of Youtube, he gained probably much more notoriety outside his native Scotland than in it. He was invited to speak at Alt-Right conferences including, I think, several events in the USA in 2015 and 2016, before the tidal wave of negative coverage that began in late 2016 and sped up in 2017.

At some point about that time, the Scottish media revealed his name and home address. He was subject to intense harassment as a supposed Alt-Right Trump Guy, that he had to leave his home, disappeared, and drifted for a while with no fixed address.

His real "woes," at least in the late 2010s, therefore came from being targeted for destruction by the system and pro-system left-wing activists---not from being a "Millennial."

After his life-ban from Youtube, followed by life-ban from Twitter, I think he uses other video platforms but his audience became necessarily smaller.

The following is dubious praise, but it seems like he was a master of the genre of "Youtubing." He started in, I think, the early 2010s doing generalized dark commentary. He was living as a "NEET," or barely above the level of the "NEET," at the time. In his twenties he had become adrift and lost in purposelessness, which he identified as a typical malaise of the generation, hence his self-chosen nickname ("Millennial Woes"). This was generally the main line of his commentary and something about it won him thousands of followers.

As for his move towards the ethnonationalist-Right (or Alt-Right, at its lean-and-mean height, before the crackdown), I'm not sure exactly of the timeline on it but it proceeded in the 2010s. The problems he identified with his generation naturally led him further and further towards this ethno-nationalist Right. He "there" by 2015, he became a big fish in the Alt-Right pond and had the moral courage to carry on with it, which is what destroyed any semblance of normality in his life, and he was run out of Scotland. He then chose to stay active as a kind of hardcore dissident and exile from his native land given threats to his life and a political blacklisting that would prevent any gainful employment. He emerged out the other end like a (very) downmarket Solzhenitsyn.

A lot of his commentary in his videos was dark in metaphorical and literal senses, literal in that he always recorded his videos or livestreamed in near pitch-black conditions smoking a cigarette. As a slow-starter, his commentary appealed more to the b.1980s set than the b.1970s set. Both sets of people were chronologically equidistant from him in age, but given Millennial Woes' years of aimlessness and NEETism, he was much closer to the typical to a b.1985 or b.1990 in life-cycle than to other b.1980 people or earlier, which I suppose justifies his chosen moniker.

I tell this story in part because Millennial Woes may be an example of the possibilities from seemingly totally unimpressive people, from (relatively) young men who otherwise seem totally unimpressive.

The fact is that all political change, always and everywhere, comes from young men, on the main. A movement without young men in it is not going anywhere. Young is an elastic and relative category and not important to set limits on, but Millennial Woes surely counts as an example in the 2010s in his thirties and in life-cycle more like someone in his twenties. In any previous generation he would be definitely classifiable as a loser, but conditions changed underneath out feet such that the current youngest generation, "Generation Z," those currently teenagers and up to age 25 or so, have MANY more people adrift and lost, and active social participation rates among core-males are the lowest ever. It doesn't seem helpful to blame these people for what smacks of a clear systemic problem.

I was never a close follower of Millennial Woes' "content," but my understanding is that this all (the above, the problems of the b.1980s and b.1990s generations, basically) was his major point. In the West, the cultural well has been poisoned. Most people don't even know it. Native White youth, moreso males than females, are the biggest losers, being practically a public-enemy class. While not a brand new phenomenon, each generation starting definitely with those born in the 1970s, I think, has been subjected to it in ways that have been some degree of life-course-shaping and defining, but worse with proceeding time.
Moderator
Thursday - June 16th 2022 5:11AM MST
PS: "... *put* it that way.", I meant.

Yes, of course I really want to see this, Dieter! I'll watch in a few minutes.

Sam, the internet is great, but it's hard to separate the real from the unreal. Before, some people knew there was nefarious stuff going on, but not many had a way to investigate or prove anything. Maybe the best situation is to talk to wise people who really get the big picture and search for articles about specifics that they mention. Paste in some links here to the stuff you think is most important.

BTW, I am sorry I didn't catch your (and a guy named Jack Russell's) comments under the last student loan forgiveness post until last night.

Moderator
Thursday - June 16th 2022 5:07AM MST
PS: There must be so many good comparisons to the fall of the Roman Empire. I like how you turned the meme around, too. The big air conditioning cart by the jet airliner was there with the hose hooked up but flat on the ground in the middle of the summer with a broken APU on that plane. (It gets hot quick in there.)

I asked one of the employees why that nice new-looking cart was not pumping cold air. "It was working before, but it just stopped." "Everything needs fuel, you know... just like that jet there.. gotta keep fuel in it." Yes, that's what it was - out of diesel fuel, but perhaps that's a bridge too far to think about this ... for well, someone who's not from the generation of the drill sergeant, but it that way.
Sam J.
Thursday - June 16th 2022 1:54AM MST
PS

"...Vox Day comments often on the coming Day of the Pillow..."

I really don't get this. I will tell you I had no idea how bad off this country was until sometime around after 9-11 when I realized that it was a complete impossibility for building 7 to fall as if it's only support was air for over 100 feet. And that no one said a damn word about it. I started really looking then.

And it’s not liked I was uninformed, it’s just that everything I was fed was lies my whole entire life. I asked the glorious Vox, I mean you have seen this stuff for a large part of your life, just what are you going to do about it?

I had no idea it was so bad and I'm a serious book and magazine worm. Reading stuff from Libertarian, National Review (way back) and even LaRouche stuff. All the stuff you're "supposed" to read to be informed. But only after it started leaking about "the Finders", the sex scandals at military bases linked to certain intelligence officers, the Franklin cover up that went all the way to the Bush Sr. white house, the Detroux case in Belgium, many of them in Britain, it goes on and on. Until the Internet, all of this was kept in the dark.
Dieter Kief
Wednesday - June 15th 2022 10:25PM MST
PS

Warning! - The following link to a young Columbian juggeling three rubic cubes while setting them straight in less than five minutes (world record!) might rob you of five minutes of your conscient live - do you really want to see this - - or is it some hidden brain structure, that makes you finally look at this everyday miracle?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njKW8t0aAF8&t=2s
The Alarmist
Wednesday - June 15th 2022 10:06PM MST
PS

Vox Day comments often on the coming Day of the Pillow (as in smothered by) for the Boomers. I personally hope my pillow doesn’t arrive until I’ve had a chance to see the Right-wing Death Squads go after inter alia the Wokesters and the violent criminals repeatedly allowed by the formal “justice system” to roam the streets wreaking havoc.

The last Dark Ages’ feudal order arose in no small part from the populace of the Roman Empire being abandoned by their decadent elites to the privations of the barbarians having to seek protection from essentially private security forces of their new overlords.

“You can’t start a lawn mower!”
“I had to fix your computer.”
“You still can’t start a lawnmower.”
“You didn’t give me enough money for gas.”
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