Myth of the Millennial as Cultural Rebel

newrepublic.com/article/136415/myth-millennial-cultural-rebel

Interesting article I just found.

Basically, most differences between millennials and preceding generations can most eastily be explained by the fact that millennials are considerably poorer and worse off than the generations before it. Indeed, at least in Burgerstan, it's the first generation to have seen a drop in standard of living in comparison to their parents.

But, as you well know, this isn't the story being peddled out by the media, which has chosen instead to weave an ever more convoluted narrative about how all the differences between Millennials and the older generations is due to some sort of absurd counterculture where Millennials voluntarily choose to continue to have multiple roommates out of some kind of love of communal living, and do precarious work and primarily rent their vehicles because they think it's "cool", not because, you know, they need to save money.

What I thought was even more interesting is that the architects behind this narrative are two old Porkies that peddled out this generational theory that generations cycle between four different archetypes: Prophets, Nomads, Heroes and Artists. The Boomers were apparently Prophets, GenX was Nomads, and the Millennials are Heroes. They formed an organization, LifeCourse Associates, to sell this theory to large corporations as a way to advise advertising techniques based on each target generation's generational temperament.

These two guys were sort of self-hating Boomers and theorized that Millennials, as a "Heroes" generation, would rebel against the worst excesses of their own generation, and would save society from the spiraling consumerist decadence that their associated with their own generation. Less self-hating Boomers have taken a much dimmer view of this, but have still ultimately upheld this narrative, which is why the media has stuck so rigidly to this bizarre "Millennials are just acting poor to spite us" line.

Other urls found in this thread:

sbs.com.au/comedy/article/2015/09/04/lazy-millennials-too-busy-working-read-report-about-themselves
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I ain't buying any of that shit nigga

Diamonds are a scam. You'd need some sort of massive marketing campaign to make people believe otherwise.

Well I wouldn't buy diamonds anyway, but even if I wanted to I couldn't afford it

Pirate bay forever bitches

I'll never understand why Boomers are so buttflustered over people not buy music and movies.

It's hard to express Culture when you don't have the funds. It's hard to fulfill cultural mile stones such as getting married, establishing a household or raising children without the material means.

How can you rebel against something you were never a part of us?

That's the point.

Because they've been told to by the TV

Because they are the most classcucked generation ever. They lived through the era where the political and economic elite put as much effort as they could into destroying the left trough COINTELPRO, propaganda, and most importantly, concessions to the working class designed to pacify them. Now that the threat of communism is percieved to be gone, they have begun to return to the pre-WW2 status quo of capitalism through neoliberalism. That's why we're seeing the return of depression-era inequality, that's why standards of living are dropping. Boomers lived in the era where capitalism tried its hardest to be all smiles and sunshine, but neoliberalism has caused the mask to slip and millennials are starting to see through it.

It must be something else to be so classcucked you actually get mad that people aren't helping the music industry's profits.

Their prophet-nomad-druid-whatever scheme just sounds like an unnecessary mystification of people having different mentalities because they were brought up with different circumstances lol.

It's kind of Idealistic: it portrays the advancement of society's values and ideas as the outcome of some type of ongoing dialogue where one generation is telling the other to fuck off until they end up unknowingly reaching the same ideas of some previous, distant generation, completing the cycle and setting it off again.

In reality, it's our economic expectation that shape who we are, so obviously there's going to be some conflict between those who knew abundance and prosperity and those who know poverty and decadence.

I don't have a firm enough grasp of economics to ponder about what the future will bring, but if we encounter significant economic growth and a new welfare system in the next two decades I'm sure all these left-wing millenials will turn relatively conservative too. Hell, give me a job and free medicine for my poop problems and I might even buy a CD or two.

This just sounds like more "Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts".

A myth that nature is cyclical and self-regulating.
But in reality the forest sometimes burns down and never ever regrows.

"In the 1960s, an idea penetrated deep into the public imagination that nature is a self-regulating ecosystem, there is a natural order," Curtis says. "The trouble is, it's not true — as many ecologists have shown, nature is never stable, it's always changing."

I used to go to a car blog called the truth about cars.

I stopped going because it was non-stop boomers saying millennials didn't buy cars anymore because they were lazy and preferred to talk to people online.

They also went ape shit when Tesla started to become successful because it has the potential to destroy a big compnent of classism in autos, namely performance.

The Tesla pretty much has super car levels of performance, with no real engineering impediments to letting dirty proles access it, which Elon has promised to do with lower prices versions.

My gott you would not believe the level of reactionay-ism (is that a word?) on this site.

I ain't even mad.
Can't get my head around how these boomers think.

People are addicted to complaining about this "new generation". It's like complaining about mainstream media or Hollywood. And it doesn't even have to make sense, you'll see college kids attacking teenagers for their preferences of entertainment, as if we were all reading William Gaddis when we were 13.

I personally think your entire worldview and personality must be a legit blank page if you think this is an interesting trait to have.

honestly i think it's displaced guilt for how shitty they raised us.
or maybe inability to accept responsibilty for their plethora of missteps & failings.

Even if I was super rich I wouldn't buy diamonds. I'd spend most of my time travelling tbh…

What the fuck?
This sounds like some scientology shit.

That's what I'm getting at. Apparently, multiple huge multinationals bought into that dungeons and dragons bullshit.

sbs.com.au/comedy/article/2015/09/04/lazy-millennials-too-busy-working-read-report-about-themselves

Why do these people continuously justify every act of terror that's coming for them?

economic reductionism is just as bad as cultural reductionism

[citation needed]

I don't think you grasped what he was trying to say

Economic reductionism is just a silly way of describing materialism.

same shit, different name.

probably some lame attempt at a false dichotomy that since this is false DiaMat must be true.

Enjoy your non-shit idealism then, I'm sure there are many events out there to be read through the lens of which fairy tale trope they fit.

what a joke

yeah yeah that's exactly what I said

… wouldn't the retard cycle be: greatest generation are heroes, boomers are artists, gen x are prophets, and millennials are nomads? They didn't even pick the configuration that best fits the "theory".

I just laughed out loud at this shit.

They are so deep in denial that they think millennials are merely pretending to be poor to be hip. These are people who watched the Flintstones and Jetsons and internalized a belief that their culture is a culture for all time.

Because they had to save up a lot to buy an LP. They resent people having things easier than they did for even the pettiest things. That's the behavior you get from obscenely spoiler children. Also they're jealous because they're too technologically illiterate to use torrents.

Save up a lot = Spend a little of huge disposal income

Yeah, but that's how they see it. Again, they were extremely spoiled. Having to pay for something a little expensive was like giving up your firstborn to them.

Also, diamonds are shit. You can fly places in airplanes or chill out on a private island. Diamonds are just ugly rocks. Also, they are almost all blood diamonds. Yadda yadda no ethical consumption under capitalism, but buying diamonds is worse than most things, because they do nothing for you at all.

And they're only artificially scarce. Can't think of a worse commodity bth

This. I can't believe people still believe diamonds are a store of value.

That's what I was getting at.