Boomer Nostalgia

[version]

Arbitary, but also suggestive.

As with generational categories there is both nothing there and enough there to generate insights/ideas.

Interesting to consider the dots you can join just from scanning the events of a given year, like Adam Curtis' filmed cork boards.

I'm looking at '77 now and this is the entry for January 18th:

• Scientists identify a previously unknown bacterium as the cause of the mysterious Legionnaires' disease.
• Australia's worst railway disaster at Granville, a suburb of Sydney, leaves 83 people dead.
• SFR Yugoslavia Prime minister Džemal Bijedić, his wife and 6 others are killed in a plane crash in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

You can see how Curtis or a podcaster could do something with that alone.

1977 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

November 22

• British Airways inaugurates regular London to New York City supersonic Concorde service.
• The TCP/IP test succeeds, connecting 3 ARPANET nodes (of 111), in what eventually becomes the Internet protocol.

Also on the anniversary of the JFK assassination.

Set the scene by mentioning it's the JFK anniversary, jumble something together about speed/technology and the real and the virtual via Concorde and ARPANET, throw in a comment about the Atlantic or the "special relationship" going supersonic, then cap it off by making a vague statement about the 60s truly being over and you have your suggestive podcast segment and your listeners will fill in any blanks with their own associations.

 

[Murphy]

https://www.discogs.com/master/1243114-Grateful-Dead-May-1977-Get-Shown-The-Light

 

[version]

A lot of Gen Xers are making a catastrophic job of parenting because (even more than Boomers) they can't accept any form of cultural generational divide, either because it doesn't exist or their egos are too fragile to face up to it or they don't have the discipline to enforce social norms themselves. We're going to be hated even harder than the Boomers.

Also, we have no story.

Someone was telling me the other day that TikTok's full of Gen Xers making videos of themselves issuing some vague challenge to Gen Z.

 

[...]

Woodstock 99 is a fascinating marker in the shift from Boomer to late Gen X.

I am going to watch this soon and report back:

https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81280924

 

[...]

Another key thing that you can see in products like WW84, Stranger Things, legacy reboots like the new Ghostbuster franchise or Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, etc. is a ubiquitous cultural fascination with the 80s that now grips the mainstream.

It's analogous to the 60s nostalgia of the 90s that was generated by Boomers who took control of key positions of cultural power. It's what happened after The Big Chill.

Well, now it's the turn of Gen X. We're in control, so the 80s has become the new 60s.

 

[...]

I notice that Gen X are the primary culprits here:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/27/cheap-cocaine-deaths-britons?CMP=share_btn_url

 

[shakahislop]

had a great conversation with my parents the other day about how they couldn't imagine living in a house without a garden, how it seems like a minimum requirement for them

i feel like i've watched the anti-boomer thing emerge over the years. probably over the last decade essentially, as part of the general package of it becoming more and more prevalent and acceptable to be anti- some demographic or other, people thinking in those terms. there was a point in the early 2010s where the most prominent anti-boomer was a conservative minister or ex-minister, or whatever, david willets, the geezer who was part of whacking up tuition fees i think. that was the first time i saw what i think he termed 'intergenerational inequality' edge into the kind of discourses i was tuned into, i think via LSE starting to record their public lectures and put them up for download (that was a major education for me). getting old enough now to be able to track the slow evolution and spread of ideas like that.

 

[shakahislop]

i've already said this apparently

 

[Mr. Tea]

i've already said this apparently

Don't worry about it, my parents repeat themselves loads.

 

[...]

had a great conversation with my parents the other day about how they couldn't imagine living in a house without a garden, how it seems like a minimum requirement for them

i feel like i've watched the anti-boomer thing emerge over the years. probably over the last decade essentially, as part of the general package of it becoming more and more prevalent and acceptable to be anti- some demographic or other, people thinking in those terms. there was a point in the early 2010s where the most prominent anti-boomer was a conservative minister or ex-minister, or whatever, david willets, the geezer who was part of whacking up tuition fees i think. that was the first time i saw what i think he termed 'intergenerational inequality' edge into the kind of discourses i was tuned into, i think via LSE starting to record their public lectures and put them up for download (that was a major education for me). getting old enough now to be able to track the slow evolution and spread of ideas like that.

You're right, Willets was conceptualising this in 2010.

This underlines how the 2008 Crash and the Great Recession made generational conflict more acute.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I notice that Gen X are the primary culprits here:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/27/cheap-cocaine-deaths-britons?CMP=share_btn_url

Funnily enough I heard there'd been a small but measurable fall in use among 40-somethings in the UK a few years ago, coinciding with a rise of the same magnitude in Portugal, which remains unexplained.