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I wouldn't say this is quite accurate. I'm technically in the zoomer bucket, and can't remember 9/11, but I absolutely remember a time with more optimism than we have now. Perhaps it's just that I grew up in a conservative part of the US, but the George W. Bush hate especially after Iraq just wasn't really present in my childhood. He was kind of buffonish sometimes, but obviously all my evangelical Republican family members loved him. I remember being impacted by the great recession, but I was young enough that it didn't seem to matter very much. The idea of patriotism was just real, people believed in it.
And even as I grew older, Obama's election was a moment of massive optimism on the left and center, a black guy named
"Osama""Obama" was elected president of the United States.The smartphone (and before that the iPod) were actually a big part of the optimism of the time. We remember these changes as negative, but people were massively excited about them at the time in a way they just aren't for technological changes today.
I place the turning point
USAaround the time that the Black Lives Matter movement started, that's where the left abandoned the narrative of Obama being the signpost of full racial integration and brotherhood. The modern culture war can be traced back to that, IMO. Feminism and gamergate and that kind of stuff were fellow travelers, but around that time that stuff was just a few weird girls on Tumblr and hadn't hit the mainstream yet. I guess in some sense it never did, I can't imagine the left legitimately scrawling "KILL ALL MEN" in all caps like an Umbridge punishment the way the Tumblrinas used to do.I guess in some ways this was true, particularly as we look at prices for major expenses. But I'll say that my elders are just as flabbergasted at cost disease in healthcare and ballooning house prices as any young person. My parents are shocked at how much the family home is worth, and my mom is kind of a YIMBY.
But the big thing I think that's changed is just social trust. My dad was a hippie back in the day, and hasn't gotten a raise as an associate professor in a decade; he's no evangelist for institutional loyalty. My mom is, but she trusts everyone, so that's just her personality.
I actually think the boomers have a good counterpoint when they say that young people just aren't willing to do low-tier work and consider a hard day's labor beneath them. I think that's true. I think about the kinds of things my dad put up with before he got hired as a professor -- 12 hour days, cleaning buildings in the middle of the night, saving all week to buy a movie ticket as his weekly entertainment. I'm pretty sure zoomers would call that a human rights abuse. But many, many boomers did things like that.
If there's one thing where I feel resentment about the scripts I was handed not fitting reality, it's that the depictions of flirting and romance in popular media were almost calculatedly misleading about how you actually develop a relationship with a woman. Lots of friends-to-lovers arcs and will-they-or-won't-they nonsense. That makes for good TV. But real relationships usually require some level of approach and some kind of status display, even if we're polite and we don't call it that.
I think a lot of our intimacy crises kind of go back to that, we never taught young men how to flirt and young women how to intelligently discern flirting from offense, and hence we're in a place where lots of young people don't know how the fundamental human mating ritual is supposed to work and either fear it or smash through it like a bull in a China shop. I guess we assumed it's instinctual -- it isn't. Turns out our prefrontal cortexes were actually a load-bearing part of human reproduction after all.
If culture as a whole doesn't teach this, that's how you end up with the PUA subculture and redpill bros doing it. They're winning the social game among young men because they actually give actionable information about how to achieve an intimate relation with a woman. The honest truth is that it's not so different to court a woman passionately as it is to seduce her, at least in terms of the feelings of attraction and interest you have to create in her for it to happen.
Regarding low-tier work I reckon we have discussed it multiple times both here and on the subreddits, and for a good reason. I think it bears repeating here that lots of types of low-tier work that Western societies currently employ immigrants to perform was normally performed by high school or college students on weekends or nights or during the summer. It was sometime during the '90s that Western societies seemed to have collectively decided that prep school and after-school activities are a better use of the free time of sufficiently gifted high schoolers than working. And I do think that society did end up losing something significant with that.
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