Boomers knew only improvement; Zoomers experience only decline. By John Carter.

Boomer’s experience [born 1946 – 1958, not 1964]:

I don’t want to minimize the hardships that boomers endured when they were young. Boomers worked hard, and they didn’t enjoy the same conveniences that we enjoy now. They fought in the Vietnam War (well, about 3% of them), they spent most of their lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, they suffered through the oil shock and stagflation in the 70s, they were punished by double-digit interest rates in the early 80s, and they spent their working lives trying desperately to stay one step ahead of the skyrocketing inflation that was unleashed when Bretton-Woods fell apart and the last vestigial support of the gold standard was kicked out from under the brrrring money printer.

But, despite all of that drama, the one thing boomers could generally rely upon was that — so long as thermonuclear annihilation was averted — things would generally get better.

• Technology would advance.
• Working conditions would get safer.
• The special effects in movies would become more convincing.
• Houses would get larger.
• Cars would get nicer.
• Air conditioning would get quieter.
• The environment would get cleaner.
• Society would become more just.
• The world would become freer and safer for democracy.
• And so on and so forth.

Baby boomers have enjoyed a charmed life such as no other generation has known: free of major wars, full of technical wonders, in which whatever difficulties you might endure now, you could generally count on the future being a better place. For the boomer, deferred gratification always had a payoff.

The Zoomer experience [born 1997 – 2012]:

For the zoomer — and the millennial [1965 – 1980], and generation X [1981 – 1996] — this has simply not been the case. After 9/11 a police state panopticon settled over society. The 2008 real estate crash pulled the rug out from under the millennials, after which real-estate got ZIRPed to the Moon. Mass immigration pumped real estate demand further, while undercutting wages and rendering public spaces steadily more alienating, unpleasant, and dangerous. Black Lives Matter immolated quaint notions of racial harmony. DEI threw young white men, their careers, their futures, and their unborn children to the wolves. COVID stole two years from young people’s lives so that old people could feel safe from the coof. Now, AI^2 (Artificial Intelligence + Actual Indians) means that the only thing the young expect in their future is gig work in the sex trade industry (until robots take that, too).

If you’re a young person, the only thing you’ve ever known is decline.

• You’ve seen society get digested by the attention economy, human interactions digitized into shares, views, and likes.
• You’ve seen the war of Discourse poison relations between the sexes to a degree never known before in history.
• You’ve seen dating apps replace romance with swipes and monogamy with Tindergamy.
• You’ve seen third spaces disappear.
• You’ve seen culture stagnate.
• You’ve seen music, movies, television shows, video games, and books be converted into hamfisted, poorly written, badly composed, terribly edited agitslop.
• You’ve seen the Internet get enshittified by adware, malware, spyware, engagement bait, and the subscription-model SaaS scam economy.
• You’ve seen food get more expensive, even as the quality of the ingredients declines, and the portion sizes decrease.
• You’ve seen a third of your income get stolen by inflation in a few year’s time.
• You’ve seen the basic elements of a human life – a house, a spouse, children – recede before you like a mirage in the desert.

I’d like to believe that this is all temporary, that things can be turned around, but if you tell me this hope is nothing more than cope it is very difficult for me to argue otherwise. Maybe things will finally improve and maybe they won’t; the point is that, for the young who have only ever known civilizational rot, it is entirely rational for them to lay down and let it rot.

Generation X and the millennials both tried to do everything right, according to what the boomers told them was the path forward: save money, study hard, get a ‘job’. At every stage we got rugpulled. Most of us have nothing to show for any of that.

Zoomers looked at what happened to Gen-X and the millennials and said, quite rationally, fuck that.

That is why zoomers don’t care about ‘jobs’ or ‘careers’ or ‘education’ or ‘savings’. They know there’s no such thing as institutional loyalty, that they’ll be cut loose the moment their job can be automated or outsourced to cheap Indian labour, and so why would they be loyal to their employers? Why would they do any more than the absolute bare minimum to avoid getting fired? Especially under the identitarian spoils system of DEI that makes a point of rewarding someone else for your hard work. …

This generational demoralization is a great tragedy. Zoomers have been spiritually sabotaged, and many of them will never recover. Once social trust is broken it is incredibly hard to rebuild.

The big picture — yes, the way money is manufactured corrupted it aall:

This is not entirely the boomers’ fault. They’ve been the primary beneficiaries of the vampire economy, and they are by far its strongest defenders, but they weren’t the ones who set the system up. That would be the ‘greatest generation’, who were the ones that built out the welfare state, passed the Civil Rights Act, dismantled long-standing protections against third-world immigration, and first started letting the money printer rip. Boomers have profited from a kind of generational Cantillon effect: they were born close to the time when inflation first began in earnest, meaning that the money they were lavished with would always be worth more than whatever spare change their children could scrape together. …

The only way to fix this is for things to start improving for young people again, and not in the sense of getting cheaper smartphones or whatever. We are talking about very basic, mammalian necessities: food, shelter, mating. …

Solution?

I don’t know how to solve this. Unless there’s a world-historical economic boom thanks to AI — which there’s no sign of yet, and furthermore it would need to be one whose benefits are not concentrated in the hands of a small number of oligarchs — there’s probably no way to solve it without pain. The only question is how that pain will be distributed. …

If we were sane we’d dismantle the social security system immediately, and start putting in place systems to transfer opportunity, wealth, and power to native-born child-bearing demographics immediately. This is improbable.

The most likely outcome is that, over the next decade or two, the boomers will spend down the last of the West’s national wealth on heroic end-of-life health care, and leave behind a broken mess of insolvency, shattered institutions, lost cultural knowledge, and tribal warfare. None of which will be a problem for the boomers. Après moi, le déluge.

It will be up to everyone else to piece together something resembling a functioning society amidst the ashes and ruins. By that point, millennials will be in their 50s and 60s; most of their lives will be behind them. Zoomers will be hitting middle age. Perhaps you can see why everyone under 50 is so dejected, and prefers treating themselves with the small pleasures they can still afford rather than dwelling upon the long decline that awaits?

Great. If the communists or Islamists don’t succeed in making all their serfs again.