Op-Ed: Youth vs the world, and thank God, they’re winning – Slowly

Millennials (born between 1980 and the late 1990s) and Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2010) are taking an early interest in luxury goods – Copyright AFP/File GREG BAKER

If this world got any more uninteresting and unproductive, it’d be compulsory. Things are so bad now that even young people are getting attention. They’re getting attention from the most insular, ignorant, useless people who’ve always had everything. That’s new.

It’s ghaaaastly.

It’s also overdue by about 40 years. Generations X and Y were largely ignored. They had no image, no independent culture, and they weren’t scary like hippies and punks. They were no threat to anyone. They turned into yet another mere middle-class slum-and-sleaze-worshipping demographic to be duly ignored a bit more.

Something had to change, and it did. Due largely to the sheer ignorance and incompetence of previous generations, two generations finally arrived that have to be very different.

As you might expect, they’re starved of resources, income, social sanity, any attempt at useful culture, and role models, but they’re getting somewhere. They’re avoiding the whole unnecessary train wreck to the best of their ability.

The current big achievement of the Millennials and Gen Z is that they’re so different they’re not understood at all. They talk about things outsiders know nothing about. Mainstream media can’t pin them down to looks, hairstyles, and clothes. Fashion has no idea what they want. Advertising and marketing are baffled.

This is as it should be. Kids (generic expression) with any level of functional intelligence should realize they’re living in a pretty shoddy museum and in this case a pretty dumb one. There are no adults. You could hardly call a herd of older self-indulgent spoiled brats “adults”. The Mills and Zoomers have been largely immunized against these fools by their experiences of them.

They’re mightily unimpressed because there’s nothing impressive in this mausoleum of a society. They’re surrounded by the physical failures of antiquated morons and a “civilization” unworthy of the name.

They’ve been told they have to rot in the old business models. They should goosestep off to the office, college, and wholesome domestic oblivion. They should go broke chasing a future illiterately defined by proven morons.

They’re told to look forward to the past. …And go broke paying a fortune for basics on trust. Does that sound like a good deal to you?

It’s not like they can miss seeing how few real opportunities this stinking idiotic soap opera is giving them, either. A money-mad feudal environment might not be their idea of bliss. A world where the obvious problems are never solved might not generate such enthusiasm.

…Then you wonder why they want to do things their way?

Let’s start from the most banal level, that is, the level older generations might understand. It’s about money, which those generations never really had themselves at the current ages of Millennial and Gen Z entrepreneurs.

These people are having to find their way out of the maze of dead ends left by the past. Either markets are saturated or too niche to generate capital. Many of those older markets are well on the way to extinction.

(This is about money, so you’re supposed to understand it, remember, dearie? Oh, never mind. Just keep whining and pretending you have a clue.)

Anyway, they now have to create markets as much as work in them. They have to do these things in a desert-like global market where nobody currently has any money at all.

See any issues there, geniuses?

You’re supposed to get this stuff, and you don’t.  

Now, let’s make it complicated. This environment requires toughness, competence, initiative, and everything else you market-senile fools have never been accused of in any form. It requires saleable new ideas. It needs perceptive energy.

Another subject, society, or rather the total lack of anything resembling a society, is a bit of a problem. This mess refuses to deal with any of its problems.

Choices are repulsive in this world.

You can be a criminobody, a politipeasant, a suckophant, or a tatty little fraudster and you’ll fit right in the trash can with everybody else. You can be a Duh-lebrity. You can be executive trash, too. It’s a jingle, not a society, and you have a 99% chance of being right at the bottom of it.

Congratulations.

You have achieved non-existence, at great expense.

Now –

Can you think of any reason why a generation with at least one working brain cell would want to end up like that?

These generations are telling you what you should already know. Stop bitching about it and help them. …Because you will need their help, soon enough. Does this sledgehammer-like subtle message make sense?

They’ll win, and you better hope they do.