Sorry for the long delay between videos. Had COVID.

"...and young people don't feel trapped by the future, because nobody *believes* in the future anymore." Holy fuck dude you just summarized all of my anxieties.

As a Zoomer, I have to respect Millenials for taking so much sh*t from older generations. We do too, but y'all were the beginning of the "holy shit the world is broken" revelation that both of our generations have had. For Gen Z, the recession was a part of childhood. The idea of returning to "when things were better" doesn't make sense to us because when were things better?

Damn, as a Gen Z kid, this is the first piece of writing that actually made me understand the millennial perspective somewhat. I always thought Millenials where dumb and naive for expecting things to go back to normal and to bring back the destructive mundanity of the 90s, but it must have been utterly horrifying to watch the guard rails come off of society, as it were. We were born into a world of constantly increasing absurdity where the concept of “normal” will always and forever feel like a luxury, but perhaps we are protected from the pain of losing something we never had.

Millennials: nothing in life matters 🌧️ Gen Z: ✨NOTHING ✨ IN ✨ LIFE ✨ MATTERS ✨

Boomer: “Milennials are cynical buttheads” Gen X: Milennials: 🤔. “Daria does not care about participation trophies” well yeah. Then again, neither did any actual milennial when we were given them.

"Neoliberalism is a politics of saving the relationship that only works in crisis by allowing more crises to happen." Damn, there's a line.

"My goal is not to wake up one morning in my 40s with the bitter realization that I wasted half by life in a job that I hate because I was forced to choose a career in my teens" I... am not sure if I've ever related to something more. I was born in the early 2000s, But, this... this is just so... damn. All the adults around you in highschool are always like "What do you want to major in?" "What college are you going to?" I mean, fuck, I was asked this shit in the 7th grade. Dear god, I was 13, you want me to pick what I want to do with my LIFE? I think between this and the similar "My goal is not to graduate college thousands of dollars in debt only to have a computer program do the thing I spent years studying for ten times better and one thousand times faster" Is why I am in college and still trying to figure out what the hell I actually want.

"The 90s were [...] the only sustained period in 75 years where the US wasn't in a forever war against an infinite and loosely defined enemy." War on Drugs poking its head in here.

that "Fraction of US Wealth Owned by Each Generation" graph broke me in a way that nothing else ever has. oh my god im beyond horrified

"Daria does not want participation trophies." Neither did we. Did anyone even ask for a participation trophy as a kid? Because to me and my peers growing up (and I realize this is anecdotal evidence), participation trophies were fucking humiliating. It was the "you tried" star but in physical form, and it was basically confirmation that we sucked in the thing we were trying to do. Also we didn't give them to ourselves; our boomer and gen X teachers gave them to us. They're the ones who introduced us to participation awards in the first place, so why is this our fault lmao

It’s hilarious looking at Boomers-Millennials talk about going back to “better times” as a Zoomer Like what better times? The Great Recession? 9/11? Will I miss the global pandemic in 10 years?

"The 90s are as good as this system gets" is a pretty soul crushing take.

"and young people don't feel trapped by the future, because nobody believes in the future anymore" is the perfect explanation for why millennials are so fond of zoomers even when they joke at our expense. It's not only because their jokes about millennials are significantly funnier than those of Xers and Boomers, but because their jokes demonstrate the problems with cynicism and ironic detachment in the first place.

As a gen z kid, I must say I have only three moods We must try to salvage what's left of our future to build something better The world is dying, theres so much to fix I cant handle it all Make jokes to stop the pain

The choice of muting out the conversations between Daria and Jodie is interesting to me. I feel like Jodie was the foil to Daria’s choice to be apathetic because she felt crushed by how sick and sad the world was. Jodie is well aware of horrible the world is and was just as disaffected but knew she didn’t have the privilege to lean into the apathy the way Daria did. Jodie is one of the voices in the show that gets Daria to think about if she didn’t lean into the disaffectedness and possibly be proactive in addressing the issues she cares about so much.

As a millennial, it's so weird to me there are zoomers old enough to drink but too young to remember 9/11. They are old enough to enlist in a war that started when I was in elementary school.

"Things stay terrible for so long, you almost miss when they were merely bad" is something that hit on a much more personal level than I was expecting it to. Another fantastic entry.

As a 16 year old zoomer you summed up pretty well why I do that strained, wheezing Joker laugh every time I remember the "Man what if we get a stable, well paying career and turn into consumerist squares" trope.

I was in college exactly when the recession hit. I was promised (for my degree) $60k starting salary entry level guaranteed. By the time I finished, you needed 2-5 years work experience for an “entry level” position that pays $30k. I think the cynicism has stayed directed at the larger social structures as we’ve all become more sincere in our relationships with ourselves and each other. Like, I just want a lot of money so I can create a commune for all my friends where we don’t rely on corporations and greed.

Imagine having *any* accumulated wealth, this post brought to you by Gen Z

As a "born in the early 90s millenial" I related to SO much of this. Especially because I often talked with a Gen Z friend of mine about the differences between our generations. And I had always said: 'When I was a child, things looked like they were on a steady path of improvement. Then some bad stuff happened. And then the bad stuff didn't stop happening.' To my friend, things getting worse was the norm. Which is why I am constantly heartbroken and she isn't afraid of anything.

As a Gen Xer I've never understood why people dump on either millennials or zoomers, I got lucky. Many in my generation didn't, I grew up with punk bands using "no future" as a cool slogan, we've come to a place where "young people don't feel trapped by the future, because nobody believes in the future anymore" isn't said to be edgy or angry, it's just a cold statement of fact.

Bernie losing the primary after winning the first couple of states was crushing. To zoomers, there had never been a Hope as promising as a Sanders presidency. He built up just enough steam to break hearts.

For some reason, that summary of millennials' generational anxieties and traumas and the "relationship in crisis" metaphor are hitting me like a fucking _airplane,_ and I am unable to stop crying. ... And by "for some reason", I mean COVID gave me familial, relationship, and political problems all at the same time, and I was born in the early 90s and have long since watched my and all my friends' roadmaps go up in flames, and I really am desperate for things to only just be bad. Jesus. Thank you for giving me a space to feel all this, genuinely.

As a Gen Xer, there's a part of me that wants to defend my generation. You know, leave some ominous message about how growing up and selling out are inevitable. Thing is, the generations that came after us have no one to sell out too. No one is buying.

I was bad mouthing neoliberalism on another video, and someone asked what the other option was. I said bring back unions and have some reasonable banking regulations. But they have us so brainwashed we forgot that we beat this before.

This is why I, as a millennial (peak millennial in fact, born in '91) feel so fiercely protective of Gen Z and am willing to fight anyone who tries to rob them of their sincerity and sensitivity. Having experienced the traumatic "loss of innocence" that was 9/11, the subsequent war on terror, and the recession, I know what it's like to feel helpless, hopeless and scared upon realizing that the world is as unpredictable as it is cruel, and that older generations will happily sell out their own children's future for profit (and then blame them for being bitter and angry about it or caving under the pressure). I also know that bitterness is paralyzing. I think the social activists of my generation tended to overfocus on identity politics rather than class divide or environmentalism because to so many of us, our identities were all we had left, the only thing that gave us any joy or sense of community. (I assume that's also why so many cishet white male millennials were so easily steered towards reactionary politics. They longed for the same sense of community, and for an enemy to fight in order to feel even slightly empowered, but couldn't easily identify one.) As heroic as it is that zoomers are able fight for an uncertain future without falling into cynicism, I know how easy it is to fall apart and/or in line eventually. Children and young adults shouldn't have to shoulder the burden of undoing centuries worth of damage to society, the economy, and the planet. I'm not going to do what my parents and their parents did and leave it to future generations to pick up the pieces of everything mine broke or couldn't fix.

As a gen z kid it’s weird for me to think about how we’re trying to recapture a past that I never knew. I was literally in the womb when 9/11 happened so all my life it has felt like no one even really knew if the sun was going to rise tomorrow. I think that’s why I’m so deep in the mindset of “screw the past, let’s focus on making sure there is a future.” Everyone promises a return to when things were better, but that’s not what I want, or what I think any of us need.

As a Gen z kid I never got why "90s kids" were the way they were. Thank you for explaining it to me.

Oh boy, that "wanting to shake Daria and tell her how good she has it" is such a mood. The DVD set came out during the recession, and all I could see was her big house in a pre-9/11 world. I still like the show and appreciate what you said about her feelings being treated as valid by the narrative (as a sensitive snowflake millennial, of course, I'm all about telling people their feelings are valid), but I came away from my rewatch wishing Jodie had gotten more screentime and with a new-found love of Brittany. Brittany is a ditz, but she is mostly very kind, sincere, and enthusiastic, and we need more people like that.

"I'm no pessimist, Tulio. I'm just well-informed optimist" - Juan Carlos Bodoque.

When people ask me when I graduated college, I tell them "After Bear Stearns collapsed, but before Lehmann Brothers."

As a Gen Z, the "nobody believes in the future anymore" part hit so hard when I realized that when we say "nothing really matters" we actually believe it which is why we are so calm about the future. We aren't as disappointed with the world because we didn't believe in it in first place, but Millennials did.

I think that we already got a good feel for what an adult Daria would be like from Bojack Horseman.

If we had a glimpse of our map before it caught fire... What must Gen Z be feeling to have the ashes of theirs poured into their hands and instructed to "go find it".

Oh my god, the vision of getting another Bush-type president in 2030's has left me genuinely traumatized. And fun fact, some conservative organisations like the Lincoln Project are already working on to soften the image of George Bush and make him retrospectively not as bad as he used to be.

My favorite "Millenials Are Killing ____" article was when they accused us of killing MAYONNAISE of all things! Like mad that we prefer mustard and other flavors and connecting that to the end of American culture as we know it 🤦🏾‍♀️ I often reread it for laughs and to remind myself it was real 🤣😭

You nailed it, you effing nailed it. this is how it happened for me. "This doesn't work this hasn't worked for many years Things stay terrible so long, you almost miss when they were merely bad." That sums up everything!

As an elder millennial, I'm upset at how laser-targeted that "be in a ska band or make adventure games at lucas arts" comment is.

It's weird watching this as a zoomer who's in his freshman year of college, because I've never really lived through the time when things were just bad. I was born after 9/11, so when older people say they want things to return to normal, I have no fucking idea what that would look or feel like. My entire political upbringing in the last few years has been predicated on the thought that I may, truly this time, be part of humanity's last growing generation, and trying to not be that

You're right, I don't believe in the future. It's why we embrace sincerity. Because like, fuck it, I'm not making it to 30, I may as well live life as me. The world is burning for profit and nobody who could change it gives a fuck. I feel like it's at best even odds whether I live for another 5 years.

Everything from "For two generations, the nineties were the least things had sucked in living memory" onward felt like you pulling things straight out of my soul.

When Boomers were children, Boomers owned the world. The world was run by adults, and the door was held open for children. When Gen X were children, Boomers ran the world. The world was run by adults who acted like children, and who expected their children to raise themselves, but got mad when their children didn't turn out to be icons of themselves. When Millennials were children, Boomers ran the world. The world was run by older people, and incompetence seemed proportional to age. It looked as though as you got older, you got more incompetent. And we knew firsthand that the more competence you had, the more you got blamed for problems caused by others. When Gen Z were children, Boomers ran the world, perhaps. The leadership was so old and incompetent as to seem like a fantasy; where the real leadership happened was anyone's guess, and how the world didn't simply fall apart was a mystery. The generation after Gen Z has no idea who is in charge, and no concept of what it means to think of the future. They have no plans, and no dreams except maybe it won't be like this anymore someday. Boomers have never not owned the world. It was handed to them on a silver platter without an instruction manual, and they've never known struggle. They've looked down on those younger than them with contempt for their differences, failing to understand how forces outside of their control have shaped them. The Boomers have no concept of responsibility. All along we have relied on them to take care of what they own, because we can't access the control panel. Today, as they are dying off, we are finally wresting the controls from their cold, incompetent hands. And now we start to see that the entire concept of Generations was invented by the Boomers to slander and otherize people they don't like. Each name is Boomer-centric, and once you realize this, you begin to see why. The Silent Generation is so named because Boomers didn't listen to their parents, because they never needed to. Generations before that aren't really a thing because those people never mattered to Boomers. Gen-X is the first hated generation, the X being the thing you smack on anything to label it "generically bad". No basis for the hate, just hate. Millennials are so labeled because Boomers always liked to place blame on anything convenient, to avoid thinking too hard. The problems were the fault of the turn of the millennium. The turn of the millennium was the fault of millennials. Gen-Z is just because it's the second generation after X, and Boomers can't be bothered to put effort into providing names or reasons for who they hate. The generation after Gen Z doesn't really have a name, because Boomers are too old to see the difference anymore, they're growing senile, and the whole concept of generations is dying out of their world as they die out of ours. But it's being replaced with a new concept of generations. Younger pop culture has, like always, taken that which was used as slander against us as a model of what we should all aspire to be. Undoubtedly this has led to a new paradigm in which each new generation will receive a title they can wear with pride. With the world crawling out from under the weight of the Most Useless Generation Ever, we are finally becoming able to take control of our lives, unite together, and realize that everyone who came after the Boomers is a victim, and we're all in this together. -a Millennial, and I will never not wear this label with pride

actual in-high-school zoomer here. while gen z is definitely the new "sincerity generation", i don't think the cynicism ever leaves teenagers. things are bleaker than ever n while a lot of us are finally, finally deciding to be ourselves bc There Is No Saving Us Now, that layer of jadedness n alienation n fear has stuck around. we're terrified. n we're all doing something different to try n deal w it - i've turned into the archetypical transgender anarcho-whatever 12 year old - but it's not rly working. every time we get our hopes up for a second that things could be okay, that we could have even the smallest chance of a "normal" transition from adolescence to adulthood, we're let down. that sarcastic view of our current situation hasn't gone away. i just hope to god we turn the dissatisfaction into action for once.

I wouldn’t mind if you kept making these kinds of videos after COVID is under control. Not to tell you what to do with your own creative work, but I wouldn’t be opposed.

Y2K Zoomer here and something odd I've noticed is that for people around my age, we have a sort of nostalgia-by-osmosis for the 90s as well. We weren't alive for it, but between the fact that most people feel it was the last time everything wasn't awful, and the fact that millennials are the only living older generation most of us have any real respect for, we have more familiarity with and nostalgia for 90s culture than would really be expected.

I turn 30 this year. I feel like I'm constantly getting it from all sides and the "fuck you got mine" bit really got to me. I have boomers on facebook attacking me for not being able to own a house and I have teens on twitter telling me to get back in the kitchen and be a mom.

A big 90s moment that cemented my world view was listening to Romeo Delaire every night on CBC radio, pleading to the reporters to tell people about the Rwanda genocide and send help. And how that was happening globally. After watching 80s propaganda about fighting for freedom wherever there's trouble learning just how little humanity was actually valued even when the evidence that hundreds of thousands of people were dying horrible was indisputable, well, it got very easy to be numb to everything else.

Young people don't feel trapped by the future...because nobody believes in the future anymore. Goddamn.

Speaking as an early Xer (who loved/loves Daria by the way) I can tell you why we thought the 90s were so great. The 70s were a darn scary time to be a kid. I and my age mates graduated HS shortly after one of the worst recessions to date since the Great Depression. I graduated college into a stock market crash and another recession. When people talk about how great the 90s were, they mean from about 1995 on, and even then, the quote about things going from horrible to merely bad is relevant. I didn't have a scrap of optimism or hope until about 1997, and that didn't last long. Have you ever heard the phrase "No future?" It was a hallmark of late 70s/early 80s punks who even then felt they had, well, no future. To be honest, I always looked at Daria as a Gen X artifact, even though the characters were technically early millennials by age. Your analysis of Daria is spot on. I don't see how anyone could see her as a person who didn't care.

From an elder Millennial to younger Millennials and Zoomers: I got you. Let's set things up better for our kids and grandkids than they were set up for us. We both grew up online, which broke down generational barriers. We have a historic opportunity to be the first pair of generational demographics in North America that don't shit on those weaker and younger and poorer than us.

In defense of Gen X, we were born during the baby crunch. We are a smaller voting block. We were out numbered and out gunned by Baby Boomers in their prime. I personally saw some of this coming. And while I was ahead of the curve, I get the impression some of us knew something was coming. I now see a lot of my fellow Gen-ers getting sucked into Boomer beliefs and I made a realization. Gen X isn't a lost generation, we are a generation held hostage and we are getting Stockholm

When you were like (paraphrasing here) "Sarcasm was the response to having this map of a stable career laid out for you and maybe not wanting that, wanting to choose your own path instead", I was like "Wow dude, I wish that was my problem. I'd be happy to have ANY path in front of me." And yeah... turned out that was the point of this video

See I was born in ‘95. I was literally 4 years old when the year 2000 rolled in. The 90s might as well be considered a mythic lost period because that’s what it sort of feels like for me, even if I live during those twilight years as a infant/toddler and live during the last years of quite before 9/11. My child life was throw into the weird world that was resulted from the rise of far-right conspiracy and religious fundamentalism and the War on Terror and the eventual Great Recession and the decaying politics of the moderates. Hell my dad was practically deployed during the worse of it. So, in the end, I really don’t get the appeal to things like the 80s and 90s. The supposed better world. Because when I look back as an outsider, they all feel just as bad as I had it. I can’t grasp what was this glorious golden past because all my life all I even knew was the cynicism and frustration and for the most part hatefulness of this world that I was raised and continue to live in and look back on how it all began. The Obama years and the eventual train wreck of the Trump years were nothing more then a twisted version of the 90s and 80s respectively trying to regrasp the world. In the end, it felt all so superficial when looking back in history at all the ways the world was already a steaming pile of shit. The imaginary aesthetic the world supposedly had. The fetishizing of the musics, media, and styles. It wasn’t an accurate representation. It was an over glorified version. It’s probably why I have such a hateful disposition of nostalgia even if it’s my own. All I can see when looking at the safe version of the past constructed in people’s head and in my own is nothing but absolute anger. A “how dare you try to sell me on your bullshit again when all it did was forge the world I had to live in for most of life” kind of thing. “Why are you celebrating and reminiscing on the “Golden Age of Rome” when Rome is literally falling because of that supposed ‘golden age’” is probably the best way to put how I feel. It’s probably why I am so infatuated with the future and the present. I don’t see any glorious past awaiting us. I don’t see any promise in returning to how things were or the promises of past beliefs and ideologies saying they will get it right and have the better world they promised. There time is already over. All I can hope for is when a better possible world will come and hope to find a way to bring it.

Speaking as an 80s teen, this description of GenX seems to be coming from a very straight, white, and affluent perspective. My 90s experience consisted of desperately trying to find community when most of the people who would have been my community were already dead.

Because we zoomers didn't really grow up with a future, hopefully we'll be able to break out of the system and avoid the nostalgia trap, and cause real change in the process. That is, if we can survive until our 30s.

The parties should change their name. It’s now a choice between the Fifties Party and the Nineties Party.

It’s hard not to wish we could go back, in part, to grab the Gen-X teen by the shoulders and shake ‘em, yelling, just like their parents, “What right do you have to be disaffected? You don’t know how good you’ve got it!” But where their parents would say, “It was so much worse in my day,” we’d tell them, “It will never be this good again.” I get literal chills at that point. Reminds me of Lindsay Ellis describing the feeling she gets when watching Rent

I'm late, but this is odd for me, as early Gen Z. I learned to walk as planes hit the Twin Towers, and I grew up with two barely-not-Boomer parents that worked in healthcare and law enforcement. My memorable life has been a split dichotomy of Reality vs. Everything's Fine, We Swear. It's watching your parents radicalize, realizing that---for as little trust or belief you had for them to begin with---you still didn't think they'd vote for a fascist. My friends and I joked that nobody had any goals, teachers never understood why we'd laugh about getting killed in a school shooting or drinking bleach, and the only things we felt were worth getting mad about were deep systemic flaws that threatened our ability to live to see sixty. Growing up, I kind of hated the '90s and '90s kids. It felt like they got to complain about becoming disillusioned when they weren't around to help. And that's not fair, not really, but sometimes it still feels that way. It feels like our grandparents have already cashed out, our parents' generation loathes us, and millennials have just as little as we're set up to have but they haven't helped. It's on us, but we don't feel like we'll succeed. Childhood was just failure after failure after failure being shoved in our faces, and because we had internet so early, it also felt like we were crazy because our parents and teachers didn't see it. In a forum in 2019, I laid out why fascism was such a threat, and why calling Antifa as bad as fascists was allowing fascists political power, and nobody believed me until January 6th. None of those people, mostly millennials and a few Gen Xers, were stupid. They just had too much faith. I don't think I could act like Daria and be alive, honestly. It's gotta be funny or it's crippling. If you don't hold onto sincerity, you'll lose yourself in the irony.

This hits really hard when I think about my relationship with my Step mom. My little brother was about to enter college in a few years when she asks me to give him advice. I tell him make sure to study something your actually interested in and follow your passion. She got mad at me because she thought I would tell him what degree would make him the most money.

It wasn't until listening to a podcast talking about how Forrest Gump was a movie that could only come out in the 90s because it was the time to sort of take a breath and look back like "whoa, that was quite the ride, huh?" that I realized just how unique that decade was. I wasn't old enough to really exist in that moment. I went to my first anti-war protest when I was 12. I was 14 when I saw An Inconvenient Truth in theatres. As soon as I was introduced to the world outside the playground, the world was unfair and unforgiving. And we were raised by people who held strong personal responsibility (pay the rent on time, no crying) and weak moral responsibility (actually do something about injustice in the world), and chastised us for having our priorities flipped.

Okay, this one almost made me cry a few times because of how close to home it hit. Thank you for really encapsulating a ton of the things I feel. Even as someone who's on that precarious cusp of Millennial and Gen Z (b. 1995), the feelings are still there. A million times, thank you.

Zoomers (like me): We didn't even get a map

Hi, zoomer in a semi-poor city here. The part where you talked about the stance of gen Z, and what's cool/brave and what isn't, I feel is missing something. Going through school in both honors classes ("the smart kids", a lot of them were more wealthy, not me though) and gen ed classes, I felt like the mindset differed greatly between kids in the two. Honors kids were vastly more accepting and genuine, particularly when it came to social issues like LGBTQ+ stuff, but I felt like most of them didn't fully grasp the financial hardships the average student there might have had to go through. Like you could be trans and most of them would be cool about it, but if you asked them about socialism, or about the modern day financial gap between races, they might react with indifference, and they have little class consciousness. The kids in the gen ed classes were much more aware of financial issues that burdened them, but they also had the kind of mentality that leads them to think "I'm gonna be really good at football and get in the NFL" is an achievable career choice. And their mentality regarding social issues was much less forgiving. Anyway, this was just my takeaway from one school in one part of the US, as part of gen Z.

gen z here. there's a brazillian channel that talked about the gen z feeling of living in a cconstant crisis, and not remembering any "good times" to return too. the video mentioned this as a reason of why young adult novels and teen movies nowadays are so often set in a dystopic world --- well, we sure do relate with dystopias

The credits song is "The Grunge Song" by The Vestibules, for anyone wondering.

Baby Boomers: Millennials are ruining businesses. Gen X: The young people are ruining music. Millennials: Kids are ruining the internet. Gen Z: All of you are ruining my life.

Vaguely related but I for one am sick to death of “participation trophies” as a talking point. We never actually asked for those, we just didn’t care enough to actively oppose it, yet the very generation who came up with the idea act like it destroyed our minds and that it’s somehow our fault. It’s like dropping your sandwich on the floor, deciding to continue eating it anyway, and then blaming the floor when you end up sad because the sandwich now tastes like dirt.

It just struck home for me that Biden's whole appeal is "Make America Okay Again"... wow

I'm a grey-area millenial/zoomer and I've been binging Daria for the past few days. When I was younger I struggled w Daria's downer vibe, but this time around I got deeper in and found the sincerity you're talking about. It's actually comforting for me now, like grunge tbh, when I was younger that was my angst music, but now it has a comfort and understanding quality that goes beyond the teen angst I used to feel. My only ambitions for the future are "live independently w enough free time to play the drums, and hopefully fall in love". I don't have the feeling that I won't live long like a lot of my contemporaries (esp as a queer), but I don't have any interest in a life plan either, it seems ludicrous - I'll just figure things out as they come up, bc there's nothing to reliably count on for the future outside of myself and my own resilience Edit: the accumulated wealth thing - I felt pretty proud of how much I have in savings, but it's not even half of the threshold for the government to deduct from my benefits lol. Like it's good I have something but it could probably only get me through one short crisis

I was born in the early 2000s making me a zoomer. The 90s stereotypes of Anglo-American life have been continually shattered in my mind as I've grown up. In fact, I'd say most of them shattered for me in just one very unusual week in march of 2020, where in the span of just one week, my school experience an active shooter threat (nobody got hurt), and then half my friends went into isolation on the same day due to a positive COVID case and then the school shut down, and it was announced that grades were frozen so summer was essentially three months longer, but you could barely hang out with your friends. It was also the week that Super Tuesday happened in the USA, which was an incredible shock that literally left me in tears seeing Biden's victory on that day. It was one of the most eventful weeks of my life, one of those weeks where decades happen. That one week of March was the beginning of a new era, the 2020s and imo the cut off date for Zoomer vs the Post-covid generation. If you can't remember that week, you are not a Zoomer. That week I realized was the week where I in fact would not be able to get a high school job to fund university. I wouldn't get a stable High school experience as Millennials and Gen Xers got. I wouldn't be able to move out of my parent's place until well into my 20s due to the global depression. I wouldn't get to see the progressive democrats take power and set up a better future.

"young people don't feel trapped by the future, because nobody believes in the future anymore" My 12 year old sister has talked before about how she doesn't want to bring a child (the conversation happened because my grandparents were joking about future grandchildren and stuff) into the world because of how it is.

"Bravery is being a gender-nonconfirming socialist queirdo who refuses to let the ugliness of the world close them off from human connection" This line is beautiful and inspiring.

man as a generation z person the idea of stable living conditions sounds so nice like im sure alot of people at my school would give alot just for the idea of stability like even if we live a miserable life in an office job even if we could just have stable living conditions in the future although it dosen't scare me i guess i just think that humans will have too adapt people will have too change there ways or die out like things may be bad but were actually prepared for it now and ready too adapt and though are generation is pretty embarressing right now id say we have an ok start even if the worlds got all its problems

A couple years ago, I referred to myself as a millennial while my older brother was in the room. He froze, then glared. "You? A millennial? What's wrong--Gen X not good enough for ya?" I was standing in his house, where he lives with his wife and their kids. I graduated in 2008, so I will almost certainly never own a house, and marriage and kids aren't happening either. He works with millionaires; I'm self-employed. He endows chairs at his college; I daydream about adopting a cat someday. He's a Republican, even more conservative than our Boomer parents; I taught Mom how to graciously ask for someone's pronouns. I honestly don't know how we're still kinda friends; probably it's that his kids adore me. In the moment, though, I just blinked at him, and said, "Well, it wasn't like anyone consulted me about it."

Hello. Am later-millenial. Parents are earlier-Gen X. "Sold out" isn't the exact word but it might as well be. It's more that they believed in things for a while. Saw how it was getting them nowhere and shit kept not changing. So they _gave up and had babies._ Mind you, my parents are a rare breed that is _honest_ with their kids. I feel most older people try to put on this façade of being "perfect" and never having been young or believing things or being different in the past.

Wow: an analysis of 90s ideology that doesn't use the phrase "end of history".

When I was a young teen, a friend and I joined a protest against the invasion of Iraq, and a Gen X man there told us to go home because we were only there for fun. I feel like that sums up this video's message pretty well.

The comment of being handed the map of life and seeing it lit on fire hit so hard for me. I remember being told as a kid and teen that if I got good grades and got a college degree, I’d have a comfy middle class life. I graduated 2nd in my high school class, graduated with honors with a STEM degree from college, and I’m 29 living at home still because I can’t afford to move out. Fuck capitalism.

As one of the youngest Gen Xers, I really get this. 15 years ago I got a graduate degree, and while it didn't help me do as well as my boomer parents, aunts, and uncles, and I definitely needed lots of help with student loans from them, that degree helped me acquire a career that I like. A career where I get to use skills I acquired because I wanted to, and where I feel appreciated by my coworkers and the other people I work with. I used to feel trapped and angry because I have to work a lot more than I want to, and I can't manage to really save money, and I needed help from boomer relatives well into my 30's. But now I'm 42, and I have a house, and I have a couple kids I can afford to provide for, and when I turned 40 I was even able to start an IRA so maybe I can retire some day and not have to work until I'm dead. But last year on whim I looked up what tuition is at my graduate school alma mater, and HOLY FUCKING SHIT. I'm not making much more than I did when I first got out of graduate school, but had I wracked up THAT much debt, I'd have been fucked. I would not have a house. I would not be able to afford kids. I sure as fuck wouldn't have started an IRA. I don't know what to tell my kids. I won't be able to help them like my boomer relatives helped me. And I can't even advise them on what career path to take because so many of the paths that worked out for my generation are now closed down. I find myself in middle age being increasingly radicalized toward the Left because I see what is happening to the younger generation, and I'm scared shitless about where this is going to lead if we don't do something about it collectively now.

I’m a zoomer probably on the elder to middle age and I’m someone who Wasn’t alive for 9/11 Barely remembers the recession Grew up normalized to the idea of a minority president But now I worry about the last five years and honestly am weirdly nostalgic to the late 2000’s early 2010’s culture and I feel worried about the backslide in democracies and now like millennials I think our generation will also be defined by the effects of a worldwide crisis This stuff is kinda weird to me and I learned a lot there are a few things I remember that people my age can all relate too The Wii Being old enough to remember flip phones but not old enough to have ever owned one Digital music pre Spotify The DS And early KZfaq Also (though this is more personal liking rap pre mumble bullshit) And most of all we all were just at the age when we started to notice and care about politics when 2016 happened I just thought I’d let you know as I feel most peoples only idea of zoomers is either positive like Greta thunberg or awful like Tik Tok and fortnite but few know about some of the nuances

As a Gen Z member, what you said about nobody believing in the future anymore struck a deep chord with me. Today I actually had a conversation with a Senior that ended up with her saying that neither of us will make it to twenty. Spending a term living with the constant weight of wondering if your best friend will be written off as subhuman at some point does something to you that I can only describe as acceptance. We’re the generation that recognized that we are going to die because of our parents and grandparents.running the world dry and leaving us to pick up the mess. We’re just waiting to see if the bombs go off when the clock hits 0.

The line about the Jobs. Like. I had people mocking me for my major, saying there was no jobs in those fields. They were right, but there wasn't any in their fields, either. Lol.

Millennial here, born 1990. This really made me think about my Gen X cousins have houses and are raising kids while my fellow Millenial friends and relatives are living in apartments and trailers with roommates or significant others. Hell, even my Elder Millennial boss can't afford her own car, and she has the luxury of being able to afford to live on her own otherwise. The company we work for provides her car (manager privilege, on that one). The wealth gap is wild when I compare this to my grandmother who has been living comfortably in a city townhouse for at least as long as I've been alive, and she retired (from TEACHING) in the early 1990s. When I was in elementary/middle school, my grandma would frequently travel out of the country to visit places. On retirement/social security. My Boomer mother (who had to retire early due to health issues) can't even do that on the disability she gets every month, though she can still live fairly comfortably. And me, travel? Nice joke.

I have never been more seen than “nobody believes in the future anymore”

This, but then you realize that the society Gen Z inherited is basically the Millennial's society on steroids, and instead of sarcasm and cynicism, we have memes and depression.

Even though I’m a younger millennial, a teen in the ‘00s, this video still perfectly sums up how I often feel about the ‘90s. In many ways it’s even more potent than what you say, because there’s also the inevitable “everything was fine when I was 5 years old” type of nostalgia that happens about ANY generation, let alone one coinciding with, as you put it, the only decade without some big ideological war. Thank you so much for this.

“Most cultural narratives are written by those with money” is added to my list of best lines you have ever said. I grew up in Cuba, came to the states almost a decade ago. So weird that when people refer to the 90s and early 2000s they speak of things I never experienced at all until I arrived here. And it creates different kinds of people even if they share the same generation. They ask me if I remember shit I never saw and look at me in a way that reminds me that even with my weird accent I sometimes pass as a normal American boy lol. No worries tho, I still hate you for being a far better writer than I will ever be! I think I this point I watch your videos out of sheer jealousy.

As someone from ex Yugoslavia I can safely say my parents and my older friends had a quite different 90s experience. There was constant fear, paranoia, nationalist propaganda and a war that went on for years tearing apart people who all spoke the same language on the basis of religious differences. What I'm trying to say is that the 90s weren't that good for everyone.

"In 2024 the Republicans are going to run the next W aren't they" Hi, can I just say, from the bottom of my heart AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

that "fuck you got mine" line is weird for me as a warehouse labourer... cause my bosses attitude is that, but my coworkers go "shit sucks for you man, your wage has been capped at half of what mine was and your dollar is worth substantially less... sorry kid." but hey at least I don't have a bunch of debt, that's nice.

I was born right on the line between millenial and gen z, and let me tell you, every part of this video resonated so highly with me, especially the last bit about how we've become a generation of loud, uncompromising sincerity and self-truth.

You know, I really wouldn't mind seeing a Daria continuation with the main characters entering into Middle Age and reckoning with where they ended up and where they felt they should be versus where they are. I mean, real substantial stuff. I knew people like Daria and Jane and Jodie and Quinn and all of them and where people end up and how they evolve is rarely a straight line. I think there's a real opportunity there, but it's not something that's going to make a ton of money. It could, however, be really powerful if it was handled right. It wouldn't be particularly 'fun' though. I'll say that. There's a whole lot of fear plumbing potential there, even with late GenX'ers/Early Millenials, which Daria would be (I won't use the X term either...FYI, I am one) who happened to 'make it' in life before the future came crashing down.

I'm a gen z'er born a little while after 9/11, I very much got the roadmap but it was more flexible (but that's possibly just because of my progressive parents) and then during/after the recession it sort of became 'well you won't be in that job forever, but you will be in that career forever' and so I'm at uni now desperately trying to cling to the idea of "The Career" that you start, in some form, as soon as you leave your educational endpoint Even though I agree that things desperately need to change, and quickly, I still fundamentally want that kind of idea to stay because I don't know what to do with myself if it stops existing

"Old World Blues refers to a person, who is so stuck in their past, they cannot see the present, much less the future." -A literal brai-in-a-jar

I don't want to sound like I'm saying "we have it so much worse!", which is just frankly an unhelpful way of looking at things, but did anyone else almost laugh when he started listing some of the terrible things that happened in the 90s? Like, make no mistake they were bad, awful things that happened, but they also seemed so quaint in comparison. I'm 19, born 12 days before 9/11. I can think of worse things that happened in the past three months than any of the things on that list. I think part of me can't stand Daria and other 90s shows like Beevus and Butthead and South Park, because sarcasm and nihilism really does seem like the path of least resistance. I respect Ian Danskin (Innuendo studios) for actually pointing that out. I can't imagine being disingenuous in this day and age, what good would it do? Aside from alienate you further from the people who matter most in our lives. I've seen people fall into manic depression and anxiety over the future. I've seen people go cross country to join climate rallies and BLM protests. I've seen people create beautiful artwork, despite the fact that it might be wiped away in thirty years. I've seen people compare us to the people of the sixties who were afraid of nuclear war, but that's not right. Nuclear Armageddon relied on someone *doing* something, climate catastrophe relies on people doing nothing. People are far more likely to do nothing than to do something, and that's why we fear inevitability whilst they feared possibility. Not saying that there weren't people who thought nuclear war was inevitable, but that is the common difference. Gen Z doesn't ask, "what would you like to do in the future?" we ask, "if there is a future, what would you want to do in it?

Zoomers are just like " wait you're telling me there was a time where getting a job in your late 20s and building a career was a real thing?"

I think I’m technically a Zoomer, I was born in 98. But I had friends and family who showed me stuff that was popular in the 90s, stuff like old Pokémon series, the original power rangers, and TMNT. I feel like I’m that weird in between and it messes with what I get nostalgic for.

Looking back as a millennial who graduated in `04, I feel like we were being trained and educated for a world that no longer existed after we graduated.