The Generation Wars are a waste of energy.
Like, "Boomer" is often used in online spaces as shorthand for Out-of-Touch Money-Hoarding Asshole Who Ruined Everything in the World, but that's a super U.S.-centric view (even if it can apply elsewhere), and I mean. Even within the U.S., you're still lumping in people who do fit that description with people like queer Black and brown Boomers who survived the AIDS epidemic and consistently stand against everything that's made life worse in the occupied territory called the U.S.
Leaning into the generational divide like it's some universal trait we all carry in us that makes us better or worse than someone born earlier or later does two things (at least): 1) erases swaths of nuance from millions of people, and 2) misdirects people from the true perpetrators of the world's ills: m o n e y and the people who control it.
As a Chronically Online Millennial, I'm suuuper aware that if I'd been born just ten years later, I would have grown up with the Online Surveillance State that's fucked with the mental health of vast numbers of people in Gen Z. My university photos are buried so deep in my Facebook that I could erase my account right now and the only remnants left would be my and my classmates' unreliable memories of them. Literally all of my most embarrassing memories were never filmed. I don't put my real name online anywhere but Facebook and LinkedIn because I was raised with a healthy fear of the internet, and even the fandom space I grew up with was led by Boomers and Gen X who barely alluded to having jobs let alone shared mental health information or showed their real faces.
And that's all down to when I was born.
Whereas massive numbers of Gen Z are in constant states of Flight, Fight, or Freeze because of the ever-present threat that they could be publicly humiliated and/or ostracized by putting one toe out of line or just…looking awkward in the background of someone else's video. If I'd been born in a different time, I would have been raised in different circumstances, so I would more likely than not be a different person. (AUs that play with this are the best kind.)
When I see older or younger people Doing or Saying an Inadvisable Thing, I don't pull the Generational Villification Card. Not just because there are too many people in any generation to generalize them, but also because they couldn't control the time of their birth any more than I could control when I was born.
It's just as random as where you were born, who your family is, how much money they had, and why any of us was born at all. So, y'know, have compassion for each other and focus on the actual problem: the people in power across multiple generations who want us to fight each other and ignore what they're doing.
