Boomers have plenty to say, but let’s be honest—if it’s a video, you’re watching it at 1.5x speed, and if it’s a Substack or a PDF, you’re skimming it at 2x. It’s the only way to bear it. Millennials and Zoomers? You don’t bother—most of them still need to season a bit before they say anything interesting. I’m biased, of course, but it takes a rare, maladjusted Gen Xer stumbling around to uncover an interesting take now and then. The rest? Zero-interest-rate fluff.
Boomers walk off with the spoils and leave the rest of us holding the bill, basking in the largesse of a post-war boom they had no hand in creating and every hand in hoarding. They lived large, laughed hard, and left Millennials with a finely-tuned hamster wheel, sleek and efficient but going nowhere. The Millennials patch the leaks and polish the machine, convinced they are saving the world while spinning endlessly in circles, mouths full of corporate “disruption” rhetoric that goes stale before it even hit the air.
Then come the Zoomers, born into a world already on fire, crawling through the wreckage of 2008, 2020, and everything in between. They have hustle, sure, but hustling on the edge of a cliff doesn’t get you far. Precarity is their inheritance—gig work, burnout, and the permanent anxiety of a future that never arrives. The System doesn’t even bother pretending to work for them.
And then there’s Gen X—forgotten and unattended, the feral middle children of history. Raised in the shadows of boom-time decadence but left to their own devices when the world moved on, they had just enough prosperity to stay afloat and just enough neglect to stay interesting. They haven’t been drafted into the System hamsterism like Millennials or crushed by precarity like Zoomers. Instead, they linger on the sidelines, ignored with nothing much to do but brood, scheme, and waste time thinking shit. The kind of shit that don’t fit neatly into the hamster accessories playground mazes. The kind of thoughts that break loops and set fires.
The only thing Gen Z is doing, man, is either absolutely nothing, or else documenting the slow-motion collapse throwing a random masterpiece into some ancient, forgotten art form just before it surfs up the Pacific garbage patch. They sit in the kaleidoscopic firestorm of memes, TikToks, and dystopian fantasies wreckage, staring at their phones, waiting for some digital signal to break through the static, offering some kind of reprieve—while all around them, the world crumbles. It’s a generation of spectators, but every so often, they pull off something beautiful—a final scream, a bloodshot grin, a stroke of genius in the middle of the rubble. The rest of the time, though, it’s just a blur of smoke and mirrors, apathy, and apathy that mean absolutely nothing. And yet, once in a while, they’ll hit you with something so raw, so real, that it feels like the last breath of an era long dead. But then, just as quickly, they retreat back into the void, as if even they can’t bear to keep the fight going.
Bittersweet, yeah—like a fading Polaroid of a better time, warped and yellowed at the edges. They pull brilliance out of the ashes, sure, but it’s always fleeting, like they know it doesn’t matter, or maybe it’s because they know it matters too much. They create these jagged, beautiful artifacts, these masterpieces on borrowed time, but there’s no celebration, no victory lap. Just a quiet retreat, as if they’re leaving the rest of us to wrestle with what it means to witness something so stunning in a world that can’t sustain it. It’s not hope, not exactly, but it’s not despair either—just the ghost of something we might have been, lingering for a moment before dissolving back into the static.