Today, Explained - Ok boomer

Episode Date: November 22, 2019

TikTok's hottest meme is pitting the Youngs against the Olds, but the truth about this generational standoff can be found in its shades of gray. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Before we start the show, a quick shout out to my guy Ted. Actually, his new podcast, it's called Ted Interview. You know Ted, capital T-E-D. On the Ted Interview podcast, you hear deep dives with great minds. It's hosted by Chris Anderson. He is the head of Ted, and I really hope that's what his business card says. Season three of TED interview is out now. It's got interviews with great minds talking about why we're so bad at knowing what's going to make us happy or why populists are so good at manipulating human emotions. And there's all sorts of other stuff to check out TED interview wherever you listen to podcasts mom yes you're a boomer right yes have you heard of okay boomer no what's that it's a meme a meme it's blowing up on tiktok mostly typically it's like a kid doing an impression of a boomer. Okay, here's one. So she goes, me going trick-or-treating with my little cousin. And then the old lady giving my cousin

a handful of candy. Gives me one. You're a little old to be trick-or-treating, don't you think? And then she goes, okay, boomer. Have you seen these?

Never. What do you make of it? It's more like a boomer to say something like that. You're too old to be trick-or-treating. You it's more like a boomer to say something like that you're too old to be trick-or-treating you think that's something a boomer would say of course some people do i won't so you you and i clearly don't have this generational divide but a lot of people are feeling like there is something there this meme has gotten very big a new zealand legislator said okay boomer on the floor of parliament in new zealand to an

elder legislator when he criticized her climate change speech yeah one conservative radio host called it the n-word of ageism wow can you believe that and then fox just recently apparently tried to trademark the phrase because they want to make a tv show potentially called okay boomer oh fox really not box fox i know it seems like something worth explaining right yes it does need explaining maybe you should explain it today. My name's Sean Ramos-Verman. I'm a millennial. Well, I'm Asia Romano. I'm a culture reporter for Vox. And I am on the cusp between Gen X and millennials. Asia, for all the people who don't sit around thinking about these generational sort of divides all day,

can you just tell us how many we currently have living in the world? So you've got about five different generations that people fall into. You've got the silent generation, which is the World War II era. The official years from people who researched these things are 1928 to 1945. Why do we never hear from the silent generation? Because they're silent. Then you have the baby boomers, and the baby boomers were pretty much anybody born between the years after World War II and before the rise of the counterculture. Okay, boomers. Yes, 1946 to 1964.

Then you have Generation X, 1965 to 1980 roughly. And then millennials, anybody after 1980 to around 1996 or so. Shoutouts to millennials? Yes, that's you. And then if you were born after 1997, and I think the upper end of that cutoff is between 2012 and 2015. So if you were born somewhere in there, then you belong to Generation Z. Can I just say I don't understand those kids? Well, that's sort of the thing about kids these days. No one ever understands them, right? That's why they're kids these days. Okay, let's talk about the stereotypes or the traits

associated with each one of these generations, starting with the people before the boomers. If you were in the World War II era, that became a huge identifying trademark of your generation. You know, you fought World War II, you defeated the Nazis. And so I think many, many people still associate that generation with that specific major, major world event. I don't know anything about Ryan. I don't care. You know, if going to Rommel and finding him so he can go home, if that earns me the right to get back to my wife, well then, then that's my mission. Boomers are associated with the countercultural movement. They're

associated with Vietnam War protests, with really turbulent socioeconomic changes in the 70s. Tell us a little bit about the war, man. War in Vietnam? War in Vietnam! But they're also associated with hoarding wealth and mortgaging the future, quote-unquote, in terms of how millennials relate to them today.

I'll tell you what I'm doing this weekend. I'm getting laid. 1990s and nobody is getting laid. I'm the only man in America who was getting laid this weekend and I haven't been laid that much. Generation X is known for sort of the rise of a jaded cultural malaise. That's what I tend to associate Generation X with. Millennials took that and ran with it into an era of post-capitalism.

So now they get blamed for things like ruining whole industries by doing things like eating avocado toast or not eating cereal or not going to department stores. Maybe Andy doesn't care about us anymore. Of course he does. He cares about all of you. He was putting you in the attic. I saw you. Can't just turn your back on him now. Woody, wake up. It's over. Andy, it's all grown up. Gen Z and millennials share a lot of common traits because Gen Z is notably the first generation to be born entirely in the era of internet, which is a hugely defining trait that sets them apart from every other generation. This is Tom Hanks saying, if you see me in person, please leave me be.

Gen Z doesn't drive as much. Gen Z, they're more reluctant to get jobs. And so there are ways in which millennials and Gen Z, specifically the traits that are associated with them are more distinctly socioeconomic. Which brings us back to OK Boomer, I believe. How did this socioeconomic divide associated between the boomers and the millennials and Gen Z lead to this meme?

It's been identified as popping up on places like 4chan as early as 2015, which is a long time ago. But it really took off recently as an insult on TikTok when actual baby boomers began to post rants about kids these days on TikTok. One of these days, just like the baby boomer generation, the generation before us, the baby busters who came after us. You're going to mature and you're going to realize nothing's free. That things aren't equal. And that your utopian society you created in your mind in your youth simply is not sustainable. The TikTok use responded by just basically creating this meme and going wild with it. And responding to what they felt was every condescending

baby boomer rant with. What exactly were millennials and younger responding to with OK Boomer? What were they complaining about? In a lot of the TikTok rants, they're very familiar tropes. So you've got the fact that teens were being lazy or they weren't searching for jobs correctly. You know, one of the examples that I that I found really funny and relatable was a 16 year old girl who I actually talked to for my article who had made a viral response to her grandfather because her grandfather was yelling at her to get a job even though she was only 16 and she hadn't even gotten a chance to get her driver's license yet. And this wasn't a joke.

This was like a serious interaction between a granddaughter and a grandfather. Right. Exactly. And another thing I think that really jumped out at me was about the expression of gender and sexual orientation. One of the memes I saw was a girl reacting to a relative in her family who was mad that she had been holding hands with her girlfriend in public. On one level, it's sort of generally about how dare teens be nonconforming in public, you know, but on another level, it speaks to how a more sharply progressive divide politically between Gen Zers and boomers. You've referenced these

economic inequities between boomers and millennials and Gen Z even. Are there real insecurities behind this meme? There are a lot, and I think some of them are really obvious. If you think about millennials came to adulthood during the recession, they witnessed the housing collapse. They witnessed the financial scandal starting in 2008. They witnessed Occupy Wall Street rise and then sort of peter out, all while climate change is looming and growing worse and worse. And I think all of these things have definitely, definitely taken a toll on the way that millennials approach their finances and how they think about capitalism in general. We know for a fact that millennials are saving money, but they're investing less. They're choosing to rent rather than pay mortgages and buy houses. And there are also more of them. So they're competing for fewer spaces in the workforce that pay less. And boomers aren't necessarily retiring as early as they used to. So a lot of boomers are basically still in jobs that millennials could take if the boomers weren't there before them. So there important to point that out. I mean, there are boomers who are retired who still can't afford prescription drugs. There are boomers who don't retire because they can't afford it yet and they work later into life, right? There's shades of gray in here? Absolutely. I mean, I'm sure we all know people who fall into these shades of gray that you're talking about.

No shade to the gray hairs out there. This is the complication that always arises when you try to generalize about a very broad group of people. You know, you get people being, well, I'm not like that. That's not my experience. So therefore you can't judge me. It's not necessarily to say that every single member of the baby generation acts in X, Y, Z ways. But as a collective, these are the traits that they have culturally indulged in or enabled and so forth you know the same thing can be said of gen x and millennials and gen z we'll all have to critique ourselves at some point we'll all have to look at ourselves as a collective generation at some point and say okay what have we gotten right as a group till now what have we gotten wrong and i think um okay okay, boomer, maybe you can say,

okay, boomer is an attempt to hasten that conversation along, if you will. Yeah. Did it work in that sense? Did it help facilitate a generational reflection of some kind? Is it doing that right now? I think maybe. I think there are probably a lot of people who are listening to the conversation on all sides, although I'm sure that that's being drowned out by the typical media tendency to misconstrue the meme and the typical social media tendency to send people just sort of yelling and shrieking at each other without really listening to what the other person is saying. Hello, my name is James Barham. I was born in 1963, so I do believe I am technically a boomer. The biggest generational divide I have personally experienced is actually with some people my own age. Recently, I found myself in this rather strange position of having to not only explain my take on some of the technological and cultural changes that are happening around us, but also

having to defend the millennial generation's attitude to those changes. And this is with people my own age. It's all been a little bit weird at times. Hi, this is Donna Weinberger, and I am from the boomer generation. I find this conversation somewhat amusing, ultimately unsatisfying, and really pretty hopelessly retro. Something kind of like a parody of the 60s. The annoying part to me is that I would never characterize a whole generation as any one thing, no matter what the age. It seems really passive-aggressive to do so, and I've never seen passive-aggressiveness lead to any kind of really fruitful discussion. This is Ann Edwards. I'm just shy of 60. I'm still in the workplace. I work with younger people. I think OK Boomer and all variations thereof are a way we can laugh at ourselves

and also recognize that when one generation reaches the top of the ladder, the generations below are nipping at their heels, wanting to get up there a little bit faster, wishing we'd get out of their way. And as long as we can work together, laugh together, and even laugh at ourselves, everything's going to be okay. You ever listen to this show and think, man, I really need to start a podcast. Not like a daily news podcast because that just seems like an ungodly amount of work.

But, you know, there isn't a definitive maps podcast out there. And I know so much about maps. And I know so many map makers and highly opinionated people about maps. If only that college in my neighborhood offered like a crash course in Podcasting 101. If only I knew how to make a podcast. Well, Google Podcasts and PRX have teamed up to bring you Podcasting 101. Not in podcast form, but in video form. Because there's a lot of stuff you need to see.

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PRX.org slash podcasting 101. Happy podcasting. Hi, my name is Yoichi Hariguchi. I am 55 years old and first generation Japanese-American. My partner is originally from Germany and she is just two years younger than I am. And she always teases me that she is a Gen Xer and I am a boomer. We belong to different generations. Apparently, 1964 is the last year of baby boom. So I feel generational divide is kind of manufactured concept. Thanks, bye.

Brian Resnick, you write about science at Vox. This whole generational divide with the OK boomer meme, it's not actually anything new, is it? No, no, not at all. Like, old people have been complaining about young people for as far back as anyone can research. And we can also assume that young people have been complaining about old people. It's just that there are fewer written records of, like, a 15-year-old being like, oh, dad, you don't fucking get it. Why has there always been a divide? I mean, old people create young people. If they hate them so much, why don't they just stop? Yeah, yeah. When I've been talking to some researchers about this question, they're like, well, if every generation is just worse than the previous ones. Then like, when was the ideal generation back in like, you know, 4000 BC?

Or there must be something interesting psychologically happening where these patterns of complaints just repeat themselves year after year, millennia after millennia. Let's just assume this dynamic is immortal. Why is this dynamic so immortal? It seems to be a problem of memory. There's this collective memory loss of what kids used to be like. And adults are always forgetting that kids have always been like a little entitled and narcissistic and not very conscientious. And this is where we're getting at like the fundamental

memory problem. We are really bad at remembering questions like, what were kids like in the past? Or to say it another way, we're really bad at remembering how things used to be. And there's a lot of biases that come across. But one interesting bias is called presentism. Oh yeah, I've heard about this one. You have? Yeah, it means like we're always just thinking about where we are right now. Yeah, well, there's also like a very interesting lesson in how memory works here. And just to like remind everyone that your memory is not like a video recorder. You don't go back in time and, like, replay what happened.

Well, if every generation is just worse than the previous ones, then, like, when was the ideal generation back in, like, you know, 4,000 B.C.? The better metaphor is, like, your memory is like this video editor who's working on this split second deadline and just has to grab like whatever tape is nearby to fill in the gaps. So when was the ideal generation where we are right now? Back in like, you know, 4000 B.C. or Brian, Brian. When you're trying to remember something like where kids used to be, some of those gaps get filled in with stuff from the present. We generally will use our present to fill in the gaps of things

that we don't quite remember from the past. You don't know this is happening. When we're using pieces of the present to color in the past, you don't see that memory and go, Oh, yeah, you know, like I'm filling in the gaps here. I'm making an assumption based on some present day conditions today. No, you just remember it as the past. Is there any evidence to suggest that this presentism bias is getting worse or are we just seeing more of it because it's on TikTok, Twitter, and company? Yeah, I don't know if it's getting worse, but there was an interesting recent study looking at this presentism problem where basically the study asked adults to rate kids on a bunch of aspects, like are kids these days more respectful of elders than they used to be?

Are kids these days more well-read? Are they smarter? Are they less smart? And basically, the results were kind of neat in that the adults are just taking how they are today and just assuming that's how kids used to be and then comparing the kids of today against that. So the more authoritarian you are as an adult, the more harshly you're judging kids for not respecting elders, the more well-read you are as an adult, the more harshly you're judging kids for not being well-read, and so on. Okay, so memory and bias have a lot to do with this generational divide we've been talking about on the show today. Are there other factors involved here? Yeah, so like memory accounts for like how the story is told.

But a lot of the biases of the human brain come from this like one idea. It's like we often replace hard questions with easier questions. So a hard question is like, how did the world get so fucked up? And you think about, you know, I don't know, like corporate interests in America have been too powerful and, you know, republicanism has become more conservative and more unified against climate change. And, you know, you think like lobbying. I my stereotype of an older person and how do they fuck this up?

You know, we group people into generations and we start to tell stories because it's an easy way to interpret the world. It sounds almost like you're saying that there is no generational divide, that it's a construct. But I imagine a lot of people would argue against that. Well, people are, you know, divided. But this idea of generations, there is debate in science along the lines of like, are generations real? But there's not a lot of good data on it. Some of the generational differences we see are really just age differences. And that's kind of like why I was interested in the story of like thinking about these young people who are saying, OK, Boomer, and realizing and thinking through like, well, these young people are going to be old one day. We're going to be in the 2050s. You know, some Gen Z are going to be like, oh.

Kids these days, they're buying all their fancy boots with their brain interfaces and they're not even using a finger to click a button. You know, when we ordered things back when I was a kid, we had to click on Amazon and we had to wait two days for the stuff to arrive. And now, you know, you think of your fancy boots and you got your boots and these kids don't have to do anything. I think we can anticipate that moment because of how human memory works, of how we forget what we were like as kids. We forget what kids are like. And, you know, we can also see that in history, like the cycle repeats. So, you know, the okay boomer young people of today are going to be the kids of tomorrow. And is that okay? Does this sort of rhyme and reason of generational history actually cost

us anything? Or should we just let it, I don't know, perpetuate itself into infinity? Well, there are two sides of this, and I have empathy for both sides. One, young people don't know, perpetuate itself into infinity? Well, there are two sides of this, and I have empathy for both sides. One, young people don't want to be condescended to all the time. On the old people side of things, ageism is real. I think one of the jokes in this OK Boomer meme is like, oh, go tell a boomer to copy and paste something in a PDF. The joke is they don't know how to use like a PDF or any technology. And you can imagine that becoming ageism

when, you know, these Gen Zers are like, you know, they're like in their late teens now. You know, eventually they can be the like 27 year old person who's somehow a manager at their company, firing older people. And, you know, based on this stereotype of like, oh, you're a boomer, you don't get it, you're going to work slow. The lesson at the end of the day is we all exist on the same continuum

of humanity. Young people become old people. Old people used to be young people. We should have some empathy in that and to realize there's a developmental trajectory to being a human. And then sometimes when you're yelling at the past or when you're yelling at the future, or if you're yelling at old people, you're yelling at young people, you're really just yelling at like a different version of yourself. Just like, you know, Sean,

you and I will be crotchety old people one day complaining about the youth, I think. I think you're already halfway there, my guy. Yeah? Nice, nice. I'm going to find some kids to go yell at on a playground or something like that. Okay, Brian. Okay, Sean. Brian Resnick is a science reporter at Vox.

He wrote an article called Why Old People Will Always Complain About Young People. You can find it at Vox.com. At that same website, an article from Asia Romano, who you heard from early in the show, called OK Boomer, isn't just about the past. It's about our apocalyptic future. OK, listener, that's it from us this week. You'll hear from us again on Monday. We are Today Explained.