chat

Now if you're a Millennial and you're here to get mad and possibly out of a twinge of fear that YOU are a cringe Millennial, I'm near certain that if you're even on this website in the first place that you're one of the ones who made it. But most Millennials didn't.

Millennials were faced early on with a dark truth of reality. They have witnessed the failure of a great many institutions. They have they have borne witness to a great failure of culture, a great failure of institutions, a great failure of the state. A double whammy of 9/11 and the subprime mortgage disaster. The Millennial was born into a system that failed, and the nihilism set in. They knew they were not going to have the same benefits as their parents, as their grandparents. And rather rather than being like, oh thank God these these decrepit institutions are failing, now we can change it the path that would have led them here to Communistic thought, they fled the opposite direction. They bought in wholesale to the media of their childhood. Similar to how the overbearing "cute" aesthetics of anime were a response to the undeniable realities of The Bomb, the Millennial took the undeniable realities of the failure of capitalism and fled to consumer nihilism, and built their entire identity around that.

In the past, kids would grow up and make fun of what they enjoyed as kids. They'd mock it relentlessly. They thought it was stupid, because it was. All those CN shows that Millennials love jacking off to so much would take potshots at the Hannah Barbera cartoon shit their creators got raised on constantly. There was no reverence. Maybe the occasional little nod would slip in, but they were LIVING. They were DOING. They hadn't bought in to "their" media. But the cringe Millennial bought in to media. They bought in wholesale. Their identity became formed by this escape route. You can see this in the online media they create. Millennials in effect created the internet "culture" as we know it now, and you can tell, because the Internet has for the life of it been nothing but a place to talk about objects and media that you consume. Here we go to talk about sports, here we go to talk about Nintendo, here we go to talk about Xbox, here we go to wack off to exclusively animated porn of characters form cartoons we saw as kids. All content is meta-content. New works are not produced, only an ouroborostic dissection and re-dissection of existing works. People don't even play games any more, they just watch videos of other people talking about games.

And sure a lot of these people who bought into this wholesale did well enough. They've managed to carve out spaces and "identities" (if you can call it that, as it is all just a repackaging of other peoples' material) for themselves, but they they lost a larger and more meaningful culture. It is a total abandonment and neglect of creativity. The Millennial is in a constant state of reference. There there is no defining Millennial art movement. There is no defining Millennial music. There is no defining Millennial zeitgeist. The failure of of financial institutions and the world around them led them to to deny the reality before them and to escape back back into their childhood, back into Pokemon and Digimon and Nintendo. They sort themselves into Hogwarts houses instead of something that truly matters. With the genuine connective power of the internet they had the chance to continue the cycle of creation of culture, and instead they drank fully of popular media. Endless reference, endless homage. Endless slop. The Millennial goes out in public dressed like a Steven Universe or Homestuck or Vivziepop character because they is genuinely all they know. They do not know themselves. They only know media.

The GenZ and GenA mocking relentlessly the cringe Millennial, mocking their displays of soy consumerism, mocking their breaking down in tears at the trailer for a Star Wars movie, is a sign of great hope. The GenZ is not devoid of personality, like some breathless thinkpieces would have you believe. They are only devoid of the Millennial's artificial fetal media worship "personality". They and GenA have the potential to be forces of great destructive renewal. And I personally look ofrward to it. Even if nothing new is produced still, at least the old will have finally been swept out.