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John M. Kelly's avatar

Both of my kids are in their early 20s - the Zoomer generation. I see that they and their friends have effortlessly rejected the capitalist fantasies earlier generations were raised on (I'm a late Boomer).

Media wants to hype "Zoomer anxiety". Honestly, this generation is no more or less anxious than their predecessors. They just have more access to tools to help them manage their anxiety than we did, and feel no stigma or shame in admitting that they have anxiety and are managing it.

They think about money and success differently than we were expected to. Media wants to call them "lazy" but the truth is that they just don't care about the things we thought were so important. Their expectations are different than ours were. They don't expect to have more stuff than we did, and they're not going to fight to try to get more stuff than we had.

The thing that drives older capitalist pretenders nuts is that the Zoomer's rejection of the myth of endless growth is so casual. It's failure and impracticability is obvious to them.

I don't think that my partner and I did anything to plant the seeds for these attitudes to grow in our kids. They've been observing the world with fresh eyes, skeptical of the myths we were fed when we were their age, and they've come up with this response on their own, de novo.

Their world is going to be different than ours was, and the simple truth is that we aren't going to be a part of it.

At this point our responsibility is to let them get on with it. The way we do that is to reject the MAGA dystopian narrative that "everything was so much better back in the day and now it's falling apart".

Our assignment is to embrace the joy and loudly proclaim "we are not going back!"

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Daniel Rench's avatar

Emphasize!

“If there were ever a question of why today’s Republican Party is so at odds with itself, the answer is that it is having an identity crisis. They used one flawed theory as a scaffolding to hold up their party’s broken economic, social, and political structures. Even with its failures, they cling to it because they have nothing else to stand on.”

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