Let’s Get Rid of Generations, OK Boomer?
Don’t take offense to Gen Z’s hashtag. They’re actually onto something.
A version of a novel I published more than a year ago, and was at work on for three years before that, came true a couple of weeks back. Gen Zers have taken a simple message — responding “OK boomer” to the jeremiads of their elders against their ways — and hashtagged it, made it into merch, monetized it, and turned it into a rant in return. Now it’s gone viral, it’s trending, it’s doing the verbs and gerunds ideas do in 2019. In the novel I published, Boomer1, something similar, but louder, happens: A former magazine editor leads his fellow millennials into an open revolution, via viral videos, against baby boomers (they call themselves boomer boomers) that leads to acts of domestic terrorism.
Phew. Glad we’re not there.
Here’s the thing I discovered after spending three years working on a book about generational warfare: I’m not sure I even believe in the idea of generations to begin with. This might sound like Gladwellian contrarianism, but bear with me for a moment. The very idea of generations has been around for millennia. The word appears all over the King James Version of the Bible, though the Hebrew word translators turned into “generations,” tolodot, probably means something more like “stories.”…
