It's Official, GenZ Thinks Anyone Over 40 is a Boomer

[canyonwalker]

I clicked on a BuzzFeed listicle today with a click-bait headline, You're Officially A Boomer If You've Done Half Of These 40 Things (4 Apr 2024). It was pretty amusing... but not in the way I expect the authors thought. It was amusing because of how stupid it was. Most of the things on their list have been done by typical Gen Xers, and quite a few are not so old that even Millennials wouldn't have done them. I'd rewrite the headline as It's Official, Gen Z Thinks Anyone Over 40 Is A Boomer. 😂

For reference, Boomers are commonly defined as those born between 1946 and 1964. The youngest Boomers turn 60 this year. Thus when articles like this say "Doing A, B, or C means you're a Boomer," they're arguing that A, B, C really haven't been popular since the 1960s, maybe the early 70s— or are only done anymore by people age 60+. But oh, how wrong these clueless (and likely young) writers are. Here are just the first 3 items from their list, with my notes about how much more recently than the 1960s they've been commonplace:

1. Drinking Coke out of a glass bottle.
Sure, depictions of glass soda bottles conjure images of the "good old days" of the 1950s and 60s. But depending on where you lived, regional bottlers were distributing Coke (and Pepsi) in glass well beyond then. I routinely bought Coke in glass bottles in 1992-1993 when I lived in New York. It's what one of the local grocery stories carried. And anyone who prefers Mexican Coke today— the stuff still made with cane sugar rather than high fructose corn syrup— still buys Coke in glass bottles today.

2. Singing the "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke" jingle.
Okay, I can get how a person whose idea of ``research``is scanning the first page of Google search results would think this is a Boomer thing. The classic Coca-Cola commercial was produced in 1971. The top several search results all say that. But I can tell you that I was born after that commercial being released, and I remember people singing it at least into my 20s. Indeed, do a little more ``research`` than just skimming the first page of Google hits, like just read the damn Wikipedia article on the song, and you'll see that the remakes were done up through the 2010s. Frankly you'd practically have to be a child today never to have sung this song— or at least heard others singing it.

3. Seeing colored toilet paper in the bathroom.
Yes, toilet paper used to be available in colors other than white. In commercial use? No. But in homes, definitely. I remember up through the early 1980s it being common for people to color-coordinate their bathrooms with paper in pastel hues of pink and blue. And if your grandma was like either of mine, you saw it in their houses well in to the 1990s.

These are just the first 3 items from the listicle. What else is on their list of supposed 1960s relics? Would you believe:

• Using a phone book
• Sending a fax
• Using a photocopier

FWIW that last time I did each of those, or had someone do it on my behalf, was after 2000. And it wasn't because I'm an old fogey, it's because the world didn't suddenly become all digital in 1970... or even in 1999.

Comments

[sorcyress]

The most recent time I used a photocopier was...yesterday. The most recent time before that was...Monday. No wait, and Wednesday.

I mean, I suspect some youngsters think all teachers are boomers regardless of age, but like...babes, I'm still closer in age to most of you than I am your parents!

~Sor

[canyonwalker]

Yeah, it's not surprising there's still a lot of paper being passed around in schools. Not everything is digital in most schools. Where do teens in school today, or those who graduated not that long ago— i.e., Gen Z‐ think paper tests and handouts come from? Like, do they expect there's someone's grandparent in a locked room with a copier running all the copies and passing them through a slot in the wall?

[ckd]

Gen X gets ignored again, in other words?

At least we're used to it.

[canyonwalker]

Haha, yeah. All the "Millennials vs. their Boomer parents" articles for the last 10 years have irked me. It's like, "Hey, a lot of us Gen Xers faced the same challenges years ago, and nobody paid attention!" Now even Millennials are being skipped over as the pop culture zeitgeist has shifted to "Gen Z vs. their Boomer parents".
(How old do these kids think their parents are?!)

[rimrunner]

The library where I worked maintained a fax machine until 2014 or so, and students occasionally used it until we retired it.

[canyonwalker]

I understand. There are still companies/organizations that only offer fax as a faster alternative to snail-mailing in a physical copy of something. Like, they need a signature or photo but don't have a digital system to handle it, or they have one but it's basically broken. When I was comparison shopping for car insurance last year (2023), one of the insurers I looked was like that. I decided that even if they came in $100 cheaper than the others the hassle of working with them wasn't worth it.

[rimrunner]

Pretty much. We were finally able to get rid of it when our new photocopiers could also make digital scans that could be sent to an e-mail address or fax number.

I'm amused at how all the comments on that listicle are about how it's GenX erasure. Feels like bait.

[canyonwalker]

Erasure? Yeah. We Xers have been familiar with that for a long time. In fact that was the literal genesis of the label "Gen X". But while erasure, generally speaking, can happen due to ignorance or malice— and it was the expectation of being ignored or skipped over that drove the name "Gen X"— to call it bait implies a level of malice. A deliberate effort to poke at us, to troll us on purpose. I don't think that's there. I think we're just being skipped over, yet again, because it's simpler for young people trying to make a rhetorical point.