I’m trying to understand the “Okay Boomer” mindset, as it relates to human nature in general.
I almost started this thread in Cafe Society because I thought it had mostly to do with entertainment. But I think it can do with most anything cultural, morality, etiquette, politics, etc.
As human beings, do we become set with our environment as it stands in our late teens through our early thirties? After that, are we just programmed to see stuff as not as good as before as we age? Are we as people mostly convinced that when we were young, things were better?
Why do I like TV shows from the seventies? Movies from the eighties? Music from the seventies and eighties? More importantly, why do I think modern stuff is crap?
This has historic roots. Sixties seniors thought the Beatles were awful. There’s that famous Greek philosopher who wrote that piece about how young people suck.
Mostly I just wonder if the trends we followed so enthusiastically as adolescents make us certain that anything that follows is a letdown because it’s not as exciting as our first beer so to speak. Thus we are convinced that society is in decline as we age when really, society is just different than what we grew up with. Not inferior, just different.
There is a strong undercurrent of expectation that change should always be embraced, and that the new is always better.
Change and cultural “advancement” is morally neutral (note: I’m talking about styles, electric guitars, and CGI here, and not things like the right to vote), but we treat participation in new cultural shifts as a duty. Often because there are interests with a financial incentive to push those changes.
Whether the movies from the 70s are better than the movies of today or vice versa is maybe a fun is ultimately meaningless. The questions are: Why does our love of (for example) 70s movies inspire us to make objective statements about the quality of 21st century film? Why do we assume that the person who professes to not like any movies made past 1982 really ‘ought’ to, and that there’s something wrong with that person? Why do we assume that, in our limited ability to consume art and culture, someone ought to stop participating in the art and culture that is meaningful to them simply because it’s old?
I mean, yeah, some people are cranky, but we all ought to remember that this is pretty arbitrary shit.
You like what you like. Other people like what they like. It’s all good, until we start expecting others to conform to our personal tastes.
At some point in life we realize the world runs on bullshit. It’s a Barnum and Bailey world. The stuff nowadays is no worse than it ever was, it’s just the same. The Super Bowl half time is as bad as a Bob Hope special or the Ice Follies.
So, we become more selective. That makes room for the best of the seventies and eighties. And, hopefully, maybe there’s something new to add.
I tend to assume that people who don’t care one way or the other about things such as movies, tv, music and technology are just not saying anything about it. Heck, they’re probably not hardly aware of stuff or actively avoid it.
“New things suck” because new is primitive and elemental and lacks the nuance of the old. The new is also taking advantage of some new ways of doing things that weren’t available before. Recorded performances allowed the transition from sheet music to popular singers. Before that, how popular could any singer be outside of opera? Who would hear them? Then the electric guitar was invented, which allowed for rock. Recordings proliferated more and more, which allowed for sampling and rap. Streaming more easily allowed people to listen to wide varieties of artists, which helped end the album era. And so on. All of these developments resulted in cultural landscapes that were categorically different than what came before. Why read novels when you can watch a movie? Why watch a movie when you can create your own reality through a video game?
The old ways weren’t necessarily worse, just different. Probably something was lost when people stopped having pianos in their homes. Something was lost when wedding bands went away, when every singer of note would try their hand at a popular song, when you just had the definitive “hit” version of a song and that was all anyone listened to. I suppose for older people, they see more of this, more things fade away. The young don’t have that issue, they didn’t live through the old times, so they’re not missing them the way older people might.
It’s not just seniors. Look in the Cafe Society board and there’s a general theme that current music is not interesting. In fact it’s rare for music more recent than 2000 to be discussed seriously there. That was over 20 years ago!
As a younger man, I promised myself I wouldn’t turn into one of those older people who looks at newer music as crap. For the most part I’ve kept that promise though I am perplexed by some of the music that’s popular today. I don’t get Post Malone for example as I don’t think I’ve heard anything by him I liked. But that doesn’t mean he’s crap it just means it isn’t for me. There, I kept my promise.
Incremental positive changes are invisible, while incremental negative changes are a never-ending torrent of irritation and failure, and the older someone is, the more incremental negative changes they’ve been irritated by and the more incremental positive changes they’ve ignored.
There are books on neuroscience and music that discuss this subject.
My understanding is that for the first ~25 years of your life, your brain is developing and your sense of identity is forming. Whatever media you’re exposed to in this period becomes integrated into your sense of identity and it carries special meaning with it. As you get older, you may be exposed to new media but it doesn’t carry the same meaning that media you were exposed to as a child, a teenager or as a young adult. Your brain and sense of identity tend to be formed by age 30 or so and new things don’t carry the special meaning they did before.
Also wheres all the shocking music? I thought each new generation of music was supposed to be shocking and scary to the previous generation who thought new music was frightening and immoral. But I don’t find modern music shocking. Boring (to me, because I’m old)? Yes. But not shocking. I guess its hard to shock people who grew up listening to gangsta rap and satanic death metal.
I think it’s also that it was “new” to you at that time in your life, as was everything else. Eventually it all begins to look like a variation of something you’ve seen before. (Old guy here) When asked why I wasn’t interested in the latest movie, I told my kids I’ve seen every movie that’s ever been made, and every movie that ever will be made. At some point, everything in the culture is a remake.
Yes, lots of current entertainment is crap. But people incredulous that there are viewers for staged wrestling and “The Masked Singer” forget there was similar garbage on TV back in the day. They remember favorite shows, not all the crud they ignored.
Same for music; most of it that dominated the airwaves when I was growing up stank, and the good stuff was much harder to find.
I’ve thought it would’ve been hell coming of age in the 1930s-40s just based on popular culture, but maybe I would have survived by finding the good bits.
But becomes easier to find over time, as the good stuff continues to be circulated, while the crap finds its way to the dustbin.
If you are listening to an “oldies” station (which now plays stuff that came out when I was a teen), then you aren’t listening to everything that came out in the 70’s, just the things that were (or became) popular, which sometimes is a measure of how good it is.
If you listen to a contemporary station, 90% of what they are playing won’t be on the oldies station in 40 years.
This is a very important point. It reminds me of one of my favorite historical novels Down the Common. There’s a scene at a feast where an old man berates young people because they don’t know what it’s like to starve the way he did way back during a crop blight.
Maybe some of the music is “shocking” in different ways? “Old Town Road” stirred some controversy with accusations of racism because some institutions wouldn’t include it on the country music charts. Iggy Azalea faced controversy over accusations of verbal blackface and the appropriation of black culture. But “WAP” generated some regular old controversy due to its frank sexually explicit lyrics. (But admittedly I wasn’t shocked by the song just mildly surprised at how explicit it was.)