I (gen z) was recently having a discussion with a millennial friend who told me that millennials grew up optimistic only to have their dreams crushed, while zoomers never really had any optimistim to begin with. It's an over generalization sure, but still food for thought.

I’d say the generational trauma of the Great Depression definitely still affects my family today. My grandparents lived through the Depression and passed those values on to my father who is constantly worried about having enough money. This shrewdness about money was then passed onto me as a millennial.

'Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.' - George Orwell

"I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I am isn't it, and what is seems weird and scary to me"

It will happen to you

I'm a rare case of a Millennial from a dad of the Silent Generation. The feeling of having "missed out" in World War II,  was very real. Particularly the compulsion of doing something great to outshine the older generation who had fought in what was viewed as the most consequential event in the history of humanity. My father joined the army in the hopes of some conflict with "the Cossacks" in the 1950s. When that didn't pan out, he joined the Foreign Service. He ended up going from the Dust Bowl of Alberta during the Depression to a wealthy Canadian Ambassador, but when he died he still had this sense of disappointment at having missed out in what he saw was a moral conflict. He still talked about the War a fair chunk of the time in his final years.

As an iraqi zoomer it's really interesting because all I've ever known is political instability whilst my parents, who were born in 1970, grow up in a really prosperous Iraq (that changed in the 90s though). I guess be both have generational trauma but their lives have not been definied by it.

There's a common characteristic for all generations. They say theirs is the best 😀😎👍

I was born in late 1993 and I find it funny how there seems to be a great emphasis put on being a "90s kid" by those of us born in that decade despite the fact most proper childhood cultural experiences of "90s kids" are firmly cemented in the 2000s.

Here in Brazil the USA style cohort names (boomers, millenials, zoomers, etc.) aren't really a thing.  As a very active Catholic, however, it's not unusual in our circles to name generations after who was the Pope when they were baptised; I myself am of the JPII Generation.  I'm not sure if only Brazilian Catholics do that, or not, but I assume it's an exclusively Catholic thing.

As a paraguayan zoomer Ive always found very interesting how generations work differently depending on the country, the silent generation here usually grew up very very poor, we had a war with Bolivia wich brought national pride but at the same time would cause even more economic issues; the boomer genereation also grew up poor and would have to endure the early phase of our longuest dictatorship, they're very conservative and christian and of course tons of siblings, we have a lot of relatives due to that. The Gen x's on the other hand grew up during the epicenter of the dictarship, however a lot of them would start to rebel, they were the first who started to recieve a ton of american pop culture influence like in music or fashion; the millenials saw first the end of our dictarship, the return of democracy and our economy recovery little by little, culture an technology was of course gettin bigger and bigger but since we were still a poor country it was years behind what was going on in North America or Europe. Finally we gen z, thanks to the internet would experience a masssive change in terms of society, conomics and politics, our way of thinking is a whole new thing for our elders, we still have to endure with a lot of bad conservative ideas that sadly still remain, but year by year things change fast, luckily one day we will elect leaders who would care at least a bit about their people and not themselves and of coursen end corruption step by step and keep growing our economy
Great video JJ, btw

I just think of myself as an 80’s kid and 90’s teen.  That means I straddle X and Millennial so it doesn’t make sense to me at all.

In South Africa we call kids born after the end of Apartheid “born frees”

I was born in 1993 so on the bubble and it was so odd growing up knowing what your parents and grandparents saw. I can’t imagine what hardcore overt state-sponsored racism must do to a person. It’s hard to ask the kind of questions that would help you understand.

In Italy among younger people is very common to ask the year of birth instead of the actual age because people born in each year have very specific stereotypes attached to them, and knowing just the age of someone sometimes doesn’t mean knowing their year of birth

In France, most of the people born after 2000 would ask what year you were born in in opposition to age or grade. We also refer to each other as years like « yeah, he’s a 2004 »
The older generations find this quite odd

I feel like location plays a huge role when it comes to different generations. I was born in 1998 but have more in common with millennials than zoomers. In Qatar, we got everything super late compared to the west, and being in a lower-middle-class family didn't help either. I grew up on NES super Mario, VHS, no internet (got dial-up when I was like 9), no mobile phones etc.

My grandparents were holocaust survivors and I still have some inherited elements of it. All of their parents were murdered when they were quite young and they had no model of parenting behaviour so when they raised my parents, they didn't really do normal things like hugging their children because they were never hugged.

My parents modelled after their parents and raised me in a similarly odd way. I'm kinda hoping to break the chain of neurosis

I’m curious how we will look back on COVID as a generation thing, most Zoomers are in their teen years and those seem to be the years that shape us the most culturally. On the other hand, melenials are probably the ones going to be the most economically affected by it, and might see it in a similar way to how the silent generation and older boomers saw the Great Depression

I think there was another YouTube who made the claim that the closer you are to the transition points of the generational barriers, the more likely you are to find the concept of generations to be ridiculous.

Being an older Gen X'er (1969- ), I remember that before the book came out labelling us that way, our generation was often referred to as the "Baby Bust" for the return to smaller family sizes that succeeded the Post-WWII baby boom.  It was a tremendous missed opportunity to call us the "Baby Busters".  :)

The most poignant thing I hear and feel about Gen X'ers is that because there are so few of us compared to surrounding generations, other generations don't spend much time thinking about Gen X'ers at all, but Gen X'ers spend A LOT of time thinking about themselves.  It may be a stereotype, but I think both sides of that stereotype seems to have a fair grain of truth to them.

Great video, as per usual, J.J.!