Tangent: Generations
Added 2024-04-04 19:45:35 +0000 UTCHi friends,
Here's a Tangent on generations discourse. Sticking Out Your Gyatt for the Rizzler, the Strauss–Howe generational theory, cyclical vs. linear history, Hegel, Marx, Fukuyama, Mark Fisher, Skibidi Toilet—all the hits.
This one would probably benefit from another editing pass, but too bad, time's up lol. I'm still planning to get two more Tangents out this month—will post a topic poll for the 15+ folks shortly.
Enjoy, let me know what you think!
-Natalie
P.S. Here's the video link, in case embedding doesn't work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWJ12HQ2onI
Comments
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Vinicius Angelino de Andrade
2025-08-19 09:04:12 +0000 UTCHeard "nonsense lyricism" and immediately mentally prepared for bad romance to pop up lol
Shaymin
2025-07-23 11:12:18 +0000 UTCI genuinely thought the kid was singing nonsense scatt - 👵🪦
Viviane P.L.
2025-07-05 21:37:13 +0000 UTCOh! A Hegel Tangent! ❤️
rk
2025-06-19 18:43:16 +0000 UTCYeah, I still agree with Bernie Sanders, and I worked on Bernie’s campaign, but I voted for Hilary when I had to.
rk
2025-06-19 18:38:12 +0000 UTC"Sorry. I just ruined Hegel for you." Ha!
Pamela Boudreau
2025-04-15 22:40:32 +0000 UTCI'm a Gen X and I remember Boomers and other Gen Xers talking about what an unholy mess the Millenials were. They were never going to make it, no one would ever hire them, blah, blah, blah. Now I hear Millenials saying the Gen Zs are doomed. What is the big deal? Don't we get it? It just means you're getting old now and you resent the fact that there's a new young hot thing getting all the attention. Give them their moment. Pretty soon they'll get old too.
Pamela Boudreau
2025-04-15 21:51:48 +0000 UTCI feel like class and income play a role in relating to a certain generation. I was born in 1999 below the poverty line. Most new technology and fashion were out of reach. I watched older movies on VHS long before we got a DVD player. We didn't have cable, but we had an antenna to watch PBS. I only had access to a computer or the Internet in the computer lab at school. I only listened to new music on the radio. Buy new, popular CDs other kids my age listened to wasn't possible. I wore secondhand, clearance or thrifted clothing. I share more nostalgia with Millennials than my own "generation". Nostalgia would be an interesting tangent.
Callie Thompson
2025-03-01 18:45:12 +0000 UTCfwiw natalie i work at an elementary school and the kids have informed me gyat stands for butt and comes from "girl your ass thick" and it is not related to "gyat damn" (at least according to this cohort of children)
kellyanne
2025-02-13 22:42:15 +0000 UTC“Masculine Muslim barbarians are totally gonna assblast the American they/them pussies” is an amazingly out of pocket quote.
Zach Goff
2025-01-10 08:22:59 +0000 UTCas a fellow collegiate gen z sex-haver & drug-doer, i agree with Chloe lmao
Connor Gibson
2024-08-23 23:40:45 +0000 UTCI’m a gen-zer and I’m skeptical that the decrease in sex and drugs is quite as stark as people think it is. I mean I’m not saying it hasn’t lessened but being a college student there’s a lot of sex and drugs going on
Chloe
2024-08-23 21:38:59 +0000 UTCWatching this for the third time. Genius!
Anne
2024-08-09 14:13:59 +0000 UTCTurns out the creator of Skibidi Toilet is actually a right wing russian who has been putting overt russian propaganda as well as conspiracies about hunder biden's laptop in his vids aimed at little babies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEWrA7Gw41k OOF
Sappho's Friend
2024-08-07 20:55:38 +0000 UTCSo late to this party but that dichotomy of linear vs cyclical time is something I think a lot about. I spent a lot of time around neopagans and counter to the mainstream tendency you describe of preferring linear time they tend to be really obsessed with cycles, especially seasonal holidays (like the Spring rebirth you mention). As a Marxist though I find myself drawn less to a pure linear interpretation and more towards a dialectical relationship between the two. I heard one dialectical materialist (I think Bertell Ollman) describe the correct, DM take on time to be less a cycle or a line, but a spiral. Where crises and tendencies repeat but intensify over time. I suppose the derivate of that spiral is basically just another line depending on how you slice it but it feels more accurate than either/or to me.
Ordinary Snowflake
2024-07-16 01:21:12 +0000 UTCFrom the vtuber world😂😛😁 https://youtube.com/shorts/KHK1gMatWnQ?si=K4BfovQyvQWoujfa
Natasha Clark
2024-07-14 18:57:46 +0000 UTCNow that Gen Alpha is creating culture, I think the moment is right to finally recognize that Gen Z and Millennials are actually the same generation - a young millennial has as much in common culturally with a young gen Z as with an older millennial. We never were separate and now we can finally accept our siblingship with minimal fuss
Sunjay
2024-07-10 02:25:06 +0000 UTCThanks for mentioning the return of underground rave scene, tehehe. As long as we keep Musk out of berghain... ;D)
Wendy Thomas
2024-06-20 00:39:59 +0000 UTCI wanted to bring up the inverse of the "zoomer cuspers who insist they're millenials". Nowadays, especially on tiktok there's been an influx of zoomer cuspers who insist they're zoomers and not old/millenials, trying to hold onto their youthful interests/communities when it feels like everyone is younger then them and they are insecure about it. I've been that person before as an "older zoomer".
CyanideCrystal
2024-06-18 16:21:04 +0000 UTCi think you'd like wb yeats' "Shape of Time" theory. it's very similar to a cyclical shape but with the distinction that these are two connected spirals that widen and shrink as we move through time. for him times was not a circle, but shrinking and widening gyres. i think this sort of reconciliates the linear idea (of progress within liberal democracy), while maintaining the idea of repeating patterns as the gyres shrink and widen.
estesicoro
2024-06-04 01:22:23 +0000 UTCmix-sir-lot-dian sounded so much like mixolydian at first lol
Eliza
2024-05-28 18:05:47 +0000 UTCI presume it means "give me your everything/all your power," as in the "Wait, it's all Ohio? Always has been" meme portraying Ohio as an enormous, powerful globe-spanning force.
Ben Martin
2024-05-27 01:01:08 +0000 UTCOk but what does “give me your Ohio” mean?
Drew Franzblau
2024-05-24 05:10:07 +0000 UTCOh my god, the fucking shade at Thoreau just kills me!
Zoe Tribur
2024-05-08 00:50:35 +0000 UTCJust watched this, these are ideas I think about a lot. I think when it comes to critiques of linear frameworks of time and of a linear progression towards progress and freedom, Black feminists for example have a lot of rich theory. Saidiya Hartman's "Scenes of Subjection", for example, explains how the glorification of historical events like Emancipation reinforces the neoliberal notion of a history that always tends towards progress, but hides the lasting structures of racism. The racism does not disappear but shape-shifts, through cyclical movements. And interlaced with that, the same dynamics happen with the shape-shifting nature of sexism (ex, new ways of policing femininity). When you talk about the plausible causes of cyclical history, in my mind there's certainly something with power structures and politics themselves that kind of... keep finding ways to change form, but remain? And each generation having to grapple with that in different ways.
Juliette dL
2024-05-06 19:04:20 +0000 UTCaw shoot I just realized that the skibidi toilet guy is a pun because he's "scatting" in a toilet
Duck
2024-05-06 15:47:49 +0000 UTCIf we're living through the 90's again you young-us about to suffer through boy-bands and popper-pants. I feel so sorry for you; we thought you'd been spared. Although does k-pop count as a boy/girl-band era?
Andrew Hanson
2024-05-03 17:08:07 +0000 UTCAnother way to distinguish between generations could be around developmental milestones and how you socialize with your peers. A US-centric version could look like this: For Boomers/Gen-X Did your peers or their older siblings serve in Vietnam? Did you and your friends play video games growing up? For Gen-X/Millennials How old were you when you bought your first house? Where did you meet your first serious adult partner (work/bar/friends vs online)? For Millennials/Gen-Z Did you and your peers get drivers licenses as soon as possible? Did you spend a lot of unstructured & unsupervised free time with friends outside of school/home? I can totally see Gen Alpha rebelling against the insane college app rat race and helicopter parents to reclaim free-spirited independence as a hallmark of youth.
Evan Deo
2024-05-03 06:51:57 +0000 UTCI would like to speak to whomever decided on using FIVE colors to cycle through the FOUR archetypes in Strauss-Howe generation flowchart. was the additional slightly paler green worth the built in off-by-one error? "diagram readability is my passion <3" and they didnt even make any of them pink >:(
C.LiGS
2024-05-01 15:41:25 +0000 UTCPeople keep telling me Gen Z is having less sex and I find it hard to believe because of how much and how hard I fuck
Keegan Deathman
2024-04-12 02:23:21 +0000 UTCMaybe it's just anecdotal on my part, but I'm Gen Z (by some metrics) and lots of my friends are having sex and doing drugs. I'm not personally, but I have always been sort of an outlier in my experience. Anyway, great video! You really articulated a lot of my thoughts and feelings about the generation discourse. Especially how the divisions are not clear cut. I still have my almanac from the late 2000s stating that Millennials (or Generation Y as they were called) were born 1980-2000 and Gen Z is 2000 and onward, and the year slowly moved further and further backward until 2018, when people started talking about Gen Z activism and the year became very solidified in the public as sometime in the mid-1990s. Also, I'm old enough to remember back in 2015 when it was "politically correct millennials" who were the target of public ire, vs. the "woke Gen Z cancel culture fiends" that gets propagated today. And to relate to your point about how you're not convinced these generations are that different, I can sort of agree with that. Because 2015 was not that long ago. It doesn't even feel different this time. Jonathan Haidt even has a book out. I haven't read it, but it seems like while he's using new arguments and making new suggestions the "young people" he chooses as his subject aren't much different than those he wrote about in his "Coddling of the American Mind" article in 2015 (that in my opinion started started the whole "these kids are too PC/woke/fragile these days!" fervor).
Mathew
2024-04-12 00:34:38 +0000 UTCThis video helped me connect some things I've been thinking about for awhile. Sorry for the long comment Humans cannot be as carefree about sex as bonobos because of our biology. Pregnancy and childbirth is much harder on the human body than other mammals, and our childcare is very intensive taking many years of basic survival care as well as education. I think that this causes an innate anxiety about sex in individuals and in our culture. We’re always creating regulations and taboos, the concept of marriage with its many rituals. Gen z aren’t having sex for a lot of reasons. It has become economically risky to have children, not a very good investment like it used to be (and in some places still is and we see higher birth rates there). I think that the pandemic has caused both sex to go down and socializing in general. We have better sex education, busier schedules, and access to more pornography and sex toys than ever before. (Something I find interesting is that there seems to be an increase of sexual nonsexual relationships. Best friends or strangers doing roleplay. Nsfw artists and their friends or followers. Not only do we have totally new types of sex work, but look at any fandom on twitter and you will see friends basically sexting each other using fictional characters. We were told to practice safer sex and I guess that’s what we’re doing.) The increase of sex in the sixties can be explained in a similar way: decrease in child mortality, birth control, good economy. Overall I think this is great! The loss of patriarchal and religious power really shows us that we don’t actually need this top down regulation of sex. Giving agency back to women has very positive outcomes. I think it’s really cool how sensitive humans are to these types of changes. We are good at self-regulation and cultural norms shift to accommodate changing realities. People are having a panic about the loneliness epidemic right now, but I think that this period of social distancing is both rational and temporary.
artificialladybug
2024-04-11 18:19:32 +0000 UTCLate to the party…. How Gen X of me! Very interesting tangent. Only here will you see a discussion of the shape of time! I like the concepts - the possibility that shared experiences at stages in life have some sort of group relevance. I agree though it’s not something that can be universalised to the individual. Similar problems arise in theories made about things like birth order effects on personality between siblings - they make some intuitive sense, but social reality depends on so many things. It’s really great to see you on my screen again - always such a pleasure!
CrystalJade
2024-04-11 17:02:04 +0000 UTCLove this tangent! I am of the view that history is spiral, with cycles but also linear progress (as you describe towards the end of the video). Also thank you so much for explaining that video at the beginning, that was gold.
Vladimir Barash
2024-04-06 01:09:43 +0000 UTCNow I have to go rewatch Cringe to process my feelings on all these embarrassing millennial clips To your last point, I've always felt so frustrated with this idea that mental illness won't exist in an anarchocommunist utopia or whatever. Capitalism certainly influences the shape mental illness takes and its prevalence in a huge way. But alienated labor is not the only cause of "mental illness," a concept which is itself historically contingent. I could fill up my own hour long video on this but I appreciate you mentioning it and giving us this tangent. Could tangents cure my millennial anxieties? Hope to find out
gently shake the bees
2024-04-06 01:05:45 +0000 UTCPeople freaking out over GMOD humour is so surreal it's like we live in an alternate timeline where machinima never existed.
Lewis Barrett
2024-04-05 19:09:30 +0000 UTCThis was so fascinating and articulated so many thoughts I wasn't quite able to pin down that I was having. One thing I might push back on a bit, at the risk of being the Old Man Yelling at Cloud... you seemed to dismiss the critique of younger generations being too dependent on technology, having ruined attention spans, etc. just based on the fact that the same critiques were made about us and the TV (and the implication being the same for the youth before us and before them). But I do think that our dependence on TV and technology made our attention spans objectively worse than the generation before us. And I do think the youth's dependency on iPads has made their attention spans worse than ours. And that what's coming next will be even worse. But rather than a failing of "the youth" - I see that more as sort of a depressing reality of increased technology, specifically as its architecture was built in Silicon Valley. So rather than dismissing the critique because it was made against us, I'd propose that the critique was valid when it was lobbied against us and continues to be valid. I think that's a much more productive starting point for any conversation moving forward than just outright dismissal. With all that said this was my favorite tangent so far.
Joe
2024-04-05 19:03:29 +0000 UTC
