by Justin Wahl
One of the biggest divides in our country – and one which hugely defined this past presidential election – is the simple cultural divide between those who are old enough to remember a time before the internet, and those who only ever knew the world through a virtual lens. And, naturally, there is a huge difference in how the two groups see both technology and the rest of the world. But, perhaps surprisingly, I’ve noticed that the younger of the two groups tends to be far more sceptical about, not just the world as a whole, but even about the impact of digital technology.
The Millennial generation seems to lie right across this cultural divide, although they tend to form a bridge of sorts, between what seems to be the secular triumphalism of Gen X, and the existential cynicism of Gen Z. Speaking as a Millennial myself (although towards the later end of the generation), Millennials tend not to have a strong opinion about the world around them, while the generations either above or below us, tend to have much clearer opinions of the world. Millennials, it seems to me, tend to be so much more focused on their personal relationship to the world. Perhaps this “me-focused” Millennial gap between Generations X and Z, is a big part of what allows them to have such wildly contradictory attitudes towards our modern society.
(For the sake of argument, my definition of a “Millennial”, is anyone who was school-aged when 9/11 happened. That could mean kindergarten through college. It seems clear to me that generations are formed less by years born and more by shared cultural experiences, so I would prefer a more common-sense definition as this, rather than simply “what year were you born”. This should also clearly define Gen X and Gen Z, for the purpose of this article; Gen Z is too young to remember 9-11, while Gen X was a part of the working economy at the time.)
Napoleon once said, “To really understand a man, you must understand what the world was like when he was 20”. Over Thanksgiving, my family was discussing this quote, and talking about what was going on in the world when we were 20. My parents were 20 at some point around the Reagan era, and during the fall of the Berlin Wall – an event which marked the end of the Cold War.
For myself, I was 20 years old in 2015. I was studying abroad in Europe, and the world was generally at peace. China, Russia, and even Israel and Egypt, were all places that friends or family had recently visited as tourist destinations. I know military veterans who were stationed in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan, and their most notable stories involved getting sanctioned for drinking alcohol in a Muslim country (or, occasionally, avoiding an exploding mine on the highway). The economy was largely recovered from some “Recession” that happened when I was in Middle school. In terms of technology; social media had aged alongside myself. I could still remember when “adults” weren’t even on Facebook, but now my parents were loosing real-life friends over political memes. Netflix and Spotify were the established media of poor, broke college kids, and our families still had cable TV and purchased MP3 tracks. “Modern” technology had really grown up with me – I remember in middle school when Steve Jobs first launched the iPhone. By college, the hipster music nerds were re-discovering vinyl records, largely for the sake of being ironic. By and large, the world was good when I was 20.
This greatly contrasts with my younger brother, who is five years younger than me. Months after turning 20, was the Covid pandemic. That was followed by a summer of watching cities burn for “mostly peaceful” protests. This revealed the shameless subjectivity of corporate news media, as well as the historic histrionics of social media. In highschool, he and his friends had kept in touch almost exclusively through Snapchat, and now in college they were the trial audience for Tik Tok. Famously in 2020, about a quarter of Gen Z identified as LGBTQ+, but a mere four years later, Gen Z overwhelmingly supported Trump. They have not only never seen a world without the internet; they were children who were raised with social media and iPhones. When they were college age, they saw the legitimacy of corporate “traditional” media being largely undermined by mainstream lies about major news-breaking stories. Thus, at around 20 years old, podcasts, Youtube influencers, and “alternative” media seem to be the only legitimate sources of news. Also during their college tenure, both the Middle East and even (shockingly to my generation), Europe, were once more embroiled in huge wars. The world seemed bleak when they were 20.
Much ink has been spilled already, and doubtlessly will continue to be spilled, over how these events formed Gen Z and their cultural attitudes. Already, Gen Z seems far more ambitious in their life goals than Millennials, and I have no doubt that Gen Z will be huge culture builders, albeit with a cynical outlook on the state of the world – a world where the digital realm is genuinely seen as “more real” than the real one. Afterall, most people who are my age or younger, only learned about human sexuality through online pornography; we obsessed over school popularity mostly through the lens of social media followings; and the primary mode for our childhood “imagination” tended to be directed through video games than games of “make-believe”. Overall, if the digital world is seen as “more real” than the real world, I would suggest that a level of cynicism is far more pragmatic than an attitude of unadulterated optimism.
Nobody who has access to the internet is unfamiliar with broad generalizing stereotypes about the “Tik Tok generation”. But I think it would be much more interesting, to turn the camera around, and really take a look at Gen X and the older Millennials – the “Nineties Nostalgia” generation, and about their unchecked presumptions and attitudes towards the world, and especially towards technology.
The main impetus for this article was hearing two of my coworkers, both in their mid-40’s, trying to explain how, in their opinion, something around the year 1995 sparked a new dawning of humanity. Prior to ‘95, they claimed, we had only had sporadic and relatively minor technological breakthroughs, and since 1995, technology just took off and changed the world rapidly, for the first and unprecedented time in human history. And the reason for this change, according to one of these individuals, was the internet being launched. (The other person seemed to think it was aliens).
Personally, I was struggling to understand this argument for one notable reason; hadn’t the late-19th and 20th century been filled with major technological breakthroughs? From the dawn of flight to the Moon landing, from the development of cars and submarines and bombs, and even nuclear technology: The world in 1990 would have been utterly inconceivable a hundred years earlier. Additionally, I still really feel that most major breakthroughs which have happened in my lifetime (I was also born in 1995), have been confined to computer technology and usage.
Put this argument another way; life during the Vietnam War-era is more similar to society today than it was to society before the World Wars, despite being roughly 50 years away from either time period. This is only noticeable, though, if you turn off your screens and walk around the city. Our cities today looks more like 1985 than the imagined 2015 from the film Back to the Future.
Of course, I get it. Those co-workers want to communicate their experience of how much the world has changed since they were young. All of life, from dating to stock exchanges to encyclopedic research, is operated through this black mirror device which you carry in your back-pocket. That is a radical idea to anyone who didn’t grow up with it. And so often, they have a … honestly, a kind of innocent and nostalgic sense of wonder and possibility, which they can associate with such a device.
That is not the experience for us who grew up inundated with a virtual world which at times consumed the façade of the real one. There can actually be this alternative sense of wonder… not for a technological future, but for an organic past.
Those who remember life before the internet want to communicate how impressive a world without limitations is. They want to say to younger generations, “What will you do in a world with literally no limitations?” Millennials were generally likely to respond with a sense of confusion, trying to navigate their world which no longer made sense. Those who are even younger, are more likely to respond with an active search for meaning. That is why young people today are turning to Jordan Peterson; he gives meaning to a life defined by existential voids. That is also why young people today are turning to hallucinogenic drugs. This is why young people are increasingly turning towards MAGA politics, or more “traditional” religions – whether that is Catholics turning to the TLM movement, or Protestants either turning towards Anglicanism and Orthodoxy, or else taking a renewed interest in Reformed theology. That is also why young people turn towards queer and feminist ideologies, New-Age occultism, or a-religious Spirituality. They are looking for a reality to believe in; because they don’t believe in the digital world, which is the only one they ever knew.