MIllenials invert boomers

Cultural war and class distancing persists, apparently, in a new Facebook group, reports el gurn where millenials can pretend to be boomers. People add all sorts of amusing posts, full of boomer characteristics:

Members-pretending-to-be-boomers enthusiastically share earnest personal news, Minions gifs, and hoax posts imploring friends to copy and paste alarmist messages, all riddled with whacky syntax and redundant punctuation [totally unknown to the Gyuradina, of course] ....At any given moment, members of the group are creating tongue in cheek events with names like “SPEAK ON PHONE LIKE THE SPEAKER IS NOT ON WITH SPEAKER ON,” or sharing quotes such as “When someone says ‘stop living in the past,’ I say, ‘but the music was so much better back then.’”

All lighthearted hilarity, no doubt, but:

Comedic value aside, there are reasons why a younger crowd may want to channel boomers. Their generation boasted affordable college tuition, accessible home ownership and entry into a strong job market – no longer realities for today’s youth. Boomer envy is real.

There is classic new petty bourgeois cultural inversion:

The stereotypes emphasized in the Facebook group happen to have struck a particularly resonant chord with younger demographics, predominantly millennials, long sensitive to being labeled entitled, lazy, wildly selfish and feckless by their elders....Perry [a Psychology prof] explains that the impulse to satirize boomers may be a reaction to negative stereotypes younger cohorts face about themselves – a kind of generational tit-for-tat. “It’s playful at first, until it’s not,” she cautions....[A poster]  has found the group “kind of cathartic”, she says. “It’s sort of like the old comedic standard of punching up, not down, because we kind of feel like we’re being made out to be something we’re not, now we’re kind of turning the tables a little bit.”

There is a note of dissent here:

“There’s this assumption for a lot of people that it’s an excuse to be a Trump/Maga-[?] type, or to write homophobic things,” says Fredericksen. Yet that’s a reductive take on what was in fact an often-radical generation. “Probably most of the trans people who rioted at Stonewall were boomers,” he says....For Fredericksen, the real comedic gems come from transmuting the way people who came late to computers [who they?] communicate on social media into high camp

And there is Guardnia liberal sentiment (positive here, but there is still  P Toynbee roaming the corridors):

“So much research trying to show the differences between generations has actually resulted in showing that we’re so much more similar than we think. If we would just realize we all want the same things in life and in society, I think we could start to communicate better.”