100% agree with you. My childhood was so steeped in the nostalgia of a generation that hit its prime before I was born that I legitimately knew more about 60’s and 70’s popular culture than I did about the popular culture in my own time because of how hijacked it was by boomer nostalgia. Even in media designed for my generation, the message was clear: boomer culture was the peak culture and anything that came after was a cheap imitation or flat out ‘wrong’.
Let me be clear: millennials have their own issues with nostalgia, and I also see some of us giving younger people the same treatment: ‘oh you don’t remember that song/movie/actor from when I was growing up and you weren’t even born yet?! Did you even have a childhood?!’ type of crap. While this isn’t ok either, I can’t help but wonder if because that’s the attitude we received from our elders growing up, some of us use it for a template to handle our own feelings of irrelevance as we age. My message to these people as well as a reminder to myself as I get even older: let the youths be. Let them enjoy being young and see it simply as that. It has nothing to do with you, and your job is to listen to them and nurture their efforts to improve their world so they can continue to do so for those that come after them.
100% agree with you. My childhood was so steeped in the nostalgia of a generation that hit its prime before I was born that I legitimately knew more about 60’s and 70’s popular culture than I did about the popular culture in my own time because of how hijacked it was by boomer nostalgia. Even in media designed for my generation, the message was clear: boomer culture was the peak culture and anything that came after was a cheap imitation or flat out ‘wrong’.
Let me be clear: millennials have their own issues with nostalgia, and I also see some of us giving younger people the same treatment: ‘oh you don’t remember that song/movie/actor from when I was growing up and you weren’t even born yet?! Did you even have a childhood?!’ type of crap. While this isn’t ok either, I can’t help but wonder if because that’s the attitude we received from our elders growing up, some of us use it for a template to handle our own feelings of irrelevance as we age. My message to these people as well as a reminder to myself as I get even older: let the youths be. Let them enjoy being young and see it simply as that. It has nothing to do with you, and your job is to listen to them and nurture their efforts to improve their world so they can continue to do so for those that come after them.