I’ve been noticing the weird ‘generational wars’ videos on TikTok lately, particularly those with the theme of younger people lecturing their elders on what kinds of emojis etc are acceptable to use at work.
Each time, I mostly just find myself thinking ‘what is the point?’ Why should anyone care that some young people have decided that emojis mean something different to what they previously did, and moreover that they’re offended or upset by it?
This all seems part of the same issue: the people who self-identify as ‘the future’ want to redefine anything and everything and to control how everyone else thinks. The narrative gets framed as ‘war’ (with allies and enemies and fronts and assaults and violence and all sorts of nonsense) and the people who haven’t declared themselves ‘the right side of history’ are - weirdly - positioned as the aggressors. They are lectured about how they need to ‘catch up’ etc and vilified for not just adopting whatever the current fashion is among young people
The worst part of it all is the desperation of some people in the ‘problem’ age groups to pander to and appease the loud, young activists. People like Cooper who are so desperate to be an ‘ally’ and down with the cool kids and ‘caught up’ on their concerns. The concept of ‘culture wars’ is, I think, deeply inaccurate and problematic.
The latter bit is the new for this century but. When I was a young person who thought I knew it all, the older would around me weren’t desperate to prove they were aligned with me and my peers.
I think I’m rapidly losing any sympathy for people my age doing some weird ‘pick me, pick’ me performance to try to impress some 20 year olds on tik tok.
Poor Dawn French. Why should she ‘catch up’ with whatever the latest fashionable nonsense is. The thing about the passage of time is being able to see the coming and going of various fads and fashion - despite the certainty of those involved that they have finally figured out the absolute truth.