That honestly has 100% been my experience. I spent a lot of time around baby boomers throughout my teens and early adult years just by proxy of spending time with my parents and their friend group. I've NEVER, not even ONCE, heard my parents or their peers wax nostalgic about The Flintstones or Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, despite the fact that they were little kids (and thus the target demographic) in the mid-late 60s when those cartoons aired. The number of times I've heard them talk about how amazing it was to go to see The Who and The Rolling Stones and The Grateful Dead live, however...Kunzait_83 wrote: ↑Tue May 07, 2024 5:00 am Baby Boomers have, broadly speaking as a collective whole anyway, just about never cared that much about their childhood cartoons. Baby Boomers are plenty nostalgic, but generally they most often tend to get nostalgic about stuff from their younger adulthoods, roughly around college age and onward. Music, cars, cultural events, stuff like that.
There's certainly a tiny little bit of nostalgia from them for stuff like old Hanna-Barbera cartoons every now and then, but that always takes a firm backseat (rightly so) to stuff like The Beatles, Elvis, civil rights protests, the hippie movement, etc.
Hell, I just had a super fun, several hours-long conversation a few weeks ago with my dad's best friend who he met in college in the late 70s (they're both in their mid-60s now) and my grandfather (late 80s) who were visiting my parents when my dad was in the hospital, and at one point, we talked for probably at least 20-30 minutes straight JUST about the kinds of cars they drove in the late-60s and 70s. And the rest of it was almost exclusively the fun things they did in college and after, the pranks they would play on each other, or my granddad telling stories about my dad's childhood (none of which involved cartoons lol).
Like, I get different generations often in general are into different things, but in my experience, Gen Xers and especially boomers and the silent generation tend MUCH more often to be nostalgic about actual life experiences that they had in their teens and 20s, and generally don't give a shit about the vapid kiddy cartoons they watched in their adolescent years.
I'm nearly 32 and *I* have to make fun of my fellow millennials for that on the regular! Hell, I went on a date with a 28 year old woman just a few weeks ago, and we at one point started talking about the movies we like. She, an almost 30 year old grown woman... had basically had no interest in ANYTHING that wasn't Disney or Star Wars or Marvel or Harry Potter. She LITERALLY told me that she only likes watching movies that she can "turn her brain off" to. She, of course, shifted the blame for that onto her job, saying that, as a veterinarian technician, she "already gets too much stress at work!". And I'm just thinking to myself "Honey, that's NOT a your job problem... that's a YOU problem. I too have a stressful job that I despise, but I still come home and LOVE to watch stuff like Requiem for a Dream, Barry Lyndon, Once Upon a Time in America, Natural Born Killers, Glengarry Glenn Ross, The Hustler, Scent of a Woman, or Synecdoche, New York because I (SHOCKER, I KNOW!!) like movies (and shows and books and whatnot) that I can actually intellectually engage with!"I've seen more than my share of Zoomers viciously and mercilessly roast millennials for the cartoon/childhood fixation in ways that make anything I've ever said about it publicly on these forums seem absolutely tame and benign in comparison, and it never, ever fails to make me cackle in delight anytime it happens.
Needless to say... I wasn't exactly interested in a second date lmao. But yeah... I can't help but be just a taaaaad judgmental of my own generation when I see, for example (and I HAVE seen PLENTY of these) grown men in their 30s and up who genuinely, sincerely, with a completely straight face, say that they think He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers are some of the best television shows EVER made, despite easily being old enough to have kids of their own of the age that those shows were ACTUALLY targeted towards. It just does NOT seem healthy or normal at ALL for people that age to not be able to (or more often than not, not WANT to) intellectually engage with media written for fully grown, functioning adults. That's something I've never, EVER experienced from my myriad interactions with the older generations.
Like, I GET the whole "desire for escapism to a 'simpler time' because 'adulting' is just so hard and scaaawy" (but ONLY to a certain point) because, yeah... EVERYTHING absolutely has been stacked against millennials going into adulthood when we did with all this horrible, debilitating wealth inequality. I don't agree with it, but I do understand it. What I don't understand at all is why that somehow causes so many grown adults in their 20s and 30s to absolutely refuse to check out things like The Grapes of Wrath, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, All the President's Men, No Country for Old Men, or The Age of Innocence (and god forbid they ever read a single page of the amazing books that they were adapted from). And I've met MANY millennials like that both online AND in real life. The woman I mentioned above was only one recent, notable example. I know you, Kunzait, have brought this whole childhood nostalgia-obsessed millennial mindset up MANY times over the years, and that's because, like you said, it HAS been a very widespread issue across an entire generation of Americans for quite some time now. And if that's seemingly starting to change, GOOD.
On the flipside, though... yeeeeaahh, the less of Gen X'ers and Boomers calling millennials "lazy" because we can't find good jobs that pay us enough to move out on our own, simply because they don't understand that it was in part their spending habits, but much more so the vast multitude of horrible conservative and neo-centrist corporate goon politicians they voted for in the 70s and 80s (and continue to vote for to this day) that made that the case... THAT'S the kind of "boomers and GenXers mocking millennials" I could do with (a LOT) less of. Oh yeah, let's just ignore allll those studies that say that millennials are actually the hardest working generation (because they kinda HAVE to be)
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