Something I think a lot of oldpeepo don’t understand about Zoomers is the weird combination of asymmetry and insulation from meaningful consequences at the heart of their lived experience. To wit:

1) Small differences in IQ / work ethic / attention span produce WAY bigger deltas in life outcomes for them than was the case for Late Millennials, and with any cohort before it’s not even close. When it comes to distractions, addictions, timesinks etc. the filter these days is insanely aggressive—which means if you DO get through the filter you’re often competing in virgin territory, and as a consequence Zoomers Who Do Things clean the fuck up.

2) Things at least FEEL a lot more luck dependent than they were even ten years ago—it’s always been helpful to know the right people etc. but among Millennials there was def more of a gay networking culture of actively scouting out opportunities even if you had to lick a bit of asshole to get there. The Great Recession took its toll even on the youngest of us, and so in practice we all networked aggressively and it kind of just washed out. There are lots of Zoomers who do the same, but it’s usually more piratical and ad hoc than it was for us, so for the unagentic cows among them it seems like a few people are just getting lucky. Which isn’t true, but the agency threshold to find opportunities is for sure a lot higher than it was in my day.

3) If you ARE a loser the hard consequences just aren’t as severe. One reason for that’s just material—we’re drifting towards post-scarcity and you don’t need THAT much money to live a decent existence these days if you aren’t trying to be super trendy; there’s still a shortage of unskilled labor and deportations will help with that; most Zoomers come from small families and their Gen X parents had good monetary habits. Other factors are cultural—the girls have access to safe and destigmatized sex work to pay the bills in a crunch, and there’s less of an expectation for the guys to be a provider. Meanwhile the incel rate has climbed so insanely high that there really isn’t a huge social penalty anymore for not being successful with women; you just can’t be seen to care about it. Everything is fine so long as you aren’t insecure.

4) Thanks to the dissolution of the monoculture over the past decade you now have the option to opt in and out of whichever status hierarchies you wish, and if any of the broad cultural expectations of yesteryear are disagreeable to you then you’re free to throw them into the garbage bin and surround yourself with a cult of like-minded cheerleaders. Whether this is a good or a bad thing of course depends on the cult in question, but most people will in practice choose whichever affords them the most relative status.

5) Zoomers have a quasi-paleolithic oral culture because life simply moves too fast now for people to adjudicate right and wrong in the written record. Everyone will have their own cult believing their side of the story and in a battle of cults victory almost always comes down purely to Rizz.

6) You see a lot more triangulation. The men are super overt about it, e.g. “I’ll say this with you behind closed doors but I could never say this in public”, whereas with Zoomettes it’s more instinctual and often totally unconscious—they’ll act like a completely different person depending on who they’re with and just tell everyone the version of the story they want to hear. Now basically all women do that to some extent, but a Millennial woman who’d be considered 90th percentile manipulative and two-faced by her peers is in this dimension kind of just the median Zoomette.

7) Probably because of 5 and 6 Zoomers have far more of an All’s Fair attitude to social politics than previous generations, often operating like a decadent Byzantine court. This is especially pronounced with the girls—two of them will be besties one day and despise each other the next, and even in cases of deep friendship are WAY more overt about status competition than Millennial Matrons (who very tediously act like you’re insane if you ever intimate they’re competitive with their friends). Meanwhile Zoomerinos seem lowkey traumatized by the constant triangulation and desperate to join a mannerbund, and their masculine friendships actually seem far more intense than was the case for Millennials (who were more focused on girls / politics / their project) but also more unstable/fraught. They’re also constantly jumping between ideologies, with their adherence typically being half ironic and half fanatic.

8) Zoomers also have shorter memories—a markedly shorter “social news cycle.” Life is just more episodic for them. People get over old betrayals, animosities, and humiliations far faster than we did, and they’re concomitantly less nostalgic. Ofc exceptions exist, but they’re treated as kind of weird and overly sentimental by their peers (and are often the type to socialize more with Millennials). Generally speaking the expectation is that you just get over shit / affect indifference, which is a more reasonable strategy than it would have been for us given how rapidly things are shifting for them.

9) This last point will be a bit more controversial and speculative but at least in my experience there’s a sort of stepwise function—the Zoomers born before 9/11 are just slightly more cynical Late Millennials, whereas the ones born after are the ackshual Zoomers. Personally I attribute the dropoff to a combo of maternal stress associated with the War on Terror and whether or not you got a smartphone before 16-17, but this could just be me schizoposting.