Gen X guys have enough ambient cultural memory of toothy patriarchy and were tortured enough as kids that they can usually just internalize their pain, and while clearly suffering a lot more than Boomer guys can generally soothe themselves through a self-concept of hardboiled surliness and Got Mine logic.

Millennial guys self-soothe mostly through talk—we’re decent at being There for each other in a superficial way / Validating our bros’ pains since basically all of us have been through the same 500 Days Trauma at some point… but at the same time derive nearly all our dignity from our institutional position and romantic life, which makes us far too curatorial in our self-presentation not to defect on our niggas the instant we advance economically or slide into some halfway decent puss, such that generally the only Millennial guys who won’t constantly tell chicks everything they want to hear are unironic incels / scrubs.

Zoomers are interesting as unlike their nomadic-atomistic fathers and institutional-romantic big bros they tend to derive basically all their dignity from Brotherhood—a less sanctioned and organized and multigenerational variant thereof that frankly kind of amounts more to gangsterim, but tbf this genuinely does give them an ability to project force collectively without having to eat their pain in a way Millennials and Xers never could (or, perhaps, felt the need to), while coming up in cancel culture has made them sort of teflon and able to dodge accountability for shit like a woman, which in turn makes the 20% of them who aren’t completely retarded fantastic at exploiting life’s asymmetries. Thing is that’s tempered by a certain nihilism / cringe avoidance where Zoomers will seldom ever believe in anything earnestly or long enough to meaningfully scale or accumulate a surplus they can lean on in a rough patch like the Got Mine Xer or Avocado Institutionalist, and that tends to leave you not just brittle and exposed long-term but incapable of asserting stable diachronic leverage, and doesn’t age well at all. So it remains to be seen whether Zoomers will ever be anything more than Stealth Archers.