Cringe away, gen Z – you’ll be next, lol

The first stage of grief, according to my millennial self-help books, is denial. So this is where I began. OK, fine, I’m telling myself, wringing my hands. OK, millennials are cringe now. Fine. That doesn’t apply to me though, right? It could never apply to me. I’ve seen La Haine! I once went out with a man who was in a band! I lived in Williamsburg! I used to be a vegan! I go to reformer pilates! I worked at Vice!

You begin here, in panic, but you quickly move on to acceptance. Have I not, with sincerity, referred to my pets as “fur babies”? And were those pets not brachycephalic dogs? Did I not once have a side-parted balayage haircut, and a chronic addiction to Topshop Joni skinny jeans? Was my speech not at one stage littered with the semi-ironic markers of millennial speak, such as “doggo” and “smol bean” and “epic” and “random”? Must I swallow the bitter pill that, at one stage, I sincerely believed in the promise of hashtag girl boss feminism? Sadly, I must. We all must. It is our duty as millennials, now taking our place as the geriatric losers of public life.

We must do this because, without acceptance, we cannot move on. Millennials, veterans of endless global recessions – and more still to come! – are frequently accused of being pathologically unable to grow up. We marry later, have children later, buy houses later, if at all, and all these things supposedly keep us in a state of perpetual adolescence. We’re naturally to blame for the fall of various luxury, late-adulthood industries, from diamonds to cars. Admittedly, it is deeply adolescent to care about being cool. To move on from our stasis, we must face up to the fact, as every generation before us has done, that what we once thought cool has become cringe, that what we believed to be progressive has become passé.

It will be difficult for millennials to do this, because our greatest generational weakness (apart from smol doggos) is that cringeworthy sense of earnest self-belief, an inherent optimism that one day things will get better. That wars will end, prices will fall, our particular brand of cool will prevail. We were bred, supposedly, to believe that we mattered, that we could do whatever we wanted, that we were special just for existing.

Unluckily for us though, our gen Z successors hate nothing more than earnestness. They despise optimism, they hate encouragement to always “be kind”. As a generation, like every generation before them, zoomers are determined to place themselves apart from their elders. They’re more ironic, more conservative, they marry younger and reproduce younger, surprisingly often to Elon Musk. They hate identity politics, they hate liberal fourth-wave feminism. And they hate pausing before recording their videos.

The problem with defining yourself in reactionary terms – I don’t know what I stand for, but I know what I stand against – is that it exists on a hamster wheel of constant “progress”. Gen Z should be wary. Gen Alpha, now reaching their own teenage years, will do to them what zoomers did to us. Whereas gen Z are defined by their irony, gen Alpha are grizzled survivors of a Covid childhood. They spend less time on their phones, having always grown up with them in their faces, but have matured faster. As pre-teens they had anti-ageing skincare routines. They already have their own style of speaking.

Do gen Zers know how to translate the lexicon of gen Alpha? Do they know what “skibidi” means? If not, they’re already sliding towards the same sad future that we millennials now find ourselves in. What is cool will always become cringe. The kids are always coming up from behind.