Devon Eriksen responds to a fairly common boomer-ish post:
I don’t know if @ArbitrageAndy1 is a Boomer, but here he gives us a mashup of two classics from the Boomers’ greatest hits, “Younger Generations Suck”, and “The Television Never Lies to Me”.
It’s a jaunty little tune, and you can sing in it the shower, but the lyrics don’t actually make much sense.
Back in the real world, which younger generations actually have to live in, and where the television seldom tells the truth, WW2 was fought, on both sides, by guys even younger than 26.
And they were terrified.
The stress of combat against a peer adversary is overwhelming. It’s unendurable. But you endure anyway, because there you are, it’s happening to you, and you’re not getting out of it.
So you actually do have those little moments that Boomers would describe as stress meltdowns if they happened at work. You have them, and you do what you need to do anyway. Sometimes at the very same moment while you are melting down.
When you’re in this kind of war, there’s something terrible in front of you. In reality, that terrible thing is just as young and scared and overwhelmed as you are, but it sure doesn’t feel that way to you.
However, you also have something behind you, and something around you.
Behind you, you have a tribe that accepts and appreciates you. They know they sent you to hell, but they did it because hell was necessary, not because hell was fine. No one is gaslighting you pretending that everything is okay and that any problems you have are personal character flaws.
Around you, you have bros. They’re exactly where you are, doing exactly what you are doing, and they know how much it sucks. You’ve entrusted your lives to each other, and carried each other through things you don’t wanna talk about in your letters home.
Under intense stress and fear and exhaustion, your horizons shrink. You might have signed up for duty and patriotism and high ideals, but when you’re fighting, you fight to save the man next to you. And he fights to save you.
This is a very different experience than being isolated in a society that’s turned against young people, especially young men, especially young White men.
I won’t pretend it’s as difficult as fighting the Waffen SS. But young men fought the Waffen SS together.
They have to face the dissolution of the West alone.
That’s why they are anxious. Everything around them is not just going to shit.
It’s being systematically and deliberately turned into shit by powerful people who want them dead and replaced by someone else who will work cheaper and doesn’t expect to have a share of political power and a nice house and a retirement pension.
But I suppose Andy can still go ahead and dunk on them for clicks and a twenty-three dollar check from Twitter. That’s the fun thing about the fall of the West. Everybody gets a swing of the sledgehammer.
The Course of Empire – Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836.
From the New York Historical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.
Well said.
I am a borderline Boomer born in 1964. Helicopter leaving our embassy in Saigon and Watergate are my childhood memories. And the Bicentennial. It was great. We had a lousy economy, but a 12 year old could make some money in the neighborhood doing odd jobs and lawn work. Now, that is gone for kids. Let alone by parents? Hellz yeah. Not now.
I do not blame young people. They respond to incentives as people always have. Let’s start supporting men being independent men.
Comment by Pat McCracken — June 11, 2026 @ 20:49
It’s tough to blame young men today for the plight they find themselves in, as they’ve been systematically excluded from all the old paths to success … from public school onwards, they’re told that they’re not as good as the girls. The teachers have been trained to teach in ways that generally work better for girls than for boys, and tend to view their male students as unimportant or ineducable. The colleges have been eagerly increasing female and visible minority enrollment at the expense of white male students, and employers have also been far more interested in hiring female grads and minority grads. They have less opportunity to start careers or graduate university, so even the dating world is far more hostile to them than earlier generations — women still generally prefer men who out-earn them, have higher credentials, and (as always) are taller than them. It’s no surprise that a lot of young men give up and spend as much of their time as they can in online gaming, drugs, and porn.
Comment by Nicholas — June 11, 2026 @ 22:48