"Okay boomer!" Have you ever heard — or more likely read — this expression, sneered at by a youngster of the age to be your grandchild? If you didn't catch it at the time, it's because it was right on target:we regret to inform you that you are indeed... well, a boomer. And for that, you don't need to be born during the baby boom, the generation to which the term boomer is normally attached. So what does this mockery really mean, and where does it come from? This is what we will try to explain to you. But beware, it is better to warn you:knowing its meaning and origin will unfortunately not make you less of a boomer...
As you will have understood, the adjective boomer is used here in a largely pejorative way, although it can sometimes hide a form of attachment or tenderness towards these people judged to be picky. but basically rather harmless. This expression precisely underlines the habits and ways of thinking considered obsolete by certain people:it is for this reason that one of the characteristic traits of boomers is precisely to ignore that they are boomers (a bit like idiots, you might say …).
In the end, we could almost make it a synonym for old-fashioned, if it did not apply in particular to subjects of a political nature:a boomer will stand out for his rather conservative or in any case ignorant positions, in particular on the topics relating to identity, one of the main political battlegrounds these days:it is therefore for example questions of race, gender, sexuality, ableism (that is to say linked to the discrimination experienced by people with disabilities), and so on (for example, the unavoidable debate around vegetarianism and veganism)… A boomer will typically think that these subjects are straw fires that have nothing to do with his political preoccupations, the fads of young people above ground. Ironically, some have come to denounce the expression as a form of ageism, i.e. discrimination against older people! However, there is no age to be a boomer. Although the expression originates from opinions more commonly shared by people belonging to this generation, a 30-something can easily be perceived as a boomer by a teenager. Even a peer may be given the nickname if they express boomer opinions, or commit a technological or social faux pas deemed a little ridiculous.
Because yes, in a lighter way, a boomer will be anyone who is not very comfortable with technology and its habits and customs, unlike the youngest, these famous digital natives born with screens and the internet, for whom socialization has taken place both in the real and virtual worlds. An example are those parents who go to great lengths to communicate with emojis with their children while doing so somewhat incorrectly, or who comment on their children's/nephews' and nieces'/grandchildren's posts in a way deemed uncomfortable by the latter, and which put them to shame when they don't simply delete them (here, another word to add to your repertoire:"cringe", which therefore means embarrassing, uncomfortable).
Let’s go back a bit:this expression has its origins in very serious sociological foundations. Indeed, the concept of generation designates in social science a population which, because of its age and the time in which it lived, shares certain traits. Which ultimately comes as no surprise:the socialization of individuals does not happen in a vacuum. It is normal for people who have lived through the same historical events and who have grown up while certain mores prevailed, to build themselves up in reaction to them - and if individuals vary considerably from one to another, it will emerge at the end of the day. scale of a population certain general tendencies. In short, we are all the product of a certain cultural hegemony – a conjuncture that we in turn help to shape in reaction to the one that saw us grow up, leading to a different conjuncture that will in turn influence subsequent generations. Some sociologists thus consider that generations follow one another in a cyclical manner, approximately every twenty years, between periods of crisis and prosperity, somewhat according to the adage:"difficult times produce strong men, strong men engender times of prosperity and stability. Times of prosperity and stability produce weak men, weak men beget difficult times."
However, this field of sociology has distinguished four generations in our time:that of the baby boomers (born approximately between 1945 and 1965), generation X (until the beginning of the 1980s), the millennials or Generation Y (until the mid-1990s), and Generation Z or zoomers , born later. Each of them would therefore be distinguished by specific ways of thinking, and somewhat like a child who should "kill the father", these are also constructed in opposition to the previous ones. Hence the temptation for the youngest – the expression was rather popularized by adolescents and young adults, therefore at the crossroads of generations Y and Z – to criticize and make fun of their elders, which gave:“Ok boomer” .
With regard to the expression in particular, while its use was sparsely recorded on the web during the 2010s, it was really from 2018 that it took hold, then used by young people in response to tweets from politicians criticizing them, sometimes embellishing it with other derogatory comments (for example:"Ok boomer, go back and learn how to try to use your computer"), and more particularly in 2019, when it becomes quite unavoidable fact.
If the term is often used without a nasty ulterior motive behind it, some have therefore wanted to make it a significant marker of the cultural gap separating the generations, a temptation difficult to avoid in the face of the hegemony of the expression a few years ago, which necessarily led commentators on all sides to want to make a symbol of it. And as we have seen, the expression is significant of the existence of a cultural gap and, by extension, a political one. If we spoke above about questions relating to identity, the other big subject of political discord between the generations is of course that of global warming, especially since the baby-boomer generation is often accused, not without reason, to have largely contributed to accelerating the latter in France as in other industrialized countries, and to make his descendants pay the price.
If we refer to the theories of the generations raised, the millennials and zoomers would therefore have inherited from previous generations a planet in crisis, between climate change, economic crises, terrorism and now a health crisis – which is indeed enough to generate resentment. Especially since the baby-boomer generation, with its political volte-faces — for example, all the ex-sixty-eighters now well established among the elites — looks like hypocrites wishing to dine at the table of unbridled capitalism without pay the bill.
In short, it is therefore easy to make expression the banner of a clash of generations, the boomers seeing their younger siblings as a generation of sissys who are offended by nothing, also to caricature. We must nevertheless be wary of a craze for this kind of generalization, created by a laziness of the media which have sniffed out the buzz around the expression:this craze tends to reduce each generation to a few crude traits, ignoring all the economic and sociological dynamics and fractures that run through them. Not all old people are boomers, and not all young people are committed to the climate either!
Unfortunately, there's probably no cure for being a boomer. Worse, by its lapidary side, the expression makes sure to cut short the debate. In other words, the more you enrage and seek to defend yourself from your boomer status, the more you will only sink yourself and confirm to your interlocutors that you are indeed one...
But if it can reassure you, the expression had its heyday a few years ago:paradoxically, by becoming a mass meme, the expression lost its bite and "boomerized", if you allow us the formula, to say the least barbaric. It is indeed precisely its exclusive and excluding character that made it so incisive. Seeing someone you consider yourself a boomer use the term necessarily defuses it. In reality, using it today in the first degree already makes you a nerd with the youngest, the famous "zoomers". In other words, we are all someone else's boomer...
