OK, I’m a boomer.
Bring it on, zoomers.
Generation Z, also known as zoomers, were born between the mid-to-late-1990s and the early 2000s. These savvy youngsters are dissing their elders with a simple, dismissive phrase: “OK, boomer.”
Baby Boomers are the huge postwar generation born between 1946 and 1964. So, we’re old. We’re many. We have all the money. And we’ve messed up the world by ignoring climate change and telling people with dyed hair they can’t get jobs, according to a 19-year-old quoted in a New York Times story.
“It’s like, we’ll prove you wrong, we’re still going to be successful because the world is changing,” Shannon O’Connor told the Times.
O’Connor designed a T-shirt and a sweatshirt with the words, “OK, boomer. Have a terrible day.” She swiftly received $10,000 in orders.
So, how do boomers (and others) feel about this? I posed the question on Facebook.
Rude and dismissive, ageism, but also understandable, my friends said.
“It’s dismissive in the same way ‘whatever!’ is,” responded boomer Suzanne Piecuch of Auburn. “Maybe our generation (screwed) up with instilling casualness across the board. We be reaping.”
Gen-Xer Jennifer Gendron Carleton of Lewiston said she calls it out when she sees it on social media.
“Ageism really annoys the hell out of me,” she wrote. “I think it’s because I’ve hardly ever acted my age.”
Kristen Giguere, 32, of New Sharon said it’s a trendy way of saying, “’You’re too old to know better.’ Which really means, ‘I’m too immature to have a conversation or debate, so I’ll insult you instead.’”
Farmington native Jean Worthley of Portland said she was raised to respect her elders, but “I have to be big enough to admit to thinking, ‘Yeah, right, old-timer’ more than once. ‘OK, boomer’ is the same thing, just vocalized.”
Lindsey Montana of Portland, previously of Otisfield, wrote: “No big deal. I usually have insulted their misinformed, lazy asses by the time they think of that one.”
He said in a followup reply that he was joking, but his post angered one 25-year-old.
“If you’re calling people asses based on age, that’s probably why younger generations are coming up with ageism insults for your generation now,” wrote Eve Fuerstenberger of Farmington. “Don’t expect people younger than you to be more mature than you if you yourself can’t set an example.”
Touché.
Boomer Andrea Kierstead, a retired teacher in Farmington, said it had happened to her once in her middle school classroom.
“I know it was meant to be rude and dismissive. It particularly irked me because I was born at the end of 1959 and have never necessarily identified as a boomer,” she wrote.
Zoomer Emma Delaney of Farmington said we should get over it.
“I’m sorry, but is it that big of a deal?” she wrote. “Gen Z is dismissed all the time. Give disrespect and you will get disrespected.”
Boomer Betty Brown of Seattle acknowledged that our generation is a bit full of itself.
“(OK, boomer) stings as an epithet,” she wrote, “but I get tired of Baby Boomer baloney, too. All that, ‘We had the best music. We had the coolest clothes AND psychedelics.’ And on and on. Narrow, me-minded and calcified.”
OK, boomer.
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