Thread by @TheMonaOgg, The main difference between millennials and gen z is just: how long [...]

The main difference between millennials and gen z is just: how long we lived with false hopes/ideas about how the world works, and what living longer with the lie vs longer with the truth does to one's way of being.

Cognitive dissonance takes time to resolve, and it involves strain and sometimes rumination, sorrow, a sense of loss. Millennials have more dissonances to resolve because we were raised by a world still saying certain things Worked, and encouraging us to shape our lives to them.

The loss of an idea is still a loss, and gets processed like a loss. A disenfranchised grief - that is, a grief the world doesn’t recognise, does its darnedest to tell you isn’t real, isn’t something to grieve - is harder to hold, can hurt differently.

And when you’re trying to resolve a dissonance, you’re pulled in multiple directions, in a way that can add up to paralysis. Which world are you trying to prepare yourself for? Which is the naive daydream, shacking up with friends to form a co-op or working toward a Good Job?

I don’t think Gen Z is holding those same dissonances, because the lies millennials grew up with sounded reasonably credible to a lot of us, and now they’re bald-faced bullshit and Gen Zers don’t have to sort through as much of that. They have to contend w bald truths.

Like, I think a lot of millennials living in wealthy countries with a democratic image really thought that we were going to deal with climate change through an electoral, technocratic approach. That it would be hard but we might get there at the last minute.

Gen Z doesn’t get to have that belief, because *gestures* here we are. So, climate school strikes - bc they haven’t spent years waiting, hoping, living with the dissonance. They have the data that was slowly getting louder and clearer even to the most privileged millennials.

Gen Z, I suspect, know in their bones that no one is coming to save them. Millennials took longer to get there.

Millennials were raised in a school system that entangled both academic individualism and ideas of human capital. We got taught that we could help save the world by turning into the kinds of people who are exceptional enough to be its leaders.

So, especially those of us who were susceptible to that idea, especially the “Gifted Kids” or whatever, took a good long while to grapple with the dissonance between that lesson vs what is actually happening in the political world.

But we millennials can be done with that now. We can resolve our dissonance and embrace what is instead of what we expected or hoped for. We can reorient our hopes, like Gen Z had to.

And we can reorient our plans, our priorities, and actions, accordingly.

(And we can’t wait for our parents to understand it. If they haven’t yet, they won’t for some time longer, they may never. It isn’t worth waiting for that.)

The kind of approval we millennials were raised to want, to orient our lives around, is not coming. It isn’t going to come. Our activism is not going to get a fucking A+ from anyone.

And I know we got taught that you learn how to do things right in tiny incremental degrees, with feedback at every stage from the cleverer people until we became the cleverer people ourselves. I know many of us didn’t get to learn by doing. But here we are.

Apparently Gen Z just planned to book rally tickets and a bunch of them didn’t even think to mention it to their parents, because ... autonomy.

Millennials who grew up identifying with Lisa Simpson, aching to be graded even while knowing everything’s wrong, can learn a lot.

Ooh, if this thread is getting traction, then:

Hey, your "homework" is to think about how you and your friends can get together and pick activist actions to take even if no one ever tells you for certain how to do it right.

The work of @alfiekohn was instrumental to me in thinking this through but you don't have to read it all to get why. He writes about how reward/punishment systems in schools, grading, and similar systems in jobs etc have fucked up our relationships with autonomy & creativity.

It helped me to really really embrace the idea that I had been disempowered through the approach taken in my education, even though I was being told I was getting a lot of Gifted Kid advantages. If you feel like a book about that would help you, you can read Punished By Rewards.

But it's not an Assigned Reading, you don't have to read it before you do stuff. It just might help slightly with, like, thinking about how collective action won't feel the same as a Group Project or a work team, and might feel more like the things you've done that had no Boss.

I wrote a melancholic millennial short story a while back that only makes sense if you read it through this lens. It isn't assigned reading either, but you might like it or find it cathartic if you internalised this stuff: Last Days in the Garden https://issuu.com/antithesisjournal/docs/antithesisvol29

It's about two millennials, both operating under a few different layers of myths about how one changes the world, and who can do it, and whether the rest of us have any purpose. Tbh I don't even think it's important to read it, but I want to live in a world where I can share it >

> without people assuming the protagonist is right in her internal monologue. I want to get to the point where we understand where our paralysis comes from, and how part of it is growing up with this Lisa Simpson, Hermione Granger shit that we no longer have time for.

For fuck's sake, how many of us genuinely got told that the only way to make the world better was to get a degree and a job in Making-The-World-Better-Ism, and fell into total despair when we couldn't, or when we got there and realised how many other puzzle pieces we needed?

The Great Student Theory of History.

Reply to this tweet if someone genuinely told you that you were wasting your care & intelligence & hopes for justice if you didn’t become a lawyer or politician specifically, that these were The Ways to pursue ideals of justice. I know this sounds niche but you might be surprised

Get angry about learning the lesson that there are A+ people, Dean’s List people, who save the world, and that they’re the only people who can take action. Get angry that unions, the very idea of collectiveness, was missing. Don’t despair though, because it’s not too late.

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