"OK Boomer" - Why do we say no discrimination is allowed, but ageism is OK?

[zogthegreat]

Hi everyone!

 

So I was watching an LTT video a couple of days ago and Linus was making a commit on how older people use an email client instead of a web browser. He very pointedly stated "OK Boomer" as an insult to older people for not using a webpage interface.

 

If I post up a discriminatory comment about someone's sexual identity, religious preference, or genetic heritage, I will be slammed and possibly banned from the forum, yet it seems that discrimination against the elderly is perfectly acceptable. Why is that? I have 4 email account and yet, going by Linus's comment, I'm an old, slow, useless and basically a caveman for using Thunderbird instead of having 4 webpages open to deal with my emails.

 

I'm not a "boomer", (apparently I'm "Gen X"), but I see this discrimination with alarm as I age. Not sure if Linus and others who shout out "OK Boomer" all the time are aware of this, but sooner or later, they will grow old and face the same discrimination against the elderly that they are propagating now. Yes, it's cute to say "OK Boomer" and it get's some likes from 18 year old kid living in his/her mothers basement, but it also sets up the most vulnerable in our society for discrimination and harassment. What does Linus and others like him who push this mindset plan to do when they hit their 50's? I'm sure that in 20 years, there will be something to replace the webpage interface for email or some other tech that changes the way we do things again. Will these people be content to listen to people saying "OK Millennials", or will they get upset and complain about the discrimination that they themselves started?

 

Everyone in the "OK Boomer" crowd need to start thinking about their future. Yes, you will get old, it's part of being alive. And yes, you will face discrimination, that's also part of being alive. I'm an anglophone living in Quebec, I have to deal with language discrimination every day. Which makes me more sensitive to other forms of discrimination that I see around me.

 

I think that it is time for the "OK Boomer" crowd to grow up and realize that the seeds that they are planting today will bear fruit in their own future and not in a way that they will like. Discrimination in any form is wrong and if we truly want a more egalitarian society, than we need to stop finding reasons to discriminate against others. Even if they are old and don't understand all of the technology changes around them. 

 

How about we start trying to remember how many time in our own personal youths someone who was older taught us how to tie our shoes, cross a street and in general survive our childhoods. We didn't say "OK Boomer" to these people, we said "thank you" and we continued to grow. How about instead of saying "OK Boomer" to someone who is elderly and doesn't understand the technological changes around them, we try to remember the help, guidance and care that we received as children and "pay it forward" to the generations who came before and laid the groundwork for what we have today? Give them a hand instead of the insults. They did, after all, teach you how to tie your shoes.

 

 OK Millennials?

[aisle9]

3 minutes ago, zogthegreat said:

I'm not a "boomer", (apparently I'm "Gen X")

Whatever you say, boomer.

[IPD]

I'm Gen Y--the micro-generation between X and Millennials that everyone forgot about.

 

I'm on the fence about "ok boomer".  In some ways, sure, ageism (depending on how its used).  But I also see it as a modern-day translation of calling someone a Luddite.

 

Just because there's an element of changing tech to something--doesn't mean that those who are slow to adapt are inherently "old people".

 

p.s.

If I've only used an email in browser format since 1996 or so...does that mean I'm ahead of my time?  *EDIT* I still have emails in here from 2001.....

[Arika]

Welcome to the internet, our currency is hypocrisy.

[Avocado Diaboli]

"OK Boomer" isn't meant to attack age. It makes fun of a certain mindset. You know, that mindset where people born in that era tell younger people that in order to find a job they just have to walk up to a company and tell them they want to work there. Or that saving up and buying a house these days is just as easy as it was 50 years ago. What a lot of boomers fail to take into consideration is that their generation has been the beneficiary of many things the previous generation built up and now they're clinging to it without allowing any future generations to prosper. They bought up all the available land and real estate as a means to bolster their retirement, leading to people renting forever instead of owning property because it's now too expensive to buy. They drove up the demands for employment so that everybody these days needs a degree for a job that actually pays the bills. But they're not willing to participate in financing said education. Boomers didn't have to invest thousands to get a degree that would provide them with a decently paid job. But they refuse to see all the barriers that current generations have to navigate. And then they wonder why later generations get disillusioned and flippant with them, when they had everything handed to them by their progenitors and believe that they've earned it themselves while calling everybody after them entitled snowflakes.

[Acewing]

Because most people will not even begin to consider anything discrimination until they are taught by some big figure that it is. 
  
That aside, I wonder what it makes me, as someone using the web client of Gmail for personal use but an email client for work.

[Forbidden Wafer]

13 minutes ago, zogthegreat said:

How about we start trying to remember how many time in our own personal youths someone who was older taught us how to tie our shoes, cross a street and in general survive our childhoods.

My grandma mocks me for not being able to do a bunch of things (e.g. play piano and paint), I mock her for not being able to adjust the VHS clock.

[Middcore]

Boomer is as boomer does.

[Vishera]

It's annoying to hear people complaining about every little thing.

Toughen up.

[IPD]

3 minutes ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

My grandma mocks me for not being able to do a bunch of things (e.g. play piano and paint), I mock her for not being able to adjust the VHS clock.

Yep.  And that goes for most things.  It's why I decided in my mid 20's that I was just going to have to get a well-paying job and pay others for their expertise.  Sure, you can master a craft or 2 or 3, but not every skill and trade that you might need.  A god-tier welder doesn't inherently translate to god-tier automotive painter or appliance repairman.

[CerealExperimentsLain]

As a millennial... I am already old, lame, and cringe to the Zoomers and the generation that follows them.  It's funny, with my 'Self Hosted Game Servers', 'Physical Media' or 'Knowing how to use the fucking printer.'  If you can't depreciate yourself over your age, you must be pretty boring.

[akio123008]

13 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

<long text>

severely underrated comment

[tikker]

28 minutes ago, zogthegreat said:

OK Millennials?

I understand the humour, but raising an issue about the use of boomer and closing it off with millenial is a bit ironic / poor choice of words. Do you find calling people millenials acceptable? The "oh you millenials don't understand X" is equally ageist for mocking our lack of experience in maintenance or whatever millenials are made fun of for not knowing.

 

28 minutes ago, zogthegreat said:

I have to deal with language discrimination every day. Which makes me more sensitive to other forms of discrimination that I see around me.

Simultaneously do consider that "being more sensitive to other forms" can also turn into a bias of trying to see it in more places even when there is very little or none. Not saying that is what is happening here, but people that don't experience discrimination often don't always notice it for the same reason.

 

28 minutes ago, zogthegreat said:

How about we start trying to remember how many time in our own personal youths someone who was older taught us how to tie our shoes, cross a street and in general survive our childhoods. We didn't say "OK Boomer" to these people, we said "thank you" and we continued to grow. How about instead of saying "OK Boomer" to someone who is elderly and doesn't understand the technological changes around them, we try to remember the help, guidance and care that we received as children and "pay it forward" to the generations who came before and laid the groundwork for what we have today? Give them a hand instead of the insults. They did, after all, teach you how to tie your shoes.

Is that really what is happening though? I don't get the impression that we're calling every old person left and right with a tech question a boomer. I feel it started with the older generations "mocking" the younger generations with "you millenials don't know how easy you have it". Now the younger generations have started their version of that. Either both should be a problem or neither. In my experience it's just some banter and I personally haven't experienced it being used with the intention to hurt the other.

[IPD]

Lack of tech understanding rarely makes me feel old.  Not that there's a litany that I don't have at least some modicum of understanding about.

 

Nope, mostly what makes me feel old is when i throw out quotes from movies like Anchorman or Austin Powers or some such, and they are completely "not gotten" by coworkers.

[Forbidden Wafer]

9 minutes ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

As a millennial... I am already old, lame, and cringe to the Zoomers and the generation that follows them. 

What, I laught a lot to the bizarre shit zoomers come up with.

 

e.g. there is a video with a professor saying to his students: look, you need to put your name and number in your email.

I've received a homework from an email (these are badly translated, but will be enough to show my point): xaolin_pig_slaughterer, little_flavius_of_the_tire.

There is no Flavius in the class. How am I going to know who that is?

 

My little cousin came up with one of these bizarre names too. He uses it as a Fortnite nickname. xD
 

Spoiler

 

 

[CerealExperimentsLain]

1 minute ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

What, I laught a lot to the bizarre shit zoomers come up with.

 

e.g. there is a video with a professor saying to his students: look, you need to put your name and number in your email.

I've received a homework from an email (these are badly translated, but will be enough to show my point): xaolin_pig_slaughterer, little_flavius_of_the_tire.

There is no Flavius in the class. How am I going to know who that is?

 

My little cousin came up with one of these bizarre names too. He uses it as a Fortnite nickname. xD
 

 

 

While Zoomers are notoriously bad at email or any kind of longer form text communication, I assure you, we millennials were inventing shitty online handles like xXx_EpeonGundamRocks_xXx while Zoomers were in diapers.

[Vishera]

16 minutes ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

As a millennial... I am already old, lame, and cringe to the Zoomers and the generation that follows them.  It's funny, with my 'Self Hosted Game Servers', 'Physical Media' or 'Knowing how to use the fucking printer.'  If you can't depreciate yourself over your age, you must be pretty boring.

We are not that old...

And it probably sucks to be a Zoomer anyway.

The shorter attention span,not knowing what a command line is - Us millennials used DOS based operating systems.

Zoomers need to use their brains less,which is not good for the development of the brain.

And being with a smartphone in your hand since birth causing Zoomers to be more depressed.

 

  

5 minutes ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

While Zoomers are notoriously bad at email or any kind of longer form text communication, I assure you, we millennials were inventing shitty online handles like xXx_EpeonGundamRocks_xXx while Zoomers were in diapers.

Bad online nicknames were indeed the creation of us millennials

[CerealExperimentsLain]

1 minute ago, Vishera said:

We are not that old...

And it probably sucks to be a Zoomer anyway.

The shorter attention span,not knowing what a command line is - Us millennial used DOS based operating systems.

Zoomers need to use their brains less,which is not good for the development of the brain.

And being with a smartphone in your hand since birth causing Zoomers to be more depressed.

One thing ne thing I noticed is that both Zoomers and Boomers can't use a computer.  Now, obviously the demographic you'd see on this computer forum is a bit of an exception, but overall, nah.  The Boomers were already adults as technology came into every day use, it was a 'new thing they had to learn'.  The Zoomers were born into technology, but born into technology that is increasingly idiot proof with abstraction between the user and the underlying system.  They can use the 'machine' but they have no idea how it works.  Millennials on the other hand we're children, growing up as tech rolled out into our lives, but it was jank and not the most user friendly, so we had to learn how the guts worked to make good use of it.

 

Here's a prime example; Where I live for the purpose of poof of vaccination to enter restaurants and some entertainment venues, you have to show a QR code that can be scanned.  This QR code is not an app, it is a PDF document.  Obviously many have a preference to display this on their phone, while some paranoid Boomers and Zoomers are like 'What do you do if you lose your phone or it runs out of battery???' because they can only imagine showing this PDF on their phone.  But it's a PDF document... You can just print it.  We millennials are here, using our secret ninja skill of CTRL+P, to have a paper copy of the QR code on hand.

[Vishera]

25 minutes ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

Here's a prime example; Where I live for the purpose of poof of vaccination to enter restaurants and some entertainment venues, you have to show a QR code that can be scanned.  This QR code is not an app, it is a PDF document.  Obviously many have a preference to display this on their phone, while some paranoid Boomers and Zoomers are like 'What do you do if you lose your phone or it runs out of battery???' because they can only imagine showing this PDF on their phone.  But it's a PDF document... You can just print it.  We millennials are here, using our secret ninja skill of CTRL+P, to have a paper copy of the QR code on hand.

You can also make digital copies of the thing (Don't copy that floppy!  ),

Upload it to the cloud,your home server,send it to yourself in an e-mail (so that you will have a copy on the e-mail server).

If the file is so important i make sure that i have more than one copy of that file.

And then like you said you can also just print it.

[Vishera]

16 minutes ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

One thing ne thing I noticed is that both Zoomers and Boomers can't use a computer.  Now, obviously the demographic you'd see on this computer forum is a bit of an exception, but overall, nah.  The Boomers were already adults as technology came into every day use, it was a 'new thing they had to learn'.  The Zoomers were born into technology, but born into technology that is increasingly idiot proof with abstraction between the user and the underlying system.  They can use the 'machine' but they have no idea how it works.  Millennials on the other hand we're children, growing up as tech rolled out into our lives, but it was jank and not the most user friendly, so we had to learn how the guts worked to make good use of it.

I remember the nightmares of the junk tech we had...

Primary and secondary hard drives (master and a slave),power buttons that didn't really turn off your PC (It's safe to turn off the computer now!),drivers were a pain to deal with,

Dial up,the expensive price of dial up,

The fact that dial-up used the phone line so you can't make a phone call and use the internet at the same time,

and many more...

 

[adarw]

1 hour ago, zogthegreat said:

 

If I post up a discriminatory comment about someone's sexual identity, religious preference, or genetic heritage, I will be slammed and possibly banned from the forum, 

 

you do realize Linus is a hypocrite, truth is most of us are. Linus had said multiple political stuff that would have gotten him banned if he didnt own this website.

 

1 hour ago, zogthegreat said:

18 year old kid living in his/her mothers basement,

i dont think that an 18 year old living with family is shameful whatsoever. heck i living costs so much that living with your parents until you get a partner should be accepted, i mean it already is in so many countries.

 

While i do think that saying ok boomer is stupid and not rational, boomers saying that millennials have is easy is also stupid.

[Heliian]

1 hour ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

But they refuse to see all the barriers that current generations have to navigate. And then they wonder why later generations get disillusioned and flippant with them,

Everyone has to navigate barriers, get over yourself regardless of age.  

 

OK boomer is a dumb term, just like all the other terms that previous and future butthurt generations use/will use.

 

Complaining on the internet about jobs and real estate is pointless.  I have a job and real estate and I'm not a boomer.  You can't even correlate boomers to the housing market anymore, it's now younger people buying and selling for their next get rich quick scheme. 

 

This whole generational segregation is dumb anyways.  People are born every day, stop trying to classify them by some arbitrary years.

 

On the other hand, it's very easy to dismiss idiots when they use such terms unironically.  Along with other insulting and derogatory terms that have become popular. 

 

 

[Zodiark1593]

1 hour ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

While Zoomers are notoriously bad at email or any kind of longer form text communication, I assure you, we millennials were inventing shitty online handles like xXx_EpeonGundamRocks_xXx while Zoomers were in diapers.

From what I’d been told, Zoomers are kind of like Millennial 2.0. Not a lot of difference. Just more mature iterations of tech that millennials had already been using to wreak havoc for some time. 
 

Least the Millennials already grabbed the “good” internet handles.

[Guest]

My father is a boomer.

 

Baby boomer. When people had lots of babies, on average 3 per house hold.

 

The past generations paved the road for what you all have today..

 

Perhaps Ok boomer should be considered a compliment. I don't understand what's offensive about it.

[Zodiark1593]

1 minute ago, ShrimpBrime said:

My father is a boomer.

 

Baby boomer. When people had lots of babies, on average 3 per house hold.

 

The past generations paved the road for what you all have today..

 

Perhaps Ok boomer should be considered a compliment. I don't understand what's offensive about it.

I don’t think it was supposed to be offensive. It seems like something that was made in lighthearted jest that appears to have taken off in usage.