Generations Done Right

How to discriminate based on age

Nov 26, 2025

A lot of peeps these days tend to see generational typology as mostly bullshit, but IMO that’s largely because the generations as traditionally conceived are far and away too extensive for a world transforming as rapidly as our own, while their cutoff points are seldom chosen in any sort of rigorous / systematic way and often feel wholly arbitrary.

As Kryptogal (Kate, if you like) has rightly observed, you really need to slice out each cohort primarily on the basis of the communication technology predominating during each group’s childhood / early adolescence—only then can you assess how economics and geopolitics and cultural trends impacted one generation as compared to another.

In the piece that follows I’ll taxonomize the generations in precisely this manner.

High Boomers (1945-1953)

Raised by parents coming out of the Depression / WWII primarily focused on sacrifice and discipline. Came up in the most robust monoculture in history, with a childhood defined by radio, newspapers, and a single black-and-white TV (with the middle class and above getting more TVs and long-distance phone calls as teens). No pill yet so sex remains highly moralized. Marriage is normative; divorce scandalous. Postwar boom plus early Cold War fear means institutions are seen as benevolent titans, such that High Boomers forever view authority as natural and necessary and fetishize normalcy.

Low Boomers (1954–1960)

Raised by anxious prosperity-drunk children of the Depression clinging to stability. Monoculture starting to fray under McCarthyism and early Civil Rights struggles but still feels robust. Have TVs as kids with landline phones as family-controlled comms; in adolescence color TV emerges while satellites start to make the world feel smaller. Last cohort with firm sex roles as adolescent sexuality predates The Pill’s mainstream diffusion. Economically ride tail of the postwar golden age and compartmentalize jello casserole consumerism and incessant nuclear dread, making them observably more neurotic than High Boomers. Raised under legible rules and implicit threat of violence from parents who went through a hell of a lot worse, with the expectation that you’ll have a normal one instead of talking about your stupid gay feelings.

Generation Jones (1961–1969)

Parents first to divorce in meaningful numbers, so a lot of them grow up in volatile checked-out households with adults experimenting with sex / drugs / therapy / cults and nobody quite understanding what the hell is going on, least of all Gen Jones kids. Childhood media is saturated TV and transistor radios; teenage years defined by live broadcasts from ‘nam, protest footage, underground press, assassinations / domestic terrorism / serial killers, and rockstars who fuck 15yo girls and write songs about it. Pill exists by the time they’re teenagers, but carries a stigma and is often inaccessible. Then Roe arrives and makes them the first generation in history to see sex functionally decoupled from marriage, with gender roles shifting beneath their feet more rapidly than for probably any other cohort to ever exist. America succumbs to macroeconomic malaise but is saved by Volker / Reagan just as Gen Jones starts to pay attention to the world, making them natural exponents of small government and broadly suspicious of power thanks to the legacy of Vietnam and Watergate—though they also retain a vivid memory of what a stable monoculture and functional institutions look like and tend to mourn their loss (at least in the abstract). Sheltered their kids like nobody’s business.

Generation X (1970–1979)

Parents burned by sex / drugs / divorce with attitude of exhausted permissiveness, creating famous latchkey kid ethos of hardboiled forest porn self-reliance. Childhood tech is color TV / FM radio / mass-market magazines; adolescence adds cheap cassette players and more cynical news coverage + first sense of cable’s expansion. Formative years overlap with oil shocks, stagflation, Watergate, fall of Saigon, and skyrocketing divorce rates. Pill / contraception legal and normalized now so they’re less romantic about sex than Gen Jones but also have more of a disgust impulse on account of going through puberty during the AIDS crisis. Chickies also start to enter the workforce in large numbers around this time, and the attendant cultural tensions cause girls born in this era to be probably the least feminine in history but also perhaps the least retarded, while the guys tend to retain a performatively dgaf tough guy Bill Burr affect well into middle age. Both sexes share a contempt for sentimentalism in romance and any kind of striver mentality in the workplace, which makes them gr8 dissident social critics and tech startup founders but paired with their paltry numbers leaves them with basically zero chance of unseating Boomers in the institutional halls of power, which means in practice a lot of them lowkey feel like Uncle Scar to the Boomer Mufasa and Millennial Simba. They learned early on in life that systems rot slowly and then fall apart all at once—and also that no one is coming to save them, which means they tend to be hypercompetent on an individual level yet can’t build communities for shit or rule with any mythic vision for the world hence Elon / DeSantis / Gavin all fizzling out before Boomer bluster. Gen X is also the last cohort with any kind of monoculture, and as such have more centralized notions of status or worth than later gens, though tbf they’re also usually very tolerant of weirdness so long as it isn’t deadweight.

High Millennials (1980-1985)

Often latchkey kids with dual-earner / divorced parents; get affection in the form of stuff + autonomy instead of supervision, but not quite as feral as Gen X since they’re parented less by The Wild than mall culture, early cable, arcades, and home consoles. Grow up with MTV, 24-hour news, and the first PCs in school / some homes. Fed lots of pretty stories from Grandpa Reagan about free market prosperity and consumerist meritocracy they later come to resent. The Pill is just a part of life now and abortion politics loud but abstract until late teens. Relationships now framed through sitcoms and music videos, with the monoculture fraying into subcultures as mass media makes everyone a lot more performative. Feminism now in full swing but men and women don’t really hate each other yet and tend to adopt culturally normative sex roles by early midlife. Success conceived more as personal hustle within extant systems than asymmetric cowboyism let alone changing systems themselves. Tend to be most drawn towards wholesome chungus center-leftism a la Buttigieg and Fatty Yglesias.

Low Millennials (1986-1990)

Rents are strivers who equate worth with achievement. Get structured childhoods: scheduled activities, academic pressure, “be exceptional” rhetoric. More sheltered than earlier cohorts; less coddled than later ones. Tech-wise childhood is mostly TV + Nintendo/SEGA + Walkman; adolescence is PCs becoming routine. Globalized cable news makes events like Lewinsky and 9/11 hyperreal; as kids watch the Berlin Wall fall and USSR collapse, confirming to them The System is correct. Likely the sluttiest generation in history—adolescence maps to SATC girlhood / XoJane buttstuff feminism for chickies and the Vulgar Wave + pre-nofap internet porn for men, while a frictionless sexual ecology is in full swing as post-AIDS sexual reticence dies down and kids are thrust into the dating market on a diet of blank slate obscurantist Butlerslop. As such men and women resent each other a bit more but OkCupid dating is nowhere near as asymmetric as Tinder will prove to be while male stratification is at this point far more a Greek Letters thing than haves and have-nots. Meanwhile the girls develop a certain aspartame quality to them borne of a feminism that literally tries to frame all sexed behavioral differences as stemming from cultural training instead of biology, while the guys become deeply performative and confused in their masculinity due to a lifetime of mixed messages. Rents more physically present than for High Millennials and Gen X but more psychically consumed by work, which means Low Millennials generally internalize that working The System—school, megacorps, respectable normie paths—is the only rational way forward since questioning the system looks like self-sabotage. That said they get deeply into subcultures (often cringely mapped onto high school cliques) as well as tastemaking hipster culture and are superficially hyper-nonconformist despite mostly all having the same personality underneath those sleeve tats and IPAs. Largely secular; absolutely despise fundies, forming the backbone of New Atheism. Fucking LOVE Obama at first but quickly grow disenchanted with him after which many migrate into Occupy / the Alt Right.

Generation Eisner (1991-1996)

Children of divorce in a world where it’s entirely banal; mostly parented by confused and anxious Spockmaxxing / Butlermaxxing Gen Jones softies who vacillate between permissive best fren parenting and ineffectual authoritarian panic. Childhood tech is dial-up internet, AOL, early chat rooms, and console gaming. Still anchored by TV; adolescence brings faster web, early search engines, forums, and ubiquitous email. Grow up in the unipolar 1990s with Clinton/Blair, NAFTA, WTO, globalist optimism, plus Fukuyama’s indefensibly retarded “End of History” thesis. Childhood is likely the most pleasant and coddled of any generation in history, with the Disney Renaissance, Harry Potter, and mass pop telling them the world is basically safe and legible with a good guy and a bad guy and also you’re totes special boo. The Pill and condoms are now default assumptions, while sex-ed might be abstinence-only in theory but even in Kansas all the info is just a click away. Eisnerites learn the world is open and borders are soft and culture is a playground—until lol ackshully no it isn’t man up snowflake. Intersexual relations begin to sour as hetero swipe apps stratify the dating market and men start to realize they’ve been thoroughly lied to their entire life, flocking to fringe movements a la New Atheism, Occupy, Ron Paul, Redpill, and at last the Alt Right. Meanwhile the girls try to adopt the same aspartamey Lean In Sandberg worldview of their elder sisters but never quite buy into it for realsies, as at this point there are just too many chicks in the workforce for e.g. Women in STEM to not feel sort of retarded while for a lot of them the single most salient feminist issue is finding a man who isn’t a weepy pornbrained scrub. They also start to lose faith in sex-positive feminism as they hear about girls in their class having their nudes leaked to all the boys in school or getting blackmailed by online pedos into sticking a hairbrush up they asshole or w/e during the internet’s decentralized unpoliced wild west epoch. Ofc they still have too much loyalty to feminism to go Full Trad most of the time, but a lot of them do begin to dabble in ironic traditionalism or sex work adjacency, while the earnest feminists among them start to move away from saran wrapped normative androgyny towards something vaguely maoist in character (these are the infamous “SJWs”). At this point the monoculture is completely dissolved and people tend to identify primarily with a broadly legible subculture that has its own ethos / values / status hierarchy.

High Zoomers (1997–2001)

Parents first to worry about “screen time” (often using screens to cope); parenting methods toggle between helicoptering (grades, safety, college) and benign neglect (hours online unsupervised—though the internet is also quite a lot safer now than it used to be). Childhood communication technology is late dial-up, kids’ cable, DVDs, early online gaming; early adolescence brings broadband and hyper-salient social networks. iPhone and app culture arrive in early teen years, completely reframing how they flirt and socialize as they learn the future can snap from harmless to terrifying overnight; they alone directly witness our civilization’s transition from a textual to oral culture. Born during the pinnacle of late-nineties / early-aughts optimism—think the dot-com promise, “you can be anything” narratives—followed by 9/11 around the time they’re forming coherent world models (probs why you see anxiety skyrocketing with this cohort). Hookup culture continues to be incubated in youth media and then Tinder shows up a few years before they can legally fuck to totally upend the sexual marketplace, leaving womyn far more overtly contemptuous of low status men and dudes a hell of a lot more resentful than they used to be (tho they also tend to retain a romantic picture of women, however curdled, unlike later cohorts of Zoomers who lowkey sort of just fucking hate them). Then on the girlside feminism is moving hard away from bloodless girlboss aspartame towards Dworkinism and Hooker Feminism, not infrequently in parallel—which girlypops are completely fine with btw because they feel absolutely zero need to be even the least bit logically consistent since they don’t really need to intellectually impress men anymore as this is also the first cohort where girls are more successful in life than their male peers (note at this point even most chicks reject anodyne Millennial blank-slatism). Meanwhile subcultures begin to shrink into illegible niche microcultures with High Zoomers, and this is also the last generation that feels entirely sentient IMO (almost certainly because they came of age before Covid delayed everyone’s adulthood half a decade) and half the time they see younger Zoomers as kind of retarded / weird / feral exactly like the rest of us do.

Low Zoomers (2002–2007)

First generation in millennia raised predominantly in an oral culture—mostly a function of smart phones and social media but also of Covid, which profoundly scarred them as a cohort and made them all kind of autistic / retarded. Rents are primarily “helicopter” / “concerted cultivation” types—e.g. tracking apps, structured activities, anxiety about college admissions—but remain clueless about the interior realities of platforms and the opaque forms of bullying / status jockeying therein. Childhood comms tech mostly YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, group texts, and the iPhone / App Store. Swiping isn’t just baked into their earliest dating experiences; it creates an entire ambiance of sexed hostility that gets really horrid (Andrew Tate etc.) right as most of them start puberty. Also basically all the boys have a crippling porn addiction and it’s completely normal these days for a 19yo to pop viagra to fuck his hot teenage girlfriend and she’ll not get bothered by it at all usually like any girl born prior to 1995 would. Speaking of the gals are A LOT more overtly competitive with each other than you saw in basically any other cohort in living memory, whereas the embattled duderinos having internalized Redpill maxims tend to dislike chicks usually and much prefer the company of their bros (note inceldom isn’t really stigmatized among them so long as you aren’t insecure or weird about it, and the same goes for being broke etc. as they’re all about frame control and agree and amplify). The men are also pretty okay with violence / terrorism / assassinations a lot of the time and while they’ll for sure need some High Zoomer and Eisnerite leadership to organize them on account of having zero executive functioning and mostly being depressed cockroaches I’d also hazard they’ll be some of the very finest guerilla fighters our fake and gay blue dot has seen should that ever ackshully come to pass. Anywho basically none of them remember Bush so they’re a lot more comfy being religious in a way that isn’t ironic / intellectualized as was obligatory for Millennials—tho it’s almost always quite aestheticized. Also Trumpism doesn’t seem a paradigm shift to them and at this point is basically their Reagan. But at the end of the day main thing to internalize is that for Low Zoomers social life has been performed for audiences from day one, with a selfhood semi-public and quantified and oftentimes rank-ordered—as a rule they’re hugely status obsessed but don’t feel any need to obfuscate it behind “taste” or “curation” like earlier cohorts would and instead kind of just act like black people about it (note also the relative ubiquity of AAVE in the LZ lexicon). From a tender age they learn being seen is a currency and you can’t ever have your missteps archived or let anyone pin you down lest you get unpersoned by the Black Rectangle Brigade—which means they constantly delete all their shit and most of the time only ever talk to you like half-ironically and half-earnestly so as to keep their options open and carve out runway to recalibrate if necessary. Moreover they’ll perennially shift alliances (or even totalistically invert their worldview) whenever it benefits them short term because in a functionally amoral and opt-in frictionless oral culture this is obviously the only tenable strategy since nobody can really hold you accountable under a liquid news cycle wherein the written record will basically always get deleted or shrouded in irony such that in practice p much everyone is incentivized to constantly pretend to have always and eternally sided with whoever is the current moment’s Strong Horse. Thing is they’re also deeply traumatized by this and whenever you fuck one of the girlies it kind of feels like it should be illegal tbh because they all tend to act like chicks my age did when they were maybe ~12.

Tom Swift

Nov 26Edited

Well done. Your distinction between High and Low Zoomers is quite perceptive, and is largely consonant with my own experiences. According to your analysis, it would seem that the younger Zoomers are essentially a blank slate, in that if they were presented with the opportunity to join an ordered society, many of the most ambitious and intelligent among them might very well gravitate towards it. While they may be ignorant and impulsive compared to previous generations, they already do seem uniquely impervious to the Progressive mindset which has dominated the written culture of America since the middle of the last century. Of course this would necessitate separating them from the digital monoculture, and replacing that with a new written culture. As is sometimes the case among the homeschooled, my cultural frame of reference is largely based on the midcentury and earlier eras. We homeschoolers realize this, and the shock of adjusting to many aspects of modern culture often results in profound alienation. However, this alienation is not necessarily a bad thing, as it allows us to analyze modernity from first principles, instead of taking its precepts for granted. Perhaps it is our duty to develop an alternative to digital involution based on the best principles of previous eras. For these reasons, this cultural moment may be our best opportunity to reverse the Sixties and restore the high culture of the West.

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