On Generation X and HR Ladies
Is it really still whatever?
It seems like people can’t shut up about that Coldplay Kiss Cam incident.
What follows is my take, which nobody asked for but is likely far cleverer than yours.
So I think the clip is having a moment for a number of reasons.
The first and most obvious is that Gen X is starting to realize they’re the new old people.
We like to joke that the Boomers will never die, but that’s happily quite untrue; ever since Covid roughly 2.6 million of them are passing on every year to realms unknown, not infrequently leaving behind locally catastrophic deficits in skills and knowledge, and as a consequence Gen X has begun to realize that they failed to meaningfully seize power from their elders—a basic responsibility of young men in every age.
Even the most impressive among them have basically zero gravitas—consider the ease with which Haley and DeSantis (and Rubio and Cruz before them) were humiliated by an obese geriatric game show host, or how Greasy Gavin refused to properly seize the moment and oust an unironic dementia patient from power, forcing Fatty Yglesias and likeminded Elder Millennial mandarins to haphazardly prop up that airheaded mulatto hooker. The whole affair was genuinely pathetic on both sides. But at the end of the day even the most cringeworthy and unwarranted Boomer bluster will always triumph over insipid Cobainmaxxed boasting about “not playing well with others.”
There’s precisely one Gen X archetype who can pull that shit off in a credible manner, and that’s the tech entrepreneur—men like Andy Byron. The Whatever Mindset is more or less optimized for founding and scaling a tech startup, which kind of just needs a detached and hypercompetent narcissist at the helm.
It also sometimes works in cleaner political ecologies—Newsom and DeSantis are genuine sharks in their respective ponds—but the moment they’re forced to deal with the messy intersectional realpolitik that comes with playing in the Big Leagues it seems Xers break down in the shoals, which is why institutional power is at this point all but guaranteed to flow directly from the Boomers into the whiny and performative hands of my generation: the Millennials. On the GOP side Vance’s accession already seems a fait accompli, and unfortunately for libtards I’ve begun to suspect Gavin is just too risk-averse and prevaricating to make a serious go of it, and will instead let Buttigieg and AOC slug it out for real while running a fake and gay vanity campaign mostly to sell some tedious airport book about Effective YIMBYism.
It seems the Latchkey Kids got skipped—mostly because everyone in their ranks worth a damn realized it was far easier to raise a hillfort out in the boonies than to stay put in the castle playing courtier whilst King Boomer rants and raves and just lives way too fucking long. The math simply wasn’t in their favor; when TRT and speed keep Sulla viable into his seventies and eighties Pompey doesn’t ever get his day as the rising sun, and the old man’s funeral will always serve primarily as Caesar’s coronation. From the very beginning Gen X was doomed to become a sort of Uncle Generation.
Except, of course, for gents like Andy Byron (and Musk and Thiel and so forth)—life has always been rather generous to them, hasn’t it? Few things in this world are luckier than earning your fortune in an epoch where basically nothing matters.
The problem is that nothing mattering also makes it palpably harder to spread your wings and take a real shot at your dreams—to risk failure, bankruptcy, humiliation— and I suspect a fair few Gen X guys who never got the memo that they were supposed to be a tech entrepreneur have begun to realize men like Byron and Musk are sort of the only ones in their cohort who’ll ever establish themselves as true Men of Destiny. That’s got to hurt, especially at an age most men are thinking quite a lot about legacy.
And then to find out the motherfucker gets to smash the HR Director too?
Though if you think about it even beer track Xers lucked out given that their peak years coincided with an ecology that largely catered to the tastes of virile men and proffered them endless banquets of gullible sex positive Millennial cunt amidst the height of the xoJane era, their conquests in skinny jeans laughing off age gaps two or three times the size of ones I’m forced to fetishize or edgepoast about whenever I manage to slip inside one of these guys’ aspish Zoomette daughters.
Hell, if anything the slackers among them enjoyed a sizeable advantage in their depredations—particularly given that back then there was virtually no expectation that you actually take care of the girl or act like Daddy.
Cause age is just a number, maaaan…
But speaking of age gaps, I suspect that’s the second reason this clip is going viral.
Because it turns out Byron’s paramour Kristin Cabot isn’t just age-appropriate even by dumdum Zoomer standards—she’s two years older than him.
And let’s face it—if you’re a dapper physically fit decamillionaire silver fox and your idea of a sordid affair is gently cradling an older woman in front of tens of thousands of people, you’re easily above the 95th percentile of male romanticism. Men of that SMV could and often do have a different teenager on their face every other weekend.
But Byron serves as proof positive of the lasting appeal of mysterious unarbitraged Adam and Eve romance—an almost cinematic reminder to Xer gals growing insecure over their increasingly withered tidders that even a sleazeball cheater will feel most seen and understood and valued by a dame of his own generation and social class.
Just speaking for myself, the vast majority of my own entanglements through the years have been with hardscrabble Zoomettes, but it’s always been the girls closest to me in age and cultural capital—e.g. Natalie, Rebecca, Gretel and then Selene—who’ve managed to truly get under my skin. And I suspect one reason for this is that when you’re not trading on being Daddy (or Mister White Man, etc.) there pretty much HAS to be a rock solid connection for a relationship to emerge, such that the failure modes are inevitably a lot more interesting than just poorly performing Daddy.
More often though the gap is pretty banal. Sure, your little Zoomette will have that tight childlike skin and adorable pink butthole and exquisitely groomable cognition, but you’ll never groom the bitch into properly grokking your ingenious Hey Arnold! references, and to her Drake doesn’t at once suggest Josh. She grew up watching noodle-armed androgynes drone on about boundaries, and everything she says and does is either from that tradition or some internalized Tatepilled reaction to it. Her only registers of femininity are courtesan and lesbian, and while the former is great fun when you’re inside her it really oughtn’t be expected to extend to her groupchats.
Meanwhile the Millennial Matron tendency to bemoan “stereotypes” (i.e. literally all useful heuristics formation) is at times indescribably grating, but it’s also an impulse that can be more or less fucked out of her, at least in private. The real problem with dating Millennial girls is at this point more of a selection effect thing—the ones who still aren’t married usually have something wrong with them, or are grinding an axe against all men on account of some fuckboy who wasted her late twenties.
Though I suppose that’s no less dignified than perennially blasting jissum into the aether on account of the manic pixie who led you on for years.
Anywho my point is a huge part of any relationship is being able to feel vulnerable and regress to certain childlike cultural scripts stripped of all performance, and it’s oft a challenge to pull that off with maids sired after the towers fell without it reading as Reddit Uncle or causing her to impishly liken you to Ice King. At all times one’s obliged to Stay Daddy—to maintain a certain level of coolheaded sprezzatura and indifference (or affective sadism if she happens to be a minority or working class).
And in fairness that’s usually not a rough ask. We rather enjoy feeling like Daddy—that’s more the reason men like fucking younger girls than just the pink buttholes.
But when you’re actually running an empire, and there are millions of dollars riding on your decisions, not to mention the lasting employment of better men than you?
Then sometimes you just want to act like a retarded teenager with your girl.
And for Gen X I suppose that will often involve listening to Coldplay.
My third and final take pertains to the fact that Kristin Cabot works in HR.
It feels like every other person who has an opinion about this has quipped about how ironic it is that an HR Director fucked the CEO—that or bemoaned how enraging it is.
And this is one of those impulses that makes quite a lot of sense at first glance, but when one peers beneath the surface with any real thought or consideration he realizes in an instant that OF COURSE it was the HR Lady.
To properly illustrate this point I’ll regale you with three little anecdotes from my benighted decade in the actuarial world.
The first is that shortly after I resigned from my first position my former manager and still-friend informed me that our small insurer’s HR Manager—basically the gal doing all the day-to-day brainwork in that department—got canned for making a racist joke.
The second is that whenever I was looking for a new job as an actuary I pretty much always used Selby Jennings as a recruiter. The reason for this is that SJ has a business model where they exclusively hire smoking hot sorority girls they hilariously call ‘VP’ after like three months of continued employment before unleashing the maids upon various and sundry professional conventions, wherein they corral legions of thirsty neckbeards back to the SJ afterparty with a “friendliness” that feels like just that to them (at least at the most overt level—these girls are experts in plausible deniability) but will read as flirtation to bottom quartile men and easy prey to the top decile.
Anyway the point is that one time at a SJ afterparty following a Society of Actuaries convention I got a bit sauced with one such girl—we’ll call her “Lucy”—who at some point in our banter mentioned that she was originally planning to go into HR, and when I expressed surprise at that in light of how volcanically unprofessional she was the lass simply giggled and let slip something to the effect of “headhunters are just HR bitches who like coke.”
Unfortunately I didn’t wind up inside her that evening, but she was actually the one who got me that Deloitte job. Like basically all actuarial recruiters Lucy didn’t know the faintest thing about any of the technical requirements, but that kind of worked to my benefit since I didn’t either. It obviously came to light once I eventually faced the hiring committee, but the thing is it was a consulting gig and the core skillset there is mostly all about making shit up anyway. So thanks to her I continued to fail upward, while for her part she almost certainly walked off with a five figure payday.
Lucy also still sends me job listings even to this day, and seems more or less fine with me sexually harassing her over text. Like one time I said I’d need her to send feet pics for me to even consider being an actuary again (one of those 4 Adderall Hail Marys, understand) and she just said hmm I’ll consider it and kept sending jobs.
The thing is having a hot female recruiter is kind of like having a hot realtor—the good ones are Women of the World who understand it’s a form of light sex work
And speaking of that, my third anecdote pertains to a sugar baby I had once—henceforth “Amber.”
Amber wasn’t herself an HR Lady or even an aspirant—though she was studying psych or some shit so I’d hazard there’s a 60% chance she ends up there if only by dint of inertia—but she was the daughter of one, and that was entirely legible from her bearing and affect, in the same way it likely won’t surprise you to learn my own parents were a marketing executive and linguistics professor.
For one thing she enunciated her speech very beautifully, with a crisp and polished diction you almost never hear from girls born in 2003, most of whom talk like niggers. Even in Millennial girls you usually only hear it from theater kids / spergs / rich girls who went to cotillion or something and are evoking the voice half-ironically. But for Amber it was literally just her natural affect, and when I asked her about it she giggled and said it was probably because her mom worked in HR.
I adored her voice—made me hard as shit. Felt like fucking a princess.
Which isn’t to suggest Amber was in some deep sense any classier than the modal Zoomette—if anything it was sort of the opposite, given that on several occasions she met up with me sub rosa well after having gone steady with her gay little boyfriend.
Though in fairness the first time was kind of a gray area given that after dinner she initially demurred on coming up to my condo—a mire I escaped by politely offering to walk Amber to her car, whereupon I gingerly made my way into the passenger seat and bashfully offered a benji to let me take her upstairs and give her a foot massage. Which of course the little lass acceded to, only for me to end up inside her approximately three minutes after stepping into my unit.
This is the sort of thing I tend to feel mildly guilty about when looking back on my Fuckboy Era—hence me writing a whole ass essay on how Andrea Dworkin was right about all sex being rape given that metacognitive frame control practically obviates meaningful consent in vibemaxxed neurotypical girlies—but I actually don’t feel bad at all when considering my various intimacies with Amber, because from start to finish she played that shit like a tried and true Human Resource Kid.
For one thing she didn’t waste time trying to make me feel like a rapist or something—she knew I knew she knew the semiotic import of going behind closed doors with a feller she met on a sugar baby website, and also that I’d establish an impeccable paper trail locking down affirmative consent (I’d told her as much quite overtly). But this shit was entirely trivial to her—no doubt precisely because of her mother’s vocation.
Her chosen tack was far subtler.
“I mean, clearly you didn’t do anything illegal…”
“I know you aren’t a bad person…”
“It’s my fault really… I’m such an agreeable girl and just compulsively please people!”
“It’s mostly I feel really terrible for my boyfriend…”
“But I’m just so broke… my rents won’t send anything and they cut my hours so I can barely afford school supplies these days!”
Long story short through implication and covert contracts she created a script whereby I always ended up doubling or even trebling her promised allowance every time I fucked her. Amber understood to her bones that some histrionic and trashy veiled threat accomplishes precisely nothing other than getting men to lawyer up—whereas an artfully timed shudder, or a tear wiped off with curatorial precision?
Now that’s a performance of victimhood men will open their wallets for!
Basically all human interchange is at its root a transaction, but the best and most satisfying transactions are never fungible—they’re higher order, plausibly deniable, and written not in ink so much as in winks and shrugs and all things left unsaid.
It’s a cliche to say that masculine power shouts while feminine power whispers, but it’s also kind of uncharitable to the fairer sex, because it’s more twinks and trashy bitches who need to whisper. A proper lady makes sure everything feels like your idea from start to finish—both because she actually is a Pleaser and because in practice this eliminates tons of logistical friction from life for zero hedonic cost to someone with an agreeable neurotype. And so she’ll intuit whether you need her to play the chewtoy or the brat or the golden retriever and so long as you don’t ackshully have NPD will invariably end up far ahead of the women who can’t operate in this register.
Also looking back I’m not even sure the boyfriend was real.
So what’s the takeaway from all this?
Basically that actually disliking HR Women—as a lot of right wing STEM guys especially tend to do—is indescribably pedestrian and gay.
Working in HR is basically just an extended MRS degree for cultural ecologies where marrying your college boyfriend and immediately becoming a housewife is seen as weird and retrograde. But it’s literally the exact same type of woman who does this.
By and large these are dames who want an easy job doing girl-coded shit. They don’t worship anodyne corporate memphis girlboss culture, and certainly aren’t committed ideologically to Company Policy in some malebrained way. The stronk independent Womyn in STEM you regularly work with who have real skills and studied real things are probably way more annoying about taking that shit seriously, and whenever a dude gets fired for hitting on his secretary or saying nigger on Facebook the girls in HR will virtually always sympathize with him a lot more than the viragoes on his own team.
That’s literally why they let them do the firing.
Moreover these are the gals who know better than ANYONE that bitches be lying to cynically frame the past in a way that benefits them, and are meanwhile the LEAST likely to take accusations at face value, because they themselves will laugh with their girlfriends over spicy margs about destroying a guy’s reputation. Never forget that these chicks are the ones coming out of those Faustian sorority rape dens.
Sure, they’ll make fun of the incel who posts the double standards neckbeard meme, but they’ll also sideeye the social climbing neurotic midstatus broad making a false accusation against the ghosting Chad they’d gladly let obliterate their own pussy. Such women are unironically the reason most false accusations never manage to gain steam!
Yeah they’re mostly Democrats—because they’re hyperfeminine neurotypicals with basically zero propositional cognition, for whom literally everything is subconsciously about optimizing for status. But the HR Director at any big corpo will always look more like a Fox News anchor or the kind of bih who throws church galas than a Women’s Studies prof, and a background check will often show she’s registered GOP.
HR exists because shareholders don’t want the corporate entity to get sued because some subaltern janitor decided to pull his cock out in front of a client and not because of a conspiracy of shrewish HR Ladies to prevent you from finding your Pam Beasley.
HR Ladies are the ones who want to be Pam Beasley!
Human Resources is just a thing no heterosexual man wants to do even for his own business but is essential as you scale and women tend to find comparatively tolerable because they get a kick out of talking and following directions. That’s literally it.
Yes, the HR Lady will throw white male resumes into the garbage bin because she has to meet some irredeemably evil fake and gay libtard DEI quota. But once she has a few Long Islands in her and mayhaps some of your ejaculate she’ll also start dropping racial slurs a hell of a lot faster than the bitch who can take a double integral.
Now, it goes without saying I’m all for antagonizing HR in a broader institutional sense—I mean, I literally wrote a song where “Fuck HR!” is a prominent and recurring lyric.
But that line clearly shouldn’t be interpreted as any kind of broad indictment of HR personnel, who are overwhelmingly just silly girls doing what they’re told.
When I say Fuck HR! what I mean is you should lie about being a genderqueer Hispanic with autism and AIDS so you can underperform and milk the ADA for “reasonable accommodations” while aggressively documenting every breath your manager takes and creating a dossier to bog down HR if they ever put you on a PIP.
But don’t be needlessly curt with the HR ladies or something—if anything you should do the opposite! You ought to charm her, flirt with her under the cover of plausible deniability… perhaps even groom her a bit as a treat? Play your cards right and bae will see you as a quirky Jim Halpert once her boss tells her to prepare your file, and that might actually buy you a few more weeks of salary.
Then once you walk away with your exit check you’ll discover that of all your former coworkers she’s just about the only one who doesn’t feel weird about saying yes to a date—because, remember, this is likely a gal who cut her teeth on shitheel frat boys.
Which means you’ll get to pull a Byron and Fuck HR! in the very best possible way.
And then longer term—who knows?
Once you begin to scale your own consultancy it won’t be long before it dawns on you your own operations could materially benefit from a capable Chief People Officer—and is it not a little romantic for that to be the lass who once assembled your PIP?
…or even better, that coquettish cokeheaded VP who at long last delivered feet pics?
You're hilarious but overstimulated. If I was your editor I'd tell you try, just as an experiment, to write in the style of Raymond Carver. Mix in a little discipline and restraint and you could be brilliant.
Also probably cut down on the Adderall.
This article actually gave me a fair bit to think about. You made some great points!