Zoomer Boys and Stealth Archer Masculinity
Must have been the wind...
The chief issue with Liberal Modernity isn’t one of late capitalism per se or even the Incel Question as such so much as that modern life fails to offer the Unfair Sex a useful and coherent grammar for metabolizing dignity loss and masculine status adjudication, and if anything analytically precludes the development of one.
When seeking redress of grievances men are met with bald-faced obscurantism from one side and brutalist stiff upper lippism from the other, the goal in both cases being to reroute structural discontentment into something basically toothless and illegible by way of therapeutic / moralistic individuation—which in practice actually games out to a surprisingly robust equilibrium given the centrality of precognitive status weighting to womanly epistemics; the risk-reward calculus of status signaling ensures men are constantly incentivized in all sorts of ways both obvious and subtle to suppress their candor in high-stakes scenarios with both women and any institution that prioritizes their interests in its governance logic, and that creates a lot of perceptions of the broader situation in both women and more affluent / aged men that fail to track especially well with real-world outcomes in dating and employment markets.
The upshot is a self-sealing closed loop in which the Late Modern Cassandra is branded incel dalit ipso facto and epistemically foreclosed—ambiently, deniably, and a lot of times quite gently, but almost always totalistically, such that as a rule there’s no viable escape route from the Truman Show except occasionally through the social insulation that comes with positional status in a dissident subculture… which I suppose is fine if you’re specifically a heterodox intellectual or artist, but isn’t exactly scalable.
And that’s a real problem, because contra Millennial chick sensibilities one does not, in fact, summon durable civic-institutional legitimacy from the aether by pigheadedly branding anyone structurally aggrieved as “entitled” or “bitter” and doing precisely nothing else, which functionally is kind of just the same thing as ignoring calls from one’s creditors—a tactic that clearly works at least some of the time or blackpeepo wouldn’t do it, but also look at where it’s left them! Mistaking the operative response to one’s solipsism as a real change in incentive gradients versus a simple management tactic is a classic womanly failure mode and most of the time quite cute / hot / useful, but in this case specifically it really does amount to chugging civilizational antifreeze.
Which even then wouldn’t be a problem had we retained at least a few of the classic social emetics—think perennial warfare to yeet surplus males and keep the fairer sex antsy about the state of the non-gimp hubs market, intergenerational brotherhood in mail or cloth, the option of a socially legible exit on the high seas or steppe or frontier, a robust dueling culture to ensure elite status jockeying is more than a John Mulaney impression contest… all of them mechanisms that would hugely diffuse male grievance in practice but will never be permitted as doing so would both expose the inescapable contradictions of Liberal Democracy that made such exits necessary in the first place and implicitly undermine the ontological supremacy of antientitlement maximalism.
And so it’s all kind of just locked in at this point—anyone who’s read their Hirschman knows exactly what happens next, and sees the first signs clear as day in Zoomer boys.
…or as I’ve taken to calling them, the Stealth Archer Generation.
So what do I mean by Stealth Archer?
Mostly it’s a reference to Skyrim—a vidya game lots of Zoomer boys grew up playing wherein the basic gameplay loop pretty famously leads to most new runs abandoning the originally intended playstyle and organically phasing into a Stealth Archer build.
There are lots of reasons for this, the most salient of which being that Skyrim’s AI is generally quite dogshit and so most enemies even while being picked off one by one from afar aren’t remotely capable of reacting in a tactically appropriate manner that meaningfully suppresses your asymmetric advantage e.g. by taking cover. Meanwhile the player character is the only entity in the game with genuine diachronic agency, as NPCs will follow their own very basic schedule as well as situationally bespoke scripts but elsewise have no meaningful capacity for individuated action, let alone iteration or adaptation or heuristics formation, and that makes them kind of Paula Jones Tier going up against someone who can go anywhere at any time with zero real constraints on his risk appetite, saying nothing of the ability to quicksave.
Thing is though that asymmetry is kind of just a deep but mostly contingent bind of that generation of console tech, and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if a future rerelease completely changed the game with an AI capable of diachronic action. But as it stands the dice just aren’t falling evenly, because terrible AI amplifies stealth far more than any other dynamic, and on some level that makes gormlessly waddling up to your foes as a warrior or mage build feel like pointless self-sabotage when the alternative is ending them in an instant and with complete safety from the shadows—almost like being the only kid in class during covid times not to cheat on everything.
And so you’ll reclassify your warrior as a “skirmisher” or your mage as a “witchunter” and begin opening new fights with a bit of stealth archery as a treat...
…until you start to one-shot nearly everything precisely the same as before and realize for perhaps the eleventh time in your life that it’s basically never efficient—and most definitely never satisfying psychologically—to actually close the distance once you’ve properly integrated stealth archery into your gameplay loop.
…which of course before long makes anyone who does bother to close the distance seem lowkey sort of retarded.
Anyway to properly contextualize Zoomer masculinity it helps first to illustratively contrast it with that of their latchkey dads and horchata-enjoying elder bros.
When I think of Gen X masculinity the first thing that comes to mind is Fight Club—and then nineties nihilism more generally, and Henry Rollins acting like he’s gonna come beat you up if you don’t support gay marriage, and also Bill Burr talking about his black wife being smarter than him but putting a bit of edge in his voice whenever he says “black” so that subliminally it lands as quasi-racist and you register his style as naughty and transgressive, which is kind of like when Kryptogal (Kate, if you like)’s husband reportedly insists the kitchen is no place for a woman.
See what I mean? Clearly this shit is a generationally patterned thing—no doubt a consequence of having been raised in a world that forced them to be tough only to almost immediately start punishing guys for being too tough at the wrong time.
Still the baseline Gen X register is adversarial, as unlike us Millennials with our brains drenched in soy milk the Xers haven’t any sentimental illusions on a precognitive or intuitive level about what moistens cunt or puts real respect in the hearts of men—a divergence also from my own cohort’s Boomer progenitors, who compared to the daycare-diddled seem to have put a lot of faith raising us in the prospect of overriding basically all of human nature through the wisdom of that charming Dr. Spock. Point is these guys were socialized (not-socialized?) to expect mild hostility as the default but also understand that as a basically friendly register and completely normal part of life essential to flirtation and masculine banter kind of in the same vein as spanking it to forest porn with your bros or gangbanging the molested chick in the sewer so as to embiggen your friendship energy before the boss battle with that evil clown, and asking an Xer to repress his hostility is kind of like asking a Millennial to stop writing confessional essays or a Zoomer to jettison his winsome hippity hop jargon.
Because to put it in RPG terms Gen X dudes are warriors—think tank builds in an MMO or a single-class fighter in Baldur’s Gate—and unlike subsequent generations have a foot in the Before Times of toothy patriarchy and your dad breaking your arm sometimes. That said they’re also not Barbarians, being clearly a lot less antiquarian than the illimitable Boomer for instance (though also far and away less idealistic), and as a rule will reject teeveebrained contempt for noncomformity and abstract thought qua themselves for a more refracted and compressed version of a similar impulse that as a rule is quite pluralist so long as said pluralism jives with results-first meritocracy.
Moment it crosses that line? Suddenly the dude is indistinguishable from a Boomer.
The reason being that to Gen X dudes competence is currency—in some deeply-felt sense the only thing in the universe they trust to consistently reward their faith in it—but the Xer’s mode of competence is ultimately an embodied one that when properly actualized often really does require Boomerishly taking your domain of competence on its own terms and internalizing its standards of practice as normative as opposed to self-indulgently eating cognitive load by forever living in the meta like a Millennial or immediately trying to jailbreak shit like a Zoomer.
And so the Xer is very rarely “optimized” per se—but he sure as shit is durable and legible and emotionally continent. And on the one hand that caps upside in certain scenarios given he’ll never wear his heart on his sleeve or really roll the dice in the manner probs necessary to get elected POTUS for instance, but it simultaneously imposes a pretty high floor on downside risk while insulating him from humiliation and makes him a lot more credible at e.g. asserting diachronic leverage over women.
Like all modern men the Xer is fascinated by asymmetry, but will never explain or understand it as precisely as a Millennial or move on it quickly as a Zoomer—though he pretty frequently *is* the one who has the simple brute gumption to start charging niggas to drink from the fountain of youth in a scalable way instead of uselessly ruminating on it or sneaking sips in the dark between assorted gooning / Fortnite sessions. In many respects the Gen X mindset is optimized for that sort of thing, hence lots of these fellers staying active as entrepreneurs well into late midlife.
Anyway, circling back to discursive styles / baseline adversarialism—the Gen X male equilibrium often seems to be creating all these zero-stakes situations to be kind of an asshole for no reason e.g. calling his friend gay for putting syrup on his pancakes or something, whereas when he flirts with chicks it’s almost entirely through teasing (note Xers often see Millennials as sort of sexually toothless and babylike when we flirt through anything BUT teasing) because in other contexts he can’t feel properly masculine or even authentically himself. Thing is this register is basically never meanspirited (if anything Xer guys are a lot nicer than Millennials and certainly Zoomers deep down), but it still led to a certain friction between Millennials and Gen X as we entered the workplace and subcultural scenes en masse during the aughts and 2010s—part of which was on them for resisting matriculation from Hunter to Lord, but most of which was on us tbh for being huge fucking Millennials convinced at 23 we already knew everything one could about how the world works.
Which interestingly isn’t a Zoomer Boy failure mode at all, I’ve found—if there’s an analog it’s more that they intuitively register Knowing Things as lowkey sort of gay.
But whenever they DO need to know something they seem to incur a lot less cognitive load overall reaching out to one of their earnest Millennial uncs for his take, whereas like back in 2016 during my solitary phone call with Richard Spencer I was honestly a little offended when he spitballed the idea of me working for him, being almost 23 at the time and therefore knowing everything, and besides that controlling a platform that at least by my reckoning put me in an entirely serviceable position to make a credible bid for leadership myself should that dapper patrician’s star ever fall.
And the ironic thing is Spencer had told me in the very same call that the Alt Right has “too many chiefs and not enough Indians”—when I mentioned that to Natalie she said it was clearly true but that I shouldn’t be one of the Indians, as formal affiliation with Spencer hasn’t much upside and would only limit my own power and influence long-term. Which looking back maybe that was true and maybe it was just her being a woman, but it doesn’t really matter either way because it was exactly what I wanted to hear from her and also what Millennial Girl cultural messaging had been priming her to say for decades—a thoroughly Hermione Granger opinion for a generation full of self-important Harry Potters each individually convinced he could Do Anything in a world increasingly defined by wunderkind startup narratives.
That said I myself actually am kind of Special.
…and like in a hard objective way other Millennial guys quite clearly aren’t and never will be however you track individual discursive impact considering I not only became an eceleb on two entirely separate occasions playing to audiences that barely overlap but have also this time become a decently impactful public intellectual within my own little niche at least who at this point is periodically read by thousands of folx with real adult jobs including Boomers and Jew broads a couple of years older than me who’ve no idea I jerk off to their LinkedIn and multiple fellers with blue names on Wikipedia e.g. Alexander Bard who last year likened me to Slavoj Zizek (not favorably, but still), and so I think that when it comes to youthful narcissism I’m entitled to a bit of grace.
Not so for the average man of my cohort, who in his early years had a tendency to approach the world like main character even when he plainly would have been sorted into Hufflepuff—which if you think about it’s kind of a stupid idea for a faction since it’s not like the modal kid in any other house would have been any less of a vapid NPC; if anything the Hufflepuffs seem like the only ones in that school with a modicum of self-awareness, as not unlike your typical Xer guy / Zoomer boy they grasp on a deep and intuitive level that they don’t fucking matter—and also that that’s kind of just fine. Meanwhile the kids in all the other houses all act aggressively Millennial, which given the nature of our upbringing very genuinely is on some level just a deeply pathetic and undignified thing to be assuming you aren’t Harry specifically or at least like Draco.
That said if you are Harry you probs don’t want to be in Hufflepuff.
Because at our core Millennial men are wizards—socialized to value brains over brawn; to earnestly believe any limitation of the body or explosion of disgust or hesitation towards an outgroup can eventually be overcome with either the right argument or rightly impassioned sonnet; to take women wholly at face value as not just moral equals but epistemic and phenomenological equivalents in essence; and overall to conceive of the world as a basically fair and legible place where you can do anything and ackshully you can lick my fucking ass, snowflake—this isn’t Harry Potter.
Or at least not for the fellers—the chickies kind of got to keep on being Hermione and leaning in and never doing anything wrong ever, until one day the Zoomettes vibed in to call their skinny jeans cheugy and turned them all into Professor Sprout overnight.
By that point, of course, we menfolk had long been disabused of our own youthful chungusness thanks to Gen X roasting from the other direction, which had served as a crash course in the same lesson they and all cohorts before them had absorbed mostly ambiently in early childhood about competence being your only real savior as a man.
Only for us that shit wasn’t ambient literally at all. It came fast and hard and mean, such that many millions of us learned over the course of just a few years that basically everything we’d been taught about the world as kids was a big fat faggoty lie, while the modes of deeply limerent romantic love and earnest civic participation we’d modeled as a basic part of life are in ackshuality mostly all about brutalist power and leverage, which at least in our vaselined epoch of Seinfeldian frictionlessness translates mostly to the ability to walk away from shit unfazed thanks to high optionality, which in turn tends to be achieved most effectively by treating women basically as retarded children.
Note precisely none of this is shit we wanted to hear, let alone propositionalize like that in such a gauche and ugly way as muh based and redpill knowledge or w/e. Thing is older generations never even HAD to do that because they got broken in so early on in life it never registered as all that painful to them, and could mostly sit as inchoate archetypal understanding of Woman-As-Girl that never had to be spoken allowed in a manner that risks calcifying mythopoesis into ontology—always a failure mode in mixed company given that regardless of its correspondence-level truth women will never be able to handle hearing something like that about themselves so directly.
Thing is we never really had a choice—not when our childhood was Johnny Bravo and our adolescence Friends and Scrubs and our early adulthood Judith Butler. We needed heuristics, and we needed them BAD, and if that risked overfitting, well—it was still a hell of a lot less underfitting than anything we got from Bravo and Butler, so fuck off.
Such was how Millennial men evolved from Harry-coded to Snape-coded, becoming systematizers; optimizers; mythmakers; theorycrafters; shamans and hierophants—for us masculinity is irretrievably entangled semiotically with memories of intense sexual gnosis (usually following some Zooey-coded perfidy that completely blindsided us at the time but in retrospect feels overdetermined if anything), as well as deep feelings of betrayal or at least epistemic misalignment with the obscurantist regime we came up under.
Sometimes you see the same wound in older Zoomers and the very youngest Gen Xers (particularly when they’re kind of autistic), but on the main this really was a brief and blisteringly unjust social experiment that in trying to make every Millennial girl like Hermione mostly just quintupled our Neville Rate, and so in practice the whole thing kind of just got quietly dismantled without much fanfare—the fallout of that ofc being that as a rule Millennial men are far more “performative” in their masculinity than either Xers or Zoomers… which doesn’t at all mean inauthentic here or any other context btw so much as kind of a Theater Kid thing e.g. picking a masculine archetype broadly legible as compelling and truly coming to inhabit his skin—which for me obv manifests rather messily through art or baroque metamodern screeds on how bitches be, but for most other upper income white guys born in the early 90s seems to almost always involve extreme Straussian deniability buried in a John Mulaney impression, as given our cloyingly romantic modal preference stack the most taste-optimized and therefore purely Millennial strategy for us will pretty much always amount to telling Hermione literally whatever she wants to hear while mirroring her harm avoidance epistemics with statusmaxxing epistemics of your own that quietly and coldly groom the ChatGPT-sounding bitch and her skinny jeans into Girlboss Cupcake Submission.
But anywho—to summarize the overall dynamic:
Gen X are warriors. They live embodied in systems and take things comparatively at face value, which gives them a lot of practical agency day-to-day but makes it hard to navigate an increasingly liquid cultural space. Their sense of masculine dignity comes from the ability to shrug off pain, demonstrate practical embodied competence and systems mastery, and hold their own in adversarial banter—with women especially, who they intuitively see as bitchy little girls to roll your eyes at, and for whom they’ll seldom grow prematurely limerent / outcome-dependent.
Millennials are wizards. We see ourselves as special brilliant boys the rules don’t always necessarily apply to, and so are a lot more “meta” in our thinking: great at gaming out behavioral equilibria and mapping incentive structures in sharp relief, but compared to other generations we’ll often have far harsher internal gradients for parsing niceties as social lubrication vs. Strauss-As Demiurge, and tend also to overestimate how much leverage we can extract by modeling the world accurately. Our dignity comes from a belief in our own essential Specialness—though only as reified as publicly legible success in romance or institutional climb, both of which at times oblige a density of status signaling and performed belief in meritocracy that makes us lowkey shitty friends to anyone we pass by on the way up.
Zoomer Boys, of course, are rogues—and more specifically Stealth Archers.
Zoomer masculinity is not oppositional and compulsive like that of Gen X, and for sure isn’t propositionally gnostic and institutionalist like that of Millennials.
Rather it’s evasive and extractive and above all deliberately illegible to oldpeepo.
Because Zoomer Boys don’t want to be Understood; feel no great need to be Seen—and even if they did would choose opacity all the same, because the lads understand in their marrow that they can’t especially afford to be Seen by a system that denies them a coherent grammar of dignity while analytically precluding effective self-advocacy.
Which to some of you reads as antisocial or “nihilism,” but anyone who spends a lot of time around Zoomer Boys will inform you they’re about as nihilistic as fish are wet—which is to say yeah, like always and totalistically so, duh, but also in a manner they’re remarkably habituated for, whereas any Millennial who isn’t either rich or handsome and ideally both of those things tends to experience Late Modernity rather like Koko would have experienced being dropped in the Pacific Ocean.
Yeah we’re richer and a lot more institutionally embedded than they’re like to be even at our age, and on aggregate tend to score quite a bit more puss.
We also need all those things a hell of a lot more on account of deriving nearly all our masculine dignity from externally adjudicated institutional and romantic validation we know full well can never be as mutual as we were trained to expect from the world.
Whereas note you actually don’t really see tons of Zoomer Elliot Rodgers—like clearly we’ve had that sniper surge recently, but it seems less about inceldom qua inceldom to me than a far broader species of alienation from society at large, whereas to be honest it kind of seems the modal Zoomer would just laugh at Elliot and call him a simp.
Though don’t get me wrong—as a class they’re pretty obviously not happy about the skyrocketing incel rate and the various circumstances that produced it. But it’s more of a collective thing overall, in kind of the same way most black people are lowkey sort of black nationalists without individually feeling super alienated from white people all the time, as for Zoomer Boys being sexually excluded and downwardly mobile doesn’t really obliterate their self-concept like you’d often see in Millennials so much as make them kind of cockroachy in a way I’ve honestly come to see as sort of vital and robust,
As the world and especially masculine life therein grows more and more asymmetric it’s just not operationally sustainable to moralize sexual market outcomes post-hoc in a manner that functionally ties male worth to sexual access while affording women absolute jurisdictional veto on male interiority and epistemic standing as a knower of his own experience through bad faith slurs like “incel” and “entitled” and “bitter,” let alone the power to shred reputations and retcon narratives asymmetrically and after the fact without literally any mechanism of redress. After a certain point dudes just start rolling their eyes and quiet quitting—and then after some other point begin to stop valuing propositional truth and coherence and epistemic hygiene altogether as it’s kind of just a law of the jungle oral culture now that lowkey lets its winners walk around raping bitches and having they friends send cunt shots after and even thinking of all this in terms of does this make sense frankly reads as Tard Unc.
Because it turns out plenty of Zoomer Boys spent the last decade online watching the spergier sort of Millennial attempt to reason with women in good faith on the merits of all this shit only to get epistemically foreclosed in a bitchy and personally vindictive way thanks to obliviously bad faith precognitive ginethought literally every time, and one of their biggest takeaways from that was that Unc’s need to feel Seen is cringe and a huge liability, much like our commitment to consistency both across time and in our arguments, which in practice only tied us down while our adversaries used Krav Maga in Queensbury fights to end discussions before they could even begin so as to make an example of anyone sufficiently bad at acting like John Mulaney—think cumstained Youtube Atheist Diogenes types, who’d as a rule would end up banished forever to the epistemic cornfield by that benighted Clitoris Empress.
Meanwhile it’s not as though Zoomers can fight like Dad—that takes at least a little Got Mine money and power, plus at a minimum the negative space danger to you of having come up in a genuinely cuntripping patriachy, as well as the ability to suffer agentically and really just chow down on those negative life outcomes over and over again without it completely wrecking your shit because you’re unusually tough on account of having been molested in that satanic daycare tunnel and internalized the attendant quasi-dissociative fugue prior to your brain developing lasting memories, which to be fair Zoomer Boys are quite tough in their own way, but it tends to be more cockroach tough than anything that can actually beat you up tough, whereas even the Zoomers who do have that pain tolerance or e.g. a dispositional preference for direct conflict will a lot of times drift into Stealth Archery anyway because the return on asymmetric tactics is genuinely so enormous these days that plenty of less oldmanlike Gen X guys are lowkey sort of acting the same way, and a lot of times even express annoyance that their sons are too lazy and distractable to juice this motherfucker to its breaking point as they would have done given access to ChatGPT in the nineties.
Because at the end of the day it always and everywhere comes down to incentives—and what do those look like in practice for the Zoomer Boy?
Small differences in IQ and more importantly gumption / attention span produce far larger life outcome deltas than for any prior cohort, and it’s not particularly close. The filter in terms of dopamine traps these days is insanely aggressive—which means ofc that if you DO get through the filter you’re often competing in virgin territory, which is why Zoomers Who Do Things tend to clean the fuck up.
Life these days at least FEELS far more luck-dependent than even ten years ago—which it’s always been helpful to know the right people, but among Millennials at least there was for sure more of a fake and gay networking culture of e.g. actively scouting new opportunities even if you had to lick a bit of ass to get there. Which clearly lots of Zoomers do the same, but not nearly as many and when they do it’s far more piratical / ad hoc than it was for us and dependent on gumption, which ofc means that for the unagentic cows among them it very genuinely feels like a few guys are just getting lucky, which isn’t true. What IS true though is that the agency threshold to find opportunities is much much higher than it was in my day.
As noted above, if you ARE a loser the consequences just aren’t as severe these days. One reason for that’s material—we’re drifting towards post-scarcity and you don’t need THAT much money to live a decent life these days if you aren’t trying to be super trendy; there’s still a shortage of unskilled labor which deportations will help amplify; most Zoomers come from small families and their Xer parents tend to have decent savings. Meanwhile there’s far less of an expectation on guys to be a provider (and if a girl wants it she’ll probs just go for an age gap anyway), whereas the incel rate has climbed so precipitously there really isn’t a huge social penalty anymore for not being successful with women so long as you aren’t seen caring about it too much. Everything is fine so long as you aren’t insecure.
Thanks to the dissolution of the monoculture over the past decade people now enjoy the freedom to opt in and out of whichever status hierarchies they please, and if any of the broad cultural expectations of yesteryear are disagreeable to you you’re entirely free to throw them into the garbage bin and surround yourself with a cult of like-minded cheerleaders. And whether that’s a good or a bad thing to you will of course depend on the cult in question, but whether they realize it or not most people will in practice choose whichever affords the most relative status.
Zoomers operate under a quasi-paleolithic oral culture because life simply moves too fast these days for anyone to adjudicate right and wrong in the written record. Everyone just has their own cult that takes their side of the story at face value, and in a battle of cults victory almost always comes down to pure amoral Rizz.
You see a lot more triangulation—in the males super duper overtly—think shit like “I’ll say this behind closed doors, but could never do so in public”, whereas with Zoomettes it’s a lot more instinctual by my reckoning and for the most part entirely unconscious, and these sexy babies will functionally become a completely different person depending on who it is they’re talking to and will tell everyone the version of a story they want to hear…. which granted basically all women do that to some extent, but a Millennial gal who’d be 90th percentile manipulative and two-faced by her peers is in this dimension kind of just the median Zoomette.
Zoomers have far more of an All’s Fair attitude to social politics than previous generations, often operating like a decadent Byzantine court. You see it more in girls, generally—two of them will be besties one day and despise each other the next, and then even in cases of deep friendship are WAY more overt about status competition than Millennial Matrons (who very tediously act like you’re insane if you ever intimate they’re competitive with their friends). Meanwhile Zoomerinos seem lowkey traumatized by the constant triangulation and sort of desperate to join a durable mannerbund, while their masculine friendships actually seem far more intense than was the case for Millennials (more focused on girls / politics / their project) but also more unstable and fraught given their constant jumping between ideologies with an adherence most typically half ironic and half fanatic.
Zoomers have shorter memories and a markedly faster “social news cycle,” which means life is just far more episodic for them. Folx get over betrayals, animosities, and humiliations far faster than we did at their age, and are concomitantly less nostalgic it seems. And ofc plenty of exceptions exist, but they’re also treated as kind of weird and overly sentimental by their peers (and are a lot of times the type to socialize more with Millennials). Generally speaking the expectation is that you just get over shit or affect indifference, which is a far more reasonable strategy than it would have been for us given how rapidly things have shifted for them.
So what kind of behavior does that incentivize?
Zoomers tend not to moralize shit in the heavy, propositionally coherent, and above all deeply earnest manner a Millennial would. The girls will occupy a moral register basically as theater during intrasexual status games should it proffer any clean and broadly legible vector of humiliating That Bitch Who Stole Liam, and will even experience themselves as doing so entirely in good faith, but it’s all just dumb synchronic pussvibes at the end of the day—none of that respectable proto-maternal Wendy Darling femininity, but more pixie dust in her puss than you’ll ever know what to do with. Whereas for Zoomer guys it increasingly seems that having consistent morals you care about at all or take seriously as anything more than just a social w/e is deeply autistic-coded these days… as is actually caring about propositional ideas at all, frankly, because for neurotypical Zoomer Boys their default social ecology increasingly resembles that of a woman—i.e. maximally synchronic / relational / affective on account of feedbrain, which paired with the essentially diachronic nature of male condition is naturally going to land on basal and functional amorality punctuated by fleeting periods of half-ironic fanaticism that in practice serve as a spontaneous mannerbund-in-a-can social technology. So it’s doing its job as a coordinative fiction—just not in a way oldpeepo recognize.
Another similarity to women is the Zoomer Boy’s greatly depressed sense of stable diachronic selfhood and time-binding agency—which doesn’t invalidate a broader essentialist thesis btw given Zoomettes are clearly a million times worse and basically all have about as much diachronicity as a DID patient, whereas I’d place Zoomer Boys at around the same place overall as Millennial women, being a lot better usually at mooring affect to deeply-held life goals and more self-aware about their fluctuations but also moderately worse at impulse control and simple hotdog grandma executive functioning, such that basically everyone who’s worked with or managed a Zoomer will tell you that you can’t rely on them for shit.
Thing is they’re also kind of like that for a reason—namely that in a frictionless late modern society being sort of unreliable often serves as an entirely real font of power given it forces intermediary nodes within The System to incur oodles of cognitive load chasing you down for shit while even putting together paperwork to fire you is a lot of times far more annoying than simply rolling one’s eyes and moving on. More important though is Zoomers as a rule don’t get their feelings hurt when their boss is Disappointed in them; if anything the experience tends to land a lot more painful to the snowflake Millennial carrying it out, which it goes without saying is a pretty fantastic reason to act like an unaccountable shithead.
Their communicative style runs a lot more feminine—though again this dynamic only applies to the neurotypicals, as it seems to me the super spergy Zoomer Boys are functionally kind of just Millennials with bad attention spans. But the normie ones are fascinating, as at times it’s like you’re talking to something ontologically equidistant with the categories of man and woman—not unlike a gay guy, frankly, which actually makes sense given Zoomer Boys often find themselves similarly positioned in a nexus of mutually unintelligible forces that can only be properly managed by e.g.code switching or always speaking in three registers at once and also insulating one’s utterances in enough interpretive slack to recontextualize later if necessary—which a lot like gay dudes but unlike most neurotypical girlies the Zoomer Boy is 100% conscious of himself doing, and also sees as an obviously necessary part of social reality in a world where unkish flat-footedness oft leaves one on the floor rubbing his ass. Anyway the upshot of this is that hanging out with neurotypical Zoomer boys often feels kind of date-coded because unlike neurotypical Millennial men who having come up in a robust textualist culture are basically comfy code-switching into autism-speak on the fly Zoomers will often experience that as kind of oafish and vibe-killing in basically the same way that male artists of any generation will probably feel talking to similarly aged farmers or something, as even among their male friends they’ll want a sort of baseline erotic charge that comes from irony that’s never fully unfurled and ambiguity that’s permitted to really ferment.
Kind of in the same vein is Zoomer sexuality, which at least compared to that of Millennial guys seems a lot more comfy objectifying itself as a passive unagentic vector for the Female Gaze—hence their great enthusiasm for Looksmaxxing and -physiognomic critique. All of this no doubt is the result of coming of age in a post-Tinder sexual ecology that massively amplified the erotic salience of height and facial aesthetics in particular while tanking if not the value then certainly the baseline legibility of more traditionally diachronic aspects of male sexual worth, which in today’s mainstream dating ecology can usually only be operationalized if you clear the hurdle for a first date that ofc in practice is kind of secured entirely by way of height and facial aesthetics. And that setup to Zoomer Boys often feels unjust, but it also feels basically Normal and serves as their default sexual market baseline… which since they have neither our ambient cultural memory of pre-Tinder dating norms nor the resources and hard institutional status position to pull chickadees in through diachronic daddymaxxing (and tbf are increasingly pushed away from these things by structural forces) often impels them to sanctimoniously moralize against all modes of masculine sexual positioning that involve anything BUT looks as somehow unclean or cope-driven or otherwise “not counting” in precisely the same way—which to my mind speaks to a hugely cringe internalization of MeToo consent logic that very tediously frames servicing female desire as the entire point of sex and is kind of just a down syndrome way of looking at it frankly given said desire is basically just rain, and no it’s NOT your job as the man to do some insipid little rain dance for her at all times but rather to construct the greater diachronic architecture in which her weather takes shape and under whose auspices you can kind of in practice just grab her by the puss whenever she’s being bratty and get her wet in seconds to blow her out—after which 99% of the shit you think is a problem normally kind of evaporates. Anyway point is it’s just aggressively gay to sexually objectify oneself for the woman’s eye, as that’s what she’s supposed to be doing for you and actually makes sense there given she hasn’t any symmetrical cheat codes for turning you on.
Final one I can think of which in a sense also ties it all off the above together is a certain intuitive comfort with minimalism and restraint and, perhaps to belabor the point, illegibility—think a refusal to be pinned down—that almost certainly wasn’t borne of anything more sophisticated than TikTok Brain and for sure tends to exacerbate the disadvantages Zoomers face competing for institutional status and securing the respect of more established older men… but is also more or less the only weapon men can reliably deploy to protect their dignity and interests amidst our late modern Seinfeldian clownworld sans instant unadjudicated status loss, and specifically insulates them from basically all the classic failure modes that caused Millennial men such tremendous strife over the past decade or two. And it’s very much a Cockroach Mindset, but hey—cockroaches survive.
..and whatever we say about Zoomer Boys, it’s pretty damn clear they’re survivors.
Which in no small part is because they kind of just decided to be—figured out early as unironic little boys that society is basically fake and gay and even if once governed by something vaguely approximating fair or coherent rules sure as shit isn’t these days.
They watched their unkies push for redress; saw us get ignored; then shrugged their shoulders and without ever thinking of it as such leaned in hard into Hirschman Exit.
And if there’s one thing about Zoomer Boys I find genuinely wholesome it’s how they managed to achieve that, which was unironically through the Power of Friendship—unlike us faggoty and prevaricating Millennials, Zoomers don’t see selling they niggas out for cunt as an uncomplicatedly obvious choice, and for all they’ve lost the ability to feel genuinely protective and indulgent towards women they’ve likewise gained quite a lot in terms of baseline masculine solidarity through brotherhood.
And perhaps it’s not a proper brotherhood in the old sense, lacking both the intergenerational component and binding diachronic rootedness that made those orders so stabilizing. But there’s no denying it counts as the reemergence of a masculine honor framework in which dignity can’t just be extracted from men asymmetrically anymore without any expectation of reprisal and closed ranks, which in practice have made social isolation and Girardian scapegoat tactics a lot less viable.
That won’t stop women from doing it, of course.
What it WILL do is make it all more clearly a blacks ignoring their creditors situation.
The memo lands at 9:14 a.m.
Like always, it’s written in that anodyne and bloodless prose that somehow gives passive and accusatory at the same time: a failed project, a “clarification of ownership,” a junior guy’s name appearing one too many times, a well-liked female manager’s name not appearing at all… everyone who reads it understands exactly what’s happened, and also understands that pretending not to is part of the job.
—
First to read it is The Warrior: forty-eight, divorced once, remarried once; no kids,
at least that he’s aware of; currently owns a grill that weighs more than his first car.
He reads the memo and exhales through his nose.
Then walks straight into his manager’s office without checking Slack first.
He doesn’t argue policy. He doesn’t cite fairness. He doesn’t invoke process.
He says, calmly: “This is wrong. You know it’s wrong. Fix it.”
She hedges—speaks of optics; donors; team harmony.
He nods, lets her finish, then says: “If my name stays on this, I’m not carrying it.
And if I’m not carrying it, then I’m not staying.”
No need for threats or drama—a Warrior understands where his leverage is:
in his willingness to eat pain.
Worst case, he walks. He’s done it before and can do it again. Best case, the memo gets quietly revised without apology or recognition—neither of which he especially wants.
At lunch, he makes a joke about how this place is getting soft.
Everyone laughs. He’s already moved on.
—
Next to read the memo is The Wizard—thirty-three; smart; articulate; has a Notion doc for everything. His scalp begins to itch as those baroque internal clockworks spin to life: Patently obvious narrative shielding... she’s donor-safe; he’s surplus. Sets a precedent. Incentive gradients, initiative suppression, long-term trust erosion—
He stops himself.
He’s done this before.
He opens a private document—not to rage or litigate, but to orient himself. He maps the incentives; predicts the reactions. Then decides, quite consciously, what not to say.
In the meeting he waits for the room to settle into a comfortable hum of performative seriousness. Then smiles, a bit sheepish, as if about to admit something embarrassing.
“Can I just flag something?” he says. “Very low stakes. Might be nothing.”
Everyone relaxes—this is a safe man.
He continues, warming to it: “You know how when we were kids we all thought quicksand was going to be a way bigger problem than it turned out to be?”
Laughter. Real laughter!
“And then you find out quicksand exists, but the actual danger is—you only get stuck if you freak out and start thrashing?”
More laughter. Nods now.
He gestures vaguely at the memo. “This kind of thing—unintentionally, of course—teaches people that the safest move is always to stop moving. And then six months later we’re somehow always like, ‘Wooooow. Crazy that no one’s taking initiative!”
He shrugs. “Anyway—probably nothing.”
The meeting moves on.
A week later the memo is revised. There’s no announcement or apology—just an extra name added; responsibility diffused… enough to matter and not enough to talk about.
In the hallway, someone tells him, “That was a really constructive way to handle that.”
He smiles. “Yeah. You don’t want to thrash!”
Internally he notes the win; limits; cost. Notes it was the sperg who handled the analysis and comedian the delivery. He goes home and doesn’t think about it again.
—
At last we come to the Stealth Archer: twenty-two, hoodie, earbuds; unreadable affect.
He reads the memo once. No expression. No commentary. No doc.
He doesn’t go to the meeting.
Instead he stops volunteering for stretch work. Moves his best shit to a side project. Takes a late-night call from someone he met through a friend of a friend on Discord.
He watches the Warrior walk past later, jaw set, ready to absorb impact. He watches the Wizard land a joke and bend the system just enough to get what he wants.
He understands both of those moves perfectly—just doesn’t really see the point.
Two months later he’s gone. No exit interview, no feedback, and no scene. When someone asks what happened to him the answer is vague. “He moved on.”
In a group chat that night, he types: “lol yeah… that place was weird”
Then queues up the next run—silent, optimized, untouched by the mess behind him.
No thrashing. No speeches.
Just a clean kill from the shadows.
I can't speak to the Zoomers, but you nailed Gen X and Millennial masculinity perfectly.
This is all true.