I think I might be doomed to find myself in a leadership position in the future out-scoping what I feel safe and comfortable having; but which I will end up with only because I am prepared to explain with some degree of rationality what’s happening.
History may repeat itself, but the current moment is always unprecedented. I can’t predict with any kind of solidity what the future holds, but I can certainly read a trend and figure out some idea of how to question the oncoming cultural changes (assuming I live to see all of this transpire).
The generational gap in the United States has grown vast; both in the sense that people are living longer than ever, and also in the sense that the elderly cannot possibly grasp the present cultural concerns of the young. Old people (baby boomers are the only ones left) don’t know why the housing market is fucked (many of them don’t know THAT the housing market is fucked), they don’t understand any of the controversies surrounding technological transformations to culture, and they can’t even fathom what the fuck is going on with their great-grandchildren. But they vote.
Nonetheless, there is a staggering amount of these boomers, not only because they were the largest generation to ever exist in the first place, but also because they’ve gotten to live longer than any previous generation thanks to advancements in medicine. This has meant that the systems familiar to boomers, around which they built a barely-functioning society, remain in place long after innovation has hollowed them entirely of meaning to the younger generations; because continuing to turn the wheels for decades and to maintenance their ailing bodies has left them without time to grasp what is implicit to generations that grew up in the world which the most-intelligent boomers created.
In 2024, all of the people on the TV news in the US—(meaning the broadcasters and also the people whom they talk about)—are older than fucking shit. Most of them have been on TV longer than I have been alive, and have very obviously spent amounts of money that could lift small countries out of poverty on keeping themselves healthy enough to do whatever cockamamie bullshit they’ve convinced other old people to let them get away with. Young people want nothing to do with any of this and built their own world underneath of it (economically), just waiting to take over when death finally takes them all. (Queen Elizabeth was the starting gun.)
Before I sound insanely ageist, let me be clear that I don’t think old people being alive is a problem in itself; it’s more so that old people wield incredible power in this country because of how they built the system underneath of them entirely to service themselves, pulling up the ladder at every stop on their way into the Hills.
At some point, it stopped being allowed to build new property in Los Angeles; it stopped being possible to afford college without grants; and also (in the long run this will be a good thing), it got harder to fuck people over and rip them off; especially for younger generations who were born fucked over and ripped off to begin with. The boomers stole our future away and hold onto it in what has felt like perpetuity—the whole lifetime of all the youths who perish by the wayside in the meantime—who will never have a fraction of what their forebears did, because what was held valuable by those generations no longer holds value in the modern day.
Even if they wanted to hand something down to the younger generations, they have nothing to offer, as young people (youth of spirit means more than the number of years here) are the only ones capable of generating anything valuable; and the few things they have that we might want (their houses), they usually will not even share with us because of how they regard us as other to their ideas of cultural correctness. (I am lucky, personally, that my parents let me share their home, and have let many others share it over the decades, and I have always copied this behavior. I think I can say with self-righteousness that it’s fucked up how few people will open their homes and minds to struggling people, even including friends and family, which are seemingly more culturally strained in the US than in most other civilized countries).
I have been wondering for more than a decade what is going to happen when enough of the boomers are finally dead that they can’t represent a significant cultural force in US politics anymore. The reason that US presidential politics have been stuck in this unending Trump-Biden rut for 8 years is that THEY ARE THE ONLY VIABLE CANDIDATES LIVING WHOM THE MAIN BASE OF VOTERS CAN RECOGNIZE.
Joe Biden ran for president THREE TIMES before he became president (it was surreal reading Hunter Thompson’s election coverage from the 80s in 2020 and seeing the parallels), and it’s obvious why he’d lost every time prior (he fucking sucks so badly)—just as it is obvious why he finally won (he outlived the competition).
Donald Trump had talked about his plans to run for decades also, and basically spent his entire life insisting on his own cultural force. EmpLemon’s fantastic video about how Trump memed himself to presidency is what inspired my catchphrase “self-insistence is a success necessity,” which I keep insistently saying so it will stick, and is why I feel so amped to reinforce myself constantly in cultural presentation. I want people to be familiar with me, because I know that one day, people who are the same age that I am surviving into the future will have no interest in what people my (current) age are up to; and everyone else they used to like will be dead. (I might also be dead, but I will also have made tremendously more content than anyone else in my bracket, and all of it will increase in value over time.)
I could never imagine being president, and I wonder how many young people can? Is that something which anyone whose idea of a “president” was shaped over the last eight years would possibly ideate? In order for a system to operate, it requires participation; but when the people being propped up now are all dead, is there going to be someone capable to seize the reigns when a generation that cared about that old person isn’t there anymore? No: culture will be commanded by the newly-considered high-guard as determined by the generation now in control. So here’s my question: are we going to keep doing the president thing forever?
United States Americans generally don’t vote. Even in presidential elections, less than half of the people qualified to vote actually do so, and an overwhelming amount of those are old people. It is often said that voting is important, but I think most of us realize that’s bullshit by this point, considering the breadth of election fraud and the whole popularity-contest system we have which churns out just the worst trash for us to cast our ballots toward.
I don’t think we’re likely going to stop having presidents when millennials or zoomers are the oldest generation in the US, but I think we’ll almost certainly reconsider the way we go about all of this when TV completely dies, along with every politician that any mainstream person has ever heard of in (god willing) the next five-to-ten years.
I have a suspicion that technology will have gotten so magical to laypeople by then that we’ll just peel back the curtain on the technocratic dystopia we’re already living in and admit that the US is actually CURRENTLY in its warring states period. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are the daimyous. When the generation after zoomers talks about this period in history, it’s going to sound like a corporate version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms.