Words, usages, and phrases that annoy the shit out of you...

Greatest Generation ugh. You're right it's for Yanks.

― The Prime of the Ancient Minister (Tom D.), Tuesday, April 2, 2024 3:47 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

A lot of the popular conception of recent generations comes from the work of sociologists William Strauss and Neil Howe, who were explicitly writing about them within an American historical context. Their first book, published in 1991, was called Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069, in which they theorized that American history repeatedly cycles through four distinct generational types. Then they wrote books that specifically analyzed the beliefs and attitudes of Gen X (which at the time they called the 13th Generation, because it's apparently the 13th generation in American history) and millennials (a term that they coined). The latter was called Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation because, according to their theory, millennials are the same type as the Greatest Generation within the four-generation cycle.

But wrt to not being Gen X or a Millennial - when I saw Reality Bites (in the theatre obvs) I was 15 and it was like oooh I can't wait to grow up and live in a shitty apt with my friends not like I was watching my peers so there was a disconnect.

xp (Needless to say, a lot of this is hooey.)

x-posts Yeah, I'm sure it was not nearly as appealing if you weren't a 15 year old girl with the world's biggest crush on Ethan H.

People born in the British Isles after WW2 are known as 'the post-war generation', sensibly. The only booms going on at that time were from unexploded German ordnance accidentally trodden on by poorly-paid rubble clearance teams. And the only X's in relation to what Americans call Gen X were the ones put on ballot papers next to Tony Bair's name in 1997 before everyone twigged he was a war criminal. We just don't really do generations.

xp haha, as a nearly 30 year old man I wanted to tell the characters to get off my lawn. I was a big fan of several of the actors, but much preferred them in other films.

I want to be part of the Greatest Generation, so unfair!

Sorry, Tom, we came in after the good times.

Was it “reality bites” not the “the big chill” for gen x

sorry for atrocious grammar

I have never seen The Big Chill.

I have not seen it in years, but have watched it probably upwards of a dozen times.

Holy shit, maybe I am a Boomer.

I've never seen Reality Bites. The movie young teenaged me watched and thought "I wanna be that guy!" was Repo Man.

And to be clear, I wanted to be Sy Richardson, not Emilio Estevez.

I was deeply embarrassed by Reality Bites at the time. I had friends who liked it but mostly I hated everything about it. I was 18 and had been through a lot already at that point and those people were not people I related to at all. Absolutely loathed Ethan Hawke and his character. I was a very grouchy jaded young person. As a GenXer frequently was.
I’ve grown to be much less of a hater but at the time hating was the only currency I had.

I feel reasonably millenial I guess. Born into a cozy End Of History consensus, radicalized by the '08 crisis. Remember a time before the internet, followed it as we both became older and worse. I don't think millenials have a Big Chill/Reality Bites type movie, though alarmingly enough it could still happen.

Well the character isn't a very good one though he redeems himself at the end. Kinda.

I think if I was 18 when I had seen it I might have felt similarly but I was a very bright-eyed young 15 y/o who didn't know better yet.

I think it's harry potter for them. Idk but I feel like milennials fucking love him and having never read nor seen any of it/them that's one thing that tells me I am definitely not one of them.

Harry Potter is not a Generational Statement! Of course there's tons of popcult I associate with millenials but Reality Bites/The Big Chill are explicitly about their generations.

The characters in The Big Chill were the cooler older siblings I didn't have. Interestingly, it was in heavy rotation among my friends in college in the mid-80s, which would have been more about 15 years removed from the college experience of those people.

"Cool" may be pushing it for some of them.

Mean Girls is the Millenial big chill/reality bites y/n

Hmmmm maybe? No, I don't think that's quite right but it's close.

Daniel I know! I was being silly but HP does seem like a very big deal for them.

It’s probably fight club or something

In the UK Skins is the millennial generational thingie, although I don't know how well remembered or loved it is.

Oh no it’s Garden State :-(

Fuck, it prob is Garden State at that

Mean Girls more like our Breakfast Club/Clueless

I am technically Gen X, since I was born in 1979, but never thought of myself that way, because almost all of the iconic Gen X cultural signposts were about people older than me who had deep knowledge of watching 1970s TV shows as children. Apart from My So-Called Life, there weren't many depictions of xennials for me to more closely relate to. Still, like Erica, I went to see Reality Bites at age 15 and vibed with it as a movie about people I didn't necessarily identify with but did think were *cool*, in that intriguing aspirational space between peers and parents. I also read the Douglas Coupland novels Generation X and Shampoo Planet around the same time and had similar feelings; they were appealing because they felt cutting-edge and zeitgeisty.

Yet here I am a scant 4 years older and repulsed by Reality Bites.

My comparison to Ethan Hawke that comes to mind for me is my abnormal parasocial relationship with Paul Westerberg. I really felt like he was speaking to me when I was 14-15. As I got older I fell out of that but it lingers as a touch point in that he was my idea of a cool guy I wanted to be in love with. Lol.

lol I also felt like Westerberg was speaking to me when I was 15, tho that was in 1985. (My first grumpy reaction to all the Gen X talk circa 1991 — when I was a grouchy jaded 21-year-old — was, "You do realize the Replacements invented all of this, right?")

lol it's totally Garden State!

donnie darko felt like more of a big millenial moment when i was in high school than garden state

and somehow appropriate that it's set in the 80s instead of the 00s

Really I feel like I'm the Simpsons/Seinfeld generation, if anything. Generation SNES.

i watched garden state tens of times in high school and attempted to revisit it a few years ago and gave up twenty minutes in, unwatchable. so yeah it's the millennial reality bites

agreed that donnie darko made a bigger impact and had a longer tail of influence, because it is actually good

How do we feel about the proliferation of "neuro-spicy"?

I heard this for the first time last week at a librarians' conference, when two young-ish information professionals from Ohio announced and detailed their neurospiciness for us at the start of their presentation: for one it was an auditory thing which meant she might have to ask us to repeat any questions, for the other it was a recall issue which meant she might at times have to refer to her notes. Both of these struck me as fairly standard aspects of giving a presentation, so fairly unspicy...? Neuro-korma maybe. Neither showed any unease at public speaking in a auditorium of 200 people; the presentation was faultless.

if it helps people with mental health issues self actualize then it’s probably good

" could care less" is just a linguistic peeve for me

"Could care less" has a cute twist to it, though. "I couldn't care less" is pretty definitive: "I care nothing about this topic, thus I couldn't care less." In contrast, "I could care less" has a kind of shruggish admission to it: "I suppose I could care less about this topic, now that I think about how little I care about it." Idk, I know it's a malapropism but it's always kinda delighted me. Generally though I quote the Quebecois when I need to express indifference: "J'care pas", lips slack and slightly open, tone extremely monotone, "pas" rhymes with "duh"

I would never in a million years say neuro-spicy, but I'm agnostic on other people using it if they're comfortable with it. To me it has an offputting cutesiness.

i think we need not try to shame entries to the thread else nothing wwould be allowable on such defence and we should try to have standards

neurospicy objectively awful like

For me Reality Bites was …to "ok now yr just pandering."

Neurospicy makes me think of Sapiosexual … it sounds like ur brain is hott?

This Soraya Roberts article on the whole backstory of Reality Bites is really good: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/03/reality-bites-captured-gen-x-25-years-later-helen-childress/583870/

I have never walked out of a movie except Garden State, what loathsome trash, tho I guess many Xers feel that way about Reality Bites. I have an abiding affection for Winona so

I don't think millenials have a Big Chill/Reality Bites type movie, though alarmingly enough it could still happen.

how have we come this far without anyone nominating Juno?

That's High School though when the others are all post college so not sure that really fits.

Had also thought of Can't Hardly Wait but again - HS. I think that and Juno are more equivalent to Pretty in Pink, B Club etc.