Boomers have plenty to say, but let’s be honest—if it’s a video, you’re watching it at 1.5x speed, and if it’s a Substack or a PDF, you’re skimming it at 2x. It’s the only way to bear it. Millennials and Zoomers? You don’t bother—most of them still need to season a bit before they say anything interesting. I’m biased, of course, but it takes a rare, maladjusted Gen Xer stumbling around to uncover an interesting take now and then. The rest? Zero-interest-rate fluff.

Boomers walk off with the spoils and leave the rest of us holding the bill, basking in the largesse of a post-war boom they had no hand in creating and every hand in hoarding. They lived large, laughed hard, and left Millennials with a finely-tuned hamster wheel, sleek and efficient but going nowhere. The Millennials patch the leaks and polish the machine, convinced they are saving the world while spinning endlessly in circles, mouths full of corporate “disruption” rhetoric that goes stale before it even hit the air.

Then come the Zoomers, born into a world already on fire, crawling through the wreckage of 2008, 2020, and everything in between. They have hustle, sure, but hustling on the edge of a cliff doesn’t get you far. Precarity is their inheritance—gig work, burnout, and the permanent anxiety of a future that never arrives. The System doesn’t even bother pretending to work for them.

Antiques dealer, machine psychologist. http://www.musicinphasespace.com