Narrative Warfare: How To Trap Gen X

Settle in. This is a Big Think.

Dragon Award winner and nominee Brian Niemeier has done good work in restoring sense to generational reckoning and identifying each cohort's common attributes. What I'm going to talk about below follows on his posts here, here, and here; review them before proceeding if you need to. He focuses on Generation Y, but in the context of the larger living cohorts and the problems the Boomers made for the rest of us.

Aydin Paladin put out one of her hour-or-so videos recently, on Parasocial Relationships, in the context of Pop Culture Franchises and why these matter to the success thereof- and why Mouse Wars screwed the pooch. This too plays into what's going on here today.

If you want the TL/DR, the relevant timestamps are here, here, and here. I do urge you to watch it in its entirety, and if you really want more follow-up the sources she cites.

Finally, a note on something I call "cultural lag".

Information travels as fast as the fastest available medium allows. Slow transfer of information results in signficant variation between locations, when talking about culture. The rise of mass media, starting with the printing press, sped up the transfer of information. At each instance of refinement or improvement, this speed increased and with it came a homogenizing effect; this was not notiticable for most people because the pre-19th century rates of change were just slow enough to escape the notice of all but the elderly, but with the explosion of mass media starting then massive homogenization happened and it only got worse as the media got faster. Today, the Internet is homogenizing the planet, and yes various mass media observers and critics noticed--and have noticed for generations--but to no beneficial effect to date.

This lag-time of cultural transmission from points of origin to the most remove nodes is the cultural lag time, and it plays into specific individuals regarding how they do or do not manifest certain cohort profile traits. Someone born and raised (e.g.) on the coasts where the media culture is core to the local economy is far more likely to possess a given generational cohort trait than someone who was a child in a small town in Flyover Country until they somehow got into university or joined the military. This time has all but collapsed in the West with the Millenials.

Why does this matter? Best explained with a story.

Last night, a perfect Gen Y Nostalgia Trap post came across my Twitter feed. While Brian and a few others correctly saw that frame, what got me was the mother at the end saying "He's always happy now."

That, friends, is how you trap Gen X.

Valentine's Day is ruined for me. Not because some girl broke my heart, but because some gold-digging thot drove a gaming buddy of mine to drink himself to death. He died almost 16 years ago; he was my age, and so would be 45--46 this month--if he were still alive. I won't name him; it's not necessary. He was prime Gen X; curmudgeonly, cynical, and--like far too many of us--sold a bill of goods, realized he got had, and then figured out how screwed he was so he gave up. Stuck in strings of dead end jobs he could never keep for long, already a diabetic, had a booze problem, perpetually living the Uni Bro life of renting a room in a house just off campus rather than go home- not that he could. His cynicism was his way to cope, and like that old Garbage song he was only happy when it rained. He was the guy that coped with living in the metaphorical trenches, but he didn't want to stay there.

He had buddies, pals, etc. who'd lend him a hand here and there, but he was a man without brothers- and like many he had issues with God because the church failed.

But, deep down, he wanted the things his elders had--and promised him, even if implicitly so--but denied. He wanted the meaningfulness, but had no clue how to get it- only what it looked and felt like.

Then the thot came. We didn't have that word then, but if a guy like Roosh had seen what went down--before or after his Road to Damascus moment--he would've been slamming that Red Alert button like the fist of an angry God. She was about 10 years his senior, as I recall; post-Wall, but still attractive- especially to an affection-starved man like him, and once she got past that shell of cynicism she had him. Even at the time, "He's happy" wasn't said with unreserved joy; all of us who saw them figured something was wrong.

It was. She used him as a boytoy while swimming through our social circles looking for something bigger, and she found a much older man--a Boomer with about as much gray hair as zeroes in his net worth--that she latched on to without a second thought. My man got tossed like a used rag, and she ended up marrying the older simp. My man was happy, and in an instant he felt it ripped out of him, and that was one blow too much. I don't recall the exact timeline, but if I have the details correct it was her getting engaged with the simp, then breaking it off with my pal, then him drinking until he fell into a diabetic coma and died.

She attended the funeral with the simp boyfriend.

Like many of us who were his pals, I tossed a die into his casket. He had at least three full sets for D&D when it was over. At the time I was just glad that his pain had finally stopped, and then I got angry about it all, but--like him--I couldn't do anything useful about it. Then more shit happened and time moved on; only on the anniversary does the nerve get rubbed again.

What's going on here?

The way to trap Gen X is to offer him what his Boomer elders denied him, and that requires selling him a fake relationship- which is a weaponized parasocial one. It's a long con, and a dangerous one, but if you can pull it off you've got a success as powerful as love-bombing someone into a cult- and, quite frankly, that's what it is. It's just a cult with just one member, the Xers you trapped. The more you know about that specific Xer, the more you can exploit cultural lag to fine-tune your approach even if you are otherwise coming in cold; someone from a poor working class household in rural Iowa isn't likely to have Atari 2600 memories to exploit.

You have to offer him love, affection, meaning- things his elders should have provided, but didn't, because they hated him and his peers (even if no specific individual abuse occurred, institutional indifference will suffice) and wanted him to Go Away Kid, You're Bothering Me. If he found surrogates for what his elders denied him, there's your in; you use them to make contact and establish rapport that you can build upon to draw him into a love-bomb attack and start turning him into your asset.

And the real tragedy is this: surviving one such trap doesn't make a Gen Xer immune to it. It just makes future attempts require more cunning; the scarring of cynicism grows back thicker for those who survive. This also makes recovery harder; you have to convince an Xer to want it to get that to happen, and for that you have to use the Rhetoric of Demonstration. Show Don't Tell. And, for the love of God, tell the whole truth about how to get there when asked. When an Xer is ready, they'll commit.