Cheugy and Intergenerational Conflict

Speaker A: 00:00:00

ey Hills high school in about: 2013

Speaker B: 00:00:57

What's that? It's a scene you're quite plugged into right? Yeah oh quite yeah yeah exactly.

Speaker A: 00:01:01

Youth correspondent Chris Wragg. Yeah a mere eight years later I picked up on the term but basically it's a term that is aimed at millennials by Gen Zers which kind of labels them as being a bit naff, out of touch, kind of characterizes some of their social media behaviors as kind of trying too hard. It's maybe it's a little bit anti sort of hipsterish. I'm getting criticized for being obsessed with skin tight jeans or something. Yeah skinny jeans are definitely now considered choogy and so yeah it's a kind of term that is like just slightly off trend or not even slightly off trend but fairly off trend but thinking that you are still on trend and also it's about being a bit of a try hard and you know perhaps curating your own life through the means of social media and so on. So that is the term as I understand it and it is now you haven't heard of it yet well you obviously have heard of it because I've just mentioned it to you but it will I suspect in the next six months be everywhere because it's the fact I've heard about it must mean it's about to become pandemic. But I think what's also good about it is this is the first time I think that you know the Gen Z really I know that the older ones are like they're in their mid-20s and stuff but you know they're really starting to be in jobs and have careers and doing and saying things and finally it's fun to have an ally I think if if you're not a millennial it's fun to have an ally at the other end of the spectrum. Because the poor old because you know as we all know the millennials don't come in for enough stick you know they get an easy ride from everyone so you know it's only fair that we have them being punched from the other side as well. Well I think the thing is you know what we can all sit back and apart from Tom and relax about is the fact it's not it's not our war to fight so you know. That's right it's almost a kind of divide and conquer strategy. You say that but

Speaker B: 00:03:28

I've been trying to revoke my millennial status for as long as possible. So this is interesting

Speaker A: 00:03:34

you know yeah well I was born: 1973

Speaker B: 00:05:48

normally draw the line either: 1994

Speaker A: 00:06:51

t and squire um Francis Bacon: 1625

Speaker C: 00:08:58

doubt will think us so what's it all about well look I mean we're we're not we're probably about 10 minutes in and is this end of podcast because it does feel like you know this has been going

Speaker A: 00:09:12

on forever so there's your answer is that it Chris yeah well I mean I I think there's um I I think that the sort of cyclicality angle is quite is quite interesting or or rather you know the way it's not just the fact that uh generations dislike one another it's why they dislike one another and I think that does change sort of subtly um and and the actually we talk about generations as if it is you know um actually sort of you know well now nowadays you know most people would have children in their late 20s or early 30s right so that would be the the the definition of a of a generation today but actually we're talking about micro generations really if you look at if you look at the sort of shifts and the kind of that um animosity between different age groups you know if you look at kind of uh hippies to punks to to new romantics you know idealism to sort of nihilism to to materialism it it happened in you know 10 or 15 years so you're like an eternity at the time it did it did feel like an eternity at the time yeah uh but it doesn't um so so we I think there's something that is not strictly captured by the idea of of children and their parents railing against their parents it's more in this case this notion of chugi is is not people saying oh my parents are terrible it's saying like my older siblings or you know the the kind of co-workers the co-workers who I now see you know maybe seven eight years nine ten years older than me are are really annoying for the following reasons so I think that's what we're getting at rather than necessarily this you know this more historic generational um uh kind of factor and I feel like yeah that's that's something which is just more manifest now because there are so there are so many more ways to um kind of display and uh create

Speaker C: 00:11:27

a record of your your behavior through so you're saying that there's been a kind of a slipping in the in the scales as it were um and and so yeah as you say it's no longer looking at those above me

Speaker A: 00:11:41

or further in it's as you say it's my co-workers yeah but I think it's interesting that Chris is using culture which I think is a key is that's something I think we need to talk about as a as a sort of something defining about a generation here and and if that's true then you could I think you could make a very plausible argument that culture has sped up in the sense that you know the amount of change in the type of entertainment and art produced um it seems to be faster now than it was say 100 years ago um simply because of the speed with which it could be transmitted and you know cultures can grow around those things um so so I think yeah that's an interesting uh theory it feels like it sort of fits in well with the idea that there's been a kind of acceleration in in the rate of culture change you know yeah so there's more reasons to be more quickly um well let's get I want to get Tom's view because I feel we need to hear from Tom a bit out of it all

Speaker B: 00:12:40

really so I was going to just build on your point Nick about it being a cultural thing but a lot of sociologists have also uh taken account with that by pointing out that effectively culture isn't one thing there are a lot of components that make up culture so if you look at for example like a political generation as it were that might not line up with the the boundaries that you apply to uh you know a literary generation or a musical generation uh which I think also goes some way to explaining the kind of the blurred edges that we described earlier you know for example you might have similar politics to the the generation above you but you know cultural and musical tastes that are more in in common with the generation below um I'd also note that the the way that generations are defined in sociology um so Chris you've already touched on the the original biological definition of generation which is simply you know parent to child to child to child to child etc um but since kind of Karl Mannheim who was one of the the kind of big sociologists who first started like talking about generations from an academic point of view they've really been treated more as um so I'm gonna I'm gonna quote here from a paper by uh Alan Spitzer um so generations are conceived as groups of co-avals people of roughly the same age whose shared experience significantly distinguishes them from contemporaries in other age groups so almost by definition that's baking in generational conflict because you're saying that the reason we're thinking about these people is because they disagree with these people yeah so it kind of presupposes that there will be an organizing principle in itself so yeah yeah okay so in a way observing that there is generational conflict becomes meaningless because you've basically defined them yeah but I think I mean I think the the problem

Speaker A: 00:14:39

rd: 1996

Speaker B: 00:28:20

that now you know z generation zed uh are making up more and more of the contemporary uh cultural scene if you look at like the age who runs youtube who runs youtube and tick tock uh so but are we talking about the platform or the actual people who make the content like who because you know if you say bob dillon like it was bob dillon who made the songs right whereas you know his his label were probably older than him sure but you know the actual people who have the cultural weight now would you say they align more with the actual generation that they

Speaker A: 00:28:58

unfortunately i'm just i'm going to expose my ignorance here and so i don't know who they are um right you know i don't know who the big sort of influencers are really do you do you know or are you out of it now what with you being a kind of well i i wouldn't want i think i know but i

Speaker B: 00:29:13

wouldn't want to say names in case i embarrass myself go on have a stab but for example if you look at like you know for example billy eilish is definitely gen z right i think she's right like 18 or 19 18 19 yeah you know and she's obviously one of the kind of you know biggest kind of pop stars that's emerged in recent years and similarly if you look at go back a sort of a decade or so to look at like you know when katie perry and lady gaga were topping the charts all the time they were solidly of millennial age right and they were influencing millennials so i think that that mismatch that you're describing has disappeared somewhat as you know younger people essentially make it into more influential cultural roles yeah i wonder if

Speaker A: 00:30:00

we'll look back and say that the key influencers were the content creators all the people running the algorithms though i mean i just i sort of wonder if the the kind of defining experience of the last 10 years has been let's say something like content you know user-created content yeah and again i want the people who the people who decided it was going to be user-generated content that gen z are enjoying are all millennials and you know late gen x i mean i wonder the extent to which history is written by the old boring people so actually if you were genuinely if you're genuinely being a hippie maybe you thought bob dylan was a bit naff you know maybe there were some other people who we we aren't aware of just like people looking back on today might say oh yeah you know the the real people influencing youth were mark zuckerberg and elon musk and everybody's like no they know they weren't but that somehow gets written into the history because it's people like us who look back and go oh what can we find in the historical record oh these people looked important i bet they were really influential um guys i think that sorry wait sorry tom um because we need to finish pretty shortly um i'm not i think i think we've got somewhere um i don't think there's i don't know if there's something to draw it all together um but oh i've got i've got a question we can ask brilliant well we've got a data point of

Speaker C: 00:31:28

view okay i want to hear the data no no well i want to hear from tom and then i want to hear this

Speaker B: 00:31:35

this question uh go for it tom well um so what i was going to say i was going to complain about the four turnings theory but instead i'll talk about my my data request yeah there's probably

Speaker A: 00:31:44

no need because i think what we're saying is that it's unfalsifiable and probably nonsense

Speaker B: 00:31:48

i just really like it it's just that people people just like categorize things as crises to make it fit and then they're like no no first world war no that doesn't count as a crisis yeah um uh so yeah what i would really like to see is we've talked about you know the very vague boundaries of generations and whether it's cultural whether it's values based all sorts what i would like to see is uh you know a data set encompassing let's say survey results right of people of all ages like a snapshot people of you know everyone in the country at a moment in time that has things like their cultural tastes their their values all sorts um to which you could then do some analysis you could do for example a clustering analysis to see if you do get distinct clusters are there like different groups of people with values and then are those

Speaker A: 00:32:43

based on age you know the continuous attitude survey which you could probably uh yeah run a rollover and unfortunately it's it's yeah even then what you really want is a cohort sort of based approach where we've got 50 or 100 years of that data so that we can separate age effects which from generation effects because you know it might be we talked we done done a podcast previously about you know why people are people more right wing as they get older and you have to distinguish the you know the time you're born versus the age you are i'm not sure that matters

Speaker B: 00:33:17

because inherently people who are in their 40s were all born around the same time

Speaker A: 00:33:24

so i suppose what i mean is the same as generational let's say that we we we can we find a meaningful difference between um oh i see what you mean so is there are there are there can we is are there joints which we can cut generations even within a certain uh is there some significant difference between 25 year olds and 35 year olds which isn't true of 35 to 45 or something like

Speaker B: 00:33:46

that exactly yeah so so i think from what i'm groups of people with different values but they actually have nothing to do with their ages it could be to do with their you know their social status or

Speaker A: 00:33:55

their geographic origin or anything i think some from what i've seen it is more the latter like actually that's that's the troubling thing about generation theory is that it there aren't really you know really significant cutoffs which is annoying and feels counterintuitive we and on that point we need to draw that discussion to a close um nick what's your question right so let's let's let's run with the idea that we're both on the trousers theory and on the four turnings theory that we're at some significant point of you know with the generation z is probably coming to an end and we've got a new generation coming up what are they gonna be what are they gonna think so they're gonna be called oh well is that question right well it would have to be generation we've run out of omega so this is what so sorry what the question is what's comes next after generation generation z we should probably be generation aa if we're going by yeah generation double a isn't it out there i've already seen stuff because i think i think we've talked about generation alpha because this will be our kids won't it is that right well no i mean my kids are kind of generation z really okay well mine must be as well then now i'm talking about people who are like very little now okay who are just sort of you know so we think the people who are

Speaker C: 00:35:19

coming after generation z well hold on so what so our kids sorry you said our kids are generation

Speaker A: 00:35:27

z already um and generation z are meant to be going to be even more um technologically savvy growing up is i mean well okay i mean so we're talking about we're talking about people born in from the late 90s to quite recently from say five years ago or something so we've got a new generation i'm just i'm just asking for for completely unfounded speculation about what we think their kind of values are going to be like i've got i've got some potential answers but i don't want to i don't want to yeah yeah i yeah let's start off with chris what do you yeah well my my the the the optimist in me uh thinks that that they will they will reject the current um ubiquity of of technology or certainly of social media that there will be you know a a sense that this is ridiculous recording everything is both pointless and damaging to oneself so let's not not do that that's what that's what the optimist in me hopes for

Speaker B: 00:36:38

okay we won't go on to the pessimist um tom i i think you'll see a similar kind of thing to gen x to millennial because i think gens that are often characterized as very cynical and i reckon the generation that follows them will kind of react to that and be kind of more more earnest as it were um whether that's a good thing or not i'll i'll let you decide yeah i've decided

Speaker A: 00:37:06

um nick yeah so i was trying to think of what what are the pervasive phenomena that we have now if you think about say the boomers sort of coming of age in the late 50s and early 60s and and seeing social conformity and railing against it i'm i sort of imagine people who are you know uh young now very young now will see things like you know political polarization culture wars um the politicization of the personal and of you know the prevalence of social media everywhere as chris says but also a kind of moral censoriousness that uh is around now and i suspect yeah so i i think we might see something more like the kind of late 19th century edwardian sort of um sort of slightly kind of consensual a bit of rejection of traditional politics um transgressive being deliberately kind of pushing up boundaries instead of trying to conform within them um and uh and i think like chris i i i would like to see what uh rejection of technology would look like you know the idea that oh god you know generation z or whatever are always on their phones uh tweeting about things but we we we live life you know we like to everyone leaves their phones at home when they go out of an evening because um you know because they're it's considered really naff to be in contact with people and stuff could be quite an interesting trend to watch for would be interesting for listeners 20 years hence go god those guys were so wrong well they won't be able to listen to it because it'll be on it'll be on the internet and everyone will have forgotten what that is exactly yeah all right uh we'll stop there um as always thanks for listening if you've got any thoughts or suggestions for topics you can email us at podcast at aleph insights.com we'd love to hear from you also if you enjoyed the podcast what should people do nick uh yep tap that like button i can't think i didn't i haven't got a thematic thing has anyone got thematic i thought you would be good for this one no i hadn't thought about this to be honest um do you want to have a go tom what should people do uh like and subscribe i think they should sneeringly ironically um sort of eschew the like button or something like that all right um we'll stop there thanks as always for listening i'm Fraser McGruer we've been here with Tom Spence, Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and until next time goodbye