I’m a 28-year-old millennial engaged to a 23-year-old zoomer and our five-year age gap is nothing compared to our generational gap.
At first, I thought of our generation gap as two different ways of knowing. Take social media, for example. Zoomers tend to favour short-form content, like TikTok and YouTube Shorts. millennials prefer long-form content, like video essays, podcasts and books. I assumed our media-landscapes reflected our mental-maps, the ways we engage with the world and understand it. Technology has shaped our worldviews and our values, which is what I mean by a cultural difference between zoomers and millennials.
Does your partner remember 9/11?
Our generation gap is actually two different ways of being, which are informed by more than our relationships to technology. Consider some of the most significant events of our generations’ lifetimes.
Some millennials are old enough to remember life before smartphones and before 9/11. We were there to witness the transformation of our daily lives as our sense of safety and prosperity turned to paranoia and uncertainty. We millennials saw rapid increases in cyber security and the crash of 2008.
Zoomers saw similar events, growing up with the impacts of post-2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic. My fiancée’s generation became adults with that financial crisis and a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. Zoomers were shaped by this experience of decline and isolation. Their crises, paired with the further encroachment of what Neil Postman, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, calls a “peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again,” combines to create an adverse sense of detachment.
Do you understand your partner’s jokes?
It’s no secret zoomers are more ironic than previous generations. In attempting to understand their humour, I’ve read about more types of irony that many English classes teach: irony, post-irony, meta-irony, etc. What all these ironies have in common is an appreciation for the absurd. True, all humour involves some sort of exaggeration and absurdity, but zoomers seem to see the absurd, or what they can define as the absurd, itself as humorous.
Their emphasis on the ironic and the absurd is part of their overall pattern, their worldview, which speaks to the generational gap between millennials and zoomers. Millennials are still optimistic, to an extent, yet their sense of optimism has been shaken through the course of current events. Zoomers, I suspect, lost their optimism before they had it. Financial crisis and COVID-19 combined to convince zoomers hope is pointless.
Zoomers are not lost, they’re hopeless. The isolation imposed upon all populations reinforced zoomers’ sense of the inherent instability of our world. So they’ve grown accustomed to taking pleasure in brief bursts, not from building or investing in some long-term project whose results they may never see.
The generation gap between millennials and zoomers could be considered a cultural difference. Our maps of this world are distinct. They do not overlap as much as millennials relate to previous generations.
Bridging the gap
Essentially, the difference between my millennial worldview and my fiancée’s zoomer worldview is where we find value, meaning and humour.
There’s a distance between zoomers and the world at which they’re laughing. This space they create implicitly reinforces their sense of autonomy, which they may or may not actually feel, and allows them to laugh through any and all absurdities they encounter.
Millennials, on the other hand, seem to find humour less in the absurdities of events or stories and more in the awkwardness which arises from sincere attempts at connection. Millennial is about laughing at the absurdity of sincerity, of the honest desire to establish mutual, intimate relationships with other people.
Zoomers laugh at absurd events, while millennials laugh at absurd attempts.
Our distinct senses of humour is, of course, reflected in our media choices — the kind of content we choose to consume. But it’s also evident in our values and the ways we approach daily life. Millennials are often optimistic enough to invest their time and energy in a long-term career path, while zoomers are more cautious, opting to spend theirs in the here and now, moment-to-moment.
The generational differences in an age-gap relationship are more interesting, and more important, to consider than how many years apart you were born. Can you share jokes? Can you share experiences? Are you able to relate to your partner, despite the years between you? To me, those are questions more worth pondering.
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