My daughter was born in 1998. I was born in 1956. In sociological terms, she is a “zoomer” and I am a “boomer”. This vocabulary sounds like an idiotic Hollywood comedy, but it is what has come to be used to describe the generations that now occupy the two extremes of the biological arc: the retirees, or those approaching retirement age, who were born during the demographic boom of the 1950s and 1960s, versus those born around the new millennium who are now starting to make a living (the so-called Z generation). In other words, the sixty-somethings versus the twenty-somethings. The generation of those who first saw a television at home versus the generation of those who grew up with a mobile phone on their bedside table. In short, boomers versus zoomers.
A boomer grew up in a home where there were siblings – usually many of them – because the family was so big (and the flat so small), with both father and mother as well as grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. But that kind of traditional family is inconceivable to a zoomer who has grown up in a squalid family – and very often in a mono-parental, or rather mono-marental family – and with hardly any contact with siblings or grandparents or uncles and aunts or cousins. When we talk about the notorious emotional fragility of zoomers, we forget that they have usually grown up in environments where loneliness reigned and where human contact, and the emotional stability that comes from it, was very rare. Zoomers know their pets much better than they know their fathers (assuming they know them personally). Their emotional world is built on shifting sands.
More differences. In the age of Instagram and TikTok, any teenager witnesses the humiliating spectacle of other people’s happiness on a daily basis – dramatised, scripted, pretended – which they perceive as real when their own is precarious or non-existent. Hence the anguish, hence the insecurity, hence the continuous existential crisis. Why are others so happy when I am so miserable?, the zoomers ask themselves. Unfortunately, they don’t realise that those thousands of influencers (both males and females) who are constantly showing off on social networks are just as unhappy as they are. Or much more so.
And finally, there is one unavoidable factor that cannot be forgotten: work-related stress. We boomers grew up in a world that seemed to offer us countless job opportunities. We knew that with a bit of luck we could find a moderately satisfying job and the subsequent opportunity to buy a flat or a house (however modest it might be). Zoomers, on the other hand, know that this is very difficult: jobs are precarious, wages are meagre and job opportunities are scarce. In these conditions, it is impossible to consider buying a house (or even renting a flat). The punks of the 70s said they had no future, but that motto is much more applicable to the poor zoomers. And yet we have barely begun to talk about Artificial Intelligence, a civilisational leap similar to the transition from the Palaeolithic to the Neolithic.
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