#zillenial struggles

[niconiconwo]

Just btw, the reason I got out of IOP early is because all the losers being babies about the pandemic hit me like that screencap from 4chan where the guy was bewildered out of being fucked up.

[autisticlancemcclain]

fic rec friday 37

hello and welcome to fic rec friday! where, on friday, i rec five of my favourite fics.

1. Fade to Black by @yokohogawa

Things between Keith and Lance are changing but Keith is restless, especially with Shiro still weak, and ends up taking a bad decision: he leaves Lance alone in the Castle with a Lion he cannot pilot. Unable to form Voltron without the newly appointed Red Paladin, the four Paladins left struggle against the sudden attack of a Galra ship and later on take damage from the explosion of a star in close proximity. Lance, on the other end, is left to defend the Castle by himself and has little time to succeed: without energy, the Lions have only 6 hours of breathable air. Beyond that point, his friends will be dead.

okay yes technically this series is unfinished. HOWEVER the first two works ARE finished, and they are amazing showstopping incredible etc. tbh im not much of a black paladin lance fan, i genuinely think solo leadership is not what he is suited for, but this fic made me way more open to it. the way he handled severe crises was as fear stricken as it was awe inspiring highly recommend

2. once again i am a child by @lilaclavenders

“You’re not a spare tyre,” Adam interjects.  “I know that,” Lance says, too unsure to sound completely defensive.   “That almost sounded like a question.” “No... it didn’t,” Lance says.

Lance and Adam talk.

i have always been a fan of lance and adam even tho its the most evidence lacking fanon thing in this fandom. its truly just so interesting. and to have lance as a young cadet getting slammed so badly just in so many different directions being given at least one grownup in his corner...its a good read.

3. Lance the language man by @irish-vampire-blog

Lance didn't really try to learn a language. He just, kind of, picks up the basics and then works from there. Its usually unintentional. Ish.

He isn't stupid though. He isn't an idiot. He just isn't the same kind of smart as his friends are.

this kind of smart for lance is so REAL bc no he cannot do like quantum physics or whatever probably but the way he seems to have a pretty innate ability to successfully do many things that he tries. he just can u know?? thats the autism with the gay audacity i would imagine but i love seeing fics like this

4. my boyfriend's back (and you're gonna get in trouble) by teacupfulofbrains

hey la, hey la, my boyfriend's back

Keith Kogane has never heard of Vine. Lance McClain takes personal offense to this, and makes it his personal mission to teach his boyfriend to meme. Keith is confused, mostly.

(OR: several instances of Keith not getting the meme™ and two times he did)

I LOVE THIS FIC SO BAD I CANT BELIEVE I HAVENT RECCED IT BEFORE. yes i am a cringe zillenial who still finds vine funny and quotes it on the internet but truly idc idc. this fic is funny. this fic is cute. established klance my love and light. also keith comparing lances eyes to the star of bombay is some of the gayest shit ever and also the only time i will entertain blue eyed lance

5. The Most Dangerous Thing is to Love by running_downn

Last time something like this happened to Lance, Keith wasn’t there. He’d thought he would have been able to do something if he had been there, or at least if he was, the guilt wouldn’t be so heavy on his chest. But this time he was there. He was right fucking there and he decided that it was infinitly worse.

~

Basically there's a new threat after the Galra and it almost kills Lance. Desperate making out ensues, but it's okay to recognize when it's not the right time for it. Keith cries a lot cause he's older and grizzled and therefore not as emotionally stunted.

green sock reality? team still out fighting as adults and lance isn’t a fucking farmer while the rest of the team isn’t? keith’s abandonment issues treated with respect and dignity and also the acknowledgement that he’s older and therefore mature enough to handle those issues in a way that doesn’t risk a relationship that is important to him? lance understanding all this and using the supportive nature he is known for??? yes yes yes. stellar fic that should have way more hits than it does

that’s it for today!! i’ll see y’all back next friday for the next fic rec post!!!

[dracaryswonder]

<<Not just the stalking delulus, most of the judgy crowd on BTM on Reddit is also middle aged women. They will not hesitate to pronounce him a grandiose psychopath with next to near evidence while struggling to hide how badly they want to sleep with him. >>

Okay but fr some of the people on that subreddit are something else. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, some people are treating his case as confirmation bias for their own morality superiority complexes. It’s for sure some sort of righteousness thing for them. Some of the more ridiculous things I’ve seen, include:

1) somehow infantilizing a grown ass man but also undercutting the fact that HE IS YOUNG so of course he’s still trying to figure things out. Oh and they also refuse to acknowledge his own agency, while simultaneously jumping to conclusions based on limited info and then degrade/judge him based on those conclusions.

2) pass severe judgment and make major assumptions about him, his personal life, and personality to demonstrate his “narcissism, hubris, arrogance, etc.” while they’re all playing detective and lawyer on a subreddit (bffr). Also I’m begging these armchair psychologists to read academic sources on narcissism because news flash; we all have narcissistic tendencies but that doesn’t make you a narcissist (it’s a very specific diagnosis that I guarantee no one on reddit is qualified to make).

3) I 100% agree with this anon that you can tell the judgiest people are middle aged/older, because the amount of pearl clutching they do over typical zillenial behaviour is ridiculous. I’m the same age as him (we’re a few months apart) and literally nothing about him seems out of the ordinary for people our age. He’s literally a guy in his mid 20s, he’s allowed to have a personality and a sense of humour that’s reflective of his generation.

4) as anon said, while they do all this song and dance it is blatantly obvious how badly they wanna fuck him and they’re embarrassed by it lol. Look, he’s hot and I think anyone with 2 eyes knows that. Finding people who are younger than you attractive- WHO ARENT MINORS- isn’t inherently bad. What makes you a fucking weirdo is when you obsessively snark over them to make yourself feel better over liking him. Something something about the opposite of love isn’t hate it’s indifference or whatever. Like babes, you have all these judgements about him (which btw I’m also begging people to understand that we don’t know him and a digital footprint only tells you so much) and yet he lives in your mind rent free and you live on that subreddit. It’s giving obsessed and you ain’t fooling people.

5) don’t even get me started on the men lmao they’re arguably worse but I won’t get into that.

I agree with all your points. I haven’t looked at that subreddit in a week and my life finally knows peace!

[bmpmp3]

it does piss me off when people talk about zillenials/genz/people my age not knowing how to write cursive because they only type/are lazy/arent taught/whatever when they see me struggle with writing because like MAYBE thats the case for other zillenials but LEAVE ME out of it I CANT WRITE because i have a learning disability

[mysticalsadgirl]

I always want to make fic playlists but then I remember that I'm an uncultured zillenial when it comes to music and I struggle to listen to anything from earlier than the 90s that's not disco music

[chubbyfeedeefemboi]

So what's your fat story? WHat made you want to get fat and sexy?

So basically when I was younger I was forced onto meds I didn't need and they like permafucked up my metabolism and how I put on weight. I struggled a lot off and on with my body image and feeling good about myself for like a bunch of reasons yno general zillenial era constant pressure to be skinny sort of stuff. Fast forward to me being like 2 years into transition and healing a bit and having a much clearer and better sense of self I was like this constantly managing my food and not doing things I wanna do sucks and isn't making me as happy as I could be and like mused on what I actually wanted to be and eventually thought back to my best friend who was this really cute adorable fat enbie who had incredible vibes and just were who they were 100% and I was like I always thought they were super fucking cute and their body and style and energy was like goals.

So I basically just full stop started trying to just eat whenever I wanted to eat and whatever I want(even if that meant me eating cinnamon rolls for lunch everyday for a few weeks cause it just sounded good to me) and just being who I was without trying to make myself feel bad about it.

Turns out I just love being a cute as hec piggy housepet who doesn't do much and just plays games and snuggles faer plushies and snacks alot and is just a generally saccharine critter and thats p rad of me an led me here 🥰🥰

[teenagefeeling]

you know what im thinking about the phone call thing and honestly i think the biggest reason young people struggle with them is because we literally don't do them and never had that formative experience growing up of learning proper, old-school phone etiquette. im a zillenial and i grew up with a landline but we got rid of it when i turned like 12 and i really never got used to using it on my own. watching seinfeld is like a period piece to me, the way they talk about phone calls is completely fucking foreign. they call someone to set up a date and then worry about calling them afterwards???? not an experience i've ever had lmao. honestly, past the age of about 12 i can count on one hand the amount of phone calls i've made that have been purely social and not commerce-related and most of them have been with my parents or grandparents.

so yeah, young people tend to be a little nervous making phone calls because we never really got used to doing it and we know if we fuck it up in front of anyone, all the older people in the room are gonna roll their eyes and call us snowflakes. i think it's actually very a reasonable thing to feel.

(that being said, i used to have a phobia so bad that i'd have to have someone next to me every time i made a call because i had a tendency to freeze with fear and not be able to finish the conversation and now i make mimimum ~20 phone calls a week for my job with no issues at all so it can be done <3 it just takes practice imo, like in any social situation i just needed a script and some guidelines. which i realize is a very neurodivergent thing to say lol, but i think that's also a huge factor for a lot of people so i do wanna reassure you all that that won't hold you back ❤️)

[245inthemorning]

why do zillenials/zoomers think they are the first group of people to ever struggle financially or not have things all figured out in life

[joe-moi]

Man i really dont feel like i belong to gen z

Im a zillenial for sure

zillenials definitely will side more with one then the other I’ve found. I’m a very young millennial, but I am a millennial and I struggle to find similarities to gen z: they amaze and confuse me

[phnxpcky]

So I recently watched Stephanie Soo's (Missmangobutt) "Baking a Crime" video about the movie "In time" (I know the video is a year old but anyhow) and I watched this movie forever ago when it first came out but at the time I was too young to have any thoughts about it other than "huh that was an interesting and exciting movie". I've basically forgotten about the movie since then but then I watched Stephanie's video and she of course commented on how the movie is, in a way, an interesting portrayal and critique of our current society.

If you haven't watched the movie before, it's basically about a futuristic version of society where everyone stops aging at the age of 25 but also at the age of 25 the rest of the time in your life basically becomes currency. So you will never grow physically another day older after the age of 25 but starting at 25, you start paying for and get paid in the amount of time you have left to life (e.g. You might pay a convenience store 5 minutes of your life for a bottle of water or 500 hours of your life for each month of rent, someone might pay you 6 hours of their life to fix their roof, and you might put down 10 hours of your life for a round of poker in hopes you'll win 20 hours back). Your bank account is literally the amount of time you have left to live and it's constantly going down (talk about your no/low interest bank account actually losing value with each passing moment....) until the moment it hits 0 when you'll just drop dead. This means the poor are literally struggling to stay alive from day to day while the rich basically life forever.

That's the general context of the movie, there is obviously a statement being made about income inequality and the 1% vs 99% when you have the super poor literally struggling to stay alive juxtaposed against the super rich basically living forever but I won't go into details because as a Zillenial in 2023, I've a few other interesting thoughts about the movie now.

Basically, I don't think that kind of society would have lasted very long. I'm basing this on several things including the lie flat and let rot movements by the Millenials and Gen Z in China, the quiet quitting trend in at least the US, North Korea literally making suicide illegal because they started having a suicide problem, and just the overall terrible state of mental health across the world. It's all just not a great recipe for a society where if you're not crazy wealthy and you don't work like a slave you'll simply drop dead. To be quite frank, there are currently many significantly worse ways to go than to just drop dead. I don't know the details on how people die in the movie but if it's a split second thing like it's shown to be, it can't be more painful than the current way most poor people die (slowly from starvation/illness/physical injuries). I can see Millenials and Gen Z getting dropped in the world of "In Time" and everyone basically goes "soooo lifetime of miserably slaving away or nonstop partying for about a month before just dropping dead? Guess it'll be the craziest party of the century". The society basically built in an easy and possibly painless if not as least minimally painful way out. The movie literally starts with a man who is over 100 years old giving away the 100 years he still has because he's tired of living. What's to say the people that're grinding everyday for an extra 12 hours won't get tired and just be like "you know what just going in my sleep sounds not bad actually". Once all the poor start dying out the rich will realize that suddenly there aren't anybody left to help them uphold their lavish lifestyles. Sure they may have an eternity to live but there won't be very many people, if anybody, around to build their mansions and farm the food for their 3 star Michelin meals. It'd all fall apart pretty quickly. What do you think?

[mionakt]

are there also alot of zoomers struggling in nz

I think so, definitely with Zillenials, a lot of people move to Australia because they pay better/overall have a better quality of life and I know I want to move overseas so I think there definitely is with the cost of living crisis

[turnways]

Dnt rb

I hate being a zillenial and watching people struggle with the idea that “youre brainwashed by the patriarchy to view your body as only worthy if its sexually appealing to cishet men” and “youre brainwashed by the patriarchy to be ashamed of your sexuality and desires” arent concepts with unrelated roots

[bottaslicious]

Weeping about ur tags about younger drivers being super hard on themselves and obsessively asking for forgiveness. Ur so right! Thank u for perspective 😭

I feel like this is a very controversial thing to say - it is certainly an extremely multifaceted topic - but I really think there’s a risk for the “social media” generation of drivers just burning themselves out because they’re so self-punishing. Like it’s not uncommon for zillenials and zoomers to struggle with finding the boundaries on social media and overshare. Add extreme fame to this, massive audiences and live feeds that can show your worst moments. I think many of them have a compulsive need to address themselves and attempt to curate their image in a way that’s very...... misplaced. Even if they express it in a mature, appropriate fashion, I always get this “oh no everyone will always remember what an idiot i was so i have to get in the gag and minimise it” feel and like. It’s a very normal thought pattern that everyone gets, and in some form more true with their situation - everything is recorded, everything is seen, everything gets memed - but they fail to grasp the bigger image and realise that if it’s not colossal or continuous, it probably isn’t going to ruin them. (Obviously there’s a lot of overlap with image control and other things, as I said, this is massively complicated and there’s not one right aspect to evaluate this from.)

[patchdotexe]

actually the “english is my first language” thing feels so weird for me to say bc like.. it IS true... and im not fluent in any other languages... but it also just feels like The Tiniest Bit Incorrect. i guess its bc of like, me learning english thru Books:tm: and that mostly happening while i was in a country where only a few ppl i knew spoke english? so i didnt really have anybody, like, Properly Teaching Me or w/e’s supposed to happen there

then again i feel like that with a Lot of stuff bc my education is all kinds of fucked up. like, both in actual schooling and in Pop Culture whatever bc i was completely Away from america from when i was 6 to when i was 10 (and missed out on like, 2nd and 3rd grade asides from vague homeschooling) so a lot of ~90s Kids~, or i guess ~Zillenial Kids~ stuff goes right over my head and i feel weird about it

cause like. i struggle with words, i barely know anything abt history, i dont remember a lot of cartoons or books or popular toys or anything, im just... in a very weird place with like. all that.

anyway im still mad about salmon being said w/o an L

[sinweichen]

Also while I'm on the topic, in regards to Zillenials, Xillenials, and other micro-generations and cusp generations

Growing up with neopets vs club penguin vs tamagotchi vs pog vs high school musical doesn't change your life experience hugely. In the end, it's not a generational difference as it is a access to goods and media.

It seems to be, as technology rapidly evolves, "generations" are getting shorter and shorter (20 years at the beginning of the century down to 5 - 10 years between a Millennial and a Zillenial). We are getting ridiculously close to arranging social definitions around technologies instead of shared cohort experiences. We seem to be expecting more and more people to "not get" what it means to be in our generation, and to use that as a way to dismiss dialogue where we could be fostering solidarity.

We are more than our technologies. We are not the Vinyl generation, Cassette generation, CD generation, MP3 generation, Streaming generation. We can learn from those who came before us, but also learn from those who came after. We need to de-heirarchalise age, assuming that you can only learn from up the chain.

Our teenagers, our children have more information available to them now than ever before. We are raising geniuses, and compassionate powerhouses. It's time we stopped dividing by generation, and started accepting that learning, growth, and maturity are non-linear.

Even if they don't know the struggles of GaiaOnline