Revenge of the Zoomers

I come bearing unfortunate news: A new inter-generational war is afoot, with the opening grenades having been tossed wantonly across the Internet over the past few months.

If you’re not a heavy user of the social-media platform TikTok — and I congratulate you if you aren’t — you might be blissfully unaware of this skirmish, so I’ll fill you in: If you wear skinny jeans, or use the “crying laughing” emoji in your text messages, or if you part your hair on the side, you are officially O-L-D, according to Generation Z.

Believe it or not, this aesthetic clash of generations — which mainly targets Millennials but certainly applies to Gen Xers like me and beyond — has been documented everywhere from NBC’s Today to People.com to the U.K. Guardian. My favorite headline on this tempest in a TikTok comes, with faux gravitas, from the beauty magazine Allure: “Gen Z Teens on TikTok Say Side-Parts are Ugly, But History Says Otherwise.” As the kids used to say, I LOLed.

Now, to be fair, almost 100 percent of this side part / skinny jeans / “you’re as ancient as Methuselah” dustup occurs entirely online — and so, like much of our “news” today, it is not completely real. At times, in fact, I feel that an alarmingly large portion of the current news cycle is an infinite regression of self-referential memes that don’t actually exist in the real world. It’s sort of like if you were to stare at a Rice Krispies box that featured a cartoon image of Snap, Crackle, and Pop holding the exact same Rice Krispies box, so that you could technically look down an infinite rabbit hole of identical cereal boxes, each growing smaller and smaller until the End Times emerge and the Four Horsemen run rampant and the earth is ultimately plunged into the sun.

Anyway, there’s an important lesson here: Generation Z should be embarrassed, and not just because they’ve been nicknamed the “Zoomers.” Seriously, guys? This is your great rebellion? Reverting to jeans that were popular in the ’80s and attempting to cancel certain arbitrary emojis and shifting your part one inch over in your hair? Say what you will about the Boomers in the Sixties, but at least they had some originality. Just search “skinny jeans” in the New York Times, and you’ll find this relevant headline: “Jeans: Skinny Is Out, Baggy In.” It’s a headline from . . . wait for it . . . 1979. Sorry, kids: In mortifying fashion, it’s all been done before.

But here’s where things take a twist, for I have great faith in Generation Z. My children are Zoomers, and even though one of them literally just wandered into my office with his T-shirt stuffed with pillows and wearing broken fake Harry Potter glasses while mysteriously claiming that his name is “Big Chuck,” and while another recently set off the whole-house fire alarm through stealthy and unauthorized usage of our outdoors-only Halloween fog machine because he thought his bedroom would “look really cool shrouded in mist,” I think they’ll do pretty well in life.

I also employ several impressive and delightful Gen Z babysitters to whom I would be comfortable promptly handing a Senate seat or the nuclear football or an editorial position at the New York Times. Heck, now that I think about it, I would also hand my eight-year-old an editorial position at the New York Times, as it would probably be a wildly dramatic improvement over what they’re working with now.

Regardless, if the Zoomers want to be truly fresh and rebellious and countercultural, I have a few ideas.

First and foremost, while we’re speaking of Zoom, Generation Z should start by immediately boycotting Zoom meetings that could be conference calls. After that, they should boycott conference calls that could be emails. After that, they should boycott social media entirely. (Ha ha! Just kidding! I know that will never happen.)

After that, more realistically, Gen Z should boycott restaurants that call you after you’ve made a reservation and leave you a message saying that you need to call them back to confirm the reservation that you already called them once to make in the first place. (I live in Texas, where you can still freely make dinner reservations of multiple stripes, in case you’ve been dwelling in one of the more oppressed sectors of California and you’re worried you’re somehow reading a column from 2019.)

A few more crazy ideas: Get married in your twenties and have a bunch of kids. Talk about blowing people’s minds! Question government officials. Question the media. Question professors. Embrace the almost lost art of good-faith, open-minded debate, and while you’re at it, become a person who is extremely difficult to offend. Trust me: You’ll have more fun.

It also might be high time for a fresh generation to seriously question our nation’s government schools, which have not exactly covered themselves in glory during COVID’s awful yearlong march. Many have simply refused to open at all, forcing small children into disastrous months of isolation and wild amounts of screen time while ignoring the fact that private schools throughout the country have somehow managed to operate in-person disaster-free.

Finally — and this would be wild — how about bringing back a long-neglected string of words: “You know, when it comes to that particular topic, I’m not sure!” Our society seems to have sprouted a bumper crop of people who are increasingly willing to spout off passionate and fervent opinions on every topic that might cross their path on any given day, regardless of whether they know anything about it at all. This may sound bizarre, but it’s true: You don’t need to have an opinion on everything. It’s exhausting!

You don’t even have to have an opinion on this column, in fact, or an opinion regarding my side part and skinny jeans. Yes, I have both, and heaven knows I use the cry-laughing emoji more than I should. Sorry, haters: I’m proudly Gen X. We’re the Chuck Norris of generations, with a blend of irony and apathy thrown in. You couldn’t cancel us if you tried.