The new 20
This video is brought to you by BetterHelp. Recently, [James Greg’s article](link in description) “Feast Everyone Needs to Grow Up” got us talking. Has culture become childish? Are we all babies now? What are the implications of an increasingly infantilized society?
Pop in your pacifier and join us for this Wisecrack Edition on the baby vacation of culture! But before we get into it, we want to thank this video sponsor, BetterHelp.
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Now let’s get back to the show. To stay in our lane, we’re going to focus on what this looks like right here in the US of A. But for our international friends, let us know in the comments if and/or how the baby vacation of culture shows up in your country, or are you just adults? Okay, let’s get into it.
Calling American culture immature is nothing new. In 1946, French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss noted that American culture was charmingly infantile, citing its fixation on things like baseball, toy-like cars, and hobbies. If you had to identify who set up 30-year-olds to argue about whether they’re a Gryffindor or a Ravenclaw, you can as always blame the Boomers.
Shout it out in the comments if you thought I was about to say blame Ronald Reagan! While pockets of the Silent Generation (born between 1928 and 1945) reveled in a kind of permanent adolescence by becoming beat poets or, like Hugh Hefner, the vast majority just lived vicariously through their more out-there brethren.
In contrast, according to writer Kurt Anderson, the Boomers were the first generation en masse to refuse to relinquish the privileges of youth as they aged, and thus ushered in a new national fantasy of permanent youthfulness. The groundwork for this was laid when teenagers became the focus of pop culture in the 1950s and then throughout the 1960s with the popularization of the idea of the inner child and widespread suspicion of everyone over 30. We’re gonna make 30 the new 20. .V. and we buy adult toys that look like they were made for children
A mandatory retirement age and Rehabilitation camps or Mercy centers in every state of the union were set up as Boomers aged out of literal youth and embraced figurative youth. Herbert Marcuse and Eric Fromm of the Frankfurt School argued that entire societies can experience arrested development due to social engineering. The baby boomer generation was largely facilitated by the mass media and specifically advertising, which lowered the criteria of youthfulness and extended the possibility of seeming youthful to older and older people.
The rebellion of the Boomers against consumer society in the 60s was steeped in a profound individualism, which ironically led them back to consumerism. Advertisers transformed them into the Pepsi generation, and liberation marketing posited the right consumer goods as offering freedom from conformity. Advertising and consumer culture more broadly turned youthful rebellion into a commodity that wouldn’t change even as Boomers aged.
Throughout the 70s and 80s, nostalgia became increasingly intertwined with pop culture as Boomers were encouraged to relive their childhoods through films, albums, and music videos. By the 80s and 90s, the culture of adult childishness was mainstream, as adults became a huge audience for video games, comic books, fantasy sports, and collections of model railroads, baseball cards, toys, and vintage beer cans.
Politics began to resemble popular entertainment, with JFK being the first TV president. Financialization of the economy led to extreme optimism and quasi-religious devotion to the free market, which Anderson calls Fantasyland Economics and Nick Pound Garden calls magical thinking. This wild speculation and risk-taking led to the 2008 financial collapse.
The Boomers’ permanent nostalgia seemingly pissed off their first batch of kids who grew up as the small contingent of Gen X. They were united by their dislike of nostalgia and their irritation whenever their barely formed narratives were appropriated and marketed back at them.
Today, baby vacation and its wistful twin nostalgia are not mere features of millennial culture, but the very water we’re swimming in. From superhero movies and reboots dominating entertainment to adult coloring books, from adult Disney communities to YA novels, from Pokemon Go to LARPing to spending hours watching cat videos, we call women girls, we watch man children on TV, and we buy adult toys that look like they were made for children.