Why I don’t subscribe to the 'OK Boomer’ meme.

First Coined by New Zealand’s Green Party MP Chlöe Swarbrick just weeks ago, ‘OK Boomer’ has become an international meme and sensation. The comment, dropped with a throw-away degree of alacrity by Swarbrick mid-speech in parliament, to silence an opposition heckler, caused an immediate sensation, and a great deal of global discussion.

The comment, although, at the time, funny and compelling, fails desperately to engage the much deeper and more meaningful conversation.

Descending into name-calling with OK Boomer and more importantly the meme which it birthed, a lazy way of laying blame for a global situation. This situation has been distilled down to one overwhelmingly inconvenient cause, and one generation: the baby boomers.

Feeding Separation

‘OK Boomer’ feeds separation. The phrase chooses to view a group of people as an ‘other’. Doing so perpetuates an already deep rift between parties of grown-ups, consistently incapable, (the nature of the system in which they operate), of transcending their two-dimensional beliefs to find creative solutions.

Descending into name-calling, often out of pure frustration, is part of our culture it would appear, and yet, where do you go when ‘OK Boomer’, or any other label for that matter is dropped in your lap? More name-calling?

Labelling and name-calling are lazy: they lack a clear distinction between who we are, and what we have done. This behaviour also fails to recognise how the recipient of our response is feeling about it.

The challenge with expressing one’s feelings in such an environment is that it will be interpreted as a form of weakness, and lead to a raft of labels and name-calling. A ‘can’t win either way’ scenario. There is the rub; name-calling and labelling lead us into a Double Bind.

A Double-Bind

It was Gregory Bateson, back in the ’60s and ’70s, who was asked to find the precursor to schizophrenia. Following many months of research, he returned with a paper titled ‘The Double Bind’. Gregory Bateson was well respected for his work in linguistics, philosophy, psychology and anthropology, and was given this remarkable job because of his discoveries in these fields.

The Double Bind, simply stated, discussed at length the nature of dissociation relating to aspects of our language and how we communicate with each other. An example would be the phrase ‘good boy’. A seemingly harmless phrase of you may hear daily, a phrase that might be contradicted, even within the same day with, ‘bad boy’.

The intention of the remark ‘good boy’ or ‘bad boy’ is clear. The dilemma for the recipient is that to interpret these comments, they have to remove themselves from who they think they are. The recipient has to dissociate into what they think it means to be a ‘good boy’, or, for that matter, a ‘bad boy’.

There is no clarity given from the person giving the feedback that what they talking about is their own perception of the recipients’ behaviour. Instead of saying for example, ‘I like it when you do…”, they take the easy, inefficient and incorrect route with, ‘good boy’.

At some point the boy will hear ‘bad boy’, ‘clever boy’, ‘angel’, ‘dickhead’, ‘moron’, ‘genius’, ‘ugly’ and more. The list of potential labels does not stop with appraisals of worth or value, professional labels will follow: Lawyer, doctor, fireman, firewoman, author, dentist, and on and on.

Midlife Crisis?

Is it any wonder that when we get to our forties, we find ourselves lost for knowing who we are. We struggle to make sense of who we are because there is this inner feeling that we are missing something. Having spent my life ‘being’ a lawyer, for example, and realising that the considerable investment in this activity has defined who I think I am.

We have dissociated ourselves over and over throughout our lives to fit with the recommended path of ‘least resistance’, the status quo, and being a good boy. We have not learned that we cannot ‘Be’ what we ‘do’. No matter what people may have told us about who they think we are, they were wrong: no one knows who we are and they cannot understand, ever, how we feel.

Because we receive constant feedback as a child about who we are, we are seldom allowed to learn who we might actually be. Because learning who we are means we will do some pretty ‘exciting’ things, and those ‘explorations’ may not fit with the status quo, we are directed -by those who care — towards the safe, acceptable and predictable. Because the normalised route fits nicely with the status quo, the experimenting types will not have a learned group from which to learn. There are very few people a child can sit with to discuss the distinctions between self and action, and the ‘who’ behind ‘who am I?’.

Removes Empathy

‘OK Boomer’. A response that is lazy and unacceptable, and yet not surprising. Boomer encapsulates a group of people without the needing to know who they are, how their lives are, their loves and losses. We live in a time where hashtag and meme define and defy. Who has the time to learn about other peoples’ experience and perception, especially if they have different opinions and beliefs? Is there even any time to express our sincere and honest feelings without using quick and easy name-calling?

We have spent our lives, disconnected from who we ‘feel’ we are so that we can live in what is essentially an unhealthy system, and by other peoples rules. Is it any surprise that this lazy and ineffective way of communicating is so acceptable, and for many, meaningful? We continue to wonder why we repeat the same stories generation after generation and hear of the same abuses of human rights year after year. The only way to perpetuate such injustice, such misguided judgement, is by living life dissociated from who we are and what is right for us? How can we know what is right for us or who we really are when we have never been gifted the opportunity to learn what that means. Our education into ‘self-hood’ defined by a disengaged culture, distracted and bamboozled by bread and circuses.

Dissociation breeds blame.

When I dissociate into name-calling, I also remove myself from responsibility. The feeling I have is the fault of someone else. The thief, the looser, the government, the abuser etc. It is all their fault, and that means I don’t have to change. I have removed responsibility because they have made me feel and behave this way. ‘OK Boomer’ is a way of shifting the burden, and in this global predicament, we are desperate to lay blame; a culprit at whose feet we can put the problems of the world. And like many times before, it will not work.

Follow the feelings

What if, we engage our courage and follow our feelings?

What is it that I feel, and how can I communicate that feeling, and own it?

What is it that this feeling is trying to get?

And,

What do I want… really want, from this conversation?

This is a small beginning, and yet until we shift our position concerning communication, little will change. By continuing to dissociate from who we feel we are, and into what is right for others, no matter how compelling, we will fail to make sense of our world.

Photo by Laurenz Kleinheider on Unsplash