If you thought boomers bullying us about avocados was bad, Gen Z just got a whole lot worse

'Have you seen this new thing?!' I asked my housemates excitedly at the beginning of the week. 'The young people are taking the piss out of us!'

First, they came for the avocados and coffees we supposedly (but didn’t actually) spend too much on. Now Gen Z has taken up the mantle, ruthlessly dragging each and every millennial with more acute and hurtful observations than the boomers ever could have mustered.

There’s a reason the Gen Z’ers – that demographic of kids born after 1997 – and their coming for us stings so bad. And by “us”, I mean the continually loathed generation who were in their teens around the millennium, (myself included) who’ve taken to wearing their “financially frivolous” (LOL), if not a little boring, reputations like a badge of honour, amid quiet sniggering from the children of our future.

The first time I caught wind of this new trend, I was probably, like the rest of us, weeks, if not months, behind the curve. “Have you seen this new thing?!” I asked my housemates excitedly at the beginning of the week. “The young people are taking the piss out of us on one of the things they also use...TiKTok? Where’s that tweet I liked about it earlier?”

That tweet was from @local__celeb, a Chicago-based Twitter user, whose early morning scrolling unveiled an underworld of hilarious yet cutting commentary to thousands, ridiculing our partiality for plants, obsession with the 90s and overuse of the term “adulting”.

Bar my distaste for the Harry Potter universe, it’s a spot-on assessment.

It’s pretty hard to argue with the idea that we’re “too busy reading BuzzFeed articles about why the 90s were better” to find their comments online (it did take us over a week, which is aeons in social media terms), or that “Gen Z is being raised by Gen X, whereas Millennials were raised by Boomers and it shows”, as one Twitter user pointed out.

We’re starting to becoming cringeworthy in those ways we thought we’d never be: Messaging our 15-year-old brothers every couple of months to ask what songs “the kids” are listening to, or what the “new slang” is; sending him articles about this Gen Z phenomenon and telling him you’re going to write about “his people” for work tomorrow, only to get a dry “why”, with no question mark back, filling you with the shame those comments on TikTok, or TikToks themselves, first caused.

@glamdemon2004

I would’ve added Harry Potter but I am too hot and popular to own a copy ##fyp ##millenials

♬ original sound - glamdemon2004

I’m sure even our embrace of this so-called “millennial bullying” will be derided pretty soon, if it hasn’t been already. I tried to gather some intel from the same 15-year-old brother to see if that was the case, but no luck. We are doomed to be considered just as out of touch, boring and selfish as our predecessors.

All I can say is this: While you’re taking the piss out of our 10th re-watchathons of The Office, or our inability to accept that we are, contrary to our aversion to adulting, getting older and duller by the day, (which really, was made a much worse reality because of those boomers) the years will creep up on you and Generation Alpha will be there waiting.

Good luck learning how to navigate the apps they use to talk about you then.