The Nicest Generation

I don't mean that in a nice way

There’s a saying about New Yorkers that 33% of you dear readers, according to Substack analytics, have probably heard before: We’re not nice, but we’re kind.

Clearly kind. (JK, just the greatest t-shirt from the ‘90s)

As someone who’s spent half her life in New York and the other half in L.A., I feel uniquely qualified to explain this adage in subjective, vibey terms:

People born and raised in New York’s outer boroughs have a grumpy seriousness that is “not nice” to outsiders. It’s Resting Bitch Face as a personality for the population. This is torture for people who don’t know how to grocery shop without everyone smiling at them.

My theory on the grumpy seriousness? Many* native New Yorkers are from immigrant families who landed in a borough like Queens or Brooklyn because it was better on some measure, if not many*, than where they’re from.

*I don’t know how many, this is data-free reportage.

So here you have a bunch of first-generation Americans who’ve either seen some shit or were raised by people who’ve been traumatized by shit, (though they’d never say something so snow-flakey), which gives them a low-grade intensity at all times.

Compound that with the pressure cooker of a big city, being smushed against every shape and flavor of humanity, taking the subway to kindergarten…New Yorkers are not charmed easily!

It somehow works

There’s a beautiful flip side to avoiding eye contact and the dehumanizing experience of jumping to attention when someone barks, “FOLLOWING!” from behind a cash register. (For the 67% of readers outside NY, “following” is a shortened version of the more polite, “following guest,” which had already been shortened from the white glove, 5-star, “I’ll take the following guest over here.”)

And that beauty is the social contract among New Yorkers who look out for one another while minding their own business. No one acknowledges the unhoused fellow with the duct tape belt singing badly on the Q train, but if he drops his dusty baseball cap on his way off, at least two people will dive to pick it up and yell after him so he doesn’t lose it.

Now, the L.A. contrast:

Once on a yearly visit, I went to a yarn store with a fake French name in Studio City, because there was a period of my life when I quit drinking and started knitting. The Un-French shop lady was doing something behind the counter but greeted me with standard shopkeeper politeness and asked if she could help me find anything. When I took her up on her offer, she became palpably annoyed*. The audacity of asking a knitting shop owner a knitting question!

*I just scanned the stores Yelp! reviews and turns out this is a pattern at Les Yarns Terribles (not the real name), so I was indeed not the asshole.

This type of nicety — the veneer of kindness on an empty soul — is not uncommon in L.A. Even (especially?) in the slightly folksier San Fernando Valley.

New Yorkers are the opposite. There’s a micro-eyeroll when you stop to ask a question, but then they revel in the pure joy of giving directions. Or answering any other question, regardless of expertise. See Café Anne’s woman-on-the-street stuff for regular proof!

Now that I’ve laid the groundwork on the nice/kind binary, I’m going to contribute to the divisive Boomer/Gen X/Millennial discourse with the following analogy:

Gen X are kind, but not-nice New Yorkers.

Millennials are phony and toxic Californians.

As a Xennial, I’m a highly qualified, neutral third party who can make this scientific assessment. In my handpicked and biased examples below, I say “we” when I want to align myself with one generation’s coolness and “you” when I want to blame the uppity younger ones for the decline of western civilization.

Nice, but not kind:

• Mark Zuckerberg - Built an app to rate his schoolmates’ hotness, rebranded it as a way to connect the world, actually raised its value by harvesting user data and turning the internet into an enraged hellhole with super-customized ad space.

  This has been the two-sided ethos of pretty much every tech startup with a millennial CEO since. Put forward a “world-changing” mission (nice) in your marketing while still making money the old-fashioned way, through extractive and exploitive consumer practices that ultimately benefit shareholders and B2B partners (not kind).

  I haven’t read it yet, but I heard the first line in Kara Swisher’s (a Gen X cusper) Burn Book is: “So it was capitalism after all.” Still is!

• An aversion to awkwardness - Gen X embraced "awkward.” It’s what made things funny and interesting and challenging. Millennials turned “awkward” into a pejorative. My theory on why: Millennials were raised on anodyne, frictionless Disney Channel content that was engineered specifically for them. Gen X watched Three’s Company and MTV in elementary school, and had Comedy Central as their summer camp, back when Comedy Central was all problematic standup clips.

  Everything on the radio and TV in the 80s was wildly inappropriate for kids and our checked-out Boomer parents didn’t care, which means we inadvertently saw too many movie sex scenes and heard horny Madonna songs at home and in the car.

  This gave us a high threshold for discomfort (a requisite for kindness) and primed us in the art of distracting conversation. We lived in constant embarrassment and made do. Millennials could never! Their world was stage-managed for them, so if any social interaction went off-script, they lost their sense of self and cried “awkward!” before they took a selfie to feel in control again.

• More on discomfort, this time at work - If you’re on a call or in a meeting at one of the aforementioned millennial startups or a business in service to them, there’s almost guaranteed to be a parallel meeting happening over Slack at the same time. Chances are, whoever said, “This is fucking awesome,” has just finished Slacking someone else about how not-awesome it is.

  I’d never credit Millennials with inventing anything as fabulous as talking shit, but Gen X knows how to say, “What the fuck is this?” with love, to your face, (not quite “nice”), but then point out what’s wrong and tell you how to make it better so you can stay in your job (kind).

  Millennials who can’t tolerate friction will simply be “nice” before they figure out how to get you fired. There’s a whole genre of recovering girlbosses on Substack who attest to this.

• General busy-bodyness - What baffles me about the current hustle-culture backlash is how Millennials fell for it in the first place. They took these “world-changing” startup jobs with zero skepticism, and instead of realizing their work was an impossible trap, they tried to outperform each other in service of their cult leaders CEOs, instead of turning on them and collectively demanding better before burning out.

  Maybe they can’t be blamed for this. Gen X’s parents were older boomers who were complacent and spoiled by the greatest economy in history. They didn’t have to overwork themselves to hang onto their middle class status, so they didn’t push their kids to do much of anything. (Behold, the Slacker archetype.)

  Perhaps the younger boomers, Millennials’ parents, saw it coming: Now you have to be excellent at your job and work 16 hours a day to stay out of poverty because there is no middle class.

  Gen X also had a front row seat to mendacious leaders like Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachev, so we grew up with a healthy distrust of any and all authority. Millennials had Barack Obama with Hope™ and Change™ and parents who cared enough to push them to perform, but seems like they overdid it?

  Millennials have realized everything is a greenwash and a scam, which will hopefully lead to some corporate-culture reckoning, but Gen X’ers (the ones who haven’t killed themselves) have insisted on enjoying their unambitious, NPC lives the whole time.

Millennials can still save the world, though!

As a Xennial elder, it’s too late for me to do anything but complain, so I’m going to put more pressure on my younger cohort to achieve something big and redeem yourselves.

Instead of moving into venture capital or starting a personal brand based on reclaiming your humanity, you should go into government instead!

Here’s a new career track I’ve laid out for you:

• Run for office. Something small and down-ballot for almost zero dollars per year (the MAGAs are doing it, don’t let them win). You will be able to cover the lost salary when your Boomer parents knock off and you become the beneficiaries of the great wealth transfer. Clock is ticking, guys!

• Work your way to the top on an unrealistic timeline. C’mon, you’re good at this. You were Chief Comms Paw-ficer at Dogly.ai before you were 27. It’s time to run for Senate! Ask your VC / Princeton friends to pay for your campaign. Fill the chambers with your still-youthful idealism and render those stubborn ghouls obsolete, just as they are in tech.

• Once you’re in the top echelons of government, we need you to actually change the world. First thing, give yourselves the $1MM annual salary you’ve always wanted. I mean it! This will deter you from taking any more of your VC friends’ money. You were just using them to get where you are, which is the only acceptable time to be so insincere.

  To keep you honest, you’re going make it a law that no elected officials are allowed to take outside money from anyone ever again. Then you’re going to regulate the shit out of the entire internet! No more social media for kids. No surveillance capitalism. Hold social media apps responsible for spreading disinformation and influencing minors.

  You’re also going to provide UBI, healthcare, and paid-family leave to everyone, actually fix the border crisis instead of using it as a political tool, and invest in making the U.S. completely energy independent so we don’t have to fuck with oil countries any more.

  It will be little awkward, but then it will be fucking awesome and the whole world will say, “Wow, look at you!” just as you’ve come to expect.

  LFG, I believe in you!

Hello and welcome! I’m Phoebe, and I write essays about startup culture, regular culture, creativity, and some mom stuff. If there’s a section you don’t want receive, you can update your preferences here.

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