do older generations not get fatalistic humor?? like the other day my friend’s parents were hanging around and we were joking and i was like “well no matter what i can always fling myself off the nearest cliff” and they didn’t laugh then later the mom pulled me aside and was like “maybe you should get some help, sweetie” like stfu?? help? in this economy? i don’t think so, debra
I honestly don’t think they get it as a coping mechanism, they think it’s a cry for help rather than actually helping.
i’d even say it’s past just coping and is also now a category of Stuff Kids Got Used To When No One Was Looking; not everyone using that humor is even covering up something bigger, we just stopped thinking fatalistic = taboo/unspeakable somewhere along the line, and most parents don’t seem to know why or how ~
My boss opened a door and missed me by inches, he said “whoops, almost killed you there!” My result of “Oh, if only.” Led to an awkward end of shift debrief.
This generation shares the same humor as the goddamn Addams Family and the previous generation is the White Sixties Family™ that lives next door and runs away screaming at the end of the episode
I will say that it’s interesting because this kind of humor is very, very prevalent somewhere else…
the military.
Which is honestly a place you would expect fatalistic humor to be common and used as a coping method. You’re one “oops” away from death on the flight deck, one inch to the left and you don’t have a head anymore because the jet that just landed now owns it as a wing-tip decoration. So you joke about it because lowkey you’re fucking terrified it’ll happen, but you’re also desensitized to the danger itself because you face it every single day for 12 hours at a time.
Anyway so we all know the mindset you adopt in the military because of the danger, so to realise that an identical sense of humor has been adopted by normal people should probably tell you something very important about the amount of stress modern young folks experience in daily life.
That last one… it’s true
Does that not mean… and I am genuinely asking this question, no flippancy intended, does that not mean that the parent who asked if help was needed in the original post was right? like… do we need help guys? is my fatalistic sense of humor how i cope with something that could be handled better?
That’s the rub there I think. It’s hard to tell cause we’ve gotten to this point ya know? So now which of us is capable of deciding what a tolerable level of this thought process is? But at the same time, we don’t trust the older generation to help because they’re the ones who allowed us to fall into this mindset, and a lot of their help is just trying to convince us of the okayness of The Way Things Are, which none of us are satisfied with anymore.
So who’s to say *awkward laugh*
*awkward laugh* The complexities of this post are killing me.