My Generation, by Justin E. H. Smith.

This is the best essay I’ve read in a while. I wanted to write something similar for a long time, and I think he did it better than I would’ve. So thanks — saved me a lot of work.

As a Gen Xer as well, the piece captures perfectly what a lot of people in my generation feel and believe. What I feel bone-deep. Most of my friends are millennials or the first year or two of the Gen Zers, and the world they experienced as they grew up was very different from the one I did as a child and young adult: my world is one which the last of the experimentation of the 1960s was still hanging on, but was being extirpated slowly, surely, and very resolutely by the new progressive church ladies (not all of whom were ladies, of course) and resurgent conservatives. By the time the millennials and especially Gen Z got old enough to pay attention, that world of true liberalism was gone, replaced with something far more baleful to human thought and flourishing. It was a new authoritarianism, dressed up in gayer clothes, but with a sort of revulsion at the insuperable vagariousness of humanity and an obsession with purity that was perfectly in line with that of the most fervid evangelicals.

Thus, the world shifted quite quickly, but there were lines around the block telling you that it was all just the same. But no, it was all changed.