I met the new guy at work; stereotypical hipster. I already don’t like him. Hipsters invaded and destroyed everything I love.
As a kid, I never got on with the other kids. You know, “doesn’t play well with others” on the report card. I always got on with teachers and adults better. I guess I always figured that things would get better, that one day the kids would be mature like those teachers and adults.
I stopped getting beaten up, sure, but it turns out it’s generational. I still get on with the generation Xers above me; the kids my age still find ways to exclude and belittle me, even though we’re past 30 now. I cling to my gen X identity like it was my last shred of clothing, like that isn’t the least gen X thing in the world to do. Stupid millennial.
They said nerds were popular now. It’s not true. Nerds were social outcasts, we retreated into Trek and Wars and D&D and Video Games, and the good looking hipsters followed, took over those communities, drove us out. I thought I was one, until they made it clear I was no longer welcome in the communities I helped to build. They called themselves nerds, but the actual nerds? No, now we just get called “neckbeard” and “fedora” and “incel” instead.
I stopped getting beaten up, sure, but it’s all over the new media – the internet, the thing I helped to build, the place I retreated when I was young. A beautiful place, pseudonyms judged on what they had to say, and the moment they came here they plaster their faces all over it and talk to their real life friends – the ones I never had. Day in, day out, I hear about how terrible a person I am. I want the video game sites, the ones that review the games I drown myself in with nowhere else to go, to judge the games based on if they are good games instead of if they push politics the reviewer agrees with – so I am a ‘sexually harassing gator who makes rape threats’. A prominent voice who gets her pictures up on walls at the workplace literally tweets #killallmen but if I say men suffer too, it’s misogynist hate-speech. I got a job doing tech support, the only thing I was ever any good at, and I’m a “patriarchal shit-lord, driving women out of the industry”. A CEO of the internet company threatens “What are you going to do about the incels in your company?” like further segregating and driving away those with nothing to lose won’t end up in more violent rampages.
I won’t ever do anything. I’ll just take it, like I’ve taken it all my life. Sooner or later they’ll purge me from my job, and then I guess I’ll have nothing. And I guess I deserve it. The truth is, I am a shit person. Maybe I’ve always been a shit person, or maybe I’ve just heard it so many times I believe it. I honestly don’t know.
It’s not long now until the gen Xers are gone entirely, and I’ll be stuck with nothing but my own generation, the shitty generation who always hated me. I’ve seen the way they look at me when I’m called out for a job to help them, the sneer that says ‘how dare you think you have the right to be in my presence”. I made a couple of friends, to be fair, at least a couple I didn’t drive away. One never leaves his house, the other got a girlfriend and I haven’t spoken to in four months.
Hhere I am, drinking, and playing a video game to pass the time, one that subtly sneaks in every so often that insidious implication: “you are a shit person; you are not welcome here.”
I am not sure how much longer I can keep this up.