I caught clips of Tucker Carlson interviewing Nick Fuentes, and the thing that struck me was the body language. Here was a man who had the biggest show on cable news, who once commanded an audience of 5 million adults, sitting across from a twenty-something New-Age shock-jock with the energy of a guy trying to impress his son’s friends. See how cool I am? See how I’m not afraid to go there? An astute culture commentator, Jon Gabriel, recently posted on X:
You start reading the room instead of saying what’s true. You notice your audience is getting younger, more online, more radicalized—and instead of pushing back with the credibility you spent decades building, you chase them. Every take gets a little edgier. Every interview pushes a little further. You tell yourself you’re being brave, but really you’re just performing for an algorithm and a demographic that will forget your name the moment someone edgier comes along.
So much of what you’re seeing in the media right now is this dynamic playing out. The battle for market share. Massive legacy-turned-New-Media stars recognizing that their Fox News audience is aging and clinging to relevance. New Media stars getting older in the space, watching younger, ever more contrarian pundits and podcasters suck up all the energy and the eyeballs. The pick-me energy is palpable. So many interviews feel like, “See how based and cool I am?”
Maybe it’s the Gen-X in me, but I don’t care if the coveted demographic of 18-34 year olds like me—because they don’t know shit about shit.
They think they do, because they’ve grown up online with supercomputers in their pockets and cameras in their faces and gentle parenting. And because they’re young and it’s just a function of being in your twenties to think you know everything—in this way, they’re normal. In every other way, they’re not.
I’m not looking to the youth for wisdom—and I don’t care if they look to me for it.
If this sounds very “GET OFF MY LAWN” it’s how I mean it. Leave me behind. I’m fine with it. The problem with chasing the high of a younger audience—eventually they will turn on you for daring to get old, or as the kids these days would say, “Oldheads don’t understand the vision.”
My people are not the black-pilled, irony-poisoned youth who have been stewing in a vat of nihilism, victimhood, and entitlement. Very few of them read books. Most of them get their news and talking points from TikTok. They have no attention span and can’t make eye contact.
This generation is like an alien species to me, and mostly, I pity them. A lot of them are also thoughtful, astute, industrious, curious—they’ve been through some shit too, like multiple economic crises and an apocalypse-lite in which they had to stay at home in pjs and got their brains turned to pudding from a foreign virus in the form of TikTok content. But the ones everyone in Media is contorting themselves to impress are not the thoughtful ones.
My audience is Late Boomer, Gen-X and Elder Millennials (and some Gen-Z dudes who get me). My audience drank out of water hoses—this is obligatory, you cannot be Gen-X and not mention drinking out of hoses—and played outside until the street lights came on. We were children of divorce, latch-key kids. We rode our bikes. Everywhere. We remember life without the internet. We didn’t have the ability to get weed and food delivered to us via an app on our phone. In my teens, I lived on Burger King and cigarettes and got weed from a sketchy hippie who wanted to play guitar for me before he sold me my drugs. My audience came of age with E.T. and Star Wars. We grew up reading the classics. We grew up reading, not getting our brain melted by short-form content.
We grew up with many examples of the hero’s journey. These are my people.
I realize this might also be a function of the fact that I got a later start in Media, and I never really “peaked” or “blew up.” In the same way that it’s hard for an actress to age in Hollywood, I imagine it’s hard for pundits who had huge shows on Fox News or Comedy Central to lose relevance as they age. What happens, inevitably, is that you start chasing youth. Youthful looks. Youthful ideas. Clinging to the coveted demographic, like a tech bro with a blood boy.
About five years into my career as a writer and media personality, this realization bummed me out. However, at exactly that time, I was reading Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art for the umpteenth time, and his section about territory versus hierarchy jumped out to me:
“For the artist to define himself hierarchically is fatal…The artist must operate territorially. He must do his work for its own sake. To labor in the arts for any other reason other than love is prostitution.”
I don’t want that demographic. I don’t want to be on TikTok doing dances and dunking on children. I don’t want to learn whatever the new slang is—I’m going to be forced to learn it when my daughter is a teen and I’m in my fifties and she’s calling me whatever the new slang for “cringe” is.
Again from The War of Art: “I learned this from Robert McKee. A hack, he says, is a writer who second-guesses his audience. When the hack sits down to work, he doesn’t ask himself what’s in his own heart. He asks what the market is looking for.”
The algorithms and analytics have made hacks of us all. Some more than others. And you can see it if you’re paying attention—many of those with the biggest megaphones in Media are using them to parrot back whatever the coveted demographic already believes. I don’t need polls or studies about the percentage of young people left and right who hold antisemitic views or how support for Israel is collapsing among younger generations, all I need is to watch the weathervanes nod along, soften their positions, chase the algorithm. Pressfield had a word for that.
The kids have words for me. “Boomercon slop” is a pejorative that’s thrown around casually in any online debate these days and in the comment section by younger, online-savvy users to signal they’re above “normie” conservatism. Call me a Boomer. Call me out of touch. I get it because I remember being in my teens and early twenties and I thought all the adults were morons who didn’t know anything, too. Anyone who consumes my content knows I have my issues with Boomers, my sister and I have been raging against them since we were in our twenties, so welcome to the party, pal.
My grandparents were Depression-era kids and survived World War II. Big deal, I thought at the time. They don’t know what I’m going through now. I was so certain their experience had nothing to teach me. And they had the grace not to argue about it. They just waited. Because they knew something I didn’t: That wisdom isn’t persuasive to people who haven’t earned it yet, and that trying to make it persuasive is a fool’s errand.
I was a fool. Now I’d give anything for their wisdom and it’s too late.
The part the platform-chasers don’t understand: You cannot reason a twenty-three-year-old out of positions they were algorithmically radicalized into. You’re not going to win them over by learning their dumb slang and nodding along with their worst impulses. All you’re going to do is lose yourself. And your audience—your actual audience, the people who showed up because you had something to say—will watch you do it in real time.
I never peaked. I say that without self-pity. I got a late start, I never had the massive Fox show or the viral Comedy Central moment, and for a while, that bothered me. But it turns out never peaking is a kind of freedom. There’s no high to chase, no glory days to recreate, no slide into irrelevance to panic about. There’s just the work. Territory, not hierarchy. You do it because it’s yours to do, and you hope the right people find it, and if the coveted demographic thinks you’re an oldhead who doesn’t understand the vision—good. I only want to do my work.
Leave me behind. I’m fine here.
Amen sister! I had an intern recently- 22 years old, spent his senior year of high school and freshman year of college being pushed through the system without doing the work because of Covid. I have been working in my field longer than he's been alive and yet he was on his phone every time I was trying to teach him something. He subtly (and not so subtly), constantly told me that he knew more than me, and I had nothing to teach him. Oh well, his loss. I thought I knew everything too when I was 22. He'll learn, or he won't. My job was mentor, not friend. Thank you Bridget for writing exactly what I'm going through as a 40-something GenXer ❤️❤️
You are on quite the roll lately …