Okay, hear me out: How much of that is a function of ChatGPT and how much of that is a function of… gestures at everything else

MOSTLY joking. But had a good talk with my primary care doctor at the bar the other week (only kinda awkward) about how she and her team have had to restructure the questions they use to check for depression and the like because… fucking EVERYONE is depressed and stressed out but for reasons that we “understand”.

T Swizzle is, funny enough, a big chunk of why things have escalated so much. Like her or hate her, she puts on a motha fugging SHOW with incredibly high production values and comparatively limited dates. That drastically increases the baseline price and makes the scalping market start selling their coke filled labubus to get even more seats.

Which, in turn, makes her contemporaries feel the need to put on a comparable show even though they are nowhere near talented or popular enough to make it work. Otherwise you start having very real discussions about why Famous Astronaut Katie Perry is nowhere near as expensive as the Swizzle Stick.

And ticketmaster mostly is just there to help facilitate that scalping and to add obnoxious (and expensive) infrastructure to prevent every single ticket from being sold to the scalpers who stand in line when the booth opens (80s and 90s kids will remember that).

You can very much see this in the pro wrestling space. In a venue that (company full of racist sex traffickers) WWE is a regular at? Basically everyone but AEW is priced out of even having a show and AEW suffers from needing to not be a laughing stock next to WWE on the ticket prices which results in overpriced tickets and blacked out sections of the arena during panning shots. A venue that WWE doesn’t go to very often? You have a lot more genuine indie shows and you can get ringside tickets to an AEW event for under 200 bucks.

And ticketmaster fucking sucks but mostly they are just there to be vultures on whatever demand is already there. They can’t really do much if you have regularly priced tickets going to “actual fans”.

A few reasons.

Part of it is that wealth never really got passed down to us. Boomers got money and houses from their parents. Some GenX got money and houses from theirs. Millennials increasingly have family that live longer because of modern medicine (depending on your family, good or bad) and increasingly have family that burn through all their money because they want to buy mypillows and trump watches. Not to mention how many of us went zero contact because of the aforementioned trumpism.

Which, combined with multiple economic crises (how many of us saw the job market and said “I’mma gonna get a PhD and deal with that later”?) means that millennials have kinda been struggling to even get their lives “started” well into their late 30s. Hard to become a professional politician when you are always a few months away from poverty.

And the last part is… 9-11 kinda fucked us. Basically starting in the early 00s it became a mortal sin to criticize the military. Even today, we are allowed to criticize “the military industrial complex” but NOT the brave men and women who are on our streets oppressing people and helping ice round up brown people and protesters.

So by the time a good chunk of millennials reached the point where we are stable enough to fight and the world isn’t going to villify us for doing so… we also have responsibilities. In your teens and twenties you can talk about burning it all down and quitting your job to live in a tent for 14 months while you smoke weed and protest and smoke weed. You might have kids that you need to give a chance at a better life. A partner with medical concerns. Or just a cat that would slit your throat in your sleep if you moved into a tent.

So all the pushes for progressive politics and the like get us labeled as "traitor neo libs’ by the kids who want to live in tents and film tiktoks and protest and film tiktoks. And when you get told “okay boomer” when you are in your 30s… it is REAL fucking demoralizing (this is where some jackass replies “okay boomer”).