‘We’re Not Your F--ing Parents!’ Iliza Shlesinger Begs Gen Z to Cut Millennials Some Slack in Viral TikTok Rant
Iliza Shlesinger needs her younger fans to understand that the only difference between her and them is that, when Shlesinger parts her hair in the middle, she looks like a witch, but when they do it, they just look like the kids she eats.
Generational warfare is, unfortunately, some of the most click-driving content on the internet. Every time an out-of-touch Boomer like Whoopi Goldberg clocks in at 10 a.m., goes on TV and declares that young people don’t deserve houses because they don’t work enough, then clocks out at noon, it inspires a sea of retaliatory TikTok posts explaining why “kids these days” have an uphill battle that is only getting steeper with each new generation. However, the most common and clickable example of intergenerational strife on social media is the clash between the two age groups who spend the most time on TikTok and Instagram: Generation Z and their embarrassing older siblings, the Millennials.
One Millennial has had enough of the “cheugy” accusations, the fashion policing and the finger-pointing directed at her people from their younger counterparts — earlier this week, Shlesinger went mega viral on TikTok for her strongly worded message to the “contextless generation made of sound bites and hot takes.”
As the video approaches 7 million views, Shlesinger’s heated call for common ground has clearly resonated with both the Millennials and the Zoomers who are similarly tired of living in the “tire fire of an urban rummage sale that you’ve been given called society.” Many Zoomers showed up in the infamous TikTok comment section Shlesinger name-dropped to insist that they don’t have any ill wishes toward the hilariously untrendy generation who “walked on Instagram so that Gen Z could run on TikTok” as other “Elder Millennials” (a term Shlesinger herself coined in her 2018 Netflix special) added their messages to the younger crowd in that same simultaneously self-congratulating and self-effacing tone that can only come from a Millennial. “We Limewired so you could Spotify,” one such commenter quipped.
Hopefully, Shlesinger’s message reaches the intended audience and creates the cross-generational unity necessary to face a collapsing planet, but she would do well not to step on any toes in the process. Don’t let Generation X hear that a Millennial is going around telling kids, “We had the ’90s first you fucking bitch!”