April 27, 2021
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On one side of the TikTok split screen was a middle-aged man, ranting that “millennials and Generation Z have the Peter Pan syndrome.”
“They don’t ever want to grow up,” he said, referring to the fictional character who fights adulthood.
On the other side of the split screen, a teenager contemplated the rant before silently holding up a notepad, and the phrase “OK Boomer” was born.
Since 2019, the hashtag #okboomer has been used 3.7 billion times on TikTok and has sparked debate between Boomers — born 1946 to 1964 — and Zoomers — born in the 1990s to the 2010s, and who use the video conferencing app Zoom liberally — about whether age and generation are to blame for society’s ills.