Zillennial Dad Core is My Anti-Depressant
If you looked at collages of photos of the "older brother core" aesthetic, you'd get a pretty close approximation to my lifestyle. Even though I fit really heavily with this, I'm a bit too old to really identify with it. It doesn't really feel like a modern lifestyle more than it does if you gave NostalgiaCore a caffeine addiction. I tried finding something in that realm of "POV: Your Gen X parent is blasting Hair/Heavy Metal in the car while you ride in the back seat" vibe, but for the late Millennial-early Gen Z. As bands like Linkin Park, Green Day, Powerman 5000, Blink-182, and such become the new "dad rock", I decided to use a new term, "Zillennial Dad Core".
Zillennial Dad Core is like if you took older brother core, gave it a full-time job, a wife and kids, and all the BS of modern life. He works a shit corporate job, flips off a cybertruck every chance he gets, and goes home to play on a PS2 with his kid(s). It's the guy who's playing Need for Speed Underground while their kid plays with a lego set they bought and occasionally watches what dad is doing. It's "POV: Your Gen Z/Millennial dad is blasting Pop-Punk/Nu-Metal in the car while you ride in the back seat".
The Zillennial Dad walks around with an iPod, wired headphones, maybe a dumbphone. Dressing in baggier clothes and a tee shirt of their favorite band/game series. Could be listening to 90s grunge and pop punk or 00s Nu-Metal and Emo. They're daydreaming about going home to play GTA: San Andreas on their PS2, or playing Pokemon: Heart Gold on their DS on their trainride home, or bumping Pearl Jam with their kid. They may even have that artificial fish tank lamp or a Windows 7 PC Build.
I say this sort of "core" is my antidepressant, because in spite of the chaos of the outside world, here I have the joys of interests I've had since childhood mixed with the joys of adulthood (i.e. my wife and daughter). While I'll never be able to live in a pre-2008 financial crisis life, I can bring aspects of that into my life with a decent-sized degree of success.
I got such a dopamine spike playing Smackdown: Just Bring It, playing as the Undertaker with Limp Bizkit's "Rollin'" as his entrance music.
My Hair-metal fan Gen X mom has videos of me dancing and singing to "Detroit Rock City" by KISS. I have videos of my daughter dancing and singing along to "Geek Stink Breath" by Green Day.
There's a growing number of people roughly my age who would feel at home with Zillennial Dad Core, some of them are making videos about Frutiger Aero, others are making "Hell Yeah" core videos, others are reminiscing about the social gaming scene of the 2000s.
Anyway, this was a really stupid post that took me way too long to write. I'm just putting my stamp on this before it lands in the Aesthetics Wiki and gets put on TikTok compilations with the caption of "POV: You're with your dad who was born in 1998".
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as of writing this...
I'm tired. I spent a decent amount of time over the weekend getting games onto my modded PS2 memory card to great success. I was worried the PS1 games wouldn't play well, but so far it's been pretty on point. I've been listening through Alice in Chains' "Jar of Flies" and Soundgarden's "Badmotorfinger". Ready to just be home and unwind for a while.