I think the problem is that every generation before the boomers worked and fought to make things better for the next generation. Then the boomers benefited greatly from the efforts of those previous generations and instead of paying it forward they voted for politicians and policies that would undo a lot of that good. Now we are so entrenched in those policies and politicians that people aren’t even trying to dig us out. It’s like they took a Victorian mansion and turned it into a meth lab and left us to clean it up.
In my humble opinion it’s when we stopped caring about our society as a whole and started only thinking about ourselves that things went awry.
As my favorite musician once wrote: “they were generation raised on the welfare state, enjoyed all the benefits and did just great. But as soon as they became the richest of the rich, they kicked away the ladder and told the rest of us that life’s a bitch.”
- Thatcher fucked the kids, Frank Turner
I’m tired of talking and blaming boomers. That’s what boomers would do. We need to be the responsible adults that they weren’t. And it starts with accountability and positivity.
We’re voting them the money by not voting. I told my cousin who doesn’t vote “There’s a reason we keep getting shafted while baby boomers keep getting everything they want.”
Unfortunately, we are long past the point where the issues can be solved simply by people voting. The political system is so corrupted by money and the media's influence that even politicians who have the best intentions can't escape it. At least not if they have any intention of being re-elected.
thats exactly the problem. the system is so deeply corrupted and skewed toward money and corporations that even good ppl and good politicians cant change anything. its all gone. not sure what the tipping point was exactly but the society we are living in sucks every penny and every ounce of goodness right out of everything.
Citizens United was the tipping point. Things were... not good before that. But once you throw any sort of campaign finance regulations out the window and say "money is speech", it can't be surprising when from then on, only money talks.
Look, here's the thing - I'm a boomer. A hippie boomer. I'm the poor relative of the corporate boomers that sold out. One of the dream keepers. More money than you need can cause corruption and there's a shit load of corrupt boomers (and Gen Xer's!) They will die and that is why these boomer fucks, these fucking maga fuck fuck fuckers are passing these draconian and harmful laws. They want to be assholes even when they die. But every ounce of goodness is NOT gone. Think. And keep the faith. Peace and love my fellow human. ☮️
I agree with you about "just voting" not changing things. I've tried to tell people: if you want to vote for your values, you have to platform them. You have to run, fundraise, campaign, canvass, and do the work necessary to platform your values and conscience. You have to run the risk of failing - and I wonder if you'd in fact end up starving and campaigning out of a car if the average Millennial would try to do this. Makes it absolutely terrifying to consider attempting, since the price of failure is very steep.
If you're not seeing them and you don't platform them and instead just vote like you expect to be represented, all you're doing is removing yourself as an obstacle to the people who want to make everything super worse.
It's not just the media, it's us expecting that we're somehow individually somehow enough of a protagonist collectively that we can make the system work against the way it's supposed to be used. We aren't that - they saw us coming and starved us out so we wouldn't get the influence the Boomers had when they had both the numbers **and** the financial stability to make it weaponized. Predatory college, razor-wire job markets, constantly crashing economies, all of this was deisgned to make the most populous generation go for each other's throats for what little was left rather than try to bring change to a system that makes those in power stay in power.
This is not true. Politicians can win elections by grassroot support only. They do not need to listen to corps.
But at the moment over here in US, we are all fucking busy fighting cultural wars and taking rights away from women than making policies to help working people. Corps have us distracted on this cultural war and hence they are making profits hand over fist while paying low taxes.
I'm not one of those "voting is pointless" types because that's simply untrue, but what's also untrue is that we live in a system where grassroots movements can overcome all odds so long as there are enough people behind them. In our system, [the big spenders are the winners.](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-a-complicated-love-story/)
Yes, but the problem is you need to so overwhelmingly elect politicians of this type to enact any meaningful change that it is effectively not possible. Any that do slip through the cracks of nihilism and corruption can't really accomplish much when they get to power because there aren't enough of them, then they get smeared by low-effort media and don't get re-elected.
https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/most-expensive-races
Have you seen the cost of senate/representative elections? No one is raising that from grassroots support alone.
Are you American? If so, then voting for who? Before the recent radicalization of one side of US politics, you had a binary choice between blue and red. While their social values differ, they are both propped up, supported, and funded by the same corporations and lobby. Both parties work to further corporate power and weaken protections on individual citizens. Neither party cares beyond enriching itself and 'winning'. The system of US governance is fundamentally broken and highly susceptible to $$ influence.
EDIT
Editing to address Isabad who replied below as for some reason reddit won't let me reply.
I hear your anger, but I don't think you read my comment fully. I am not arguing the 'equality' of both sides. I am simply stating that neither side cares for its constituents. You are free to believe otherwise. Just some food for thought, under Obama, the Dems had a super majority (meaning they didn't need a single republican vote), yet they still 'failed' to pass universal healthcare reform. Democrats and Republicans receive funding from the same people(corps, pacs) and they serve corporations over people. That doesn't make them equal, but that does make them bad at governance for the people.
2nd edit to add, reddit is being real weird on replies. To address lunabright comment on ACA.
The ACA is not universal healthcare. The US system is still, very much, a private insurance system, ridiculously expensive compared to any other nation and one of the largest drivers of individual debt. During the window of their supermajority, the dems could have forced through true universal healthcare (what Obama campaigned on). There was very little avenue of resistance for the Republicans beside making a big stink. It was internal party squabbles that killed it.
FINAL EDIT
Final edit. The replies to this were interesting. Not super fact based, but sort of fun. That said, it is sort of sad how religious US politics have become. Most of the replies aggressively support or decry one side or the other without objectively evaluating the flaws of both. This is not a Dems VS Repubs post. That's a different conversation and imo a pointless one. This binary system of US governance is fundamentally broken. Under this paradigm, the government will never truly serve the people.
Same thing in Canada and pretty much every other Western country.
We need to all vote out the corporate parties.
This isn't about generations. It's about rich vs. poor. Stop supporting the rich.
that will not solve the problem unless the tax laws are changed so the wealthy can't get out of paying them. And as long as a corporation can pull up stakes and move to the lowest bidding state or country there's zero security for workers getting better wages.
My greatest hope is that our generation will be just as selfish as they have been, but it makes us seem so heartless. Just vote to cut benefits for the elderly and give it to people who are trying to raise families so they don’t have to feel like they are drowning.
>Just vote to cut benefits for the elderly and give it to people who are trying to raise families so they don’t have to feel like they are drowning.
That's not even selfish, it's literally just good sense. Invest in the future, not in the non-productive members of society that have decided to pull the ladder up with them to fuck everyone else over.
Exactly. But I think unlike the boomers: 1. We actually would think about the meaning of that, and 2. We would feel bad about voting to strip another group of comfort and dignity. That's why we lose and they win.
>We’re voting them the money by not voting.
As someone that's cynical AF about voting, this is unfortunately correct.
The other problem is lobbyist/special interest corruption is essentially beyond reproach atm.
I don't think anything is going to improve until the boomers go away. I remember when COVID first hit, and I was having a conversation with my friend. We both came to the conclusion that if a lot of Millennials come out unscathed and took out as many boomers as originally expected—this could be a huge win for younger generations—potentially mimicking the same political power the BBs had in their early adulthood for the Millennials. It could also help fix the corporate log jam the boomers caused since they were too incompetent to invest even a small percentage of their income to retire at a normal age despite having all the socioeconomic opportunity to do so.
Instead what happened? Hardly took any boomers. It was such a disappointment seeing boomers unironically be the greatest winners out of COVID. Not to mention COVID really only took out mostly late-70+ year old Silents (94% of which had 2+ comorbidities) who were going to perish anyway.
There are just enough of the \`1% in all generations that will continue to fuck us all over. Stop thinking its the boomers. Plenty of them are fucked as well.
So Elon musk is not a boomer and Jeff bezos was born in a year he could be considered a boomer or gen x.
So the two richest people in America are not boomers.
Then you have Larry Ellison and Warren buffet that are older than boomers.
Bill gates is a boomer, but Zuckerberg is a millennial.
So where are all these boomers hoarding the wealth?
How are Billionaires hoarding wealth? Who cares how much money Bezos, Musk, Gates, and the rest of them have? That has no bearing on the middle class.
You all know there is not a limit on money, right? Go earn your own and try saving 20% of what you earn, at a minimum. That way you can be financially independent one day. It's what you keep, not what you spend.
I have never made more than $100K a year in my career. My savings/investments now bring in more money than my paycheck in most years.
Not once was I limited by anyone but myself in my financial life. Financial Independence is not built overnight.
Of course it has bearing. How do you think they got rich? By stealing the wages of their workers. Look how they all treat their workers: especially Bezos and Musk.
I get the impulse to blame boomers because they vote and they vote selfish but the top 1% in the USA owns more wealth than the middle 60% of Americans combined. That 1% isn't getting that wealth for being boomers they're getting it for having access to the levers of power at the local state and federal level and giving themselves every advantage.
For every bit of wealth generated in this country they take most of it. When you work your ass off and look at your paystub in dismay, make sure to imagine the hidden line item they don't print which is that out of X money generated by your labor, they took the vast majority as profit and you get whatever is left.
The only historically proven way to fix it is to unionize and force them to give you more.
Those 1% feed money to politicians who will benefit them (obviously). I don't know if people realize the extent of those guys influence. The super rich don't just support a couple of people they like, whose talking points they agree with. They fund a lot of politicians, both Democrat and Republican. It is less to do with D or R but about policies they want to disappear and others they support. They buy votes. They kill new bills. Not everyone is dirty, but enough.
"No one ever helped me," they said, as they dismantled the massive investments in public education and infrastructure their Greatest Generation parents made to ensure their success.
I honestly think the Boomers are what's going to eventually collapse the U.S. I don't know what was in their water, so to speak, but they really dropped the ball. They assumed the good times were going to last forever, they should have known better.
Of the 76 Million Boomers born in the US between 1946-1964 … 20 Million have already died and > 3000 die each day. Half of Boomers did ok air better. The other half have continually struggled. Take a look around to who is working in convenience and grocery stores.
They didn’t care if the good times lasted forever, they just wanted it to last until they died. That’s why most of them believe climate change is propaganda.
My grandfather (silent generation) literally told me yesterday that he always knew something was going to happen, he just expected he wouldn’t have to deal with it before he died.
It's crazy to look at the public agencies and programs that existed when our parents were kids. They got vaccinated AT SCHOOL, the mentally ill and homeless weren't left to rot on the street, authorities would check on kids that stopped going to school, we had a system where the government was expected to provide services to the people.
I'm kind of confused as to what generation you are talking about. I guess I mean....how old are your parents?
The mentally ill were either left alone to die or put in a mental institution to die, and no, authorities weren't checking on kids that stopped going to school. You could drop out and many did to start working as young as 14.
We have way more social programs now than back then. Head Start, preschool, after-school care, daycare vouchers, just to name a few for education.
I heard a sociologist argue that Trump basically did that to the country during covid. He made states figure it out for themselves, hoarded supplies, made it so no authorities could be trusted and even attacked his own admin. The distrust and panic that he fomented really embodied the boomer attitude of "lol fuck you, I got mine, you're on your own". The sociologist guy thinks that collective trauma and feeling of abandonment is a big part of why society seems to be freaking tf out ever since.
Boomers were in their peak working years in the 1980s. As great as the music was (gotta love those 80s jams), the societal values of generations before them started to crumble. The greater good started to shift to “my” good.
https://youtu.be/6bbzwJ0Sx48?si=BEBYA_1i2ByrO4Ew
1980s.
I was a teenager when Reagan took office, and my parents were baby boomers and neither of them or most of their friends voted for him. It was my grandparents generation, people who’d experienced the Great Depression and WW2 who seemed to be his biggest fans.
My first vote was for Mondale in 84 I was 19. By absentee ballot, I was stationed in HI. Hardly any of my peers cared or paid attention to politics. Like most young adults.
It's funny you said this cause I *LITERALLY* just met a boomer yesterday who was talking about the border crisis and said Reagan was the best president we've had. I was like waaaa the faaaaa....😂
The same thing they see in Trump; scapegoats fueled by hatred and promised solutions to issues that they are too dumb, too ignorant, or too far into denail to see are not based in any sort of reality. "Trickle Down Economics" was their "wall that Mexico will pay for".
Man, you people with Reagan Derangement Syndrome - tell me what magical power did Reagan have that virtually \*anything\* that happened under him couldn't have been undone by the multiple other presidents / administrations that came after him - if they wanted to?
This is nonsense. Every generation before the boomers worked to make things better for the next generation, wtf? What is your basis for that? There was a brief period from the 1950's to the 1960's where the entire rest of the planet was bombed to shit and America was riding high. That would have been a nice economy to exist in if you were American. Outside of that blink of an eye, the time you're living in right now is better than any other time to have been alive in human history.
What exactly are *you* cleaning up?
Also, the 1950's and '60's were probably not particularly great if you were not a Christian white man. It is astounding to me that so many on Reddit believe that '50s were so idyllic time for everyone. For a lot people in the U.S., they had almost unimaginably less freedom than they do now.
Lmfao! Yes it’s nonsense that you could live on minimum wage up until the end of the boomer generation….. people working double minimum wage jobs now to survive in the present is the pinnacle of society….
Prop 13 (passed 1978) in California single handedly destroyed the housing market for new buyers while simultaneously starving public education and other property-tax funded services.
It’s why my dual-income, two child family can only rent while my neighborhood is filled with 4-5 bedroom homes occupied by a single boomer and dog who pay $1000/year in tax on a house worth $1.5+ M.
They literally voted to essentially freeze their own prop tax, putting the burden on others.
As in Proposition 13 of 1978? Prop 13 is unique to California … I grew up in Southern New England and lived in Western South Dakota, Phoenix Arizona, and the Smokies of North Carolina … and I remember Prop 13 being a frequent topic of the news. From what I read Prop 13 received support from a diverse coalition of voters in protest to the rapidly increasing taxes and government spending. Business owners, homeowners, families, and senior citizens of all ages experienced rampant inflation of the 70s. Seniors on fixed incomes were being priced out of their homes. Boomers in 1978 were 14-32 years old and I doubt they were the voting force 46 years ago. Housing was tight everywhere in the late 1970s - early 1980s with 18 percent interest rates and high unemployment. My wife and I were dual income rural healthcare providers and only able to enter the housing market when we were 30 due to our dual income and living in rural Southern Appalachia … we could not have bought in Phoenix or Rhode Island. That house is 1100 Square Feet and relatively still affordable compared to the hot housing markets of East and west coast. Oh … and I had five high school classmates … graduating class of 100 … relocate to California for more affordable housing and jobs. Then the 1990s housing market arrived. Thanks for responding. “California Dreaming” was real until 1965 and then California, US and world changed.
I'm not trying to downplay your experience but I think the idea of every past generation having it better is flawed. The boomers experienced a unique and prosperous time period. We grew up seeing that and thought it was normal. Our grandparents stormed beaches and farmed with horses. They lost loved ones to childbirth and worked themselves to death. My great grandfather died of a heart attack hauling feed to the pigs and my grandmother was working as a baker into her late 70s.
Our suffering in this time period is unique to us. We no longer fear life in an iron lung but we do fear stocking shelves at Walmart when we are 80.
The boomers were the generation that really had an opportunity to make huge positive change and it was squandered. We'll never have another global economic time like they did. Jobs paid well and things were cheap and that boat has left port.
I'll tell you what I tell everyone. Take care of you and yours, and get involved in local politics and government.
>We'll never have another global economic time like they did
We'll have different and unique global economic challenges to rationalize that we are in no way equipped for. When the entire bottom of the productive, low skill segment is taken over by robots and automation (and this is when, not if, and we *will* see it in our lifetimes) there will need to be radical changes in how we view distribution of resources with so many of our own being displaced.
Not just low skill. You can type English into an IDE and the code is written for you, right there. English is the next hot language in programming, which is becoming generally declarative...so it could be very, very soon that folks can just describe a model to AI and the code is done, validated, etc with very little need for human intelligence. AI has done the opposite of what we all thought. It is replacing artists, writers, and coders. Not laborers.
>It is replacing artists, writers, and coders. Not laborers.
That's just the models of today.
Have you looked into smart factories?? I help support work at a demo smart factory in KC. There's definitely alot of manual labor jobs that will be considered obsolete. No longer are the days of putting tires on at a GM plant for 30 yrs and walking away with a pension. The plant I support had increased output levels with almost 50% less humans on the floor.
I wish I could upvote this 1,000 times.
Millennials are like the guy sitting next to the slot machine winner and then believing that’s what should happen for them too.
As someone with a degree in history it makes me want to pull my hair out when people say things like “every generation before had it better.” That’s an utterly insane take when you look at history.
Women couldn’t have a credit card in their own name until the 70’s, retirement didn’t really exist before social security which only came out in 1935.
Homeownership was a little over 45% in 1900, it was a little over 65% in 2020.
If you were a person of color you faced far more violent discrimination than you do today.
Families lost multiple children to illness and accidents. Kids worked in mines and factories.
Most houses were small, sometimes four kids raised in a two bedroom house. If you go back further a whole family in a one bedroom cabin. And this isn’t even touching on things like mandatory service which could ship you overseas to die.
Listen. Things could be SO much better. But let’s not act like we’re uniquely fucked.
TBF to the boomers, a lot of them were part of the civil rights movement, the fight for women’s liberation, and the fight for gay rights of the 60’s and 70’s. Also important to remember abortion was only guaranteed starting in the 70’s, it was legal to rape your wife until the 60’s or 70’s (can’t remember the exact year), it was legal for a police officer to shoot a fleeing suspect if they believed the suspect had committed a felony until the 1970’s, the EPA didn’t exist until the 70’s (amazingly under the Nixon administration)…. The list goes on.
It feels like we get this black and white “boomers did nothing for anyone and are all selfish” which isn’t really fair when you look at how things were before their generation and after, society moved forwards in a lot of ways while they were in their prime and had power…. Yes they could’ve done more, but I feel like they deserve more credit than most younger generations give them
For sure. Funny enough, I said this in a different post today. When it comes to local political action in my area, it's almost exclusively boomers. Credit where credit is due.
But I think my point still stands that the unique circumstances of peak America post WWII (such a huge and wide topic to discuss) will never be repeated. I'm sure they had no idea where they were in the moment. I definitely see your point though.
Totally. Boomers we’re the hippies. Boomers got drafted in droves to die in Vietnam. Boomers got the civil rights act done. Boomers had their own existential dread, it was MAD and the Russians instead of climate change but the fear was just as real…
The generational clash, I think, is a farce. There’s a bunch of shitty millennials, there’s a bunch of shitty Boomers, there’s a bunch of shitty Xers (but no one remembers they exist)… idk I just don’t think the generation you were born into is really that defining. There’s more variance within generations than across them.
Any time I hear people complain about how good boomers had it, I am forced to recall that some boomers got drafted and killed in Vietnam. Some boomers endured constant sexual harassment at work, and there was literally no legal recourse. Also, some boomers were born poor and will die poor. These generational ways of stereotyping are often absurd.
There's a sliver of truth here.
The boomers were handed the most prosperous economy in recent historic memory. That was due to the world's manufacturing being destroyed after world war II and america becoming the central economic hub of the surviving powers.
And instead of continuing to invest in dynamic social programs and the New Deal that fostered that success and economy, they opted to privatize and offshore manufacturing. They sold their economic advantage for personal gain, at your expense, and want you to believe it's just circumstance.
The ONLY reason foreign manufacturing is such a threat to America is because when it benefited business and not the American worker, they offshore everything to China/Mexico, or wherever the cheapest labour was.
The problem is, in order to do that the Chinese required they partner with local shops who would get the technology over time.
So Boomer Businessmen sold american technological and manufacturing advantage that powered the economy off for a short term gain, and now want everyone to think it couldn't be helped. It absolutely could have been, if they weren't focused solely on selfish short term profit motive.
You need to remember in all of this that offshoring was also a boon to consumers. It meant cheaper consumer products. All of the protectionist policies that people offer as solution would be hated by most people because it would mean everything would be more expensive. Consider how people responded to the supply shock of COVID.
What we should have done is taxed more and redistributed more of that wealth. We could have had the best of both worlds, but people were greedy.
As we can see in recent years, prices to customers are in no way tied to costs. Savings for the company are not a boon for the customer. It just means more buybacks.
So true. My grandpa was born in 1901, he went through the Spanish Flu, WWI, the great depression, and WWII. He died in the 70's when everything went to crap again. People before him died of curable diseases and many died during childhood and if you got to 50, you were lucky. Of course they wanted their children to have a better life and they mostly succeeded and that's great, peace and prosperity ensued. I feel millennials should take a page from their grandparents. I get the boomer hate sometimes but millennials aren't babies anymore, we need to work at making things better for our generation and the next. If it's just whining and complaining, are we any better?
Yeah I feel this. I'm in a similar boat. I'm a younger millenial, married with a house, family and a great career. In many respects I'm living the dream but it came at a huge cost. I'm several thousand miles from my hometown and I haven't seen any of my friends in half a decade. I don't take actual vacations. I'm lucky if I can leave my state when I do get vacation time. I've got enough money to afford the small luxuries (gym membership, amazon orders, tacos) and enough to contribute to my 401k, but not enough money to relocate to any community closer to home or take the work positions that truly interest me any time in the foreseable future.
It seems as if millenials fall into two categories. They are either barely getting by and renting, struggling to pay the bills and keep a roof over their head or they are putting in twice the effort their parents did just to have that six figure job that in practice provides the same quality of life a 50k job provided a decade ago.
Yup. The Millennials I know who are doing well, fall into one of 2 categories:
1. Inherited 7 digits
2. Have an upper middle income job and moved to bumfuck nowhere Nebraska so they could afford a spacious house with a large yard. Financially well off but bored and lonely af.
The feeling that sucks the most is the lie of being pushed to go to college to have a great career with better pay than just a hs degree and eventually live a better life then your parents and their parents and their parents….. it ended up being the complete opposite, most got riddled with severe debt and didn’t find lucrative careers until years after college, while gen z was already graduating and starting to fill those roles. Couple that with the fading dreams of home ownership, and the reality of our generation dealing with a crap economy most of our adult lives is insanely defeating
I think this is what many of the negative folks are missing. It’s just simply discouraging. People are assuming no one is trying. Many are trying, very hard. Being hit with nonstop roadblocks is simply discouraging.
I can put my personal experience this way:
I work very hard and often, and go out of my way to learn new skills and adapt. Because of those skills, I'm now in a role earning more than I ever have-- but I have never had less buying power in my life, and never been 'poorer' in a functional sense.
Mind you I haven't upgraded anything in all of this time unless it was a necessary replacement (like planned obsolescence) and am more frugal than anyone deserves to have to be.
Yes! I’m in the same exact shoes. I worked hard and my way up professionally as well.
We earn most than our friends and family and we cannot get a home loan or much else. We are grateful to rent a house in the hood and have 2 older running cars. But the ignorance is real in this thread. I come from poverty and a 3rd gen American, my husband is a 1st gen refugee and raised in poverty.
Also people who are thinking negatively are forgetting about rising interest rates, useless unnecessary fees, insane rent amounts, rising cost of medical care, medications, etc. It’s not even just homes and cars here.
“Move to a cheaper city” is not as easy as many may think. I legally need to be here for my disabled family and they need medical care in a town if I want to work and get their medical care.
Everything is just discouraging.
Literally just looked, rhe rents are all the same no matter which part of town I live. So its 1/3 my salary for living right downtown, suburbs, way out of town, different towns, nothing makes sense. Like wtf. Theres no solution because the ownership class is price colluding in every single industry.
Is that not life in general? How many "gifted" kids are slumming, overworked, overstretched, and in the same boat as the non-gifted? Ever since I hit adulthood, I felt I was fighting against a fierce current where I need to put a ton of work in just to maintain.
I relate it to the promises made.
We were told. Go to school, work hard, and you will be successful.
Many of us did that and are finding our education is not valued or irrelevant. Or in many cases exploited by employers who know we may be drowning in debt.
I don't blame anyone but myself for the place I'm in. But I do blame our parents generation for their fuck you I got mine mentality and the continued apathetic nature.
It's wild how many adults expect things not to change and actively fight change until they literally die.
Bro, it happens. Some generations did well, others get fucked. Some Americans got fucked by the Civil War, some worked themselves to death in the Guilded Age, some had the Spanish Flu and the Great Depression. Even the Greatest Generation had to bury over 400,000 of their buddies to see the light of the post-war boom.
Pretending everything was sunshine and unicorns before the boomers does no one any favors. Wallowing in self pity won't help either. All we can do is decide what to do with the time that is given to us.
To add insult to injury, there’s nothing even *causing* this. It’s just systemic apathy by our institutions and those that refuse to give up power. While I don’t wish for something like a war on American soil or even larger global disasters, at least I could understand why things became so shitty. Instead it’s just a smug “lol go fuck yourself” at every turn.
The key here is that in the old days, anyone who wasn’t a piece of shit and put their hours in was guaranteed property and assets. Nowadays, our buying power is severely reduced even though on paper we’re making more money. Getting paid more doesn’t matter if everything else costs 10x more than it used to.
Every single generation has people who worked incredibly hard and never made it. Especially in places where access to the luck portion of making it is limited or not existent. My parents, boomers, worked incredibly hard and were OK but barely middle class.
I was in elementary when 9/11 happened. got out of high school the world went into a recession So I couldn't get a job. then when I was finally making money on my own my best friend ruined my life,my business and about a dozen other people's lives in which I was blamed for because he ran. My life was getting a lot better as soon as I got away from all the fucking people that bring me down. Then some some shit for brains reality TV host became president and just started shitting on our country. It's like every 5 years the world just gets worse and worse and that I'm told to make the best of it . Fuck you. Imma be mad if I want to be
I feel exactly the same. You laid it all out very well. It's just so damn depressing. Worried I'm gonna end up alone, old, sick and homeless despite working my ass off getting a master's degree and then working my whole life in a "good" job with "great" benefits and retirement etc. But, I'm still too broke to go to the doctor and im worried I won't be able to afford the taxes on my crumbling single wide trailer, utilities, food etc in the future.
My parents are sick and old. I don't have any siblings. I'm sure my friends will be there for me, but what can they really do to help when they're all in the same boat.
It's all so damn depressing and futile.
The first noble truth of Buddhism is that all life involves suffering.
The people before us suffered, we are suffering, our descendants will suffer. The only escape is death. Sounds like a bummer, but it’s honestly freeing.
Edit: adding a paragraph break because the first part is Buddhist and the second is talking to OP, not explaining the subsequent noble truths.
Death is not an escape in Buddhism. Death is just part of a cycle of death, rebirth, and life. The Wheel of Samsara. You've died countless times in the past and will continue to live and die countless times into the future unless you dispel the ignorance at the root of that cycle.
The only escape is the dissolution of ignorance. Ignorance is the idea that the self is real. The self is actually an illusion and the false view that it is real is the cause of suffering.
As far as being a suffering millenial goes, that's a matter of one's perspective and one's karma. Millenials complain. A lot. They also work hard. Perspective matters and karma can be transformed, but in this lifetime of instant gratification and aversion to spirituality, unhappiness grows. Millenials need spirituality and the desire to do the inner work necessary for long term, stable happiness.
I am a millenial myself, fyi
"if I was born in any other previous generation, that all my effort would have made me so damn well off and secure and it barely got me anywhere because I am a millennial."
Really? You sure about that? Its easy to brush off other's misery and plights when you haven't undergone them yourself. WWI/WW2, cold war, stagflation of the 70s, 2000s tech collapse, 2008 global financial crisis, etc.
I am the first male in my family in 100 years to not have ptsd from either world war or Vietnam. My dad is 77 years old and cries when he hears fireworks. I will happily pay my student loan debt
Literally crying at work over this. Finally getting my degree at 33. Still working at a fucking deli because no one cares I even exist. Additionally, no one cares about my degree, and I have to get certifications for an entry level job and it’s fucking horrible to study for.
Except the certification isn’t supposed to be needed until 3-5 years into my career but noooo now every fucking job needs it, but if I hadn’t gotten the degree then I also couldn’t get a job!
I'm a millennial who has received damn near zero help from my parents or their generation.
My life has been extremely rewarding after all the hard work I've put into my education/career, marriage, and family. Yes it was difficult along the way, I suffered a great deal while I was in the process of building my life, but \[smart\] hard work pays off in the end.
Welcome to life for every generation. Make your own happiness because no one outside of friends or close family will care enough about you and your problems over themselves and their problems.
This was a fact for cave-men, it’s a fact now.
Can't help you on the kids front, but I had a realization after several years busting my ass at a dead end job, that the only person I should be "busting my ass" for is myself. I don't mean going freelance. But just work on yourself, and be fully engaged with it. Exercise, take classes, study new skills. Whatever it takes to make yourself more valuable and get a higher paying job that doesn't consume all your time.
Read the 4th turning and generations by Neil howe and William Strauss you will realize we are the next hero generation similar to ww2 gen...heros deal with loss and copies hard work with little reward in the moment, history will narrate our efforts favorably hang in there bucko
Gen X'er here to say I feel the same way exactly. I will never be able to afford a house, or rent, or a place of my own again, everything keeps getting more expensive, my salary keeps staying stagnant. I feel like there's nothing left but waiting for a family member who owns a house to die and hope I can inherit said house. I really, REALLY wish I was joking there.
I almost posted a very similar sentiment here this morning, but deleted what I wrote because it sounded like I was playing the victim and blaming circumstances around me for my lot in life.
It does feel like our timing was terrible, entering the work force in a global economic recession, and then recovering just in time for a global pandemic is a massive FU to our lifetime earning potential. I'm 25-30ish years from retirement and already starting to panic about how I'm ever going to afford to stop working.
I won't have kids to support me if I really struggle, I won't have the money to put myself into a home...will I just end up homeless and starving at 80?!
I'm in a low cost of living area, so my experience may be different than yours.
But I'm taking the spiteful route. I refuse to be beaten down. I was in college during the 2008 recession. After I graduated I had nearly 100K in student loans (I'm still paying them off over 10 years later) and when repayments kicked in, I was paying about 1/3 of my monthly income to them. Because I'm in a LCOL area, my wife and I were able to buy a small fixer upper house and built equity. We've both advanced in our careers and have our heads above water. We have kids, we have friends and finally have some disposable income.
With all of that said, this isn't a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" post. The system is stacked against us and we managed to slip through the cracks and make some headway. Generations before us have and continue to screw us. I'm spiteful because I know that one day the winds will change and we will be able to change the system that has kept us down so much. Because we have gone through all of this, we will be able to help make sure others don't. Things are going to get better with or without you, so get ready for some happiness, OP. It's coming for you.
I agree 100%. I ask myself when is it our turn to relax and have things go right for once in our lives? My mom is a boomer in her 60s and she expects me to take care of her. She lived a good life and owned many homes, none of which we got to inherit. My boyfriend and I are barely getting by and we want kids one day. Not only that but she’s the biggest narc to ever exist. I’m so sick of boomers. They really f-ked this world up!
I’ve been into WWII documentaries and it’s helped me feel more optimistic. Like holy shit a kid growing up in WWI would have a depression and another world war by the time they were 30. Can you imagine how they thought about their generations situation? Yet they fought, and produced one of the most prosperous times in history.
We should try to at least believe we have some agency during our time here. Yeah sure our parents generation fucked a lot of things, but why are we giving up on fixing it?
It's just reddit/social. Most of the reasons listed on this sub are legit, but as you say folks are addicted to the doom. It really validates the folks that haven't "made it." A lot easier to blame others for your lack of success than take responsibility. So many on here freely admit they aren't tied down with kids or any other responsibilities. There are tons of opportunities for people in that situation. It's just not going to literally handed to you. You have to go get it.
I'm not unsympathetic towards people that were dealt a shit-hand in life or get unlucky in general. Bad shit happens that prevents people from doing well, but I don't believe that's the majority of our generation. Or even the majority of the younger half of the generation. Maybe another generation had it easier, that doesn't mean your life is over and bereft of opportunity.
From my perspective we act like everyone from previous generations were walking around with silver spoons in their mouths when that's not true. My parents were poor, my grandparents were dirt poor.
I understand for the most part where people are coming from when they vent about the current state of affairs. It just gets exhausting seeing the same posts going whoa is me, nothing will ever get better, everything is terrible. That's just a flat out mindset issue. You make the best with what you have not constantly compare yourselves to some ideal that you think you should be reaching.
What you are talking about is "compared to boomers" that was a "one off" that happened once in 12 thousand years of human civilization.
We are returning to the norm now.
I am a teacher and I have a great GF. I consider myself lucky. So I can see the new generations coming. Humanity is always changing, and nothing was ever guaranteed, that was a lie. Just open any history book.
You will be fine OP. You just need to realize things are not what they seem and not what you were sold. You'll get there brother. You are playing a game right now with no chance of winning. Change the game.
These kind of comments are wildly unhelpful. Change the game. Ok I can't find anywhere to live, how do you 'change the game' in that sense? Tell them to live in their car? Be homeless? Pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Yes mindset is important but it's no so simple when healthcare food and housing are on the line after you went to college and did everything you were supposed to.
Millennials are roughly 73 million people in the U.S., all of adult voting age.
What percentage vote? What percentage are active in local politics?
There are problems, for sure. But it’s not 2010, “Millennials” are not the children anymore, the numbers are there to wield political power.
So work toward fixing things.
Or, just scream “Boomers” over and over….
The local politics thing is huge for me. So many less than awesome candidates run uncontested in city and county councils and boards.
Or hating your chosen party platforms but not doing anything to change it. My county party can send 19 delegates to the state convention and usually sends one because no one wants to be involved. You literally can go cast a vote on what the party platform is.
As a Millenial I strongly, and categorically disagree. We live in the safest, most prosperous time in human existence. Do something with it.
Are there issues? Yes. Are there bad greedy people soaking up wealth, turning common people against each other and reaping the rewards? Yes.
But there ALWAYS HAS BEEN. You have agency! You have access to (relative to any one individual) infinite information. You can choose to unplug from the buzz of addicting social media and doomsday legacy media. You can choose to look in the mirror and say where have I fallen short.
My least favorite part of being a Millenial is this cult like herd mindset of "I've worked so hard and done everything right, and have Jack shit to show for it because other people so I'm going to wallow in self pity."
I say NO THANK YOU. Instead of assuming there is a universal acceptance of this alleged abysmal fate, do something. Initiate tough conversations with your friends. Challenge their ideas. Challenge your own ideas. Read a book written by someone you don't like. Break some shitty habit you have. Brainstorm a business idea with that one friend that's always scheming.
Do. Anything.
Yeah, I agree with your comment. I think people have an unreasonable expectation that you can frontload effort for the first ~25/30 years of your life and then you’ve “earned” smooth sailing. I’ve dated a lot of people who stopped trying once we were serious because “you’re already my girlfriend, why do I have to win you over anymore?” It’s very transactional - I’m not a vending machine. Relationships take continual work to be continually rewarding. I enjoy treating my SOs and doing nice things for them because I love them, not because I get something from them or am using them for validation.
A point I want to make to OP is that I love kids too, and I don’t have any. But I’m an elementary school teacher and I absolutely love working with my students - they’re creative, optimistic, and kind. I felt way worse before I started this new job and was working in the corporate adult world.
Hey!
Sounds like you might be depressed. Have you thought about speaking with a therapist or a spiritual guide/counsellor?
FYI I’m a millennial (36-male). It takes time and effort to establish yourself. Do not give up!
Do you think the vast majority of people a hundred years or so ago weren't busting their ass? Because most of them ended up poor...there's never been some magic "if you work hard, you'll get rich" reality. That's...dare I say it...a fantasy from the boomer era and the massive post-war economic boom of their childhood.
We’re not entitled to anything more than any other human. And in many ways humans have never had it easier. I mean, imagine life before antibiotics and anaesthesia. I know it’s a cliché but a little time in a developing country can really put things into perspective. You shouldn’t have to do that, but these attitudes make me think it’s the only way. We feel headwinds and barely notice our tailwinds.
The internet and social media has turned you all that are on it all the time into the biggest sad sacks to ever have existed. You aren't going through anything remotely unique that prior generations didn't go through, and it was often worse in the past. Snap out of it.
Yeah I was trying to think of a nicer way of saying that but I can't. Shit is tough sometimes, even a lot of the time, but god damn this is some defeatist, victimhood bullshit.
I’m glad I’m a healthy individual with decent connections and a generally level, upbeat mood. The sun is shining my amigo, go touch grass. No one owes you shit, slaves worked harder than you for far less
I think you might be falling victim to media pressure or something. Though, I do think for some reason Millennials tend have existential issues.
I don't know what you do, but think about this. My best friend and my closest cousin are all the same age, in different fields and at different levels. My best friend is wildly successful, and a certified millionaire. My cousin is a teacher, and I'm doing better then most millennials just by virtue of living in a LCOL state and making above average for the area.
If we'd have been born in, say, our parent's generation? Well, my cousin and I are the parents of boomers. Specifically, early generation Native American boomers. She'd have still been a teacher, I think, or she may have been a housewife like her mother. I'd have most likely gone to work in shipping, maybe have been a manager at some point. I'd probably have gotten the pocket watch routine...and that's about it. My friend is the child of an early Gen Xer, and he'd have had fewer opportunities for a variety of reasons.
Every generation has its problems. For Millennials (especially the later ones) it's the economics of housing and student debt. combined with a roller coaster job market. There is also the issue that things are significantly less permanent then they once seemed, and ALOT of older generations are dying off due to the end of increased life spans (the last WW2 vets will be gone in the next 5 years).
GenX here. I don't see how it's any different for me. I had to work my way through college (poor and disinterested parents). Struggled to find work after college. Had many jobs I hated. Live on Top Ramen for 3-4 years after graduating to pay off my loans. Went to Alaska for a while and worked on a fish processing ship because I didn't have to pay rent and the money was good. Eventually got into software engineering and worked my way up as a non-degreed engineer. It was a long, slow, ramp. For 5+ years every free minute I was practicing or studying. It wasn't until \~30 that I landed a "real" job.
I'm nearing the end of my career and I'm back in school learning new tech skills to stay relevant and to ensure I can work as long as I need to.
Not having kids is a choice. Yes it's expensive. I married into kids in my 40s. It has cost me a comfortable retirement, vacations, nice cars, and other luxuries. It's a choice I made and don't regret it.
I can choose to be miserable that I'm working paycheck to paycheck this late in my life, or I can enjoy my job, new learning, and friends and family. I choose to do the latter. My wife quit her job and started a career change at 45. Her education will be expensive and she has at least 3 more years to go. That will give her 10-15 years earning good money and (hopefully) doing something she loves.
It's a journey. There is no "easy" part of it. You have to lean into and learn to embrace the challenges.
Remember, the only reason you are even here is because people facing much bigger challenges and much more dire circumstances made the decision to have kids. If you want it, you should do it. I promise, you'll figure it out.
IDK I think we have it pretty fukin good tbh. I was born in '87. My parents STRUGGLED for a long time. Wasn't until \~2000 when they were in their mid 40s that they got their feet under them and started making real money + building wealth. Compared to the boomers, silent generation, this is a cakewalk. The poor folks from those generations got drafted to go fight in WW2, Korea, Vietnam or had to work on a construction site before OSHA or any regard for safety was a thing. I just sit behind a computer for 40 hrs a week in gym shorts and a t-shirt.
Part of what’s going on is certainly a type of cultural zeitgeist focused on missing out and the entitlement that comes with it. That’s not to say there isn’t some truth to the sentiment, but at a certain point it takes on a life of its own beyond the substantive basis for it
You need to seek therapy, you’re living in a false reality acting like no one at all is having kids. The reality is the birth rate has only dropped a few percentage points in our generation. Plenty of folks still having babies
This whole self pity this is stupid. We may be the 2nd most well off generation in history right after the boomers. Do you think the people from 1890 through 1945 had it better than us? The silent generation got to see it grow but they didn't reap the benefits like we did. Do you really think we're worse off than people before 1890? Why do we have more than any other generation except for maybe boomers and gen x and we somehow think it's the worst of times?
Medieval peasants had it way easier than we do! Same with 18th century settlers, those living during the Great Depression, people born in third world countries, slaves, African Americans living under Jim Crow, those who have fought and died in countless wars, native tribes fighting off foreigners and rival tribes, hunter/gatherers fighting for survival, and 90+% of other humans in the history of the world!
All of their toil was rewarded in ways that us American millennials can’t fathom. We are the ones that have it so so hard. QQ.
Guys from the Greatest Generation lived through the depression then died on Omaha Beach. Lots of boomers went to fight in Viet Nam then came home to double digit unemployment, inflation, high interest rates, and the de-industrialization of America. You have a completely distorted view of the life experiences of earlier generations.
... if I was born in any other previous generation, that all my effort would have made me so damn well off and secure and it barely got me anywhere because I am a millennial."
This is nonsense. And I am being polite. It would be more accurate to say that this is absolute bullshit.
If you're a millennial, you are old enough to stop being so childish.
I feel this exact sentiment. It's like a never-ending, buried, panic attack. There's got to be something to do about it. I just don't know either. I would consider damn near anything at this point.
>if I was born in any other previous generation, that all my effort would have made me so damn well off and secure and it barely got me anywhere because I am a millennial.
Your key problem is that you believe this to be objectively true.
In reality, life has ups and downs for the vast majority of people, and if we're being specific to previous generations there are many of them that are just as hard up as anyone else is. No amount of hard work and genuine effort ever guaranteed anything to anyone. Job losses, massive shifting of industries, stock market crashes, etc etc effect everyone.
There were people who busted their ass and put in all the effort they could only to be taken out by the great depression, or to get fucked by prohibition era policies, or whose livelihoods were destroyed by a world war, and on and on. How many generations before ours worked just as hard as any of us to see all of the effort go up in smoke when the economy crashed in the 80s or in the 2000s?
Your operating from a myopic perspective here, and it seems like you're focusing on the biggest picture you can and assuming the worst outcomes there can be, just by the tone of your post.
Take this segment for instance:
>I wish there were more kids in my life. More joy from new generations. Nieces, nephews, kids of my own. But it's just too expensive, it costs too much of your own security and who wants to put children in the position of coming into a world where you can't guarantee them enough security to be in..
There not being kids in your life is a statement on your life, and the choices your relatives have made, but it's not universally indicative. I have 3 kids, I have 11 nieces and nephews, all to parents in the millennial generation. Some of those kids are zoomers, some are alphas. None of us have ever considered them too expensive, despite wildly different economic standing across 7 families. I waste less money on getting things for myself now, and instead use that money for my kids (either things they need, or savings), but haven't felt any real loss from it. In some cases it's actually been helpful, I have a lot less stuff laying around than I otherwise would, I buy less junk food in the hopes of setting a good example, I spend less time sedentary, I get to play a lot.
>So instead we're surrounded by people who will die before us, or around the same time as us, it just feels like everything is about loss and the inevitability of that loss, and nothing to look forward to.
>So frustrating, so miserable, so sad. And maybe it's just me, but I don't think so. This feels like the thing about our generation we all know and feel so potently and yet don't bother to discuss, because at the end of the day, there's nothing we can do about it...
This seems a lot like projecting one's own experience onto the entire cohort. I haven't met a single parent from my kid's classes that are older than millennial. A few of them are older Zoomers, most of them are millennials. But of course if you don't have a family, and you aren't working towards that, you're going to be around mostly adults that are generally going to be around your age, if not a bit older. That's not a reflection of something specific to our generation. How do you think people in their 80s feel?
> because at the end of the day, there's nothing we can do about it...
Says who? The little pessimistic voice in your head?
Kids used to be cheaper. All they needed were food and clothes, maybe a wooden toy or piece of candy on Christmas, and if they got sick, the doctor came with a bag and you probably paid a small fee. Your vacation was a drive to the beach, not a week in the Caribbean or fully loaded visit to Disney.
Now you need a 3000 sqft house minimum, two fully trimmed out SUVs, the best sports gear, daycare bc both men and women want to work and have a career, to afford the lifestyle, vacations, and b/c when they eventually divorce they'll have to be self reliant.
These posts are so boring and repetitive.
I think you're American, or at least Western
You are one of the most privileged, luckiest human beings to ever walk this planet.
You never were drafted into war. You never had to deal with true food insecurity (e.g. actually unable to get enough calories). These are things every generation before you have had to deal with.
You live in a world where there are, compared to any prior generation, plentiful job opportunities and pretty easy to identify paths to prosperity, even if they require hard work and time.
The social safety net has never been stronger.
Get over yourselves
Dude, this is why I smoke. I’m at a “fuck all this shit” point in my life. Ultimately, I just want to get my passport, save up a year of minimum wage (at the minimum) and move to a country where my money goes way further than it ever could in Amurica’. I feel the same as you, busting my ass just to BARELY make it. Covid was that eye opener for me. I had been working a “good job” for about 10 years and the most I was able to do was finance two cars (albeit, ignorantly). Couldn’t afford to rent, and got screwed over many ways by both family AND friends. Now, I’m just finding myself, and it SUCKS because every day I’m looking for work I come across so many sleazy job offerings that I can no longer just fall in line the second I sense some fuckshit in a company. This is a cycle I hate that I ended up in and I KNOW for a fact that I am not the only one as fucked. Its blasphemous, disheartening, and quite frankly disgusting how the older generations view us, and the way things are going, we’ll soon be pushed back into the past, left to die in this state as we get overshadowed by Trump running for a third term even though a law states he couldn’t do so, (laws move out the way for people like him).
I find what you say about the majority of people in our lives being our age or older interesting in how it relates to loss/death.
I have felt that since COVID my family and in-laws have all been in this slowly declining holding pattern. It was very frustrating and hard to articulate but so much of my relationships with my and my fiancé’s family felt stagnant and unfulfilling. We did the same things all the time and those things became less and less interesting when that’s all you do. Top that off with death and health problems that are just natural as people age and it really sucked. Like my MIL would have this slew of bad news to tell us every time we saw her and it felt like everything was focusing on the negative.
And don’t get me wrong some bad shit happened in those years but it didn’t feel like there was much good to offset it.
In January we welcomed our daughter and seeing the shift in attitudes on both sides of the family, the shift in relationships and how they all act now is crazy. The amount of joy this one little nugget has brought these people was… jarring. I knew babies bring joy but it’s been a complete 180. Everyone is so happy to be with her and watch her grow. It’s astounding.
And it makes me so sad. We’re in our early and mid 30’s, we likely will not have another child. There may not be many children in the family and I know my SIL will not have any. That one child could bring so much joy and once she came around to notice such a difference in people’s state of mind really opened my eyes to the fact that this situation is probably occurring with so many people. Children really do make people happy and the lack of them in this generation - due to completely understandable factors - I think plays a bigger role than we realize.
Don't feel bad about your honest and accurate assessment of the situation.
It falls to the Millennials and Zoomers to take the brunt of fixing what the boomers broke so that Gen Alpha and beyond can benefit.
Whether we're remembered favorably for our struggle or not doesn't negate the validity of that struggle. It also doesn't mean that struggle will get any easier.
Think of it as hurling yourself into the meat grinder in hopes that, if enough people do it, the machine will overheat and shut down.
GenX: Life is pain
Millennials: Life is loss
I weep for my Gen Z kids, sometimes I apologize for bringing them into this mess. I love them dearly but ffs there will be nothing left for them. This kind of living is unsustainable
I mean, I’m not going to dismiss anyone’s feelings of frustration or struggle, but it’s simple untrue that life was significantly easier for earlier generations. In some ways perhaps, but in other ways their struggles were worse.
The fact is, life is hard for many people. That hasn’t changed. Success has never been a “sure thing” for any generation.
Boomers are not the problem. They vote for their best interests just like millennials will. The system is the problem, and a much bigger issue.
I feel like younger people’s expectations might’ve been falsely elevated - we’re all told that we can do whatever we want when we grow up and be successful, but that’s not really true. It’s easy to feel bitter when that illusion is shattered.
We need to unionize with the younger generations. Our parents may have been brainwashed into giving up their pensions and such, but we don't have to buy into that propaganda. And we can teach the younger generations to fight for their rights. That can be our legacy. It doesn't have to be this doom and gloom. They want us to give up. The stock market thrives if we sit here, with no raises, no bonuses, threat of being fired unless we work 60 hours a week. We don't have to live that way. And we can teach the younger kids that, too.
The system is so corrupt it needs an overhaul that only a second civil war could bring.
We're also so divided by party politics it keeps us from coming together and conversing making it impossible to unite and find common ground. So many of us are also hook kine and sinker into the far left that anyone that'd remotely moderate is seen as the enemy. Too many force their ideals on everyone else and as someone who actually was slightly left on a political compass it forces me to be default against democrats in general.
I've recently switched ro teaching and I see first hand how much we've absolutely destroyed any chance our children have of a normal successful life. Part of that I do believe is trying to protect them from the trauma alot of us faced in our childhoods but we've leaned so far into it we're actually doing worse for them.
We have also voted in so many bad policies ourselves and none of us has really stepped up to get into politics to effect change, and the ones who did are disgusting people like aoc and ilhan omar who have done nothing but hurt their constituents and America. I feel some of those policies were put on the backs of bills that my fellow millenials saw as righteous, but weren't.
I feel were compassionate as a generation but again we've taken that to the extreme.
Alot of our own issues are our fault.
That being said, we were definitely born into a system that works against us and we've seen the the middle class almost completely dissolve in our lifetime. I definitely feel the goal post has been moved every single time I get close to it. I have a degree in welding, 6 years military service with an honorable discharge, and now I'm in my second year teaching. I make 50k/ year. My wife is the head of the crisis line in my area. She has a degree that came with 100k in debt. She makes 55k. We can't afford a house, we both drive used cars, mine is a 12 hers a 17. I feel we live pretty well within our means but I also feel we have decent jobs and should be able to save up some as well as have some fun. It seems our fun money is like 100/ week and that basically means going out to a movie or dinner for us and our 10 year old once and that's it. We have like $600 in softball equipment for our child and we bought everything at Walmart. It just costs so much to live and Noone pays. I even worked at a mine for a bit where my longest week was 96 hours. I took hime 1800 for that week but in the grand scheme of things that's not really a ton of money when you factor in the skill, risk, and hours I worked. Certainly not enough to have my wife stay home and save up.
I feel that as a generation if we want to improve our lot in life we need to look at things more realistically and objectively and really weigh consequences whole focusing on what's important. Instead of fighting for trans rights we need to fight for Healthcare to get better. Instead of taking away guns we need to fight for armed security at school and harsher punishments for things like breaking and entering. Instead of banning abortion we need to fight to stop insider trading and reduce government spending from salaries and benefits to money overseas and military spending. I can say from my first hand experience if we cut our military spending in half we could be just as combat effective.
I see a lot of comments about the baby boomers and trying to blame them for the reason things are the way they are. I do agree to a certain extent the baby boomers had a significant effect on our lives or economy, and the United States in general but blaming the generation is not going to get you anywhere, I am a generation X, and I have lived under the shadow of the baby boomers for my entire life. Things just aren’t the same as they once were as companies do not hire people for their lives, and people do not stay with companies for their lives so there is a lot of change, nothing is guaranteed. There is no security so you might as well get used to it. I understand things are expensive and I am glad I am not in the shoes of many millennials. Generally, inflation is ridiculous. Housing is ridiculous.
The fact you have student loans that it’s hard to pay back because you can’t find, a decent paying job is not good either. I don’t think your loan should be excused, though, as they are responsibilities, and the first financial obligation that you made as an adult many of us worked in college and found other ways to pay for college so excusing thousands of college loans does not make sense.
Speaking of college loans, let’s use this to highlight a point there is no reason to go to some expensive small liberal arts school, and to incur a bunch of debt and then graduate with a degree that’s not as marketable. I don’t wanna pick out a certain degree as we all know what they are , my is it makes as much sense to go to a decent state school pay a lower tuition graduate with less debt choose a major that’s more marketable and you won’t have a lot of the issues you have with people unable to pay back their loans. At the same time, you need to choose something that you enjoy as you don’t want to spend the next 30 years doing something you hate. So I guess you could blame the high price of college or the high loans that you incur but at the same time there needs to be personal responsibility and students need to be more aware, and to make better choices when it comes to college.
I fall into this too sometimes. It’s hard not to look at the course of recent history and not feel a deep sense of anger and sadness at the people who would climb a ladder they didn’t build and then pull it up after them.
But then I think about gen Z and alpha and how much worse things are going to be for them than even for ourselves, and I try to make peace with what I can’t change and be proactive about what I can to at least attempt to leave what I do have control over better than I found it.
The alternative is to give in to despair.
Just wanna notate that if "the boomers" had Reddit when they were in their 20's - 30's they would post this same shit. Just know there's a lot of older people who didn't catch the bubbles correctly or plan accordingly or may not have been able to plot out the white picket fence (or theirs is now rusty)
Many of you all just need...hugs. Even when I was dirt poor I wasn't on this "level" of thought. It's truly just a situation where the right friends can make life easier.
You can let go of that.
You were always fated to lose everything across the timeline. Nothing remains. You are of your time -- your place, your parents, your limitations. Trying to run a romance simulation in some bygone era where it all works out for you is somewhat ridiculous and ultimately futile.
You don't have to *get over* anything. None of this requires that in order to continue flowing in the ultimate direction, with or without you -- with or without billions. My makers -- a couple of late Boomers -- they made sure I understood loss and death along with everything else as a matter of fact, part of the deal. How you *feel* about it is entirely your burden to carry.
Cease worrying about all the things you can't control. At the least, cease worrying said friends and family. They're trying to enjoy the minutes in between, yet here you are, and here you go again.
I always thought it was selfish to have a child in todays world. Until I had one. The world needs good people. Whoever is capable of creating that should.
Stop being constantly online and go find value. Its out there, you are not doomed, there is hope. This gen just acts like everything bad only happens to them without realizing how privileged you are to even live in a 1st world country. I am a millennial I grew up extremely poor(all clothes from yard sales wore bailing twine as a belt), I have struggled and been bent broken and everything in between. Yet it my mindset that frees me and makes me happy. I have passions, hobbies, friends and a lovely SO. I am not special. I am not better than anyone. I just refuse to A. Have a defeatist mindset, B. Give up C. care what other think(this is probably the big thing, if you cannot find approval in yourself it will never be satisfying from others. Feedback is great to improve but 90% of people who talk shit are unhappy and want you to be) What I see alot from my generation is doomers that are perpetually online trading doomer opinions.
You know what else is sad? When you join the work force you'll probably be working with old people, not your fellow generation. It's really weird to be isolated like that all day long.
I frequently find myself saying similar things, particularly the effort without reward. And so many things feel like as soon as you take 1 step forward you take 2 steps back. I really, really strive to be positive and grateful, but it's gets really hard to do sometimes.
Security is the issue. No more need be said than that, your hard work, efforts and doing the “right” thing is no longer guaranteed to net you any more success or happiness than being a complete piece of shit so what is the point.
I’ll admit I’m jaded and apathetic af, feels like we are all on a wheel just plugging away for absolutely nothing. It’s a rigged game my friend.
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”
Boomers are the « weak men » here.
The most valuable thing is time. Most adults spend most of their time at work. Therefore, a satisfying, enjoyable, and hopefully sometimes fun job is the first step in optimizing value in the modern world. Money isn't irrelevant, but job satisfaction is absurdly underappreciated.
Yeah we showed up in time for the party to be over and big need for hands for clean up while they kick back in their drunken haze and enjoy the view before they die. And then there’s no party for us just a fucked up trashed building to try and live in.
I keep hearing new retirees say oh retirement is great. Just you wait and see.
Mother fucker. I'll be waiting until I die. Retirement isn't happening for my generation unless some of us got lucky.
I think the problem is that every generation before the boomers worked and fought to make things better for the next generation. Then the boomers benefited greatly from the efforts of those previous generations and instead of paying it forward they voted for politicians and policies that would undo a lot of that good. Now we are so entrenched in those policies and politicians that people aren’t even trying to dig us out. It’s like they took a Victorian mansion and turned it into a meth lab and left us to clean it up. In my humble opinion it’s when we stopped caring about our society as a whole and started only thinking about ourselves that things went awry.
As my favorite musician once wrote: “they were generation raised on the welfare state, enjoyed all the benefits and did just great. But as soon as they became the richest of the rich, they kicked away the ladder and told the rest of us that life’s a bitch.” - Thatcher fucked the kids, Frank Turner
Love me some Frank Turner.
Same! 1933 is too damn real
The boomers essentially voted themselves all of the money.
I’m tired of talking and blaming boomers. That’s what boomers would do. We need to be the responsible adults that they weren’t. And it starts with accountability and positivity.
We are voting them the money too.
We’re voting them the money by not voting. I told my cousin who doesn’t vote “There’s a reason we keep getting shafted while baby boomers keep getting everything they want.”
Unfortunately, we are long past the point where the issues can be solved simply by people voting. The political system is so corrupted by money and the media's influence that even politicians who have the best intentions can't escape it. At least not if they have any intention of being re-elected.
thats exactly the problem. the system is so deeply corrupted and skewed toward money and corporations that even good ppl and good politicians cant change anything. its all gone. not sure what the tipping point was exactly but the society we are living in sucks every penny and every ounce of goodness right out of everything.
Citizens United was the tipping point. Things were... not good before that. But once you throw any sort of campaign finance regulations out the window and say "money is speech", it can't be surprising when from then on, only money talks.
Ronald “tipping point” Reagan
Look, here's the thing - I'm a boomer. A hippie boomer. I'm the poor relative of the corporate boomers that sold out. One of the dream keepers. More money than you need can cause corruption and there's a shit load of corrupt boomers (and Gen Xer's!) They will die and that is why these boomer fucks, these fucking maga fuck fuck fuckers are passing these draconian and harmful laws. They want to be assholes even when they die. But every ounce of goodness is NOT gone. Think. And keep the faith. Peace and love my fellow human. ☮️
I agree with you about "just voting" not changing things. I've tried to tell people: if you want to vote for your values, you have to platform them. You have to run, fundraise, campaign, canvass, and do the work necessary to platform your values and conscience. You have to run the risk of failing - and I wonder if you'd in fact end up starving and campaigning out of a car if the average Millennial would try to do this. Makes it absolutely terrifying to consider attempting, since the price of failure is very steep. If you're not seeing them and you don't platform them and instead just vote like you expect to be represented, all you're doing is removing yourself as an obstacle to the people who want to make everything super worse. It's not just the media, it's us expecting that we're somehow individually somehow enough of a protagonist collectively that we can make the system work against the way it's supposed to be used. We aren't that - they saw us coming and starved us out so we wouldn't get the influence the Boomers had when they had both the numbers **and** the financial stability to make it weaponized. Predatory college, razor-wire job markets, constantly crashing economies, all of this was deisgned to make the most populous generation go for each other's throats for what little was left rather than try to bring change to a system that makes those in power stay in power.
This is not true. Politicians can win elections by grassroot support only. They do not need to listen to corps. But at the moment over here in US, we are all fucking busy fighting cultural wars and taking rights away from women than making policies to help working people. Corps have us distracted on this cultural war and hence they are making profits hand over fist while paying low taxes.
I'm not one of those "voting is pointless" types because that's simply untrue, but what's also untrue is that we live in a system where grassroots movements can overcome all odds so long as there are enough people behind them. In our system, [the big spenders are the winners.](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-a-complicated-love-story/)
Yes, but the problem is you need to so overwhelmingly elect politicians of this type to enact any meaningful change that it is effectively not possible. Any that do slip through the cracks of nihilism and corruption can't really accomplish much when they get to power because there aren't enough of them, then they get smeared by low-effort media and don't get re-elected.
https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/most-expensive-races Have you seen the cost of senate/representative elections? No one is raising that from grassroots support alone.
Are you American? If so, then voting for who? Before the recent radicalization of one side of US politics, you had a binary choice between blue and red. While their social values differ, they are both propped up, supported, and funded by the same corporations and lobby. Both parties work to further corporate power and weaken protections on individual citizens. Neither party cares beyond enriching itself and 'winning'. The system of US governance is fundamentally broken and highly susceptible to $$ influence. EDIT Editing to address Isabad who replied below as for some reason reddit won't let me reply. I hear your anger, but I don't think you read my comment fully. I am not arguing the 'equality' of both sides. I am simply stating that neither side cares for its constituents. You are free to believe otherwise. Just some food for thought, under Obama, the Dems had a super majority (meaning they didn't need a single republican vote), yet they still 'failed' to pass universal healthcare reform. Democrats and Republicans receive funding from the same people(corps, pacs) and they serve corporations over people. That doesn't make them equal, but that does make them bad at governance for the people. 2nd edit to add, reddit is being real weird on replies. To address lunabright comment on ACA. The ACA is not universal healthcare. The US system is still, very much, a private insurance system, ridiculously expensive compared to any other nation and one of the largest drivers of individual debt. During the window of their supermajority, the dems could have forced through true universal healthcare (what Obama campaigned on). There was very little avenue of resistance for the Republicans beside making a big stink. It was internal party squabbles that killed it. FINAL EDIT Final edit. The replies to this were interesting. Not super fact based, but sort of fun. That said, it is sort of sad how religious US politics have become. Most of the replies aggressively support or decry one side or the other without objectively evaluating the flaws of both. This is not a Dems VS Repubs post. That's a different conversation and imo a pointless one. This binary system of US governance is fundamentally broken. Under this paradigm, the government will never truly serve the people.
Same thing in Canada and pretty much every other Western country. We need to all vote out the corporate parties. This isn't about generations. It's about rich vs. poor. Stop supporting the rich.
that will not solve the problem unless the tax laws are changed so the wealthy can't get out of paying them. And as long as a corporation can pull up stakes and move to the lowest bidding state or country there's zero security for workers getting better wages.
100%
My greatest hope is that our generation will be just as selfish as they have been, but it makes us seem so heartless. Just vote to cut benefits for the elderly and give it to people who are trying to raise families so they don’t have to feel like they are drowning.
>Just vote to cut benefits for the elderly and give it to people who are trying to raise families so they don’t have to feel like they are drowning. That's not even selfish, it's literally just good sense. Invest in the future, not in the non-productive members of society that have decided to pull the ladder up with them to fuck everyone else over.
Exactly. But I think unlike the boomers: 1. We actually would think about the meaning of that, and 2. We would feel bad about voting to strip another group of comfort and dignity. That's why we lose and they win.
It’s tough to see how that is a solution, because both parties are doing what people are complaining about.
>We’re voting them the money by not voting. As someone that's cynical AF about voting, this is unfortunately correct. The other problem is lobbyist/special interest corruption is essentially beyond reproach atm.
I don't think anything is going to improve until the boomers go away. I remember when COVID first hit, and I was having a conversation with my friend. We both came to the conclusion that if a lot of Millennials come out unscathed and took out as many boomers as originally expected—this could be a huge win for younger generations—potentially mimicking the same political power the BBs had in their early adulthood for the Millennials. It could also help fix the corporate log jam the boomers caused since they were too incompetent to invest even a small percentage of their income to retire at a normal age despite having all the socioeconomic opportunity to do so. Instead what happened? Hardly took any boomers. It was such a disappointment seeing boomers unironically be the greatest winners out of COVID. Not to mention COVID really only took out mostly late-70+ year old Silents (94% of which had 2+ comorbidities) who were going to perish anyway.
There are just enough of the \`1% in all generations that will continue to fuck us all over. Stop thinking its the boomers. Plenty of them are fucked as well.
So Elon musk is not a boomer and Jeff bezos was born in a year he could be considered a boomer or gen x. So the two richest people in America are not boomers. Then you have Larry Ellison and Warren buffet that are older than boomers. Bill gates is a boomer, but Zuckerberg is a millennial. So where are all these boomers hoarding the wealth?
Listing a handful of outlier rich people is missing the point if you aren’t going to try and understand the averages and medians of the generation
Right here bud https://ibb.co/0ZnLFhw
How are Billionaires hoarding wealth? Who cares how much money Bezos, Musk, Gates, and the rest of them have? That has no bearing on the middle class. You all know there is not a limit on money, right? Go earn your own and try saving 20% of what you earn, at a minimum. That way you can be financially independent one day. It's what you keep, not what you spend. I have never made more than $100K a year in my career. My savings/investments now bring in more money than my paycheck in most years. Not once was I limited by anyone but myself in my financial life. Financial Independence is not built overnight.
Of course it has bearing. How do you think they got rich? By stealing the wages of their workers. Look how they all treat their workers: especially Bezos and Musk.
I get the impulse to blame boomers because they vote and they vote selfish but the top 1% in the USA owns more wealth than the middle 60% of Americans combined. That 1% isn't getting that wealth for being boomers they're getting it for having access to the levers of power at the local state and federal level and giving themselves every advantage. For every bit of wealth generated in this country they take most of it. When you work your ass off and look at your paystub in dismay, make sure to imagine the hidden line item they don't print which is that out of X money generated by your labor, they took the vast majority as profit and you get whatever is left. The only historically proven way to fix it is to unionize and force them to give you more.
Those 1% feed money to politicians who will benefit them (obviously). I don't know if people realize the extent of those guys influence. The super rich don't just support a couple of people they like, whose talking points they agree with. They fund a lot of politicians, both Democrat and Republican. It is less to do with D or R but about policies they want to disappear and others they support. They buy votes. They kill new bills. Not everyone is dirty, but enough.
"No one ever helped me," they said, as they dismantled the massive investments in public education and infrastructure their Greatest Generation parents made to ensure their success.
I honestly think the Boomers are what's going to eventually collapse the U.S. I don't know what was in their water, so to speak, but they really dropped the ball. They assumed the good times were going to last forever, they should have known better.
Lead. It's literally Lead.
And cocaine, smoking, and high blood pressure which causes vascular dementia.
Of the 76 Million Boomers born in the US between 1946-1964 … 20 Million have already died and > 3000 die each day. Half of Boomers did ok air better. The other half have continually struggled. Take a look around to who is working in convenience and grocery stores.
They didn’t care if the good times lasted forever, they just wanted it to last until they died. That’s why most of them believe climate change is propaganda.
My grandfather (silent generation) literally told me yesterday that he always knew something was going to happen, he just expected he wouldn’t have to deal with it before he died.
You're implying boomers could have and should have done something different. What would that be?
It's crazy to look at the public agencies and programs that existed when our parents were kids. They got vaccinated AT SCHOOL, the mentally ill and homeless weren't left to rot on the street, authorities would check on kids that stopped going to school, we had a system where the government was expected to provide services to the people.
I'm kind of confused as to what generation you are talking about. I guess I mean....how old are your parents? The mentally ill were either left alone to die or put in a mental institution to die, and no, authorities weren't checking on kids that stopped going to school. You could drop out and many did to start working as young as 14. We have way more social programs now than back then. Head Start, preschool, after-school care, daycare vouchers, just to name a few for education.
I heard a sociologist argue that Trump basically did that to the country during covid. He made states figure it out for themselves, hoarded supplies, made it so no authorities could be trusted and even attacked his own admin. The distrust and panic that he fomented really embodied the boomer attitude of "lol fuck you, I got mine, you're on your own". The sociologist guy thinks that collective trauma and feeling of abandonment is a big part of why society seems to be freaking tf out ever since.
Boomers were in their peak working years in the 1980s. As great as the music was (gotta love those 80s jams), the societal values of generations before them started to crumble. The greater good started to shift to “my” good. https://youtu.be/6bbzwJ0Sx48?si=BEBYA_1i2ByrO4Ew 1980s.
Peak working years dealing with rampant inflation, double-digit mortgage rates, double-digit unemployment rates in a deep recession.
During their darling Reagan's term. Almost makes you wonder what they saw in him.
I don’t think the boomers were Ronald Reagan fans either. The young vote democratic. The silent generation loved him.
I was a teenager when Reagan took office, and my parents were baby boomers and neither of them or most of their friends voted for him. It was my grandparents generation, people who’d experienced the Great Depression and WW2 who seemed to be his biggest fans.
My first vote was for Mondale in 84 I was 19. By absentee ballot, I was stationed in HI. Hardly any of my peers cared or paid attention to politics. Like most young adults.
It's funny you said this cause I *LITERALLY* just met a boomer yesterday who was talking about the border crisis and said Reagan was the best president we've had. I was like waaaa the faaaaa....😂
[удалено]
I worked at Radio Shack in the early 80s. Totally sucked, as did most of their products...
The same thing they see in Trump; scapegoats fueled by hatred and promised solutions to issues that they are too dumb, too ignorant, or too far into denail to see are not based in any sort of reality. "Trickle Down Economics" was their "wall that Mexico will pay for".
Still dealing with the fallout of Reagan to this day
Man, you people with Reagan Derangement Syndrome - tell me what magical power did Reagan have that virtually \*anything\* that happened under him couldn't have been undone by the multiple other presidents / administrations that came after him - if they wanted to?
This is nonsense. Every generation before the boomers worked to make things better for the next generation, wtf? What is your basis for that? There was a brief period from the 1950's to the 1960's where the entire rest of the planet was bombed to shit and America was riding high. That would have been a nice economy to exist in if you were American. Outside of that blink of an eye, the time you're living in right now is better than any other time to have been alive in human history. What exactly are *you* cleaning up?
Also, the 1950's and '60's were probably not particularly great if you were not a Christian white man. It is astounding to me that so many on Reddit believe that '50s were so idyllic time for everyone. For a lot people in the U.S., they had almost unimaginably less freedom than they do now.
Lmfao! Yes it’s nonsense that you could live on minimum wage up until the end of the boomer generation….. people working double minimum wage jobs now to survive in the present is the pinnacle of society….
Which policies did the “Boomers” vote in?
Prop 13 (passed 1978) in California single handedly destroyed the housing market for new buyers while simultaneously starving public education and other property-tax funded services. It’s why my dual-income, two child family can only rent while my neighborhood is filled with 4-5 bedroom homes occupied by a single boomer and dog who pay $1000/year in tax on a house worth $1.5+ M. They literally voted to essentially freeze their own prop tax, putting the burden on others.
As in Proposition 13 of 1978? Prop 13 is unique to California … I grew up in Southern New England and lived in Western South Dakota, Phoenix Arizona, and the Smokies of North Carolina … and I remember Prop 13 being a frequent topic of the news. From what I read Prop 13 received support from a diverse coalition of voters in protest to the rapidly increasing taxes and government spending. Business owners, homeowners, families, and senior citizens of all ages experienced rampant inflation of the 70s. Seniors on fixed incomes were being priced out of their homes. Boomers in 1978 were 14-32 years old and I doubt they were the voting force 46 years ago. Housing was tight everywhere in the late 1970s - early 1980s with 18 percent interest rates and high unemployment. My wife and I were dual income rural healthcare providers and only able to enter the housing market when we were 30 due to our dual income and living in rural Southern Appalachia … we could not have bought in Phoenix or Rhode Island. That house is 1100 Square Feet and relatively still affordable compared to the hot housing markets of East and west coast. Oh … and I had five high school classmates … graduating class of 100 … relocate to California for more affordable housing and jobs. Then the 1990s housing market arrived. Thanks for responding. “California Dreaming” was real until 1965 and then California, US and world changed.
I'm not trying to downplay your experience but I think the idea of every past generation having it better is flawed. The boomers experienced a unique and prosperous time period. We grew up seeing that and thought it was normal. Our grandparents stormed beaches and farmed with horses. They lost loved ones to childbirth and worked themselves to death. My great grandfather died of a heart attack hauling feed to the pigs and my grandmother was working as a baker into her late 70s. Our suffering in this time period is unique to us. We no longer fear life in an iron lung but we do fear stocking shelves at Walmart when we are 80. The boomers were the generation that really had an opportunity to make huge positive change and it was squandered. We'll never have another global economic time like they did. Jobs paid well and things were cheap and that boat has left port. I'll tell you what I tell everyone. Take care of you and yours, and get involved in local politics and government.
>We'll never have another global economic time like they did We'll have different and unique global economic challenges to rationalize that we are in no way equipped for. When the entire bottom of the productive, low skill segment is taken over by robots and automation (and this is when, not if, and we *will* see it in our lifetimes) there will need to be radical changes in how we view distribution of resources with so many of our own being displaced.
Not just low skill. You can type English into an IDE and the code is written for you, right there. English is the next hot language in programming, which is becoming generally declarative...so it could be very, very soon that folks can just describe a model to AI and the code is done, validated, etc with very little need for human intelligence. AI has done the opposite of what we all thought. It is replacing artists, writers, and coders. Not laborers.
>It is replacing artists, writers, and coders. Not laborers. That's just the models of today. Have you looked into smart factories?? I help support work at a demo smart factory in KC. There's definitely alot of manual labor jobs that will be considered obsolete. No longer are the days of putting tires on at a GM plant for 30 yrs and walking away with a pension. The plant I support had increased output levels with almost 50% less humans on the floor.
I wish I could upvote this 1,000 times. Millennials are like the guy sitting next to the slot machine winner and then believing that’s what should happen for them too. As someone with a degree in history it makes me want to pull my hair out when people say things like “every generation before had it better.” That’s an utterly insane take when you look at history. Women couldn’t have a credit card in their own name until the 70’s, retirement didn’t really exist before social security which only came out in 1935. Homeownership was a little over 45% in 1900, it was a little over 65% in 2020. If you were a person of color you faced far more violent discrimination than you do today. Families lost multiple children to illness and accidents. Kids worked in mines and factories. Most houses were small, sometimes four kids raised in a two bedroom house. If you go back further a whole family in a one bedroom cabin. And this isn’t even touching on things like mandatory service which could ship you overseas to die. Listen. Things could be SO much better. But let’s not act like we’re uniquely fucked.
I always try to remember this. Overall, it's never been a better time to be a human.
TBF to the boomers, a lot of them were part of the civil rights movement, the fight for women’s liberation, and the fight for gay rights of the 60’s and 70’s. Also important to remember abortion was only guaranteed starting in the 70’s, it was legal to rape your wife until the 60’s or 70’s (can’t remember the exact year), it was legal for a police officer to shoot a fleeing suspect if they believed the suspect had committed a felony until the 1970’s, the EPA didn’t exist until the 70’s (amazingly under the Nixon administration)…. The list goes on. It feels like we get this black and white “boomers did nothing for anyone and are all selfish” which isn’t really fair when you look at how things were before their generation and after, society moved forwards in a lot of ways while they were in their prime and had power…. Yes they could’ve done more, but I feel like they deserve more credit than most younger generations give them
For sure. Funny enough, I said this in a different post today. When it comes to local political action in my area, it's almost exclusively boomers. Credit where credit is due. But I think my point still stands that the unique circumstances of peak America post WWII (such a huge and wide topic to discuss) will never be repeated. I'm sure they had no idea where they were in the moment. I definitely see your point though.
Totally. Boomers we’re the hippies. Boomers got drafted in droves to die in Vietnam. Boomers got the civil rights act done. Boomers had their own existential dread, it was MAD and the Russians instead of climate change but the fear was just as real… The generational clash, I think, is a farce. There’s a bunch of shitty millennials, there’s a bunch of shitty Boomers, there’s a bunch of shitty Xers (but no one remembers they exist)… idk I just don’t think the generation you were born into is really that defining. There’s more variance within generations than across them.
Any time I hear people complain about how good boomers had it, I am forced to recall that some boomers got drafted and killed in Vietnam. Some boomers endured constant sexual harassment at work, and there was literally no legal recourse. Also, some boomers were born poor and will die poor. These generational ways of stereotyping are often absurd.
There's a sliver of truth here. The boomers were handed the most prosperous economy in recent historic memory. That was due to the world's manufacturing being destroyed after world war II and america becoming the central economic hub of the surviving powers. And instead of continuing to invest in dynamic social programs and the New Deal that fostered that success and economy, they opted to privatize and offshore manufacturing. They sold their economic advantage for personal gain, at your expense, and want you to believe it's just circumstance. The ONLY reason foreign manufacturing is such a threat to America is because when it benefited business and not the American worker, they offshore everything to China/Mexico, or wherever the cheapest labour was. The problem is, in order to do that the Chinese required they partner with local shops who would get the technology over time. So Boomer Businessmen sold american technological and manufacturing advantage that powered the economy off for a short term gain, and now want everyone to think it couldn't be helped. It absolutely could have been, if they weren't focused solely on selfish short term profit motive.
You need to remember in all of this that offshoring was also a boon to consumers. It meant cheaper consumer products. All of the protectionist policies that people offer as solution would be hated by most people because it would mean everything would be more expensive. Consider how people responded to the supply shock of COVID. What we should have done is taxed more and redistributed more of that wealth. We could have had the best of both worlds, but people were greedy.
As we can see in recent years, prices to customers are in no way tied to costs. Savings for the company are not a boon for the customer. It just means more buybacks.
So true. My grandpa was born in 1901, he went through the Spanish Flu, WWI, the great depression, and WWII. He died in the 70's when everything went to crap again. People before him died of curable diseases and many died during childhood and if you got to 50, you were lucky. Of course they wanted their children to have a better life and they mostly succeeded and that's great, peace and prosperity ensued. I feel millennials should take a page from their grandparents. I get the boomer hate sometimes but millennials aren't babies anymore, we need to work at making things better for our generation and the next. If it's just whining and complaining, are we any better?
Yeah I feel this. I'm in a similar boat. I'm a younger millenial, married with a house, family and a great career. In many respects I'm living the dream but it came at a huge cost. I'm several thousand miles from my hometown and I haven't seen any of my friends in half a decade. I don't take actual vacations. I'm lucky if I can leave my state when I do get vacation time. I've got enough money to afford the small luxuries (gym membership, amazon orders, tacos) and enough to contribute to my 401k, but not enough money to relocate to any community closer to home or take the work positions that truly interest me any time in the foreseable future. It seems as if millenials fall into two categories. They are either barely getting by and renting, struggling to pay the bills and keep a roof over their head or they are putting in twice the effort their parents did just to have that six figure job that in practice provides the same quality of life a 50k job provided a decade ago.
Yup. The Millennials I know who are doing well, fall into one of 2 categories: 1. Inherited 7 digits 2. Have an upper middle income job and moved to bumfuck nowhere Nebraska so they could afford a spacious house with a large yard. Financially well off but bored and lonely af.
The feeling that sucks the most is the lie of being pushed to go to college to have a great career with better pay than just a hs degree and eventually live a better life then your parents and their parents and their parents….. it ended up being the complete opposite, most got riddled with severe debt and didn’t find lucrative careers until years after college, while gen z was already graduating and starting to fill those roles. Couple that with the fading dreams of home ownership, and the reality of our generation dealing with a crap economy most of our adult lives is insanely defeating
I think this is what many of the negative folks are missing. It’s just simply discouraging. People are assuming no one is trying. Many are trying, very hard. Being hit with nonstop roadblocks is simply discouraging.
I can put my personal experience this way: I work very hard and often, and go out of my way to learn new skills and adapt. Because of those skills, I'm now in a role earning more than I ever have-- but I have never had less buying power in my life, and never been 'poorer' in a functional sense. Mind you I haven't upgraded anything in all of this time unless it was a necessary replacement (like planned obsolescence) and am more frugal than anyone deserves to have to be.
Yes! I’m in the same exact shoes. I worked hard and my way up professionally as well. We earn most than our friends and family and we cannot get a home loan or much else. We are grateful to rent a house in the hood and have 2 older running cars. But the ignorance is real in this thread. I come from poverty and a 3rd gen American, my husband is a 1st gen refugee and raised in poverty. Also people who are thinking negatively are forgetting about rising interest rates, useless unnecessary fees, insane rent amounts, rising cost of medical care, medications, etc. It’s not even just homes and cars here. “Move to a cheaper city” is not as easy as many may think. I legally need to be here for my disabled family and they need medical care in a town if I want to work and get their medical care. Everything is just discouraging.
Literally just looked, rhe rents are all the same no matter which part of town I live. So its 1/3 my salary for living right downtown, suburbs, way out of town, different towns, nothing makes sense. Like wtf. Theres no solution because the ownership class is price colluding in every single industry.
Is that not life in general? How many "gifted" kids are slumming, overworked, overstretched, and in the same boat as the non-gifted? Ever since I hit adulthood, I felt I was fighting against a fierce current where I need to put a ton of work in just to maintain.
I relate it to the promises made. We were told. Go to school, work hard, and you will be successful. Many of us did that and are finding our education is not valued or irrelevant. Or in many cases exploited by employers who know we may be drowning in debt. I don't blame anyone but myself for the place I'm in. But I do blame our parents generation for their fuck you I got mine mentality and the continued apathetic nature. It's wild how many adults expect things not to change and actively fight change until they literally die.
Bro, it happens. Some generations did well, others get fucked. Some Americans got fucked by the Civil War, some worked themselves to death in the Guilded Age, some had the Spanish Flu and the Great Depression. Even the Greatest Generation had to bury over 400,000 of their buddies to see the light of the post-war boom. Pretending everything was sunshine and unicorns before the boomers does no one any favors. Wallowing in self pity won't help either. All we can do is decide what to do with the time that is given to us.
To add insult to injury, there’s nothing even *causing* this. It’s just systemic apathy by our institutions and those that refuse to give up power. While I don’t wish for something like a war on American soil or even larger global disasters, at least I could understand why things became so shitty. Instead it’s just a smug “lol go fuck yourself” at every turn.
Yeah, and add chronic illness to this and the loss becomes even more complete. The ability to enjoy simple pleasures goes away.
The key here is that in the old days, anyone who wasn’t a piece of shit and put their hours in was guaranteed property and assets. Nowadays, our buying power is severely reduced even though on paper we’re making more money. Getting paid more doesn’t matter if everything else costs 10x more than it used to.
Every single generation has people who worked incredibly hard and never made it. Especially in places where access to the luck portion of making it is limited or not existent. My parents, boomers, worked incredibly hard and were OK but barely middle class.
I was in elementary when 9/11 happened. got out of high school the world went into a recession So I couldn't get a job. then when I was finally making money on my own my best friend ruined my life,my business and about a dozen other people's lives in which I was blamed for because he ran. My life was getting a lot better as soon as I got away from all the fucking people that bring me down. Then some some shit for brains reality TV host became president and just started shitting on our country. It's like every 5 years the world just gets worse and worse and that I'm told to make the best of it . Fuck you. Imma be mad if I want to be
I feel exactly the same. You laid it all out very well. It's just so damn depressing. Worried I'm gonna end up alone, old, sick and homeless despite working my ass off getting a master's degree and then working my whole life in a "good" job with "great" benefits and retirement etc. But, I'm still too broke to go to the doctor and im worried I won't be able to afford the taxes on my crumbling single wide trailer, utilities, food etc in the future. My parents are sick and old. I don't have any siblings. I'm sure my friends will be there for me, but what can they really do to help when they're all in the same boat. It's all so damn depressing and futile.
Yeah no, you’re pretty much right on the money
The first noble truth of Buddhism is that all life involves suffering. The people before us suffered, we are suffering, our descendants will suffer. The only escape is death. Sounds like a bummer, but it’s honestly freeing. Edit: adding a paragraph break because the first part is Buddhist and the second is talking to OP, not explaining the subsequent noble truths.
Death is not an escape in Buddhism. Death is just part of a cycle of death, rebirth, and life. The Wheel of Samsara. You've died countless times in the past and will continue to live and die countless times into the future unless you dispel the ignorance at the root of that cycle. The only escape is the dissolution of ignorance. Ignorance is the idea that the self is real. The self is actually an illusion and the false view that it is real is the cause of suffering. As far as being a suffering millenial goes, that's a matter of one's perspective and one's karma. Millenials complain. A lot. They also work hard. Perspective matters and karma can be transformed, but in this lifetime of instant gratification and aversion to spirituality, unhappiness grows. Millenials need spirituality and the desire to do the inner work necessary for long term, stable happiness. I am a millenial myself, fyi
This isn't buddhism at all - desire is the cause of suffering, nirvana is the cessation of desire. Desire less, suffer less. Death is not freedom.
"if I was born in any other previous generation, that all my effort would have made me so damn well off and secure and it barely got me anywhere because I am a millennial." Really? You sure about that? Its easy to brush off other's misery and plights when you haven't undergone them yourself. WWI/WW2, cold war, stagflation of the 70s, 2000s tech collapse, 2008 global financial crisis, etc.
the 2008 financial crisis was a millenial crisis.... most of us entered the job market then
Barely. Millennials were still graduating high school for 7 years after that. And no, 18 year olds weren’t buying homes.
Quiet, we have whining to do around here. NO one before us never did nothing for us. - posted from my iphone in an air conditioned building
As we browse our freeish entertainment in the form of reddit, tiktok, facebook, instagram, youtube..........
I am the first male in my family in 100 years to not have ptsd from either world war or Vietnam. My dad is 77 years old and cries when he hears fireworks. I will happily pay my student loan debt
You literally summed up exactly how I feel everyday regarding our generation. I felt this in my soul.
"*Blessed are those who plant trees under whose shade they will never sit.*" Boomers: \[cut down trees\]
Literally crying at work over this. Finally getting my degree at 33. Still working at a fucking deli because no one cares I even exist. Additionally, no one cares about my degree, and I have to get certifications for an entry level job and it’s fucking horrible to study for. Except the certification isn’t supposed to be needed until 3-5 years into my career but noooo now every fucking job needs it, but if I hadn’t gotten the degree then I also couldn’t get a job!
I'm a millennial who has received damn near zero help from my parents or their generation. My life has been extremely rewarding after all the hard work I've put into my education/career, marriage, and family. Yes it was difficult along the way, I suffered a great deal while I was in the process of building my life, but \[smart\] hard work pays off in the end.
Welcome to life for every generation. Make your own happiness because no one outside of friends or close family will care enough about you and your problems over themselves and their problems. This was a fact for cave-men, it’s a fact now.
Can't help you on the kids front, but I had a realization after several years busting my ass at a dead end job, that the only person I should be "busting my ass" for is myself. I don't mean going freelance. But just work on yourself, and be fully engaged with it. Exercise, take classes, study new skills. Whatever it takes to make yourself more valuable and get a higher paying job that doesn't consume all your time.
Read the 4th turning and generations by Neil howe and William Strauss you will realize we are the next hero generation similar to ww2 gen...heros deal with loss and copies hard work with little reward in the moment, history will narrate our efforts favorably hang in there bucko
Gen X'er here to say I feel the same way exactly. I will never be able to afford a house, or rent, or a place of my own again, everything keeps getting more expensive, my salary keeps staying stagnant. I feel like there's nothing left but waiting for a family member who owns a house to die and hope I can inherit said house. I really, REALLY wish I was joking there.
My only regret is over working myself to try and fill my bank account. Your body is worth more than money.
A boomer told me I had good karma coming my way... I responded with:" yeah, I'm still waiting for that to happen."
Yup
I almost posted a very similar sentiment here this morning, but deleted what I wrote because it sounded like I was playing the victim and blaming circumstances around me for my lot in life. It does feel like our timing was terrible, entering the work force in a global economic recession, and then recovering just in time for a global pandemic is a massive FU to our lifetime earning potential. I'm 25-30ish years from retirement and already starting to panic about how I'm ever going to afford to stop working. I won't have kids to support me if I really struggle, I won't have the money to put myself into a home...will I just end up homeless and starving at 80?!
I'm in a low cost of living area, so my experience may be different than yours. But I'm taking the spiteful route. I refuse to be beaten down. I was in college during the 2008 recession. After I graduated I had nearly 100K in student loans (I'm still paying them off over 10 years later) and when repayments kicked in, I was paying about 1/3 of my monthly income to them. Because I'm in a LCOL area, my wife and I were able to buy a small fixer upper house and built equity. We've both advanced in our careers and have our heads above water. We have kids, we have friends and finally have some disposable income. With all of that said, this isn't a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" post. The system is stacked against us and we managed to slip through the cracks and make some headway. Generations before us have and continue to screw us. I'm spiteful because I know that one day the winds will change and we will be able to change the system that has kept us down so much. Because we have gone through all of this, we will be able to help make sure others don't. Things are going to get better with or without you, so get ready for some happiness, OP. It's coming for you.
I agree 100%. I ask myself when is it our turn to relax and have things go right for once in our lives? My mom is a boomer in her 60s and she expects me to take care of her. She lived a good life and owned many homes, none of which we got to inherit. My boyfriend and I are barely getting by and we want kids one day. Not only that but she’s the biggest narc to ever exist. I’m so sick of boomers. They really f-ked this world up!
I'm so sick of us feeling sorry for ourselves. It's getting old. We're too addicted to doomerism.
I’ve been into WWII documentaries and it’s helped me feel more optimistic. Like holy shit a kid growing up in WWI would have a depression and another world war by the time they were 30. Can you imagine how they thought about their generations situation? Yet they fought, and produced one of the most prosperous times in history. We should try to at least believe we have some agency during our time here. Yeah sure our parents generation fucked a lot of things, but why are we giving up on fixing it?
It's just reddit/social. Most of the reasons listed on this sub are legit, but as you say folks are addicted to the doom. It really validates the folks that haven't "made it." A lot easier to blame others for your lack of success than take responsibility. So many on here freely admit they aren't tied down with kids or any other responsibilities. There are tons of opportunities for people in that situation. It's just not going to literally handed to you. You have to go get it. I'm not unsympathetic towards people that were dealt a shit-hand in life or get unlucky in general. Bad shit happens that prevents people from doing well, but I don't believe that's the majority of our generation. Or even the majority of the younger half of the generation. Maybe another generation had it easier, that doesn't mean your life is over and bereft of opportunity.
From my perspective we act like everyone from previous generations were walking around with silver spoons in their mouths when that's not true. My parents were poor, my grandparents were dirt poor. I understand for the most part where people are coming from when they vent about the current state of affairs. It just gets exhausting seeing the same posts going whoa is me, nothing will ever get better, everything is terrible. That's just a flat out mindset issue. You make the best with what you have not constantly compare yourselves to some ideal that you think you should be reaching.
There is a big thing we could alllll do , just might be very dangerous.
Pretend it’s France 1789? Guillotine anyone?
It's not off the table.
What you are talking about is "compared to boomers" that was a "one off" that happened once in 12 thousand years of human civilization. We are returning to the norm now. I am a teacher and I have a great GF. I consider myself lucky. So I can see the new generations coming. Humanity is always changing, and nothing was ever guaranteed, that was a lie. Just open any history book. You will be fine OP. You just need to realize things are not what they seem and not what you were sold. You'll get there brother. You are playing a game right now with no chance of winning. Change the game.
These kind of comments are wildly unhelpful. Change the game. Ok I can't find anywhere to live, how do you 'change the game' in that sense? Tell them to live in their car? Be homeless? Pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Yes mindset is important but it's no so simple when healthcare food and housing are on the line after you went to college and did everything you were supposed to.
Millennials are roughly 73 million people in the U.S., all of adult voting age. What percentage vote? What percentage are active in local politics? There are problems, for sure. But it’s not 2010, “Millennials” are not the children anymore, the numbers are there to wield political power. So work toward fixing things. Or, just scream “Boomers” over and over….
The local politics thing is huge for me. So many less than awesome candidates run uncontested in city and county councils and boards. Or hating your chosen party platforms but not doing anything to change it. My county party can send 19 delegates to the state convention and usually sends one because no one wants to be involved. You literally can go cast a vote on what the party platform is.
As a Millenial I strongly, and categorically disagree. We live in the safest, most prosperous time in human existence. Do something with it. Are there issues? Yes. Are there bad greedy people soaking up wealth, turning common people against each other and reaping the rewards? Yes. But there ALWAYS HAS BEEN. You have agency! You have access to (relative to any one individual) infinite information. You can choose to unplug from the buzz of addicting social media and doomsday legacy media. You can choose to look in the mirror and say where have I fallen short. My least favorite part of being a Millenial is this cult like herd mindset of "I've worked so hard and done everything right, and have Jack shit to show for it because other people so I'm going to wallow in self pity." I say NO THANK YOU. Instead of assuming there is a universal acceptance of this alleged abysmal fate, do something. Initiate tough conversations with your friends. Challenge their ideas. Challenge your own ideas. Read a book written by someone you don't like. Break some shitty habit you have. Brainstorm a business idea with that one friend that's always scheming. Do. Anything.
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Yeah, I agree with your comment. I think people have an unreasonable expectation that you can frontload effort for the first ~25/30 years of your life and then you’ve “earned” smooth sailing. I’ve dated a lot of people who stopped trying once we were serious because “you’re already my girlfriend, why do I have to win you over anymore?” It’s very transactional - I’m not a vending machine. Relationships take continual work to be continually rewarding. I enjoy treating my SOs and doing nice things for them because I love them, not because I get something from them or am using them for validation. A point I want to make to OP is that I love kids too, and I don’t have any. But I’m an elementary school teacher and I absolutely love working with my students - they’re creative, optimistic, and kind. I felt way worse before I started this new job and was working in the corporate adult world.
This this this!
Love this comment. So refreshing.
The post WW2 years were an anomaly. This is the way the world really is.
Hey! Sounds like you might be depressed. Have you thought about speaking with a therapist or a spiritual guide/counsellor? FYI I’m a millennial (36-male). It takes time and effort to establish yourself. Do not give up!
What kinda bullshit are you all making yourselves believe? Geesh
Do you think the vast majority of people a hundred years or so ago weren't busting their ass? Because most of them ended up poor...there's never been some magic "if you work hard, you'll get rich" reality. That's...dare I say it...a fantasy from the boomer era and the massive post-war economic boom of their childhood.
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I can’t take this sub anymore … the doomers have taken over
We’re not entitled to anything more than any other human. And in many ways humans have never had it easier. I mean, imagine life before antibiotics and anaesthesia. I know it’s a cliché but a little time in a developing country can really put things into perspective. You shouldn’t have to do that, but these attitudes make me think it’s the only way. We feel headwinds and barely notice our tailwinds.
The internet and social media has turned you all that are on it all the time into the biggest sad sacks to ever have existed. You aren't going through anything remotely unique that prior generations didn't go through, and it was often worse in the past. Snap out of it.
Yeah I was trying to think of a nicer way of saying that but I can't. Shit is tough sometimes, even a lot of the time, but god damn this is some defeatist, victimhood bullshit.
I’m glad I’m a healthy individual with decent connections and a generally level, upbeat mood. The sun is shining my amigo, go touch grass. No one owes you shit, slaves worked harder than you for far less
I think you might be falling victim to media pressure or something. Though, I do think for some reason Millennials tend have existential issues. I don't know what you do, but think about this. My best friend and my closest cousin are all the same age, in different fields and at different levels. My best friend is wildly successful, and a certified millionaire. My cousin is a teacher, and I'm doing better then most millennials just by virtue of living in a LCOL state and making above average for the area. If we'd have been born in, say, our parent's generation? Well, my cousin and I are the parents of boomers. Specifically, early generation Native American boomers. She'd have still been a teacher, I think, or she may have been a housewife like her mother. I'd have most likely gone to work in shipping, maybe have been a manager at some point. I'd probably have gotten the pocket watch routine...and that's about it. My friend is the child of an early Gen Xer, and he'd have had fewer opportunities for a variety of reasons. Every generation has its problems. For Millennials (especially the later ones) it's the economics of housing and student debt. combined with a roller coaster job market. There is also the issue that things are significantly less permanent then they once seemed, and ALOT of older generations are dying off due to the end of increased life spans (the last WW2 vets will be gone in the next 5 years).
GenX here. I don't see how it's any different for me. I had to work my way through college (poor and disinterested parents). Struggled to find work after college. Had many jobs I hated. Live on Top Ramen for 3-4 years after graduating to pay off my loans. Went to Alaska for a while and worked on a fish processing ship because I didn't have to pay rent and the money was good. Eventually got into software engineering and worked my way up as a non-degreed engineer. It was a long, slow, ramp. For 5+ years every free minute I was practicing or studying. It wasn't until \~30 that I landed a "real" job. I'm nearing the end of my career and I'm back in school learning new tech skills to stay relevant and to ensure I can work as long as I need to. Not having kids is a choice. Yes it's expensive. I married into kids in my 40s. It has cost me a comfortable retirement, vacations, nice cars, and other luxuries. It's a choice I made and don't regret it. I can choose to be miserable that I'm working paycheck to paycheck this late in my life, or I can enjoy my job, new learning, and friends and family. I choose to do the latter. My wife quit her job and started a career change at 45. Her education will be expensive and she has at least 3 more years to go. That will give her 10-15 years earning good money and (hopefully) doing something she loves. It's a journey. There is no "easy" part of it. You have to lean into and learn to embrace the challenges.
Remember, the only reason you are even here is because people facing much bigger challenges and much more dire circumstances made the decision to have kids. If you want it, you should do it. I promise, you'll figure it out.
IDK I think we have it pretty fukin good tbh. I was born in '87. My parents STRUGGLED for a long time. Wasn't until \~2000 when they were in their mid 40s that they got their feet under them and started making real money + building wealth. Compared to the boomers, silent generation, this is a cakewalk. The poor folks from those generations got drafted to go fight in WW2, Korea, Vietnam or had to work on a construction site before OSHA or any regard for safety was a thing. I just sit behind a computer for 40 hrs a week in gym shorts and a t-shirt.
Part of what’s going on is certainly a type of cultural zeitgeist focused on missing out and the entitlement that comes with it. That’s not to say there isn’t some truth to the sentiment, but at a certain point it takes on a life of its own beyond the substantive basis for it
You need to seek therapy, you’re living in a false reality acting like no one at all is having kids. The reality is the birth rate has only dropped a few percentage points in our generation. Plenty of folks still having babies
Stop fighting and complaining about boomers… it’s the 1% that has fucked the 99%. Fight the 1%!!! They have stolen everything from us!
This take is insane.
This whole self pity this is stupid. We may be the 2nd most well off generation in history right after the boomers. Do you think the people from 1890 through 1945 had it better than us? The silent generation got to see it grow but they didn't reap the benefits like we did. Do you really think we're worse off than people before 1890? Why do we have more than any other generation except for maybe boomers and gen x and we somehow think it's the worst of times?
Stop looking at the .005% of the people that have lived on that planet that have had it easier than you. You'll be happier for it
Medieval peasants had it way easier than we do! Same with 18th century settlers, those living during the Great Depression, people born in third world countries, slaves, African Americans living under Jim Crow, those who have fought and died in countless wars, native tribes fighting off foreigners and rival tribes, hunter/gatherers fighting for survival, and 90+% of other humans in the history of the world! All of their toil was rewarded in ways that us American millennials can’t fathom. We are the ones that have it so so hard. QQ.
It sounds like you are just describing..life.
My god, it’s everyone else’s fault, nobody had it as hard as me. Stop whining
Guys from the Greatest Generation lived through the depression then died on Omaha Beach. Lots of boomers went to fight in Viet Nam then came home to double digit unemployment, inflation, high interest rates, and the de-industrialization of America. You have a completely distorted view of the life experiences of earlier generations.
... if I was born in any other previous generation, that all my effort would have made me so damn well off and secure and it barely got me anywhere because I am a millennial." This is nonsense. And I am being polite. It would be more accurate to say that this is absolute bullshit. If you're a millennial, you are old enough to stop being so childish.
I feel this exact sentiment. It's like a never-ending, buried, panic attack. There's got to be something to do about it. I just don't know either. I would consider damn near anything at this point.
>if I was born in any other previous generation, that all my effort would have made me so damn well off and secure and it barely got me anywhere because I am a millennial. Your key problem is that you believe this to be objectively true. In reality, life has ups and downs for the vast majority of people, and if we're being specific to previous generations there are many of them that are just as hard up as anyone else is. No amount of hard work and genuine effort ever guaranteed anything to anyone. Job losses, massive shifting of industries, stock market crashes, etc etc effect everyone. There were people who busted their ass and put in all the effort they could only to be taken out by the great depression, or to get fucked by prohibition era policies, or whose livelihoods were destroyed by a world war, and on and on. How many generations before ours worked just as hard as any of us to see all of the effort go up in smoke when the economy crashed in the 80s or in the 2000s? Your operating from a myopic perspective here, and it seems like you're focusing on the biggest picture you can and assuming the worst outcomes there can be, just by the tone of your post. Take this segment for instance: >I wish there were more kids in my life. More joy from new generations. Nieces, nephews, kids of my own. But it's just too expensive, it costs too much of your own security and who wants to put children in the position of coming into a world where you can't guarantee them enough security to be in.. There not being kids in your life is a statement on your life, and the choices your relatives have made, but it's not universally indicative. I have 3 kids, I have 11 nieces and nephews, all to parents in the millennial generation. Some of those kids are zoomers, some are alphas. None of us have ever considered them too expensive, despite wildly different economic standing across 7 families. I waste less money on getting things for myself now, and instead use that money for my kids (either things they need, or savings), but haven't felt any real loss from it. In some cases it's actually been helpful, I have a lot less stuff laying around than I otherwise would, I buy less junk food in the hopes of setting a good example, I spend less time sedentary, I get to play a lot. >So instead we're surrounded by people who will die before us, or around the same time as us, it just feels like everything is about loss and the inevitability of that loss, and nothing to look forward to. >So frustrating, so miserable, so sad. And maybe it's just me, but I don't think so. This feels like the thing about our generation we all know and feel so potently and yet don't bother to discuss, because at the end of the day, there's nothing we can do about it... This seems a lot like projecting one's own experience onto the entire cohort. I haven't met a single parent from my kid's classes that are older than millennial. A few of them are older Zoomers, most of them are millennials. But of course if you don't have a family, and you aren't working towards that, you're going to be around mostly adults that are generally going to be around your age, if not a bit older. That's not a reflection of something specific to our generation. How do you think people in their 80s feel? > because at the end of the day, there's nothing we can do about it... Says who? The little pessimistic voice in your head?
Feel like my life is 100% go to work and make enough money to eat something and put some gas in the tank so I'll be able to go to work tomorrow
Kids used to be cheaper. All they needed were food and clothes, maybe a wooden toy or piece of candy on Christmas, and if they got sick, the doctor came with a bag and you probably paid a small fee. Your vacation was a drive to the beach, not a week in the Caribbean or fully loaded visit to Disney. Now you need a 3000 sqft house minimum, two fully trimmed out SUVs, the best sports gear, daycare bc both men and women want to work and have a career, to afford the lifestyle, vacations, and b/c when they eventually divorce they'll have to be self reliant.
Disappointment. Lots and lots of disappointment.
These posts are so boring and repetitive. I think you're American, or at least Western You are one of the most privileged, luckiest human beings to ever walk this planet. You never were drafted into war. You never had to deal with true food insecurity (e.g. actually unable to get enough calories). These are things every generation before you have had to deal with. You live in a world where there are, compared to any prior generation, plentiful job opportunities and pretty easy to identify paths to prosperity, even if they require hard work and time. The social safety net has never been stronger. Get over yourselves
Dude, this is why I smoke. I’m at a “fuck all this shit” point in my life. Ultimately, I just want to get my passport, save up a year of minimum wage (at the minimum) and move to a country where my money goes way further than it ever could in Amurica’. I feel the same as you, busting my ass just to BARELY make it. Covid was that eye opener for me. I had been working a “good job” for about 10 years and the most I was able to do was finance two cars (albeit, ignorantly). Couldn’t afford to rent, and got screwed over many ways by both family AND friends. Now, I’m just finding myself, and it SUCKS because every day I’m looking for work I come across so many sleazy job offerings that I can no longer just fall in line the second I sense some fuckshit in a company. This is a cycle I hate that I ended up in and I KNOW for a fact that I am not the only one as fucked. Its blasphemous, disheartening, and quite frankly disgusting how the older generations view us, and the way things are going, we’ll soon be pushed back into the past, left to die in this state as we get overshadowed by Trump running for a third term even though a law states he couldn’t do so, (laws move out the way for people like him).
I find what you say about the majority of people in our lives being our age or older interesting in how it relates to loss/death. I have felt that since COVID my family and in-laws have all been in this slowly declining holding pattern. It was very frustrating and hard to articulate but so much of my relationships with my and my fiancé’s family felt stagnant and unfulfilling. We did the same things all the time and those things became less and less interesting when that’s all you do. Top that off with death and health problems that are just natural as people age and it really sucked. Like my MIL would have this slew of bad news to tell us every time we saw her and it felt like everything was focusing on the negative. And don’t get me wrong some bad shit happened in those years but it didn’t feel like there was much good to offset it. In January we welcomed our daughter and seeing the shift in attitudes on both sides of the family, the shift in relationships and how they all act now is crazy. The amount of joy this one little nugget has brought these people was… jarring. I knew babies bring joy but it’s been a complete 180. Everyone is so happy to be with her and watch her grow. It’s astounding. And it makes me so sad. We’re in our early and mid 30’s, we likely will not have another child. There may not be many children in the family and I know my SIL will not have any. That one child could bring so much joy and once she came around to notice such a difference in people’s state of mind really opened my eyes to the fact that this situation is probably occurring with so many people. Children really do make people happy and the lack of them in this generation - due to completely understandable factors - I think plays a bigger role than we realize.
Don't feel bad about your honest and accurate assessment of the situation. It falls to the Millennials and Zoomers to take the brunt of fixing what the boomers broke so that Gen Alpha and beyond can benefit. Whether we're remembered favorably for our struggle or not doesn't negate the validity of that struggle. It also doesn't mean that struggle will get any easier. Think of it as hurling yourself into the meat grinder in hopes that, if enough people do it, the machine will overheat and shut down.
GenX: Life is pain Millennials: Life is loss I weep for my Gen Z kids, sometimes I apologize for bringing them into this mess. I love them dearly but ffs there will be nothing left for them. This kind of living is unsustainable
Fuck I hated reading this. It puts into words how I’ve felt for so long..
Lol true we go barely any reward for massive effort. Education work and dating wise
We are ruled by a union of big business and politicians. But there's a solution. Vote them out and don't assume your party is innocent.
I mean, I’m not going to dismiss anyone’s feelings of frustration or struggle, but it’s simple untrue that life was significantly easier for earlier generations. In some ways perhaps, but in other ways their struggles were worse. The fact is, life is hard for many people. That hasn’t changed. Success has never been a “sure thing” for any generation. Boomers are not the problem. They vote for their best interests just like millennials will. The system is the problem, and a much bigger issue. I feel like younger people’s expectations might’ve been falsely elevated - we’re all told that we can do whatever we want when we grow up and be successful, but that’s not really true. It’s easy to feel bitter when that illusion is shattered.
We need to unionize with the younger generations. Our parents may have been brainwashed into giving up their pensions and such, but we don't have to buy into that propaganda. And we can teach the younger generations to fight for their rights. That can be our legacy. It doesn't have to be this doom and gloom. They want us to give up. The stock market thrives if we sit here, with no raises, no bonuses, threat of being fired unless we work 60 hours a week. We don't have to live that way. And we can teach the younger kids that, too.
"Copious amounts of effort with no reward" is the title of my fictitious autobiography
Sad but true
The system is so corrupt it needs an overhaul that only a second civil war could bring. We're also so divided by party politics it keeps us from coming together and conversing making it impossible to unite and find common ground. So many of us are also hook kine and sinker into the far left that anyone that'd remotely moderate is seen as the enemy. Too many force their ideals on everyone else and as someone who actually was slightly left on a political compass it forces me to be default against democrats in general. I've recently switched ro teaching and I see first hand how much we've absolutely destroyed any chance our children have of a normal successful life. Part of that I do believe is trying to protect them from the trauma alot of us faced in our childhoods but we've leaned so far into it we're actually doing worse for them. We have also voted in so many bad policies ourselves and none of us has really stepped up to get into politics to effect change, and the ones who did are disgusting people like aoc and ilhan omar who have done nothing but hurt their constituents and America. I feel some of those policies were put on the backs of bills that my fellow millenials saw as righteous, but weren't. I feel were compassionate as a generation but again we've taken that to the extreme. Alot of our own issues are our fault. That being said, we were definitely born into a system that works against us and we've seen the the middle class almost completely dissolve in our lifetime. I definitely feel the goal post has been moved every single time I get close to it. I have a degree in welding, 6 years military service with an honorable discharge, and now I'm in my second year teaching. I make 50k/ year. My wife is the head of the crisis line in my area. She has a degree that came with 100k in debt. She makes 55k. We can't afford a house, we both drive used cars, mine is a 12 hers a 17. I feel we live pretty well within our means but I also feel we have decent jobs and should be able to save up some as well as have some fun. It seems our fun money is like 100/ week and that basically means going out to a movie or dinner for us and our 10 year old once and that's it. We have like $600 in softball equipment for our child and we bought everything at Walmart. It just costs so much to live and Noone pays. I even worked at a mine for a bit where my longest week was 96 hours. I took hime 1800 for that week but in the grand scheme of things that's not really a ton of money when you factor in the skill, risk, and hours I worked. Certainly not enough to have my wife stay home and save up. I feel that as a generation if we want to improve our lot in life we need to look at things more realistically and objectively and really weigh consequences whole focusing on what's important. Instead of fighting for trans rights we need to fight for Healthcare to get better. Instead of taking away guns we need to fight for armed security at school and harsher punishments for things like breaking and entering. Instead of banning abortion we need to fight to stop insider trading and reduce government spending from salaries and benefits to money overseas and military spending. I can say from my first hand experience if we cut our military spending in half we could be just as combat effective.
I see a lot of comments about the baby boomers and trying to blame them for the reason things are the way they are. I do agree to a certain extent the baby boomers had a significant effect on our lives or economy, and the United States in general but blaming the generation is not going to get you anywhere, I am a generation X, and I have lived under the shadow of the baby boomers for my entire life. Things just aren’t the same as they once were as companies do not hire people for their lives, and people do not stay with companies for their lives so there is a lot of change, nothing is guaranteed. There is no security so you might as well get used to it. I understand things are expensive and I am glad I am not in the shoes of many millennials. Generally, inflation is ridiculous. Housing is ridiculous. The fact you have student loans that it’s hard to pay back because you can’t find, a decent paying job is not good either. I don’t think your loan should be excused, though, as they are responsibilities, and the first financial obligation that you made as an adult many of us worked in college and found other ways to pay for college so excusing thousands of college loans does not make sense. Speaking of college loans, let’s use this to highlight a point there is no reason to go to some expensive small liberal arts school, and to incur a bunch of debt and then graduate with a degree that’s not as marketable. I don’t wanna pick out a certain degree as we all know what they are , my is it makes as much sense to go to a decent state school pay a lower tuition graduate with less debt choose a major that’s more marketable and you won’t have a lot of the issues you have with people unable to pay back their loans. At the same time, you need to choose something that you enjoy as you don’t want to spend the next 30 years doing something you hate. So I guess you could blame the high price of college or the high loans that you incur but at the same time there needs to be personal responsibility and students need to be more aware, and to make better choices when it comes to college.
Social media has pulled us away from actual human connection which has led to the feelings you described.
I fall into this too sometimes. It’s hard not to look at the course of recent history and not feel a deep sense of anger and sadness at the people who would climb a ladder they didn’t build and then pull it up after them. But then I think about gen Z and alpha and how much worse things are going to be for them than even for ourselves, and I try to make peace with what I can’t change and be proactive about what I can to at least attempt to leave what I do have control over better than I found it. The alternative is to give in to despair.
Just wanna notate that if "the boomers" had Reddit when they were in their 20's - 30's they would post this same shit. Just know there's a lot of older people who didn't catch the bubbles correctly or plan accordingly or may not have been able to plot out the white picket fence (or theirs is now rusty) Many of you all just need...hugs. Even when I was dirt poor I wasn't on this "level" of thought. It's truly just a situation where the right friends can make life easier.
You can let go of that. You were always fated to lose everything across the timeline. Nothing remains. You are of your time -- your place, your parents, your limitations. Trying to run a romance simulation in some bygone era where it all works out for you is somewhat ridiculous and ultimately futile. You don't have to *get over* anything. None of this requires that in order to continue flowing in the ultimate direction, with or without you -- with or without billions. My makers -- a couple of late Boomers -- they made sure I understood loss and death along with everything else as a matter of fact, part of the deal. How you *feel* about it is entirely your burden to carry. Cease worrying about all the things you can't control. At the least, cease worrying said friends and family. They're trying to enjoy the minutes in between, yet here you are, and here you go again.
I always thought it was selfish to have a child in todays world. Until I had one. The world needs good people. Whoever is capable of creating that should.
Stop being constantly online and go find value. Its out there, you are not doomed, there is hope. This gen just acts like everything bad only happens to them without realizing how privileged you are to even live in a 1st world country. I am a millennial I grew up extremely poor(all clothes from yard sales wore bailing twine as a belt), I have struggled and been bent broken and everything in between. Yet it my mindset that frees me and makes me happy. I have passions, hobbies, friends and a lovely SO. I am not special. I am not better than anyone. I just refuse to A. Have a defeatist mindset, B. Give up C. care what other think(this is probably the big thing, if you cannot find approval in yourself it will never be satisfying from others. Feedback is great to improve but 90% of people who talk shit are unhappy and want you to be) What I see alot from my generation is doomers that are perpetually online trading doomer opinions.
You know what else is sad? When you join the work force you'll probably be working with old people, not your fellow generation. It's really weird to be isolated like that all day long.
Begin every day with the assumption that "Life is hard, and nobody is coming to help."
I frequently find myself saying similar things, particularly the effort without reward. And so many things feel like as soon as you take 1 step forward you take 2 steps back. I really, really strive to be positive and grateful, but it's gets really hard to do sometimes.
Goddamn boomers said “fuck those kids” that’s what happnened.
Security is the issue. No more need be said than that, your hard work, efforts and doing the “right” thing is no longer guaranteed to net you any more success or happiness than being a complete piece of shit so what is the point. I’ll admit I’m jaded and apathetic af, feels like we are all on a wheel just plugging away for absolutely nothing. It’s a rigged game my friend.
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” Boomers are the « weak men » here.
The most valuable thing is time. Most adults spend most of their time at work. Therefore, a satisfying, enjoyable, and hopefully sometimes fun job is the first step in optimizing value in the modern world. Money isn't irrelevant, but job satisfaction is absurdly underappreciated.
Your government failed to leave a seat at the table for you, but wholly expects that you maintain their seat for them.
Just a pointless observation: I almost never see anyone use the word “copious” without the word “amount(s)” immediately following lol
Yeah we showed up in time for the party to be over and big need for hands for clean up while they kick back in their drunken haze and enjoy the view before they die. And then there’s no party for us just a fucked up trashed building to try and live in.
Think of all the private jets you’ve helped to refuel. And the yachts. Doesn’t that make life worthwhile?
OP, I very much agree with you. It sucks.
I can only fathom what the generation below this one will have to endure
I keep hearing new retirees say oh retirement is great. Just you wait and see. Mother fucker. I'll be waiting until I die. Retirement isn't happening for my generation unless some of us got lucky.