Be sure to follow the rule before you head out.
Rule: You must post before you leave.
The century of find out with almost no active participation in the previous century of fuck around.
A lot of "climate collapse global late stage capitalism and food is more and more plastic" stick with very little "convenience products are kinda nifty" carrot
It's kind of bittersweet being a very tail-end Gen X person. On the happy side, I got to do my childhood and teen years in the "fuck about" era, but on the unhappy side my entire adulthood has been in the "find out" era, and I get to remember what it was like briefly living in a world that wasn't entirely going to shit.
it's kind of affirming to hear you say that. As a gen Z person I feel like we're constantly being gaslit into thinking stuff has always been bad and we just complain more or something
Thank you! This was very well put. Felt like a big puzzle piece just fell in place and this discomfort of not knowing why stuff feels so weird nowadays let go a bit. ❤️🤜
Older millennial here, so about your age, I have really early childhood memories before ozone issues, recessions, and planet fucking, after that it's been one paper straw after another
I feel like I could still join in on all the fuck around going on, but the find out has simultaneously already started and I can't deal with the cognitive incongruence. Most people seem to be just fine with that tho. Must be nice being able to just turn your brain off and keep fucking the planet like that.
I really wish my generation was a bit more optimistic. Yeah shit sucks, don't get me wrong. But have you guys seen all of history? This is par for the course. Yeah the challenges are different but every generation had their challenges. And yeah baby boomers definitely had it better than us, but that doesn't mean there's nothing but bad stuff to come. You have to take life with the good and the bad and make the most of it.
Most generations don't need to deal with an impending threat to the whole planet. Nuclear apocalypse, sure, but at least there was no pretending that it wasn't a problem.
This is ignoring all of the other ways in which we're fucked.
Another thing that is worse is how we havent had anything recently to inspire hope. The Higgs Boson would have been the Millenial/Gen Z equivalent of the moon landing if the public hadn't been so distrusting of physics because of string theory evangelists.
For me, the first world (i.e. the part of the world allied with the US) had a common enemy to get behind and that allowed people to live in peace for 1.5 generations or so. When the USSR collapsed, that bogeyman suddenly disappeared and the infighting started nearly instantly.
I think the Internet is partially to blame.
The negative stuff happening in the world seems to spread so much faster and get so much more publicity that it's easy to end up in a constant negative spiral
Yeah I think you're dead on. I'm evidently not alone in thinking that the age of information is driving a lot of consciousness of worldwide issues on a scale we've never seen before. People in the Middle Ages only knew the small world they lived in on the scale of a city or region. If that city or region was prospering, their life was likely pretty damn nice.
These days, we're aware of all issues everywhere. And if you don't create that perspective for yourself, that can be incredibly overwhelming. You have to give in to a certain sense of wilful ignorance because you literally cannot be involved with every one of those problems. Not clicking on all the doom and gloom news articles has done wonders for my mental health. I guess you could say this thread was a moment of weakness.. :p
What's interesting when you look at birthrate declines is not that they are declining, it's that they are declining to NORMAL LEVELS. Everyone is freaking out that the next generation won't be big enough to support retiring Boomers without understanding that there should never have been so many Boomers in the first place.
Boomers without understanding that there should never have been so many Boomers in the first place.
its literally in their name too: 'baby boomers'. too many in too short a time and they have dominated politics for the better part of a century now
baby boomers definitely had it better than us
Dunno, man. Boomers in my home country went through such shit time that they think that becoming literal nazis still isn't the worst thing to happen in their lifetime. They did get free housing before that, though, so I'm not sure they actually had it worse overall...
As someone that's been around for some of history it's bad now. Just the cost of living stuff is dark. Grown adults are sharing bedrooms because they can't afford to rent a room by themselves on a full time wage. People have raised entire families on a single factory workers wage for hundreds of years before now, now two people with decent jobs can't afford one kid. It's dark.
My GenX existential horror was learning in my thirties that all the western American Exceptionalism ideology I was indoctrinated in as a kid was just a way of keeping us from getting proactive for sake of the future generations, and my parents and teachers and ministers knew this and actively lied to me anyway.
I also think that a lot of bad things about the US that a blind eye was turned to because they seemed to be getting better have since become relevant again because they've started getting worse
Oh I realized that in my 20s
I was particularly credulous.
The Ukraine-Russia & Israel-Palestine wars, and the likelyhood of China going after Taiwan before 2027, and the Koreas continually being a powder keg influenced by all of this. Between all that and me being 23 years old I sincerely think I might witness World War 3, it's terrifying, yet it feels inevitable with our era of false 1st world peace built on a house of cards.
That's not even mentioning the Republican Project 2025, as a trans person I might have to fight for my life.
Not just those under 40. I do feel bad I sorta got a brief taste of "good times" and worry eventually younger folks will think the post 2000's are normal.
Yeah, I'm juuuust old enough to have a firm memory of when things that were laughably petty were the biggest problems in the world. You mean to tell me the PRESIDENT got a BLOWJOB?!
All the real issues that sowed the seeds for our intractably broken future were sidelined and mostly ignored. Desert Storm, woowoo go world police. LA Riots, oh you crazy minorities and your intolerance for extrajudicial murder. Climate change, what's that?
Desert Storm was the good one. Sadam invaded Kuwait, a large international coalition ended the occupation. Today's analogue would be NATO entering Ukraine, kicking the Russians out, and showing that wars of aggression are unacceptable.
Iraq in '03 was the problematic one. Falsified casus belli, war crimes galore.
There hasn't been a "good one" since WW2.
Short explanation: The arms Iraqi forces fought with during the Gulf War were largely bought or built by Americans. Isn't that interesting?
Long explanation: It's all connected to the Israel-Palestine issues we are seeing this very day. Iraq was dealt a very nasty hand by the UN after the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, becoming a landlocked country, with lines drawn such that they were made caretakers of ethnic enemies and forced to forsake much of their geopolitical power and resources to tribal rivals. It's difficult to say their claim to Kuwait was justified, but it's certainly just as difficult to say it was unjustified.
On top of that, we had just gotten done with fucking over Iraq due to their failure in the Iraq-Iran war. They had initially allied with the USSR to prop themselves up, and when that went to shit they turned around and tried doing the west and themselves a favor by grabbing a piece of Iran. We were directly supporting them (anybody taking a punch at Iran is a friend of ours!), and had been increasing our support, but when they agreed to a ceasefire we stopped, leaving them war-torn, deeply in debt, and with really nothing to show for their experiment of working with the west aside from all these shiny American weapons of course.
Medium explanation?: Iraq had been engineered to be an Israel-like anti-Arab agent in the region, but when they failed and sued for peace, we left them no other option but to wage another war to survive. When they went in a direction we didn't like, we got all our buddies together (including a surprising number of old enemies) and decimated them. Twice!
When Fallout Boy did the cover of We Didn't Start the Fire, all hope was lost.
I've thought of the 1975's Love It If We Made It as this generation's We Didn't Start The Fire.
gen z didn't need a song to know who started the fire. now we all have anxiety because we're the ones who gotta put it out
Every day I wake up exhausted trying to look for a silver lining but more often not finding it until sleep.
You should come with me to the end of the world
Without telling your parents and your friends
You know that you only need say a word
So we might live at the end of the world
i thought that too but then dan and phil announced the gaming channel is coming back yesterday
That's a bit dramatic
70s and 80s were shit. The 30s and 40s? Thanks, I'll take today.
Also, Feliz el año del Niño! Gonna be a great 16 months for weather. Especially in Texas!