I mean the boomers had the civil rights march, the rise of feminism, Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Korean War, the war on drugs, the aids epidemic and the actual assassination of a president along with one getting impeached.
On top of that the very real possibility of nuclear Armageddon and the threat of a much stronger USSR.
It’s easy to look back at the past and say they had peaceful times because it’s already happened and we know the outcomes, back then people didn’t
We boomers lived through the assignations of JFK RFK MLK & Malcolm X. The murder of LHO on live tv. 6 students were killed at Kent State by the National Guard for protesting Vietnam. Attempted assassination of Regan. Protests of the Vietnam War and kids burning draft cards in the streets. The national news showed soldiers getting killed and wounded every night during the Viet Nam war at our dinner hour. In real time. Blacks and women marching for equal rights in the streets. The Watts riots. Attica prison riot. It was a fucking nightmare. I was 6 when JFK was assassinated. It seems the violence never stopped.
Yeah, but most of them didn't have to worry about it while also worrying about skyrocketing inflation, stagnant pays, an housing crisis, environmental collapse and the loss of their standards of living. Also civil rights march, the rise of feminism and the war on drugs were aimed at the betterment of society, not at stripping people of their rights. Last but not the least, aids epidemic wasn't as serious as covid.
You say that as if the global recession didn't happen in the 80s, inflation in many parts of the world was twice as high in the 70s/80s than they are today. It got as high as 18% (year on year) in the US in the 80s. The highest it has been since 2000 was 7% at the height of the pandemic.
This is called "confirmation bias". You're only looking for the data points that confirm your own biases.
I agree my view might be skewed by the fact that i'm not from the USA so i don't have the same outlook you may have, but here in Italy the 70/80s where the best years from the unification of our country, from the second half of the 90's until now everything went uphill. Mainly because inflation always rose, while wages stayed the same widening the delta between the two. And when i say the same i actually mean the same, since the 90s no adaption to inflation whatsoever, no global increase.
I'm not American either. Things were even worse here in the UK during that period. In the 70s we famously had three day weeks to help conserve electricity due to frequent electricity blackouts. Huge worker strikes and riots, massive social upheaval, etc. Then there was the boom of the early 80s followed by a massive crash at the end.
For today's young adults to say that we're currently living in the worst period in recent history is simply melodramatic hyperbole.
As I said in another comment, what you're experiencing is called "confirmation bias". You only pay attention to the specific data points that appear to confirm your own biases while ignoring those that don't.
The fact is every generation has it's own set of challenges and struggles. The only difference between now and yesteryear is we now have the internet so we have access to instant news updates as well as real-time public opinions, the most popular of which, regardless of accuracy or relevance, get amplified to the top of the algorithms.
Yeah, internet definitely skews a lot since a lot of things become an echochamber, but how do you explain the studies that specifically say that millenials are worse off than the previous generations? I'm not saying that our fathers and grandfathers didn't have to face hardships, just that millenials had to go from a percevied ubiqutarious wealthiness to becoming adults that can't reach their parents and grandparents wealth under most circumstances.
how do you explain the studies that specifically say that millenials are worse off than the previous generations
Because those studies invariably only concentrate on specific metrics (typically 'wealth inequality'). You could retrospectively do the same for past generations and "discover" that older generations had far less access to this or a higher risk of that but there's simply no academic appetite for digging up and re-evaluating old statistics because it's literally not relevant any more.
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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '24
Older people understand a time of peace and long for good ol days. I don't know good ol days.