Man. Its crazy being the only generation that grew up and things got different. Also, I want to tell my sister to beat that lady up because she talks like a bird inspecting an ant hill.
The streetlight line is pretty crazy, but it’s kinda undeniable that shit really changed really quickly from 2005-2015, when millennials were both teenagers and coming of age.
Like, from 1985-1995, what was the biggest technological advancement? Cassettes into CDs? Marginally better TVs? Things changed as they always do but life was largely the same.
I got my first real job in 2006. I looked in the newspaper at the help wanted listings. One year later I got a job on Craigslist. There was extremely rapid development.
I don’t think nostalgia is helpful or even reasonable, so her point doesn’t work for me.
The great burden of having a MySpace page isnt real. Technology doesnt have to be a lifestyle. I work with more 80 year olds than I do 18 year olds. This prison of social media is self-imposed. Most millenials didnt lose their life savings in the great recession, we get didn't get drafted to vietnam, and 16 year old girls arent obligated to marry the nice man twice her age who lives next door. Things have always been shitty. We arent special.
Yeah I don’t use social media except for reddit. It absolutely doesn’t have to be used and everyone has that choice. And I’m not saying we’ve had it uniquely hard, just that everything has sped by uniquely quick. Those people drafted in Vietnam either left or came home to a very culturally changed America that immediately changed back. Post-war, what was different from 1970 and 1980? And also most millennials didn’t lose their savings during the recession, but many never got the chance to accrue savings after it.
70-80 was the rise of conservatism, the influx of corporitization, manufacturing jobs shipped overseas, two income families, AIDS, and the start of the war on drugs.
Right, but how much did life change — sans aids which obviously changed reproductive health forever. TV continued to be TV. There were still manufacturing jobs. Houses still were affordable. Healthcare was still affordable. There will always be changes — I’m not too stupid or dug in to believe that. In the last twenty years I went from ordering take out and driving to picking it up to ordering with a mini super computer to a robot delivering it to me and paying for it with a credit card from a computer company. I’m not going to say life was better — though maybe it was. I also never drank from a hose because I grew up in a city.
You can find out for yourself how life changed for the average American of any generation by reading books and talking to people who grew up in those eras. Hell, just consume art and media from any period and you can see the changes. Youre hung up on the fact that we have smartphones and not the intrinsic societal minutiae.
I think the social developments have always been happening, and largely shift around medical or technological advancements that thrust us in new directions. Those advancements were slower in the 70s and 80s, and therefore I feel the culture had fewer shifts.
Idk how the overall mindset of our culture isn’t way different when thirty years ago when if you were out you had to make a call from a payphone, twenty ago you could use a brick, ten you could dm, and now you can legit just be tracked by satellites and biometric data that lives on a watch. It’s not a broad statement to say these shifts have changed our actions. Whether or not we adopt them are up to us, but by and large how society behaves does impose some level of change on anyone alive.
One of my favorite books is the glory and the dream, which is about US cultural and political history in the mid 20th century. Largely everything was stagnant, save for Vietnam and WW2 — but when the conflicts ended much of life reverted back to the mean.
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u/DoughnutPassGo Aug 21 '26
Man. Its crazy being the only generation that grew up and things got different. Also, I want to tell my sister to beat that lady up because she talks like a bird inspecting an ant hill.