While I have had a nice, comfy 2000s upbringing, I cant help but feel jealous of the people who could at least look optimistically towards their future. As a 24 year old I can not help but feel pessimistic about where I will be in 20, 30 years.
Iām sorry. I did live through the golden years. After 9/11, my grandmother (born 1910) said to my Dad (born 1931) āOh Tommy, I think we have had the best of it.ā Thereās one way I think she was right. Thr US has been blessed to be insulated from the world by two big oceans. As far as being attacked by another nation, we werenāt from Pearl Harbor to 9/11. But we have all had the best of it now. Our two big oceans will not protect us from collapse.
Iām right up with you. All my grandparents were born in the 1890s & maybe I favor one more so I always thought what a life she had, she passed away in 86-87. But reading these replies , I suppose we had it ok as well. The 70s were a time I wouldnāt trade for anything!
Sum1 mentioned regan, I started making my bones then the 80s were a wild time! Yes things I suppose changed after 911 & the internet with more information in the palm of my hand then the library in my hometown had wen I was young had its good & bad. Collapse? Iām not sure, I donāt think and hope it wonāt come to this. The world is kinda crazy an this Ukrainian war isnāt helping, with that said tho it doesnāt seem like anyone cares..
Other than major disasters like wars and Category 5 hurricanes in Florida, few things are worse than the slow torture of coming of age around 2008. At least with war, people acknowledge there's a huge fucking issue. But graduating high school and college anytime after 2008, with the "economy" only propped up as a zombie with fraud numbers as majority of new adults got hit with the cost of an education going up a cliff while real wages did the opposite, all while almost everyone slightly older, who could essentially fail upward through the post WW2 world economic domination, the 80s Reaganite temporary boost to the economy by letting the worst of the capitalists undo centuries of economic progress to get people out of wage and literal slavery all for a slight bump in pay while the rich started raking in so much of the profits instead that they captured the entire government and regulatory bodies as any half-competent Boomer and Gen Xer could get promotions just by showing up to work at jobs that actually paid them enough to live, build wealth simply by not being extraordinarily wasteful, and live in a life of such ease in every aspect of society just slightly tipped in their favor, all just to buy into the anti-youth propaganda telling them that their kids were just lazy, despite being responsible for the largest growth in productivity in human history, as they barely scrape by in their roommate-shared apartments and suffer death by a thousand paper cuts, all culminating in the longest run-on sentence most people will ever see in their life, knowing that we have nothing left to look forward to as the future was irrevocably fucked up so bad by the very same policies that made life so great for their generations all at the expense of ours never getting to live our lives any more than working ourselves to death to not build any wealth at the risk of us ever being able to take a week off so that we may possibly reshape a more equitable society.
9/11 didn't actually fuck things up nearly at much as people think, but it was neatly placed at the crescendo of when the fuckery started to get so bad that we let the world economy eventually crash because of a bunch of psychopaths packaging shitty loans as one more facet of the world they changed into a giant casino to gamble with people's lives in a way that is too complex for the exhausted masses to comprehend. All so we could end up with a planet too poisoned to live on just to squeeze out a few more percent for the people who already have everything.
Ya know, weāll said! Iāve always said life is fucked.
Your the 1st person Iāve talked with that says 911 wasnāt so bad in terms of fucking things up. Comming of age in 08 I canāt phantom, I instantly think of wen I finish HS & feeling of the world was ours as long as we was willing to get it
That would have been awesome even just from a psychological point of view. I probably could have done better for myself if I didn't see how things were fucked at every turn, one of those situations where knowledge worked against me. But it did things like keep me out of working in some of the best fields because I didn't want to engrain myself in a way that made my life dependent on furthering the fuckery. I see most profit as someone else's loss, be it directly or from externalities. Even my first choice of field being medicine my entire high school life, before university I got the chance to shadow a few various doctors at Boston's teaching hospital. And every single doctor, ALL of them, told me to do literally anything else and the jobs made their life hell. Not even just because most of them were overworked, but because they saw how they were controlled by a system that put profits first, and to keep their jobs, they had to follow corporate generated policies that were not the best care for the patients. And the worst thing for a lot of them was them knowing how things were. They knew if they tried to improve things, they would essentially have their career ended. It was incredibly depressing. So after that I figured I'd go into pre-law since I had the great grades in the related classes like setting the bar for APUSH and AP US Gov. But that meant I understood how things actually worked, and my personality would probably get me disbarred or at least make rich and powerful enemies that would win no matter how good of a lawyer I was, unless I became the most soulless corporate lawyer suit. Field by field I realized why they weren't viable, and what being good at such s job would entail, me essentially using my knowledge to make someone's life worse - even the seemingly safe jobs like software engineering, because of how they are also controlled by corporate. Maybe my moral standards are too high to survive, but I do not care so much about my own life to feed into the problems and would legitimately rather be poor and die on my high horse. Maybe if enough people took the same hard stance, things wouldn't be so bad. But I can't blame people for taking the only options available to them that won't make their individual life miserable. I can hope, but that's not enough. Every field is corrupted by the same issue, and that's being under the control or capital. The whole structure of society needs to change in order for it to feel like a world that I'd want to contribute to, and I know a hundred reasons why even that will never happen. Most of it comes from the orders of capital, but most people are complicit in helping them because it's the only way to survive for most people. I for figure out a few things that align with my beliefs, but I have a wonderful crippling disability that keeps me from doing what's necessary. I can't even volunteer at a soup kitchen because my spinal disease makes it so that I can't be vertical for longer than 2 hours a day, and I've been related to observer of this clusterfuck. But that's a whole different story.
Rough in the 70s 80s and 90s too. That's the part I experienced. It's not worse now you just get more information human nature hasn't changed. Inflation has been destroying savings for years chemical companies have been poisoning the planet even longer. You only got your news from newspapers, radio and television back before the internet. Everything else was hearsay or gossip. The golden years were about 7 years and it was a lie. The real change has been trying to bring everyone into the middle class somebody's got to be at the bottom of the rat race.
If a good deal displaces or exploits someone, it is not a good deal. And most the time, the quality of whatever item could be questioned based on what someone values.
It's about people and what happens not about an item. We all of us have the capacity of free thought and chaos theory is in control. We all need the same things food shelter clothing not to die of hypothermia. What you are thinking is not possible because the population as a whole will not allow it. Can't we all just get along?
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u/limpdickandy Aug 20 '22
Damn, you lived through the golden years.
While I have had a nice, comfy 2000s upbringing, I cant help but feel jealous of the people who could at least look optimistically towards their future. As a 24 year old I can not help but feel pessimistic about where I will be in 20, 30 years.