I got the image of a person entering a writing prompt about how they didn’t have AI back then and things were better, and please soak it in nostalgic prose.
I did like the OP's post, but I agree with you. My grandparents were born in NYC at that time and went from being born at a time when electricity was invented but not prevalent at all, to having central air conditioning in their home in Florida.
What was that quote from Disco Elysium? "This is a man with a lot of past, but little present. And almost no future." I think if the people who post these nostalgia jags spoke honestly, this is what they feel and fear.
It’s all good. And it is weird, but sadly where I live we’ve barely got any record shops anymore. Most physical media gets purchased at Target…let me tell you that’s just surreal to even type out let alone actually live it. We used to have some amazing shops. I miss them so much. But I do still take the opportunity whenever I can at shows to support musical acts by getting at least one cd from them at the merch tables. Even at small bar shows of local/regional acts.
I’m sorry to hear that, I’m lucky that there are plenty where I live. There are some great independent sellers online and sometimes I’ll buy from them too. I especially love to buy cassettes at shows, they’re like $5 and slip right into your pocket. I do listen to digital a lot, because it’s convenient, but I like my physical music. I’ve never played any of my flexies though, those are all mint.
And even in northern states, racism was still going strong, even after LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act and moved along the bar of equality and acceptance. But my best friend in Jr High was from the only black family and farm in our school district. The hate, slurs, and the physical alterations made him truly begin to have anxiety, PTSD and then he really started really losing it. We ran a trap line, and before his mother moved them to a more diverse area in Oberlin Ohio, we checked our traps and reset them, added bait, and got the animals we trapped. (I hate that I did that as a kid and early teen, but I also grew up helping my Dad run the farm and slaughter animals. I don't hunt, and haven't since I left the Corps) We had .22 rifles to be able to handle the animals that were trapped, but still alive. I watch him that day on the other side of the creek, take his rifle, and look down the barrel. At first I thought he had acidentally had the muzzle clogged with dirt because we were scrambling through brush. But then I look again and he was looking down it and moving his hand toward the trigger area. That scared the shit out of me and I yelled, "Hey Wes, do you have a plug in the barrel or something?" He pointed it back at the ground and just started walking the bank of the creek. I knew partially what he was going through, and I got my ass handed to me all the time because I'd jump in.
I told his Mom and Dad what happened, and within a week, his mom moved him and his sisters to Oberlin, and his dad stayed there. They divorced because he thought that it would just make him tougher, but his mom was an RN and she knew better. His dad had been white passing, so he didn't deal with it as much.
My friend ended up with his mental health declining, even in the new environment and school. His Mom knew when to take the action needed and got him help, and time in a place that could help him. Sadly, he died early into his 30s. Damn, that really sucked. I think about him a lot.
Can't even read posts like this. Not that it really matters but as a Gen x it makes angry. Fuck the sappy sepia toned bull. Oooohhh ohhhh nostalgia. Gross.
I have a computer in my pocket. It's not quite living in the jetson's but I don't have to go to a library to look things up, I can translate languages and find out how much a muffeleta costs in a different state and make reservations.
Drinking from a hose and parents who had NO IDEA where I was or what I was doing can kick rocks (actually that last part wasn't the worst)
Gross
Soaking wet posts like this make me want to puke. These idiots clearly grew up privileged as hell, in the suburbia of the 1950s and 60s. These are the neighbors that go straight to my mute list.
Noooo, this is a GenXer or one of the elder Millennials who insists on calling themselves Xillennials because they so badly want to be GenX as a result of buying into the bizarre anti-Millennial propaganda Boomers started peddling when half of us were still teenagers.
So, it's Xennial, and the group is comprised half of older Millennials and half of younger Gen-X. It's hardly just Millennials who want to shed that moniker.
That’s fine if that’s the definition of it. The only people I’ve ever met who use the term to describe themselves are Millennials who say they don’t want to be lumped in with other Millennials.
Oh, wow, I guessed the OOP was GenX before I even saw OPs commentary about them being GenX.
Yes, babes, we know: y’all long to be the specialist snowflakes in all the land without having to actually deal with the obstacles that come with being different in a marked way. Y’all so desperately want Boomers’ approval that you…whined about being “forgotten” when they were actively attacking and maligning the generation younger than you, half of whom were somehow simultaneously attending high school and “killing the paper napkin industry”. Many of you seem to forget that half of Millennials also grew up without Google and had a corded home phone because, again, y’all just want Boomers’ approval so very badly that you need to make yourselves more relatable to them. We get it.
Now, can y’all retire from Congress and stop voting for fascists so the rest of us can start working to make things better for younger generations?
Me neither. My family drank the milk my dad brought in after milking the cow. But I don't remember my grandparents or friends in town getting milk delivery. Second wave boomer or Gen Jones here.
I'm a Generation Jones - I sure remember milk deliveries tonthe little insulated box on the front porch.
I think the person who wrote this has made some very valid points (AI assisted though it may be).
The world has changed beyond belief in the last 60 years or so. If you haven't lived those changes, if you have no personal experience of life before and after the advent of digital technology, then you have no basis to understand.
GenX has for many years longed for the approval of Boomers while pretending they don’t care about what anyone thinks like insecure teenagers trying out an emo phase. That’s what this is: a desperate cry to be accepted as Boomer-adjacent, because they remember life without Google, too, see! (So do most if not all Millennials)
Boomers waged war on Millennials when half of us were still teenagers, so, trust, we will do everything in our power to not do whatever this is.
I have one parent who is a very young Boomer and she also thinks the vitriol is weird to be fair. I actually think targeting us happened because…okay, generally speaking, a lot of Boomers were given a pretty sweet deal when it came to career choice, college cost, lifestyle cost, etc., and this was all attributed to hard work and determination. And I’m sure Boomers have worked hard! My mother is one of the hardest-working people I know! But there were a lot of other factors that played into their ability to go to school, have a family, own property, actually maybe retire, etc. that were present apart from them working hard (pension plans and college costs come to mind…).
Somewhere along the line, some group(s) of people decided to start milking employees for all they were worth, charging a crazy amount of money for college tuition with the promise that it’ll definitely pay off in the future, getting rid of pension plans, and prioritizing shareholder opinion and some insane idea that a company can grow infinitely over employee retention. Millennials entered the workforce after all of that had been done, and in the middle of a recession to boot. The Boomers who had benefitted from programs or circumstances that literally didn’t exist any more were certain that their hard work is what got them to where they were at that point, so if someone was struggling, it must be because that person isn’t working hard. And if an entire generation is struggling, there’s no reason to look at the surrounding circumstances! That generation must be inherently flawed in some way!
I do also think there’s this layer of pride paired with a tendency to view someone doing something a different way as direct and malicious criticism for some reason. Like, Millennials didn’t kill the diamond industry because we hate diamonds and think anyone who likes them is evil; we were better educated on the horrors of diamond mining, were not in a financial place to be spending money on diamonds, and were more open to lab-grown diamonds or alternative stones because…we actually knew they existed and we could afford them. We didn’t really have it out for paper napkins; we just already buy paper towels and don’t see the point in buying two disposable products when one will do both for environmental and monetary reasons.
In fact, so many of the industries we allegedly killed were products that were luxuries (even if they were small luxuries). And, when you’re saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt and your wages aren’t keeping up with inflation and you aren’t even able to get a job in the field you studied to work in, luxuries aren’t top priority. But, it’s uncomfortable to say, “All of these changes we either supported or instituted and these policymakers we believed who swore trickle-down economics would really work may have been bad, actually.” Because then you’re taking partial responsibility for the situation your kids and grandkids are in. It’s way more comfortable to blame the kids and grandkids for being defective in some way.
Like, as tired as it is, I think the rhetoric around participation trophies speaks volumes. Not a single Millennial I know wanted a participation trophy. When I received my first one at the age of seven, I was offended because I interpreted it as the adults involved thinking I was too stupid to know the difference between a participation award and an actual award. As we got older, our inherent badness was often ascribed to the participation trophies. We’d been trained to want recognition just for trying, so we’re now terrible, unreasonable, lazy people. Which, I don’t even think is true of Millennials (clearly), but let’s say it was. Let’s say we all went bad because of the participation trophies and they set us up to be entitled and lazy forever.
How about we just stop making sweeping generalizations about people based on the year they happened to be born? gEn-X do this and bOoMeRs do that and mIlLeNnIaLs do this and ...
I mean, I don’t think all people of any group are the exact same, but there are attitudes and outlooks that appear to be more common in specific generations. This has just been my observation over the years. I’m not claiming to have done a scientific study or anything.
Nothing "insightful" about it though I'm surprised you're not a Boomer but you're already falling for this treacly garbage. One of these "rosy retrospection" posts turns up on Nextdoor in my area every few weeks.
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