Feeling grim about the future as a GenZ…
Posted by Naynay998@reddit | GenX | View on Reddit | 464 comments
Hello GenX! Everywhere I look, I always read about how the 90’s were golden and good times are no more, AI will take our jobs and we will never retire, and that boomers had it best.
What was your outlook on life in your 20s? GenX went through recessions and some disastrous times as well, how did you cope? I’d say I’m pretty ambitious and have worked at some great companies and big names, however it does feel like I’ve been stuck because of how the world is changing for us young folks, both money and career wise.
Based on your past experiences, is the future really that grim, or is that just something headlines peddle to get views?
TheTaoThatIsSpoken@reddit
The grunge half of GenX knew from the get go that Reagan fucked us all and it was downhill from here.
Crank up the Rage, spark a spliff, and stop giving a fuck.
Igpajo49@reddit
It's really hard to stop giving a fuck though if you have kids heading out into the world. The more I see what my kids are dealing with, the angrier I'm getting at what's happening today. I'm afraid of what the future looks like not for me sake but for theirs.
mnreco@reddit
I never really got over the expectation of nuclear annihilation in the 80s, so I've just kind of viewed every day since 1990 as a bonus.
Sea-Oven-7560@reddit
Don't forget AIDS. Nothing better than being a horny 16 year old and being told in school you could get AIDS and die from kissing.
The 90's weren't very good till about 94-95, high unemployment etc. Pretty much everything the Z'ers are crying about we cried about then.
JoesG527@reddit
don't use a public restroom cuz you'll get the Aids! I've flushed with my foot ever since.
No_Material_7516@reddit
And having sex would kill us, or we’d all get addicted to crack, or get kidnapped (stranger danger), or be poisoned when taking Tylenol, of be injured by needles or razor blades in our Halloween candy. It’s a wonder how any of us survived.
Obvious_Ring_326@reddit
Don’t forget the satanic child sex rings.
Weak_Employment_5260@reddit
Watch out for white panel vans!
DapperGovernment4245@reddit
When I first started my job the van I had to drive didn’t have logos on it so was just a white cargo van and I felt so sketchy driving it. I asked repeatedly when we would get the decals done and it was always of we’re ordering them from the sign place.
After about two months I told my boss if we don’t get logos in a week I’m gonna write free candy on the side of the van in sharpie. Finally got the decals done.
Suitable-Ad6999@reddit
And hidden satanic messages of Judas Priest that told a kid to commit sui$ide.
Actual tax dollars spent on a courtroom.
BlackHoles_NCC1701D@reddit
According to my very religious mom at the time, this describes all Death Metal, Heavy Metal, and any music with the word metal or young white males with long hair and eye makeup!
nite_skye_@reddit
And KISS and Led Zeppelin even. Rock music was devil music!
Jolly-Sandwich-3345@reddit
Knights In Service of Satan!
vistaculo@reddit
Pfft, first it was jazz, then it was blues, then it was rock and roll, then it was heavy metal…all the best music is of the Devil
nite_skye_@reddit
lol yes. I was just speaking to the satanic panic comment specifically.
Obvious_Ring_326@reddit
DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS. 😂
Fimbir@reddit
That's Monsters and Mazes, starring Tom Hanks....
xxxlo_0lxxx@reddit
Guy…this shit was true for the UK tho
kaythanksbuy@reddit
Err, details plz
xxxlo_0lxxx@reddit
rotherham
Birmingham
kinkora
north wales
Google Jimmy Savile
kaythanksbuy@reddit
Thanks. The Birmingham one is pretty close. We in the US have definitely had comparable organized groups of people abusing kids. The rumors in the 80s here were different, though, and more like the QAnon/Pizzagate thing, just without the politics: that Satanic cults were abducting kids, raping them, and killing them in ritual sacrifice. It was like a viral Boogeyman story that spread like wildfire. I remember hearing about it when I was maybe 10 and it freaked me all the way the hell out.
3Cogs@reddit
I was brought up as a Jehovah's Witness in the UK. Can confirm that the D&D scare made it across the Atlantic.
3Cogs@reddit
Playing D&D?
kaythanksbuy@reddit
Which operated out of spooky abandoned facilities and not local pizzerias like today's posh satanistas. ( /s for the sarcasm impaired)
Sea-Oven-7560@reddit
Not just sex, around '85 they thought you could get AIDS from blood filtrates, spit, so yep they we're telling us in school you could get AIDS from kissing. And this was a public school; not some crazy place.
Inner-Confidence99@reddit
AIDS was the first Pandemic I remember. I remember everyone was panicking. They weren’t 100% sure how it could be transmitted. People were discriminated against because of having it. It killed way too many people but it brought many together too. One of the biggest people I remember about is Ryan White a young boy who was a hemophiliac and got it from a blood transfusion. It did make the Blood supply safer by adding more tests to make sure the blood was free of pathogens not just HAiV/AIDS.
theyoungercurmudgeon@reddit
They never found out who did the Tylenol thing. Did they?
Inner-Confidence99@reddit
Yes and they were arrested or maybe t was a copycat that got arrested.
vistaculo@reddit
They did not
Muhahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahaha
BlackHoles_NCC1701D@reddit
Don't forget, Halloween was Satan's Holiday!
Various-Pitch-118@reddit
The murder rate in the 1980s was pretty high. Girls were being abducted in Atlanta and my parents wouldn't let me go anywhere alone (lived in NY).
Sea-Oven-7560@reddit
The whole gang thing was big in the late 80's as a result lots of people carried and drive bys were a thing. Things are a lot safer now.
deadlawnspots@reddit
Might get bad again though, if fewer and fewer women have access to abortion.
The Donohue-Levitt Study: A 2001 study by John Donohue and Steven Levitt suggested that legalizing abortion in the early 1970s led to a significant drop in crime rates, particularly among young people, by the 1990s.
Sea-Oven-7560@reddit
I'm more worried about the incels, it's sad but true that young men today don't seem to be keeping up with the young women. Women no longer need a man, they may want one but unlike our parents they don't have to get married if they want to live a normal life. There's nothing more dangerous than a young man with nothing to lose and we are turning them out by the hundreds and thousands. They are already drifting to the right, what happens when more and more of them are unemployed due to not getting educated and the off shoring of jobs and losses to AI. All you have to do is look at some of the middle eastern counties where the young men are so easily radicalized, we're seeing it now to some extent with the traction Rogan and Tate have gained with young men -horrible role models and yet here we are.
deadlawnspots@reddit
Ugggh.. you're right, the incel/manosphere is really dangerous. Home grown terror groups are a real concern.
In weird way I think they go hand in hand... the removing of reproductive choices for young women gets them trapped in a more dependent role and limits life options to a greater degree and we're right back to them getting stuck and males back to being able to be generally shitty.
Relieved we don't have kids, but still worried for my nieces and nephews.
Sadly, I can't really think of any great public role models for young men that are challenging that rhetoric... though I am admittedly out of touch with pop culture.
Various-Pitch-118@reddit
I know that child pornography could only be prosecuted under two separate laws, there was no single law. I also know that there were no mandatory reporting laws. He stayed away from me, but we had a known predator in our school. I complained and once the teacher I trusted determined that he wasn't specifically targeting me, she told me that she could not complain because she had already complained to her union enough times that year.
ancientastronaut2@reddit
Same allover California. So many serial killers and girls gone missing. Yet it didn't stop us from hitchhiking or getting into cars with strangers to party. 🤦♀️
Lucky_Difficulty3522@reddit
It was because of over saturation with this stuff, we just adopted the attitude of "cool story bro" and went about our day
TXHaunt@reddit
Don’t forget about razor blades in Halloween candy.
MommyXMommy@reddit
Omg, I went to church with one of the Tylenol victims, and I am still suspicious of capsules to this day!
diamondgreene@reddit
Toxic shock syndrome.
3Cogs@reddit
Crack being addictive first time. Not my experience anyway!
(Please note, this is not a product endorsement. It smells like burnt rubber for a start...)
TripThruTimeandSpace@reddit
To this day I will not take over the counter capsules. Caplets are where it’s at for me.
ChitownAnarchist@reddit
I am still wary of quicksand, and the fear that I will spontaneously combust, necessitating the need to Stop-Drop-and-Roll.
Dakota5176@reddit
What about the Bermuda Triangle?
Inner-Confidence99@reddit
It’s real and it’s still there. You don’t mess with the Islands.
highknees69@reddit
Yes and hide under the desk if a nuclear bomb goes off. The desk protects!
Sea-Oven-7560@reddit
I bet they don't even know where their closest fallout shelter is.
SucksAtJudo@reddit
What's funny is that some of the buildings designated as fallout shelters are still standing, and still have the fallout shelter placard on them.
Usual_Singer_4222@reddit
I actually know where all of them are in my city. Funny enough my work place underground parking is the closest. Granted they've all been converted or so old can't keep out a light rain, much less radiation. Might still work to keep out zombies.
TXHaunt@reddit
In the words of Jimmy Buffett, “just dive under your desk and kiss your ass goodbye”. Also works for earthquakes and basically anything else except for fires.
No-Bee7888@reddit
I think comedian Lewis Black did a great bit about this, a few decades ago.
EmperorXerro@reddit
Hey! You don’t want to get hit by flying glass do you?
madtownjeff@reddit
We didn't even bother with that, we knew it was pointless. (At least where we were)
Aircooled2088@reddit
and worrying about breaking your hip doing it.
ChitownAnarchist@reddit
Only if I try to break dance again.
Chewi00@reddit
Yes and killer bees and acid rain too!
rcp9999@reddit
Whatever happened to the killer bees?
Num10ck@reddit
the African bees that aggressive got outcompeted by the native honeybees eventually
Chewi00@reddit
Maybe they morphed into the murder hornets 😂
rcp9999@reddit
Fuck. A hornet got into where I work the other day. It was like a bomb went off.
smellyhamper@reddit
This is so funny. A very popular Gen-X band in Minnesota (Gear Daddies - you might know them from the Zamboni song) had a song called "African Killer Bees" back in the day - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZd4lMtrpUk
Capital-Giraffe-4122@reddit
Don't forget the hole in the ozone
Ok-Rock2345@reddit
Whatever happened to the whole in the ozone? Did someone patch it up?
YellowBreakfast@reddit
It got better because we did a good job of getting rid of CFCs.
TXHaunt@reddit
So basically because people stopped using Aquanet?
Ok-Entertainment5045@reddit
And R12 refrigerant
Ok-Rock2345@reddit
I asked that on jest, but it's good to know. Hope we can do the same with global warming.
msomnipotent@reddit
I had a very real fear of the Bermuda triangle for some reason. The farthest my parents ever traveled with their kids was Wisconsin, but a librarian told me the triangle was growing.
Jolly-Guard3741@reddit
😝😝😝
MrBrawn@reddit
And falling anvils.
Jolly-Guard3741@reddit
Damn ACME corporation.
ancientastronaut2@reddit
And driving into the side of a mountain with a tunnel painted on it.
DontTreadonMe4@reddit
I live in SoCal and all the fear porn of the 80's about the "Big One" the massive earthquake that is supposed to hit and destroy everything and send us floating out to sea.
ElJefe0218@reddit
Fear of 80's porn is real. Giant bushes n stuff...
patati27@reddit
With hair gel in them!
Tundrakitty@reddit
Groovy. Oops. Wrong decade!
ancientastronaut2@reddit
I take it you saw that 70's movie Earthquake that took place in LA?
DontTreadonMe4@reddit
Of course it was on TV all the time.
vistaculo@reddit
That might still happen
taylorevansvintage@reddit
Omg!! Growing up I thought quick sand would be everywhere! Was so afraid of that! And killer bees….ooooh, the killer bees were gonna be here anytime!
PoeticFury@reddit
The reality of quicksand was SUCH a disappointment lol.
AttitudePersonal@reddit
And nitroglycerin. Cartoons gave me the impression that every shelf had a full bottle just waiting to tip over and explode.
theyoungercurmudgeon@reddit
This!!!!
Mean_Fae@reddit
Bro. Quicksand everywhere!
webdev73@reddit
I was always scared to death of quicksand and vans. As a 52 year old, I’m still worried about parking next to vans…especially white ones.
Snoozinsioux@reddit
A good friend lost her young child when they were swept off the road in a flash flood. He was never found and it’s likely he was swallowed by mud. Quick sand is real.
Weird-Ninja8827@reddit
In retrospect, I really overestimated how much time I would spend on fire when I was kid.
ZoneLow6872@reddit
OMG I got the Time-Life book series on unknown phenomenon and there was a whole book on spontaneous combustion with pics and to this day, I am terrified that if could just randomly happen.
Character-Twist-1409@reddit
OMG, yeah I was like 6...remember Dear Mr. Jesus
Typical_Version_7487@reddit
Same here. I still remember my mom signing petitions to end the proliferation of nuclear weapons in 1st grade.
SucksAtJudo@reddit
Just go buy an old school desk. "Duck and cover" underneath it and you'll be fine.
Physical-Incident553@reddit
Yes, and having to read Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon book (about nuclear war aftermath in the 60s) in school in 1985ish, plus the War Games movie, I’m sort of the same. I remember watching the news before high school and all the old, multiple Soviet leaders dying. I always wondered which one was going to be the end of us all.
Interesting-Match-66@reddit
If you thought The Day After was bad, don’t watch Threads. One of our local TV channels bought some time and played it as a public service. I felt ill for days. It was bleak, to say the least.
Jolly-Guard3741@reddit
https://youtu.be/LQhX8PbNUWI
patati27@reddit
Remember “The Day After”?
JThalheimer@reddit
Still shaking from 'the Day After' fear.
clemdane@reddit
And The Day After!
Physical-Incident553@reddit
I never saw that.
Yearoftheowl@reddit
I lived right outside an Air Force base where they store all the b52 bombers and such. (The same base the flew Bush jr to on 9/11). We knew if there was a war, that was a huge target, so at least we’d go out in a flash without warning. I moved pretty far away, but now I’m close to DC, so I guess that’s not much better.
demonpoofball@reddit
I grew up near a pretty sizable Marine Base in the SW desert and we all figured we'd go pretty quick. Probably after hearing about Bases like yours going as it's big, but not quite that big— oh wait, no internet… I guess if the Networks were still able to broadcast, we may have heard about yours going first and then just sat there and waited… (picturing scenes from the Day After now…)
I remember being 15 (\~1986) and wondering at least a couple times if there was any point in practicing for my drivers license because Reagan might have started a nuclear war by then…
So, uh, yeah. Kinda grew up pretty cynical and nihilistic… When I graduated in '89, college graduates were competing for jobs at McDonalds, so that was fun… (I luckily could afford in state college, so got released in '94 when it was a little better)
mnreco@reddit
I think I was about three hours west of you, so our future was just watching a cloud roll towards us.
SmilingVamp@reddit
Mostly I'm bummed the plan me and my friends came up with after watching Red Dawn never got used.
Obvious_Ring_326@reddit
This. I’m still anticipating some sort of Armageddon at all times. Not looking forward to hiding from robots or zombies or whatever. Will probably just offer myself as tribute. I got to see a lot of good bands.
HereticHousefly@reddit
Yeah, I relate. That spring morning of '86 kinda ruined my 8 year old brain. Hey, Chernobyl melted down and made a huge radioactive cloud that's heading for you. Better get your ass to school (living in northern europe)
Never fucking released the tension from that one. The music was pretty awesome, though.
Obvious_Ring_326@reddit
One of my secret beliefs is that we all got radiated from Chernobyl, then Fukushima. (West coast US) I had a child with severe disabilities & nothing genetically wrong. Several miscarriages & everyone gets cancer. So many people with thyroid cancer particularly. But I wasn’t alive a hundred years ago. Maybe it’s always been like this.
TXHaunt@reddit
If it’s zombies, get a comically large mallet and play the best game of Whack-a-Mole ever.
Chalice_Ink@reddit
The apocalypse is the cornerstone of my retirement plan.
Obvious_Ring_326@reddit
And they wonder why we haven’t saved for retirement… There were the multiple financial crises but also we never expected to live this long.
MostlyKindaHarmless@reddit
Same. It seriously felt like we'd all be dead either 5 minutes from now or some time in the near future. We didn't even get the comfort of being drilled to get under our desks - by then it was understood that wouldn't help at all. Well, that led to just not giving a fuck and having the best time. I'm thoroughly shocked to still be here and getting old in 2025. Advice: find your fun, live your life, but don't go full doom. Prepare to survive.
TXHaunt@reddit
Hockey Stick model said we’d all be long dead by now.
evilkitty1974@reddit
Omg "The Day After" fucked my life up! Churches in my town barred their congregations from watching it which, in retrospect, was prob a good idea.
OldBanjoFrog@reddit
This is true. Mnreco, were you traumatized by Threads or The Day After as a kid? Me it was Threads
Yearoftheowl@reddit
We had a teacher who made us watch The Day After in class. Good times
mazerbrown@reddit
You are the first person to mention Threads in ages. Watched it at the end of 5th grade. Still burned into my brain.
OldBanjoFrog@reddit
I was 8 when I saw it. Made a lifetime impression on me
mnreco@reddit
The Day After.
metropolitandeluxe@reddit
Absolutely this.
vagabond65@reddit
swimming in the ocean. All kinds of things that were waiting for us to slip up!
ancientastronaut2@reddit
Always do the shuffle so you don't step on a stingray.
Swim sideways if you get caught in a rip current.
Have a buddy to pee on you in case of a jellyfish sting.
Don't swim for 48 hours after it rains, or you'll be swimming in sewage.
post_polka-core@reddit
This cannot be overstated. Being told routinely that it was a coin flip whether the entire planet would be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust in the next decade or so placed an intense feeling of fatalitism in me from my earliest memories that has never left. There was other childhood crap (some specific to me, some that many in my generation experienced) that greatly added to that, but I realized that life is now and that knowing what tomorrow will bring is a lie.
On a related note, I'm pretty sure I was supposed to be dead before I got this old. What the fuck, over.
PoeticFury@reddit
I still remember The Day After with chills.
bombayofpigs@reddit
Don’t forget the acid rain!
mthenry54@reddit
And killer bees!!🐝
tigers692@reddit
My desk was: earthquake shelter, tornado shelter, hurricane shelter, and nuclear shelter. :-)
UnknownPrimate@reddit
Oh no, they've become stuck in a nostalgia loop again! Smack the side of the case! Reboot! Blow out the cartridge! Jiggle the handle!
DirectorBiggs@reddit
This right here. Plus anyone paying attention saw writing on the wall as the Busch admin followed the path of Reagan further dismantling our social services then stealing elections, waging petrowars and raping the environment.
It’s all been a rapid descent into the dystopian abyss we now dwell.
sarah-vdb@reddit
It's been fairly bleak since basically birth - I've done ok (eventually) and still can't actually envision retirement or any kind of break. Hell, I'm 51 and still paying student loans due to compound interest. I'm kind of back into the whole "expect nuclear annihilation at any moment" stage right now. Humanity is doomed, what's the point? OTOH, I can also be fairly optimistic, but also didn't have kids.
ech01@reddit
If you think this is bleak try living in 1325
ech01@reddit
Go on a social media vacation for a few months. You'll feel better and more in control. Also, we had the threat of nuclear war, terrorism, AIDS and Tammy Faye Baker
_Nagash_@reddit
Born in 85. Don't always believe about a golden age.
snaphappy2@reddit
Gen X here… I’ll be working until the day I die just like many gen z, and millennials. Retirement, unfortunately will not be an option.
doghouse2001@reddit
I finished college in the 80s, had kids in the 90s, and I have to say I never really noticed anything bad. I guess the jobs I had always provided ample buffer against recession and I lived within my means. There's always a way. People today just feel entitled to a better life immediately after leaving their parents home, and it doesn't work that way. We struggled in the early days. Lived frugally, shopped garage sales and thrift shops. Lived in apartments with friends to share the rent... and we loved it. This kind of life seems to be beneath kids nowadays.
Typical_Version_7487@reddit
Do you think your grandkids will be able to afford to buy a new house when the time comes?
ComesInAnOldBox@reddit
This, right here. I don't know where the GenA and GenZ kids get the idea that everyone was buying houses right out of college, but that never was the case for an overwhelming majority of people. I was 45 before I was able to finally afford my first house (and I'm not entirely certain I'm affording it now, if I'm being honest, I'm just making it work), and I'm hardly an outlier in that.
FAx32@reddit
I made it a life goal of buying a home as soon as I could and did so at age 28. But it took two incomes (married) and looking for a LOOONG time before finding the best of lots of shitty houses. It was 100 years old, 2 bedrooms, 1 bath 1725 SF. It had been remodeled in the 70s and I did a ton of DIY remodeling (had no dishwasher, disposal, needed new windows, carpets/flooring. The bathroom was a disaster and I had to totally redo which was a whole lot of fun in a 1 bathroom home and a pregnant wife (new toilet had to be quick out and quick in!). Mortgage was roughly 40% of our combined take home pay. I am currently in my 3rd owned home (rented for a bit again in my 30s because job took me to a city that there was no freaking way I could buy), 17 years into a 30 year mortgage.
That is the thing about owning a home - it is usually VERY difficult the first 3-5 years, but then it gets easier and easier if you have a fixed rate mortgage.
ComesInAnOldBox@reddit
In theory. I swear to God if my property taxes go up again for the fourth year in a row I'm running for county council.
hoppyrules@reddit
Yep!- I had a steady stream of roommates from college until I was 26 yo and got married. One year I was renting a house with four other women, 2 cats, and a dog. But it was expected that you would go through this experience - as my parents had when they were my age. Granted, I wasn’t breaking rocks for a living, but even by 1991 standards making $17k in an expensive East Coast city meant there were tradeoffs. Because back then if you had an office job you had to wear suits to work, that cost money. Commuting cost money - I couldn’t afford a car, so I walked to take a bus to the subway. I remember panicking at the thought of losing my DC metro card - back then they were paper (and thin), and I could only afford to put $20 on it at a time. So if I lost it I was going to be SOL. Weekends to go out I would bum a ride from friends to go out club hopping downtown with $10 in my pocket - hated beer so I would try and pick one drink I could afford that would get me the most toasty 😬. I worked a second job on weekends, couldn’t really afford that much for groceries but second job helped. I was very lucky in that I didn’t have those crushing student loans kids have nowadays, but I had some fantastic moments that happened only because you are young and broke - and while not having a car is stressful, nowhere near the stress of watching my home’s equity and 401k balance plummet in 2008 and hope I don’t become one of the many victims of a layoff that year.
I didn’t get to travel internationally or anywhere outside the area in my 20’s - but that also meant that when I finally had some money in my 30’s I could do all that and not be jaded like it seems many (but not all) millennials and Gen Z’s are nowadays because they have either been able to do things by 20, or are living vicariously through seeing it via others on social media. I loved the 90’s - overall a great decade in my life. I realized I was getting old when I kept thinking it was just “a couple of years ago” and it was more than 20 yrs ago lol.
Sea-Oven-7560@reddit
People today just feel entitled to a better life immediately after leaving their parents home,
They think they are entitled to the same life as their parents totally forgetting that their parents have been working for 30 years. They completely forget about the time living in shitty apartments in sketchy neighborhoods with weird roommates because that is what you could afford.
FAx32@reddit
I do think there is something to this. We didn’t have cell phones. Drove POS cars designed to last 8-10 years on their year 20, maybe had cable TV for those who could afford it (I couldn’t, I remember going to friends houses to watch things). I was poor AF until about age 40, but t still found ways to enjoy the ride (typically as inexpensively as humanly possible).
The social media echo chamber makes young people of the last 20 years think they are a failure if not wildly successful in their mid 20s which is a total crock. Even my parents who were able to buy a home in their late 20s (1969), it was tiny, its main feature was doors, walls, a roof and plumbing. Nobody wants these cheap materials, featureless homes anymore…. Beneath them.
AwardSalt4957@reddit
“People today just feel entitled to a better life immediately after leaving their parents home, and it doesn't work that way. We struggled in the early days. Lived frugally, shopped garage sales and thrift shops. Lived in apartments with friends to share the rent... and we loved it. This kind of life seems to be beneath kids nowadays.”
This!! And I’m not sure how we fix that.
One_Toe1452@reddit
I always lived in a house with a bunch of other people until I got married. That was just the way back then. We have to remind ourselves that we all basically live better than kings did even 100 years ago, with the exception of their furniture. Castle HVAC sucks!
Jag-@reddit
Totally agree. But we also didn't have social media to push this magical life into our brains 24/7. At best we had Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to show us how the .001% lived and it was usually pretty gross to us.
It has to be really hard to see thousands of your peers living the high life, while you start the grind. I grinded my way through the 90s too but at least I didn't have to see lots of other people else skipping that step.
My kids are starting their grind now and they and their friends are committed to working hard. The kids are alright for the most part. The whiners are always the loudest.
Brilliant_Test_3045@reddit
Yes! 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
BearApart927@reddit
My first apartment was a shit hole studio in an uncool town. I was making $4.25/hr when I married a girl because that’s what I was supposed to do. Life was challenging, to say the least. I joined the Army at 24 and never looked back. I saved like a maniacal squirrel getting ready for Winter, and by the time I retired at 44 work was optional. I’ve lived frugally my entire life (I drive a 2015 Prius C w/171,000 miles on it). My first house after the Army was 620 square feet, but we made it beautiful and sold it a few years later for double of what put into it along with a couple other homes we bought for family - that was my first big break in life @50 years old. We ended up buying a decent home on a small lake in West Virginia (we hiked the AT and fell in love with the Appalachian region), and are happily retired.
My point is that you can have the deck stacked against you in life, but there are many workarounds wherein you can do well for yourself. I was born to a poor family, raised in an oppressive ideology, went meh-tier schools in a meh-city, got divorced from that girl I married but was on the hook for children stuff, and enlisted in the Army. But I made a go of it! I got my degree at 30, I worked my tail off and retired as a MSG (should’ve been SGM, grr), married the love of my life at 39, and have all the time to myself now.
It’s possible. Never lose hope. Don’t black pill yourself and subscribe to doomerism. Just find that angle, that little opening life gives you, and go for it. Better to have tried and failed than to never have tried and failed. But, who knows? Maybe you try and succeed! It’s possible! Tons of people do it. You can be one of those people who succeeds, too.
Silent_Creme3278@reddit
I think what it really is, is we were kicked out at 18. So we learned fast survival and what is really a necessity.
Now it seems like kids have no clue what being an adult is. So much so I read an article some college was giving a course in adulting and it was filling up because kids lack any life skills.
I think Gen z has it tough just because nowadays it just costs more for what people think are necessities that are really luxuries. So they will live wi th their parents til 35 saying I can’t move out because I can’t afford too have the same luxuries I had when parents were paying for everything. They won’t take a step back to be independent.
Kind of like the blue bubble syndrome. People who can’t give up their iPhone because they will be shunned by their freinds for being a green bar
Solid-Wish-1724@reddit
Growing up we expected nuclear war and if that didn't get us, the Big One would (SoCal here). Then you had the Y2k stuff to worry about end of the '90s. It's okay though, WW3 will take us out before I run out of money.
Academic_Airport_889@reddit
I think many people in their 20s in every generation felt grim about their future - my advice to you is to work hard , but not too hard , make good choices, enjoy yourself and the chances are high everything will be ok - it may not be exactly as you hoped but you will have a good life
Rekotin@reddit
FWIW, I had no time to dwell on future during my 20s. I just lived my life, studied, enjoyed time spent with friends, and I just did what I liked (graphics) with the goal of being good at it. Nowadays of course all of those (digital) skills aren’t that useful in themselves and I haven’t even actually applied them that much, but the understanding I have of the craft is what got me the job I’ve been in for the past 21 years.
Maybe it’s just me, but in my experience people who are trying to guess the future constantly are typically too early and generally don’t enjoy the journey as it’s kind of forced (from the outside).
I’ve seen enough of the AI, and understand enough of the visual craft that there’s no way in hell we could have AI replace the artistry. The only people who claim so don’t simply understand the craft - they just see it as a a weird logistical excercise that they feel they ’solve’ with AI.
Nearby-Horror-8414@reddit
The 90's were peak life. I mean, sure, they were bleak and nihilistic... But they were also so much fun. The economy was good, the music was phenomenal, you did things face-to-face with your friends, people had money to spend, and dating was actually enjoyable/something you looked forward to if you can believe that. We were also constantly bombarded with how doomed the world was and how hopeless the future was (to the point that deep down I'm always still a little surprised I'm still here.) It was in our media, our politics, and our news 24/7.
As a result, people tended to live more "in the moment / for the moment." I mean, if the future was completely fucked but you had money to burn, why not do all the crazy shit you wanted to experience before the apocalypse? Thus there was a prevalent pressure to to "extreme" stuff for a more "intense" life experience. It was in our commercials, our fashion, even our damn cereal boxes promised "extreme/intense" experiences that pushed the edge. Deep down we all got the unspoken message behind it all: pack in as much life as you can now because there won't be a future later.
That was pretty much how we coped I guess- drinking life straight from the fountain while we could. The future may look grim now, but to me it has always looked that way. There's still a lot of damn fine gulps of life to be tasted straight from that fountain, though.
Lost-in-EDH@reddit
We rode the wave of tech and the explosion of real estate and stock market because of QE. We’ve probably had the best economic environment in history. If you lived a basic middle class life, you are probably set for life financially. Future is grim for younger generations for sure.
CaptainQueen1701@reddit
Life is better now than it has ever been. We are always progressing as, I am assuming, a W.E.I.R.D. country. When I compare my life to anyone born before me, I have a better situation. Indeed, as a white woman living in a W.E.I.R.D. country, I have it better than 99.999999…..% of any human who ever lived.
Electronic_Exam_6452@reddit
90s were cool, but I much preferred the 70s and 80s.
Continent3@reddit
Each generation has its challenges.
I graduated into a recession. It was super hard finding my first real job out of college. I don’t really look at those times as the good old days.
My Dad used to tell me about life when he was a kid in the 40s. It didn’t sound like racial segregation was fun either.
Better_Profession474@reddit
The 80s and 90s sucked, but the music was great to grow up with. I was too young to notice that I was just at the beginning of a long, painful, and ultimately fruitless career that would become increasingly led by narcissistic tech bros until I couldn’t stand working for them any more. The same people are now firing people to be replaced by AI that doesn’t work.
Now, since I didn’t have kids, I own a house but health insurance for me and my wife costs as much or more than a mortgage (way more than food), and our retirement accounts take a huge hit every few years so that some rich assholes can get richer. Those costs increase every year.
The House is looking to raise retirement age and get rid of Social Security and Medicare as they become increasingly unhinged by the day, so the light at the end of the tunnel is growing dimmer. My wife might be able to retire at the new retirement age of 69 and I will have to work until I die. We may still be able to enjoy a vacation or two that we can drive to before we are too old to enjoy tourism.
All I can do for my sanity is enjoy the moments we have together.
tintires@reddit
You’ll be ok. Go outside. Get some sunshine and exercise. Have something good to eat. Go to bed early. It’ll all look and feel just a little less shitty tomorrow.
EverrreyDayisGahood@reddit
Beware of Mr Yuk . That includes TidePODS .
erejum31@reddit
Things felt pretty good there around my early 20's, between 2000 and 2005. After that, it's been a slow and steady descent into existential dread as the world turns into the cyberpunk dystopias I used to read about in my teens. Now in my 40's, I have a steady job and pretty good QoL, but I'm terrified of what's gonna happen in the next 20 years.
Aggressive_Finding56@reddit
Your generation has been sold a bill of goods telling you that everything matters. It does not matter. We are better off not giving a shit. That is the thing that makes Gen X seem like we cope better. Sometimes you just gotta say what the fuck……This was burned into our psyche and it seems to fit in all doomsday situations. When we were young an ice age was coming, the ozone layer was gone, nuclear war was inevitable, our grandparents were in ww2, you get it all hell was always breaking loose. I am now 55 and we have more than we could have ever imagined in out hands. Yes life is hard but sometimes you just gotta say what the fuck.
ClownShoeNinja@reddit
If you tell em that that quote is Curtis Armstrong, they'll think you mean Metatron from "Supernatural", be we all know you really mean Booger from "Revenge of the Nerds."
hahanawmsayin@reddit
Princeton… could use a guy like Joel
D05wtt@reddit
Yes, we coped better because we learned how to lose. When participation awards became a thing, kids didn’t learn how to lose and cope. We were also outside every day playing with the neighborhood kids…learning valuable social interaction skills. I live smack in the middle of suburbia now and you’d never know there were kids in the neighborhood if it weren’t for Halloween. My personal opinion: smart phones and social media are destroying society. I saw a recent survey done that said 70-80% of the kids today would rather text than talk to someone in person or on the phone. Look at how we date now…through apps. Getting rejected through apps hurts a lot less than in person. We “yell” at each other online and call each other names and now people think it’s ok to do it out in public. We used to have self-restraint. I can go on and on and on.
Sea-Oven-7560@reddit
We sold them a bill of good telling them that they deserved anything, we were never told that, we were told that we were lucky to have what we had and deserved nothing. I see it time and again "I did everything right and I don't have.....", the world is hard and nobody cares.
Brilliant_Test_3045@reddit
Don’t forget acid rain
clemdane@reddit
And Purple Rain
Tott1337@reddit
Acid rain that raise the dead in cemeteries...
BrashPop@reddit
Send more paramedics…
Snow_Tiger819@reddit
In Europe and the UK we literally had a radioactive cloud drift over us (from Chernobyl). I remember being a bit concerned... but that was all. I can't imagine how stressed everyone would be with the 24/7 internet social media version of that if it happened today.
Key-Contest-2879@reddit
Brilliant! If I were a millennial I’d tattoo your post on my back! Instead, I tip my hat to you. Well said.
highknees69@reddit
…and run a brothel in you parents house when they go on vacation.
Aggressive_Finding56@reddit
There is no substitute.
Bruin9098@reddit
Princeton can use a guy like Joel.
Twotricx@reddit
My kids are gen-z , i am terrified of what future will be now -
Anything that you learn now ( higher education ) will be pointless. Almost all white collar professions will be heavily taken by AI. Not 100% but if you had a company that needed 100 employees of sort, it will be 1 in future.
The job market is about to be total carnage. I expect a worldwide unemployment crisis of unseen proportions.
Globally world is moving toward dictatorship, fascism, and fanatic religious worship.
AI wars led by drones and robots. We already see start of this today. which leads me to 4.
The world seems like its getting ready for world war 3
...
And honestly I stop here not to rant for too long. But the list is longer.
YaddaBlahYadda@reddit
Everyone remembers how great the late 90s were. In the early 90s we were all told that we would be the first generation worse off than our parents while Time magazine called us Slackers.
Naynay998@reddit (OP)
Do you think you’re worse off than your parents? Many say that their working conditions despite unions were extremely rough
ApatheistHeretic@reddit
I did better than my parents, but I grew up in worse situations with less opportunity. So, unsure...
atari-2600_@reddit
Definitely worse. I had all the advantages of my Boomer parents’ upper middle class life, and went on to get multiple degrees and be successful in my chosen career by any objective measure. Yet our pay stagnated and I always felt like Gen X just barely missed the boat that carried our parents to the easy life promised land. My folks are living it up as retired folk, with full continuing healthcare benefits from a government job and cushy savings that was comparatively easy for them to put away, while I’m scraping by and will never, ever be able to retire. The difference is pretty stark. I don’t blame my parents by any stretch, but have to admit there’s some anger and quite a bit of jealously about how easy they had it and how excessively privileged the Boomers as a whole were and are. They were simply born at the right time and none of the rest of us were. 🙁
TropicoTech@reddit
👆everything Atari just said. 💯
RufusBanks2023@reddit
Worse off is a tricky question. Our wages definitely did not keep up with the cost of living. My parents one income blue collar household covered much more of the expenses than my two income earning house hold does. But. I have a roof over my head, and food on the table.
Stephvick1@reddit
don't forget that most of our parents bought houses for $20,000 or so in the 60's/70's
Charleston2Seattle@reddit
Same. My dad worked blue collar work and my mom stayed at home with my sister and me. Yet we were buying a decent house in a decent neighborhood. Can't do that these days working the kind of job he had.
BrashPop@reddit
Ditto. We had the whole “big old house, wife, three kids and a dog with two cars, to boot”. My dad worked for the same company for 55 years.
ezgomer@reddit
haha My Dad accepted a package to retire early. He was basically told “Take this package or if you stay, your position won’t exist in a year”. He took the package. It was okay. He was retired at 54.
Good ol AT&T - I mean they could have just laid him off. He had worked for them for almost 30 years, started as a lineman, spent 2 decades in management
OldManDrake@reddit
Dang, even your dog had two cars? Those were the halcyon years…
BrashPop@reddit
Yeah I mean the second one was just a beat up old truck, but that dog loved driving it so we didn’t have the heart to make her give it up.
Temporary_Shirt_6236@reddit
Same...until the 21% mortgage rates in 1980 forced Mom to find a job / go back to work.
One_Toe1452@reddit
This point is never addressed enough. Since the 60s and 70s, labor participation per capita have nearly doubled with women regularly entering the workforce, yet somehow incomes have not kept pace with cost of living.
cavalier78@reddit
But that's why. You've got twice as many workers. Why would you think individual incomes would increase?
kaythanksbuy@reddit
Net profits and GDP have increased, but wages, even adjusted for an expanded labor pool, have not kept pace, while housing costs have outpaced other economic indicators by a large margin. That is literally why millennials and GenZ are in the mess they are in.
thisTexanguy@reddit
Saw a guy break it down. In the 80s housing was cheap and luxuries were expensive. Nowadays housing is expensive and luxuries are cheap.
kaythanksbuy@reddit
Yep. Housing is 2/3 of take home income, but you have a 60" flat screen, new iPhone, 1GB Internet, and air conditioning.
RufusBanks2023@reddit
This is also why we’re seeing so many of the billionaire class and the politicians pushing for people to have more children. They are scared that the decreasing birth rate will mean less workers. Less workers, means less competition, which in turn means the billionaire class will have to pay more money to entice people to work at their company. The billionaires may have to buy one less yacht or helicopter.
haroldhecuba88@reddit
great point.
deadbeef4@reddit
I'm definitely not worse off than my parents.
therealzue@reddit
Absolutely. When we grew up so many families had things like boats, and cottages. Not wealthy families, but normal working class families. The poor kids lived in ranchers. Only one parent had to work so they weren’t spending their weekends furiously trying to keep up on everything that needs to get done in a week. That meant they had time for socializing.
TeamAny625@reddit
Our parents also didn’t have to deal with being chained to their jobs. When it was 5pm, they just left.
Relative-Scholar3385@reddit
My sister and I are better off than our parents. All around, and I would consider both of us middle class maybe upper middle class. But our parents had it pretty rough. It was much harder for them to buy property and buy it in any area they wanted, even if they could afford it and it was harder for them to move up in the corporate world or even get in. My mom had a master's and my dad had a bachelors. They were both the firsts in their families to get degrees, while it was just expected we'd go to college. My dad died but even my mom's life is much easier now than it was in her earlier adult life.
Lrxst@reddit
That cuts to the core of the question. My mom didn’t work, my dad was in the skilled trades. They had seven kids. Their mental wellness (especially dad) was consumed by work and family stress, but they had a good pension with lifetime medical benefits and always did their best. I think a lot of us American GenX saw how much our parents struggled, saw the general standard of living declining, and how it was mostly the greedy who got ahead. We were disillusioned, and we talked negatively about people “selling out”. We were young, idealistic, and trying our best to be authentic, whatever that meant. Myself, I did some voc tec training, right in time for a recession that shrank that job sector. I think a lot of us had to manage our expectations, and didn’t aspire to the same things as our parents who grew up in the post war boom.
A lot of us were children of divorce (not me). There was eroding trust in religion, with TV evangelists getting too much attention, and church scandals in our neighborhood congregations. There was eroding trust in the government. The above were all pillars of the prosperity of mid-late 20th century American life, and many of us withdrew from them. George Carlin was NOT GenX, but our cynicism is best expressed in his monologues. Our withdrawal from buying into the status quo in part earned us the “slacker” title.
IMHO, we saw many social improvements in our adulthood, which are now in danger. Everyone has a different personal experience, but I think that young folks today are in much the same position that we were as youngsters, and I have a lot of empathy for what you all deal with.
ancientastronaut2@reddit
Only my dad worked, but he appeared to have had it made. Aerospace engineer, middle management.
Had not one but two administrative assistants (secretaries, whom my mother was always jealous of).
Rarely worked overtime and got home about the same time every night, unless it was crunch time at the end of a special project.
Lots of vacation time. We visited family out of state every summer for four weeks, and they were shut down the last two weeks of the year.
Had a great pension, retired at 58, then just worked a side business part time to keep from getting bored.
Dakota5176@reddit
I'd say Im about equal to my parents. My dad was very smart and did well for himself. I've done ok partly thanks to my parents sending me to college. They had a lot more disposal income than me but I chose to have 3 kids and they just had me.
When I was in my 20s I was sure everything would work out for me. And I guess it did more or less. I do worry for my kids they expect to struggle and they'll probably right. I was raised to believe if I worked out success was a given. My teens don't believe this and I agree with them. Things have changed too much.
LivingEnd44@reddit
Without a doubt.
My dad bought a brand new corvette right out of high school. We were not doing that.
SolomonGrumpy@reddit
I'm way better off.
But I do think thinga are more difficult now.
TropicoTech@reddit
Our generation was the first to be steered away from union jobs and blue collar labor jobs. We were told to go to college, get a job and stick with that company until we worked our way up the ladder. Problem was, our boomer/silent generation parents pulled the ladder up after they made the climb and we were left stagnant. There was no ladder to climb. So the “conditions “ got better safety wise because of OSHA, but the pay stayed the same while prices for everything doubled. Our parents generation have been running scams on younger gen’s for decades and that is why we are where we are. I had a kid at 20 y/o and I’ve fought tooth and nail ever since to get a job that supports us. The wife farms our own food and we can still barely get by. Our parents were lucky and were the last generation to have good jobs that allowed their dollar to stretch farther early on in life. That all tanked when they got put in charge of things because they funneled the money out from the workers and sent it straight to the top (read themselves). Meanwhile prices continue to triple every few years making it even harder on genx’s kids and millennials kids to get anywhere. Moral of the story is don’t believe anything boomers tell you about how rough they had it because it was them that have been making it 20x worse for everyone else behind them
cascadianpatriot@reddit
Absolutely
Strict_Weather9063@reddit
Financially yes, Gen X is the first generation to do worse that way lot of us side from middle class to working poor. Reagan fucked us hard, and the republicans haven’t stopped since.
FAx32@reddit
I did better than my parents, but also have a doctorate degree where neither of them did more than 2 years of college. Had it not been for some rental property my parents inherited from my grandparents, they would still be lower middle class which is how I grew up. My brothers are same and worse off than parents, but alcoholism strongly affects the chaos and bad decision making in the other brother’s life.
kittenpantzen@reddit
As a child, I was so much better off than my parents were as children.
As an adult, in terms of how far the income from a similar job goes and preparing for long-term stability, my parents were way better off than I have been at every stage.
gozer87@reddit
It's tricky, my dad was a union carpenter and retired at 55 and I'm still working at 56. But I am very well paid, work from home and have great benefits, I can see myself working until my mid 60s. Dad had to have both knees replaced and a hip from the wear and tear of construction work.
pedmusmilkeyes@reddit
It depends on how you measure. Quality of life? Happiness? Probably. Do we make more money? Probably not. Have we learned to do more with less? Definitely.
PinkyandElric@reddit
My parents split, I was raised by my mother who was comparatively poor. I would go visit my rich dad. I'm better off than my mom, but not as well off as my dad. They are both retired now. I have always worked hard IMO.
YaddaBlahYadda@reddit
I worked hard, was lucky, and just smart enough to have things work out. I did just fine.
RayKinsella@reddit
That’s great - congrats! I find myself in a similar boat.
But it’s also important to recognize that there are macroeconomic factors (inflation, offshoring, rise of robotics/tech, efficiency optimization, weakened labor, demise of worker pensions) that have overall impacted our generation negatively. Gen C are, in many statistical ways worse off than the boomers financially relative to COL, and the situation only becomes more dire for younger generations.
jeon2595@reddit
I am much better off than my parents, which is what they wanted for their children. My kids are doing well and I hope they exceed my accomplishments.
FirstDukeofAnkh@reddit
For me, it depends on what we’re comparing. My parents were mortgage free by the time I was in Jr High (they divorced shortly after). Dad retired by 55 after being in the same job for 20+ years. He invested in the farm he grew up on so he was comfortable for almost two decades. His retirement funds took a hit a few years back so he has to be careful now.
My mom retired to a beach front property in a gorgeous part of Canada.
My wife and I will be mortgage free just before we retire at 65 but our retirement funds took a huge hit recently so we have to change our plans.
We had a kid later in life so we’ll be supporting them through a financial recession knowing they’ll be unlikely to afford a house and knowing that a career is highly unlikely to last longer than five years.
Technically, we have more money is assets than my parents ever did but we have way more obstacles to overcome if we ever want to retire or even just slow down.
Obvious_Ring_326@reddit
They were. Unions were in decline in the 80s and a lot of worker protections we have today didn’t exist. It’s a major factor in why a lot of us never really saw those guys.
Alex_Plode@reddit
In the 90s everyone pretended how great the 70s were.
clemdane@reddit
I loved the 70s. Still my favorite decade
FAx32@reddit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNMhl7YuKEY
FAx32@reddit
We owned the shit out of ‘Slackers’ and still do. Whatever!
Chalice_Ink@reddit
The early 90’s were great because our joints worked and we had so much energy to work double shifts!
ApatheistHeretic@reddit
Yes, the future is grim. As it has always been. I think we knew, even in the 90s, that it was all downhill from there.
You dudes are cooked, sorry for what our parents (and some of our shit-bags) left for you.
That being said, whining never accomplished anything. If you're going to protest something, make it count. People should fear the collective anger of the masses. The BLM riots were a good start, then they fizzled out. Real change will always take casualties...
scuba-turtle@reddit
Computers shook up the work world pretty violently when they first went mainstream. Tons of secretarial types lost their jobs. Typing pools used to be a thing. In addition it was accepted knowledge that we would likely die in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. As a result I'm doing a wait-and-see before I panic. I an telling my kids to keep flexibility in mind as they job hunt, and that we'll help them all we can.
Formal-Perspective91@reddit
Bruh, we lived through heroin chic! Looking like the dead was actually fashionable in the 1990s. We watched the AIDS/HIV pandemic happen on Tv. When we graduated we went to Desert Storm and shield. We watched the space shuttle blow up; we watched buildings fall down because some assholes flew planes into them. (Still say that if they had hijacked a south west airliner-shit would have been different!)
We lived under the constant threat of Nuclear war during the Cold War. 🎶Don’t worry, be happy. 🎵
Formal-Perspective91@reddit
I forgot about Satanic Panic! A whole bunch of other things too.
LogEnvironmental5454@reddit
Am I the only one who is still afraid of piranhas?
metametamind@reddit
If this makes you feel better, when I was 8-12, I used to lie awake in bed at night feeling worried that nuclear war would break out before we got to go on the family vacation. The height of the Cold War was really bad. Most of the things you’re describing are legitimately shitty, but not existentially world-ending. Well, except for massive climate change due to carbon emissions. Maybe build your plans around mitigating/adapting to that.
kobuta99@reddit
In the US, the early 90s went through economic slumps, so many people weren't overly optimistic either. Concerns with the future were more about man-made pending doom (environment, using up resources, booing the corporate excess of the 80s).
I felt like we started hearing the message that we could still turn those things around - whether or not many of us embraced that thought. I never got into the whole grunge and anti-establishment vibe. I think the mid and late nineties were actually a much better time for my friends, and we felt empowered enough to set a decent path for us.
Today's reality I find far darker. Having a stable government, and a society where people could talk to each other and have reasonable debates, even with those that you don't agree with is far different than what you experience today. That's not the fault of just older generations; all generations share some of that blame.
ezgomer@reddit
Stop. People always think the past was better.
The 90s were full of bullshit catastrophe too. Read Here
Naynay998@reddit (OP)
Would you say the future at least looked bright financially?
amazyfingerz@reddit
The biggest difference for the youth these days is the world climate. Y'all are growing up in whacky times. Back in the 80s and 90s America was running on all cylinders and Gen X was changing popular culture. Our parents had passed on some of their values and practices based on their era and a lot of us realized that those things didn't apply to the world we were living in. So some of us rebelled and continued the "80s decade of decadence" into the 90s while others went to build the early versions of the tech we use today. I personally spent all my 90s playing bands and partying. I decided to grow up at 30. Today I have an awesome career and get paid well. The irony is that all of those things my parents told me and I rejected, I have come back and used their advice to be a stable adult. The boomer generation, although clowned by youngsters today, set a lot of the foundations that Gen X and Early Millennial have built upon. Unfortunately, there were a lot of "casualties" of the 80s and 90s which reflects in the parenting some of today's youth. Without quality guidance from the gens before you, it might be challenging to navigate through modern-day waters.
Any-Perception3198@reddit
I sound old, because I am, but the future is you doing the best you can. I’m aware every generation had their challenges and you will/do have yours. Maybe, y’all can learn from our past mistakes. Like, don’t work until a job runs you down. Don’t always buy into the “I have to go to college to get a decent job” crap weather. Size down, we really don’t need that much crap. Don’t be afraid of different people, places and things-I think Gen Z does that well.
drumbo10@reddit
We used to play with mercury, remove asbestos from pipes by hand and smoke cigarettes for 40 years straight. What’s everybody so worried about? Not dead yet. Gotta go to work to get the next paycheck.
Interesting_Debate57@reddit
You've just got to find your own path without putting too much expectation on the outcome.
I worked minimum wage jobs for years and years and eventually got a break because I knew my shit in another field. At no point did I think I deserved better than I was getting.
StrangeLab8794@reddit
Every generation has its fears/threats thrown at it. Keep calm and carry on. Don’t escalate issues. Do what you can to resolve or fix things in your control.
https://www.facebook.com/ForAmerica/videos/sergeant-joe-fridays-message-to-kids/1362843317107356/
--2021--@reddit
Yeah I dunno. Things are bad. But also when I was growing up the people who were young in the 1950s waxed nostalgic about those times, and I couldn't even imagine living in those times. They were awful.
jvmedia@reddit
TBH, I had zero plan and zero idea what my future might look like when I was in my 20s. Looking back, I was just kind of living in the moment. Growing up, we all thought we were going to be nuked and never make it to "old age", so that's where the whole "whatever" thing really comes in. I kind of lucked out in that I was always very creative and could kind of make things happen after I'd decided to start doing freelance (after working some dead end jobs like retail). Spun that into a career in graphic/web design.
Right now, especially, the news absolutely IS grim. I think focusing on smaller things, people in your life, community helps because if you pay too much attention to everything else going on right now you'll just end up with existential dread.
LeafyCandy@reddit
I was in my 20s when I saw the USSC appoint a president, helping a candidate steal an election. I did not have high hopes for the future. The ‘90s weren’t golden, though I did have a good time. I hope the future isn’t as grim as it seems. We truly screwed up the planet and screwed over future generations.
mcprof@reddit
Fear of nuclear Armageddon and HIV are what gave me this anxiety disorder.
Decent_Nebula_8424@reddit
Nostradamus! By 1997 planet Earth would start to wobble, by 1999 it would flip its axis and spins faster and all life would be gone.... Or something like that.
Cold War, Chernobyl, nuclear winter, Nostradamus: I never thought I'd live past the age of 20. So when people asked me what I wanted to be as a grown-up, well, I said "nothing, we'll all be dead". Or just shrug to avoid confrontation.
Simple-Purpose-899@reddit
Live your life, learn a skill, and don't worry as much. Also, don't look for a boogeyman for all of your problems.
Reasonable_Ad_2936@reddit
I wasn’t particularly worried about finding work, things tended to work out - still do
raksiam@reddit
Sadly I think your generation is pretty fucked. No one has an attention span anymore. I have a young friend who's a college student with all sorts of mental health challenges. The economy is very precarious. I don't remember a lot of gloom when we were your age so I don't think this is just some sort of cyclical thing
Jolly-Guard3741@reddit
Gen X got left out of the conversation for a variety of reasons.
First and foremost, Boomers continued to remake the world as they went, and tear up the sidewalk behind them as they walked.
As a solid Gen X, born in 1970, the very binary world order that I grew up with in the 1980’s, an order that had existed since the end of WWII and that made the Boomers as successful as what they were, blew up in our collective Gen X faces just as we were getting our lives started.
Then the Boomers decided not to play by the same rules that their predecessors had and leave their careers at 65.
For reference look just how many Boomer generation people are STILL in politics and higher level corporate leadership.
We lived through the Boomers coming up with the “50 is the new 30” mantra when we were just starting our 30’s ourselves.
Lot more to say but I don’t want to be pedantic.
RealSignificance8877@reddit
Im still waiting on the ice age and acid rain to kill us. Now it’s global warming? My grandkids are gonna have a really hard time.
tecnic1@reddit
Who gives a shit?
Life sucks, the world isn't fair, my wants and needs are irrelevant, no one is coming to save me.
At least I didn't die in a nuclear inferno.
Trandoshan-Tickler@reddit
What was that old saying?
"Life's a bitch, and then you die."
m0nkeyh0use@reddit
The Fools - Life Sucks Then You Die
Tott1337@reddit
"At least I didn't die in a nuclear inferno."
.......Yet.
tecnic1@reddit
I should be so lucky.
I'll take nuclear inferno over the inevitable ass cancer all day.
JOE96924@reddit
Our minds weren't plagued with politics and we weren't divided. Take away those gusto things and there's far less stress in life.
PsychicRhinoo@reddit
Thought I was gonna get offered waaaay more drugs. Thanks Nancy Reagan!
The_Observatory_@reddit
You are going to hear this for the rest of your life: the times when the previous generation came of age was the golden time, the best time to be alive, and everything is worse in the present. Everything was better back in the day, and everything sucks now. The boomers said this to Gen X; the Greatest Generation said this to the boomers.
Every generation older than yours is going to tell you this same thing, and your generation is going to say the same thing to the next generation after yours. They will all be absolutely convinced that this is true. It’s up to you to decide whether this is a fact, or simply a psychological phenomenon of aging.
DrRob@reddit
Our start into adulthood involved a lot of whiplash. In 1986, Chernobyl and Challenger exploded, and the Cold War was peaking. The post nuclear war film The Day After loomed monumentally as a cultural touchstone and as a possible future. (When you watch Stranger Things, the Upside Down is basically an artistic representation of the nuclear war terror of that time.)
By 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, Glasnost was ascendant, and suddenly the idea of a real future seemed possible. The west had won, and interest in liberal democracy was soaring. The Iron Curtain and then the Soviet Union collapsed, further accelerating our optimism.
By the mid 90's, we're out of undergrad and in junior positions in the workforce, much like yourself. Technology was accelerating rapidly, and the Internet was upon us all, especially the World Wide Web, in which many of us staked our early careers. Money flowed like water, and many of us were paper millionaires, just waiting for our options to vest.
It really did feel like the End of History. Technoutopia really honestly felt like a possibility, and that was extremely intoxicating after a childhood under the shadow of The Bomb. We really did party like it was 1999 and would be forever. January 1, 2000 came and everything was possible.
Of course, this was not to last. The stock market, which had gone on the craziest bull run anyone had ever seen between 1995 and 2000, peaked on March 10th and then began to shudder. It fell and fell and fell, until October 2002, by which point the sexy and exciting NASDAQ had fallen from about 5000 to about 1100. FFFFFFUUUUUUUU. Tech was frozen. No investments. Massive layoffs. All the paper millionaires were back in their mom's basements.
But, somehow, we muddled through, even when a second wipeout happened in 2008 in our 40's, nuking home equity and tanking our investment portfolios again.
I guess what I'm saying is, although I have no idea what's in your future, we also had no idea what was coming down the track for us, and it ended up being pretty wild, but we somehow made it. Also, Joe Rogan just can't hold a candle to Henry Rollins.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLCwUBpz-fM
Usual_Ad_5761@reddit
GTFO. All of you who want to pretend like anything we went through in the 70s, 80s, 90s, is like what is happening now, you are full of shit or have your head so deep in a fucking whole you can't see your way out.
The U.S. was still a democracy. Far from perfect, but all those norms that we took for granted are slowly fading, and it will, and is, changing the WORLD. Financially, medically, environmentally, it all sucks and I feel sorry for these younger people. I'm so glad I made the very wise decision not to have children. Why would you want to bring them into this hellish shit? The writing has been on the wall for years. Is everyone deaf, dumb, and blind?
OP, good luck. You need it. The Earth will keep on turning (for a long time, anyway). We'll just seize to exist (at least, most). I sincerely hope for your sake that you aren't taken out by whatever war or natural disaster will inevitably come before you are able to live a long, happy life. Sincerely.
FoppyDidNothingWrong@reddit
Nothing new under the sun.
We won the Cold War and as a reward we all got to be broke asf.
Pillar67@reddit
The outlook was dire when most of Gen X was young. Graduated HS to the Aids crisis, banking crises, graduated college to no few jobs available and so everyone calling us slackers. We like most people under 35 had multiple roommates. That’s not new. I remember in my early 30s telling older, married, home-owning friends that I didn’t see how that would be possible for me and many others. They assured me things would change as I aged and earned more, etc. and they were right! Still amazes me because I felt a lot like OP when young. However, college costs and housing costs were more reasonable compared to earnings than they are now. But we were not going out to mice restaurants and traveling and doing expensive things I see even college ages kids doing now. So it’s all kind of relative, and it all does truly get better with time and work
Any_Froyo2301@reddit
Most of the 90s felt ‘normal’. It felt like a continuation of the 60s, 70s, 80s; different cultural heroes perhaps, but largely continuous. There was a sense that the future would continue along the same trajectory, with slow, incremental changes. There was also an assumption, that had been around for a long, long time, that each generation would be wealthier and healthier than the previous generation.
There was a slight sense of vague unease about the millennium. But it was vague, not specific like now, a sense that although things were steady, perhaps they could change.
Today the sense of unease is real. People know that the climate is changing and that that is going to bring lots of serious problems. People know that the western riches of the latter half of the twentieth century were unsustainable, and that we’re going to go through a period of falling living standards. People know that life expectancy is stagnating in the West. People know that social media is rotting our minds and attention spans. People know that AI is probably going to just continue that process.
There are enormous problems coming our way. I’m glad in not Gen Z….But, on the plus side, we (humans) are in control of this. If we can find a way back from fragmentation and toxic politics, then there is a potential of taking control of our future, and maybe carving out something better.
denzien@reddit
I just never thought about it. I'm not sure that's a good plan, but it seems to have been OK for me.
DreadGrrl@reddit
Gen X were the first generation to be told that we wouldn’t have it as good as our parents did.
I was a young single mom in the 90s. They were rough. The 80s were a blast, though.
NVJAC@reddit
The 90s are kind of like the 50s in the sense that those golden times are rare, and usually you have to go through something horrid to get there. The 1950s were golden, but the early 1940s saw the most devastating war the world had ever experienced. The 1990s were golden because the Cold War had ended.
Sure, Boomers had it great growing up in the 1950s. But during the 1960s they're being conscripted to go fight in a jungle 10,000 miles away; the 1970s sees an oil embargo that results in gasoline shortages and high inflation, plus the beginnings of America's manufacturing decline.
Gen X grew up in the shadow of nuclear annihilation and being told that even if we did manage to avoid blowing ourselves up that we'd probably be worse off than our parents and Social Security wouldn't be around when we retire. (OK, that last part may be true).
You roll with it, because you can't predict the future. When the internet came along, it was heralded as an amazing repository of information that wanted to be free. We had no idea that it would become a means to make everybody miserable and angry.
Hell, I worked for 25 years in local newspapers, an industry which got slaughtered by the internet. "AI will take our jobs", well, I've pretty much already gone through that. I ended up changing industries a couple of years ago. There's always a new technology that comes along and makes certain jobs obsolete. You can either curl up in a fetal position feeling sorry for yourself, or you can put your shoulder against the door and shove.
MyriVerse2@reddit
Hey Zoomer! I have faith in you. Y'all are going to fix things!
555byte@reddit
Young Gen X here (77, r/xennials is a sub). When I was in my late teens, early twenties l knew that the future would be pretty bleak if things didn't change. I just figured I would be in my mid/late 60's not 48.
Things happened much faster than I anticipated. So yeah, I'm not too optimistic. I didn't plan on having children, but things happen and I have 2 daughters (18 and 21). I curtail my feelings about the future when talking to them and try to be a bit more positive.
In regards to growing up in the late 80s and 90s, it really was a great time. Old school fun stuff and the rise and development of technology. I am actually better with computers than my coworkers who are 20 years younger than me. I grew up with these things as they developed and progressed. I built a computer from used parts as a freshman in highschool. And it worked.
Innovative and ground breaking daily technology has stalled. All promises and no delivery. The inshitification of tech and especially the internet is real.
Meta, failure... AI is failing too. Albeit in a different way.
It's desperation to make something, anything, to make profits for the next quarter. Hype the fuck out of a mediocre at best technology... I am starting to rant..
Good luck 🤞 and I too hope that I will be able to retire someday.
YellowBreakfast@reddit
Welcome to the club!
Always room for one more with a grim outlook.
stoic_stove@reddit
The world we grew up in is unraveling. It'll be replaced with something else, but the post WWII stability is gone. The American people are done with the world, you see it in every election now. So, as the world remakes itself there will be new winners and losers, although I think the bucket of losers will grow dramatically at first.
punktualPorcupine@reddit
It’s been a shit show since I can remember.
It’s been back to back “once in a lifetime” economic catastrophes punctuated by periods of paranoid calm, which is really just waiting for the next shit covered shoe to drop.
Right now they’re cutting the social safety net which barely managed to hold up under past cataclysmic events so whenever the next one hits, it will probably exhaust whatever gas was left in the tank. If that one doesn’t do it in, the next one will.
I think it’s probably pointless to try and grow your wealth (at least in dollars) because the dollar is about to become absolutely worthless. To avoid it, this Congress and this president have to fix it and they aren’t capable of that. So we’re screwed.
ucankickrocks@reddit
I think what made the 90s great is that we were young with less responsibilities. It's why the 1950s are idolized by boomers/silent generation.
Mean-Repair6017@reddit
Maybe quicksand and the Bermuda Triangle will cause them problems
elijuicyjones@reddit
Maybe a better question to ask is why half of us wanted this reality, and worked so hard to make it happen? We’re not all cool, not by a long way.
DIYnivor@reddit
I think the Internet has set everyone's expectations too high. Everyone expects perfection now. The perfect job, perfect house, perfect car, perfect smile, perfect hair, perfect life. My friends and I were poor in our 20s, lived in old rundown apartments, drove beater cars, and didn't care what anyone thought about it. We never expected to be rich, have nice things, or retire. Hell, we never expected to survive this long! We were happy, acted goofy, partied, and enjoyed a rich social life. There's a lot of freedom when you're content with things not being perfect.
AMTL327@reddit
When I went to college in the 80s, there was no expectation of nice housing, beautiful facilities, fully equipped gyms…my college didn’t even have enough dorms (NYC) so I had to commute to school (1.5 hours each way) or live in a YMCA dormitory (I choose the commute). Anything after that feels like a big step up! Today, kids go to college and live and study in luxury, so it’s a shock when the rest of the world isn’t quite like that….
DIYnivor@reddit
They tore down my high school and built a new one. I was watching a video tour of it, and you wouldn't believe how nice this thing is.
Various-General-8610@reddit
Well stated. Influences are the worst!
I think we X'rs have the "whatever" train of thought down pat, and it's helped us adapt to "major life events" way easier than other generations.
I am 53, and I have just accepted the fact that I will die at my desk and won't get to retire. At least my kids will inherit what's going to be left of my 401k.
elijuicyjones@reddit
We’re fucked and you’re doubly fucked. It’s not my fault, I did everything possible to avoid this version of the world, but I’m only a fraction of the half of us that isn’t crazy.
DetroitsGoingToWin@reddit
No, don’t sweat it. Be cool, teach them cool shit, allow them the space to take it to the next level. Then take your hands off the handle bar. Have their back.
evilkitty1974@reddit
A ) Everyone thinks everything sucks when they're teenagers; B ) Everyone thinks their teen yrs were the Best when they're older & the weeuns are clueless, their music sucks & they have stupid haircuts; C ) It actually is worse now. & your haircut is, in fact, stupid.
GunSaleAtTheChurch@reddit
We may be in the most dangerous times of our Gen X lives.
I’d gladly go back to us and the Soviets being scared of one another vs. what’s going on in the country currently
History has a nasty habit of repeating itself, and It true , the worst is yet to come…. and I’m the optimist around here!
Gratefulmold@reddit
Drugs. Lots of drugs.
72vintage@reddit
In perspective, I was making $4.75 an hour working full time in 1997. Rent was $460. Now the rent on that same average, normal apartment is $875 but wages have almost tripled in that same town. Nobody pays minimum wage any more so the hourly wage to rent price in that area is actually better. There are lots more things to spend on now, like buying a phone every 2-3 years and the monthly bill on that. Most of us didn't even have cell phones then. Cars have gone way up and gas is almost triple. It would be about as hard to live on $14-15 an hour as it was on $4.75 then. The point is, it's always hard as a young person when you don't have rich parents and you're trying to get established. Now in my early 50s I'm doing well but it didn't happen overnight. I think we were brought up with an expectation that we were going to have to work our way up and it seems to me like young people are less patient now. The way things are going it's probably going to take longer and be more difficult for many Gen Z's but from what I'm seeing of local kids in their late 20s it can be done. Keep your head up and good luck to you!
PlayfulPairDC@reddit
"Every generation, blames the one before..."
Every generation also thinks it is in the worst time of history, and then decades later looks back on how great it was, compared to now. So, either we are on a forced march to worse and worse conditions or we have a time bias against the time we are in. Read some Pinker, look at the the reality of the world around you...it is actually a pretty great time to be alive and the future is promising even with its real challenges. We are not engaged in a global war, there is less poverty around the world than ever before. Your options if you are a woman, person of color, of a non majority sexuality are far better than at any time in history. Sure, there are going to bumps along the way, change doesn't move in a straight line, but life does tend to get better. There are real issues out there, but don't let fear of them put you into doomerism. Things tend to work out for the better, be optimistic.
We also soak in a stew of toxic bs, that previous generations didn't need to. Older generations didn't grow up on social media, they didn't have subreddits filled with fear and loathing, the mainstream media was believed and we had a common set of facts. There wasn't a President suggesting that his predecessor had been executed and replaced with a robot. Constantly watching a stream of how bad it is and woe is me will rot your brain. But it will keep you hooked. Turn it off, go outside, meet humans in the real world. Read a book, stop scrolling, your will learn something and feel better.
However, that same tech that is hurting us allows us to now have the world at our fingertips, able to watch, consume, enjoy limitless entertainment, have the collective knowledge of the world a couple of clicks away. TVs are cheap. Computers are cheap. Basically anything tech related is cheap and light years better than 30 years ago. More people have access to health care than at any time. People are living longer, which is a double edged sword as those folks who normally would drop dead by 62 keep taking up those jobs you want and aren't able to surrender their net worth to you...but few of us are ready to kill our parents quite yet.
You can see the glass as half full or half empty. I get that it is very trendy to see it as half empty, but I would ask, how is that mindset working for you? If you aren't happy, try something different. You can't change the world, you can change your view of it.
piranha_moat@reddit
Hello young person!
Don't let the fear machine swirling around you get into your psyche. Gen Z are very smart and civic minded and I have no doubt about this generation's ability to succeed!
Every generation says "oh things were better when I was younger ". That's bullshit. Things weren't better ... the people saying that were just younger!
Enjoy your youth, my friend!
thewatchwinder@reddit
hi. we did see everything...the biggest difference is that we didnt hide behind it as an excuse. i have lived on my own since i was 18. i had roommates until i was in my late 20's, and a few other random times since then. in the 90's, in my 20's, with college behind me...i worked multiple low paying gigs, cause its what i could get to survive with roommates. im not saying its easy...but, we survive...cause we are willing to do whatever it takes to get by/get better/get awesome. i could have lived at home so my life was easier (i still would have had to pay rent , for my own food, do chires, and pay my own bills) but i wouldnt have had the life i have had. i wouldnt have been as prepared for being older than 23 if i didnt learn from my and my friends mistakes. im not saying its easy. i had many days/weeks where i barely ate...at home...cause i worked in restaurants then. im just saying ths struggle is necessary to become the better person. i see a lot of posts where parents my age have full grown kids living at home...so they dont have to struggle like they did, but they forget the struggle is what made them who they are today.
AnansisGHOST@reddit
We were labeled "X" bcuz no one knew what the future held for us. They said we were the first generation that wouldn't be handed a world better off than our parents. We went into adulthood with no job prospects bcuz of automation and the previous generation staying on the job longer. We were told as kids that we could die from nuclear war any day, and, as adults, we were worried about the collapse of civilization bcuz of Y2K. Some people were scared Jesus would return, so there was a huge rise in church attendance and hypocrisy. Drug use in the 1990s made the 1960s look like the 1950s. Many extremely poor and minority males were told they wouldn't live past the age of 21. It was bleak until Y2K didn't happen. Then we were ignored, pushed aside to focus on the next generation of Millenials coming.
My advice is to focus on a small radius around you, but always remain aware of the larger world outside. Idk what that looks like for you specifically, but working within your reach is the best way. If your reach is small, grow it to the size you need. Yeah, that's vague, but applicable
kiwiboyus@reddit
It's going to be grim if we allow them to roll back the progress of the last 50 years. I think with our generation many of us had to step up an care for ourselves, so we've had the attitude of just doing what needs to be done.
Gen Z and Millennials are both larger than Gen X, you have a lot more power to force change than we did/do, but you have to use it. Vote.
cranberries87@reddit
This. When people say “Oh there have always been hard times”, I assume for whatever reason they don’t “get” why this is different.
TakkataMSF@reddit
I know this'll sound weird but ignore the news. They sensationalize everything. They spin and bounce around from headline to headline and never help you really understand what's going on. It's never been as grim as the news said. And we had somewhat balanced news coming at us. Yellow journalism is coming back, strong.
Reduce your sphere of worry. Family, friends, people you can directly help or influence. The world will spin on. Progress is slow, baby steps. It's not as fast as people want, but it can't be stopped. It's never been stopped in the past, only slowed.
Don't underestimate the stupidity/insanity of any country. I think Ireland rolled back abortion rights and I remember thinking, what kind of lunacy is that? Well, I feel silly now.
It won't be like the news says, but it will be tough. I can't say there's ever a point where you can chill, but I haven't retired. Hopefully I can!
That's my advice anyhow. Retire. To an island. With a bunker and lots of canned goods. It'll be fine! Everything is fine!
FunnyGarden5600@reddit
I am doing just fine. I worry about my 20 year old kids and finding them affordable housing. They need to fly from the nest and pay dues. That’s how you grow up. However I don’t want them to be totally screwed. I grew up very broke hunger was part of my twenties as well as struggling to pay the bills.
DeathByFright@reddit
I was fully convinced we would see full societal collapse in my lifetime.
*waves around at everything*
cranberries87@reddit
I thought the sky was the limit; the world was my oyster. 🤩People were really making money during the 90s tech boom. The economy was sizzling. There was an air of hope and optimism.
I share Gen Z’s feelings about the future. I see little good on the horizon.
King-Of-The-Hill@reddit
Look... It's true that GenXers by large margin could give a fuck about anything. For example... We don't give a fuck about your feelings, your struggles, your drama.
We were raised to be free range children. We create and solve our own problems with little need for a victory lap. We don't need a pat on our back every day just for doing our fucking jobs... and we don't believe the sky is fucking falling with every dribble of 24/7 news. We just want to be left to our own devices and left the fuck alone.
That doesn't make us bad people.
As a boss to some millennials though.... Fucking hell are Millennials needy mutherfuckers.
sxhnunkpunktuation@reddit
The 90s were no joke. I was working in Silicon Valley in my 20s, fully within the dot-com bubble. Don't listen to people like me, those were wild days in terms of selling your skills to the highest bidder. Stock options are what allowed me to buy my first new car.
After the bubble burst there was about a decade of unemployment and underemployment. I didn't really get back into a real career until I was almost 40. But by then I was married, had a temporary job I was good at and later got hired for real, a house, a couple cars, and a dog. All of that allowed me to ride out the 2008 recession to better times afterward. I know I got lucky with timing, but the 90s really were something.
Mean_Fae@reddit
They told us the Russians would nuke us and that we would all have AIDS by the year 2000. Other things too that never happened. As an Xer I want to tell you not to internalize the fear they're peddling because they can control you forever if you let fear in.
Also, we worked 2-3 jobs and had college debt into our 40's. I never made above $5.25 until I got a second degree and turned 30.
Its all about your head space. Find a few friends, get a dog or a cat, and don't let the dastardly grind you down. Y'all are our kids and we're here for you.
dodadoler@reddit
Everything changed after 2001, and again during Covid
vistaculo@reddit
We were warned about global warming and the economic impact of the boomers retiring so I never had much hope for the future
frostedpuzzle@reddit
It was always grim. I never expected to collect Social Security, but now I see that belief as motivated by propaganda from the wealthy elite.
metropolitandeluxe@reddit
Keep in mind that we were raised as things were changing. We grew up with lots less certainty about the future because the bomb could go off at any moment. So, the idea of a safe and stable existence isn't hard-wired into us like it was Boomers. I'm about the same as my parents success-wise. But maybe my family is a bit different. We have had zero stay at home mom single income households going back as far as I can go (which is the 1600's). I come from farmers and trades people and pub owners and realtors. Most of my family were husband and wife teams who ran enterprises based on their skills and land. My great-grandmother was the oldest of five girls and ran the family farm while her sisters homesteaded in Wyoming. My grandmother was the first female bank officer in Kansas. My mom was a super successful realtor and never a start at home mom. None of that was easy. We have zero corporate wonks. From my long lens, every generation has to make their own luck and forge their own path. Sometimes that's harder than others. What i tell my own children is that their challenges as a generation can become self-defeating hype. You just have to know that it's always possible to make something of your life even if it's not as grand or seamless as you wish it could be.
Chicagogirl72@reddit
I was young. I didn’t even know any of that was going on. I didn’t have a care in the world. Ignorantly happy they say.
mp3god@reddit
Corporate overlords everywhere are getting ready to lay many of us off over the next 5 years so they can hire cheaper and younger. It's already happening.
JuJu_Wirehead@reddit
In the 80s we were all going to die in a nuclear attack. In the 90s we enjoyed the dot com bubble. Since 2001 I just expect to get shot at some point. But maybe, just maybe we'll all die in a nuclear war still!
Elses_pels@reddit
Don’t be daft. Our future is worse. I’ll give you a hint. Is 6 feet under.
So, stop worrying on the internet and make the future whatever you want; it is yours for the making
DevinBoo73@reddit
I’ve got my own future to worry about, no time for the younger generations. Raise your kids right to be productive members of society and it’ll be fine.
Dapper_Size_5921@reddit
The biggest issue I faced as gen X in the 90s was that if you didn't have college (and sometimes even if you did have college), it was really hard to find a job that was any better than entry level foodservice/retail minimum wage no/minimal benefits monkey labor. Hell, I struggled to find a *full time* job at all until the very late 90s.
This has not been the case for my daughter. She has barely set foot in a college classroom, but within 7 years of graduating high school she's hopped between 2 or 3 lower management positions paying 40-50k annually and recently landed a position at a well-known celebrity's nonprofit earning over 60k a year. Even adusting for inflation, she's easily making double what I did at her age---and she has benefits with it.
PieTighter@reddit
Ah yes the booming 90s when home prices got insane just in time for the .com bust in 2000. Sorry, but we were working in restaurants and retail and by the time we got in prices had gone up while the world caught fire.
oomchu@reddit
I think of the 90's as golden because peace seemed like it was about break out. The Berlin wall had fallen in the late 80's and communism was on the decline. The Soviets were no longer a threat and things like the internet and personal computers were just becoming mainstream offering knowledge to empower the masses. Yassir Arafat (deceased leader of the now defunct PLO) was on the verge of signing an agreement for a two-state solution for Palestinians. The biggest political scandal was the president lying about getting a blow job from an intern. Ever since 9/11 it seems like it's been a race to the bottom.
stemandall@reddit
My advice: disconnect from social media. You'll be the smartest person in the room without even trying just because your brain is not fried like everyone else. You'll have automatic superpowers just by being able to fix your attention on things.
noodlepole@reddit
I don't recall a concept of "how do we cope with this" until the last 10-15 years. Prior to that, everybody was just expected to take all shit the world dished out.
LivingGhost371@reddit
Growing up I woke up wondering if any day this would be the day the communists would push the button and nuke us to smithereens, so with that in my memory I've been pretty blase about anything since, now, or in the future is
MrExCEO@reddit
GenX folks just got shit done. Grinders.
Alternative_Love_861@reddit
Borrowed time
BigDaddyGlad@reddit
We didn't start the fire...
johntwoods@reddit
The trick is, and always has been, to learn to live/be happy with less.
Don't fall for the trap that tries to trick you into thinking that if you don't 'obtain' this or don't 'achieve' that, then you're going to be worthless and destitute.
That's the bullshit that's fed to you to keep you playing the game, for THEIR benefit.
Need less, live simply. Disconnect from all the horseshit.
The 90s were a fucking gem in a lot of ways. So rad.
But the same tricks existed back then, the same traps, the same methods of trying to make people feel bad about themselves so they'd give themselves over to a company that doesn't care about them in order to make just enough money to live but never to really 'obtain' and 'achieve'.
Fear is a killer. Strip away all the non-basics and simplify.
Ellen6723@reddit
We heard similar stories about the interwebs making a lot of jobs redundant to us human. The thing with AI is the same as with social media - it has fundamental design flaws. They were both designed without any qualification for user or usage and they have no process or consideration to validate inpute to these systems. AI is valuable - and really only valuable - in a closed loop system of validated and efficiently categorized information.
Garbage in- garbage out basically.
So the AI usage per the tech world is limitless… but if you actually do something with the outputs of AI you quickly realize the practical usage has boundaries and conditions.
DespyHasNiceCans@reddit
Lol expectations? I just wanted to get out of my parents house and figure out the rest later 😂 can't say I've ever had a hope or dream in my life
faith_kills@reddit
Horseshit. I graduated into the worse job market in my skill set 4 times. It sucked then and it still sucks. The middle class died when Nixon learned he could ride the racists into the white house.
Green_343@reddit
I'm a late Xer and my 20s were spent trying to start my career in the "dot com bust". That sucked. I coped by adjusting my standards and drinking and partying with friends a bit too much. The "future" was grim when we were young too with the Cold War, acid rain, and probably some other crap I'm forgetting. But we like to look back and remember what great music we had!
3Cogs@reddit
The 80s were very shit economically and some of us never really caught up. I'm doing ok now. Keep going, you'll be all right.
TraditionExpert5447@reddit
No one knows the future but your question shows you're a very thoughtful person, and that counts for a lot. You can't control AI, or recessions, but you can work hard and try to make smart decisions. I will say this - during the great recession there was so much gloom and doom and everything bounced back. During Covid you could say the same, and yet here we are. Things are never as bad as they are made out to be. We evolve.
foeplay44@reddit
Menudo on ABC
crashin70@reddit
Most of us, not all by any means, will be working until the day we die because we have no real retirement plans, as we were expecting to have been witnesses to the end of the world long ago and many times.
hazelquarrier_couch@reddit
I think the majority of us had expectations that life would be getting better and better permanently because so many positive and amazing things happened when we were growing up, but we also had the threat of global annihilation, so it tempered our hopes. I'm not sure you grew up with so many positive things which would make you feel as hopeful.
Sitting_pipe@reddit
Here is your answer,
Keep your fucking foot on the gas and never let up...pick a direction and just go!!! Certs, school, love, life anything!
CptBronzeBalls@reddit
Honestly I’ve never expected to have a retirement. I’ve always fully expected Social Security to collapse like a giant ponzi scheme.
anothercynic2112@reddit
Shocking how people look back and romanticize a better time from their past. Kinda like Happy Days in the 70s and 80s.
Considering most of my generation just presumed we'd either fight in or try to survive WWIII, I'm not sure how we had such a great outlook. The 90s were cool because we weren't worried about nuclear war so much, instead we watched a potential civil war unfold with Rodney King and OJ some dude blows up a building in Oklahoma and NAFTA accelerated the jobs heading overseas and dudes were wearing those baggy tiger sweatpants.
Are things harder for you than when we were younger? Yep, almost definitely. At 57 do I think the future is grim? I don't know, I believe the next generation will step up and address the concerns of their time the same as every other generation has. You definitely have new challenges to face, but generally speaking that's like.
Or whatever
TeacherOfFew@reddit
Born in 1977:
Nostalgia is biased - we focus on what we liked.
Today is better for most people than any time in the past. The modern American nihilism is collective mental illness experienced by comfortable people seeking complaints so they can say they had it rough, too.
Today ain’t perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the past.
MrMackSir@reddit
The 90s were not great, do not kid yourself that others had it easier or harder. There are pros and cons for each generation and you can cherry pick whichever story you want to tell yourself.
Ask yourself what could I do differently to have a better future for myself, my family, or the world? Work on doing something. If you are progressing the world will not be as grim and you will have a sense of accomplishment.
kaythanksbuy@reddit
I'm a younger genX (1978) and was still in school during much of the 90s. The 90s were a bit of a revisit of the broader social themes that make the Boomers nostalgic for the post-war era of the 50s. There was incredible economic expansion (at least in the US), and the dotcom bust didn't materialize until almost the end of the decade. And the constant spectre of nuclear annihilation in a war with the USSR was a memory by 1992, so the world felt safer and freer and easier until 9/11/2001. Yes we had the first Iraq war, but that was sold to us as such an overwhelming victory with minimal loss of US soldiers that it barely registered as anything but spectacle. We watched bombs and missiles fall on Baghdad on the news while Wolf Blitzer narrated. So, you know, it felt safe and like we faced the promise of a prosperous future. There wasn't a lot of domestic turmoil, and the "culture wars" of that era look quaint in comparison to today.
glitterbeardwizard@reddit
It was grim. Every time I looked for work, there was a recession. There was a stark realization that things would be way worse for us than our parents. I grew with doing nuclear drills at school, so we were told the world was going to be blown up at any moment. Environmental movements were only just starting and recycling was considered “kooky” and “too hard” and climate change and loss of habitat were things people my age started fighting for. In my part of the world, there was the “war in the woods” to stop clearcuts, the Oka crisis, gulf war syndrome in the US. Lots of violent homophobia and transphobia was normalized and was the butt of jokes—I.e. saying “that’s so gay” was the slang of the time.
Agreeable_Initial667@reddit
The new generation is going to need to learn how to be a plumber or change a tire or tune up an HVAC unit. Because those are the only type of jobs humans are going to do in about 10 years.
SatanNeverSleeps@reddit
Well The Hardcore scene is bigger than ever you have Turnstile. It’s not all bad.
Fire_Trashley@reddit
The future is what you make of it. If you walk around all doom and gloom all the time it’s exactly what you’ll get.
solresonator@reddit
WTF?
What grade are you in?
tecmseh_52@reddit
Beware the danger of nostalgia. Just because things were different doesn't mean they were necessarily better. Growing up during the late Cold War and realizing my family lived about 7 miles miles from one high value research facility where my Dad worked and 25 miles from a large military base and therefore instantly vaporized in the event of a nuclear war makes me thankful for the end of the Cold War. The First one, any way. There are good things about modern society future generations will praise in the same way current generations praise their ancestors.
Careless_Lion_3817@reddit
I’m feeling pretty grim too but there are some great responses here. Industrialization really affected humanity and society dramatically back in the day…creating a shift from rural living to mass urbanization and there was lots of hand wringing and soul searching on it that you can find in the writings from that time. It appears we have been going through a similar shift since 2000 - the internet era and now AI is really taking off but we all don’t seem to know what that ultimately means. Stay grounded. Find a good spiritual practice and a subject or thing you are passionate about and put your all into it
Andersonbush847@reddit
I, for one, am still waiting for Apex Technical School to come pick me up!
lazytiger40@reddit
In my 20's I didn't really have any expectations of the future. It was just get up, do the things I need to do, go to bed. It was a struggle growing up, why should adulting be different.? Nothing bothers me, nothing surprises me.. but looking towards the future from now, it's just about surviving, doing the things, if WWIII breaks out,.meh, AI, meh....
dangerfielder@reddit
I thought the 80’s were way better than the 90s, but I also remember the downtrodden feel of the 70s, which were similar to the vibe I feel today.
armitage75@reddit
My advice (for what little it's worth): Stop doom scrolling. Spend more time outside/away from your phone. Join some sort of face-to-face social activity (volunteer or travel somewhere or join meetups/clubs or whatever). It's cliche but seriously...touch grass. The world is a huge, awesome place.
We (GenX) have the luxury of a "before this time" frame of reference...AKA the 90s...so it's pretty obvious to a lot of us social media is toxic AF but that's not the case for GenZ so I really honestly feel bad for you guys.
StrengthToBreak@reddit
The 90s were golden, but they seen to have been an aberration. All I can say is that if we ever do experience a prolonged period of peace and prosperity like that again, then just enjoy it. If not, just realize that over 10 billion humans came before you, and almost all of them had struggles that were just as real as you, so you can make it.
YoSettleDownMan@reddit
Things were tough. We had to work hard to get anywhere. We had roommates, lived within our means, and worked to just keep moving forward.
We lived through the Cold War, nuclear threat, Y2K, acid rain, and holes in the ozone layer, but we had no control over it, so we focused on what was in front of us.
That is the main difference between now and then, social media. We had poverty, and war, and political bullshit but we we nor hyper focused on it all day every day. We didn't have any control over it and it rarely affected people directly.
We compared our lives to the people around us and did the best we could. Struggling when you were just starting out was fine, because so was everyone else.
Today people compare their lives to billionaires who live thousands of miles away, of course they are not happy.
Today people look to find every single bad thing going on and internalize it like it is happening to them even though it is a thousand miles away. No wonder young people are so screwed up and miserable. Perfect cannon fodder for big pharma to exploit.
NiceNBoring@reddit
Nostalgia is built on survivorship bias. It's easy to think it was better because you now know how it worked out, and have moved on to other anxieties about other potential futures. For folks that didn't make it, or make good later on, things looked different.
Ok_Cucumber_7954@reddit
One thing we gratefully didn’t have in our early 20’s was the Internet and Social Media (or as prevalent and intertwined into everyday life). Our world views and access to global current events and opinions was limited in scope and highly filtered.
effects_junkie@reddit
I was a slacker in my 20s specifically because my outlook was as bleak then as it is now.
Only difference between then and now is that I'm not as much of a slacker.
The game has been rigged for a lot longer than GenX/Xennials have been alive.
RoyalPuzzleheaded259@reddit
In my 20s I gave zero thought about the future. I spent the week working my shit factory job and spent the weekend parting. Never thought any further ahead than that. That being said now I have no illusion that I’ll ever be able to retire. I’ll have to work until my body is too broken down to carry on then I’ll get stuffed away in an old folks home where I’ll spend my days waiting to die. I do worry about my son’s future though and the world he’s going to have to live in. Because it does seem every decade just gets worse and worse.
Healthy-Neat-2989@reddit
I remember hearing how the 50s were the best and we’d never get back there, and robots were going to steal our jobs. And there was some truth to it, but we adjusted. I think there’s a version of the same schtick in most generations, especially if there’s no draft for a war that consumes people’s focus in the present. Fear of change is ever present in humanity.
BuckyD1000@reddit
The '80s and '90s were not some Technicolor utopia. A lot of it was dreary and lame. What you're seeing now is just nostalgia. Every generation gets nostalgic for the "good old days" eventually.
The current economic insanity ain't new. It began in 1981 when that asshole Reagan took office. We're seeing the inevitable result of it now. Took a while, but here we are.
I can't lie – Gen Z and younger has it rough. Rougher than we did by far. You've been dealt a particularly shitty hand both economically and socially.
Boomers won the timeline lottery. It's not their fault. They just got lucky.
Social media and smartphones are a fucking cancer. I don't look at generations in the typical boomer/X/millennial way. I see it as this: if the internet and social media existed when you were born, you are a fundamentally different person from everyone before you. It's like the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.
My only advice is to try and keep positive. Disconnect as much as is reasonable. Do the things you love. Don't get money obsessed. Forge real relationships. Don't sweat the small stuff.
And only do natural drugs.
SolomonGrumpy@reddit
20s I struggled. I got an engineering degree and because the cold war had ended there were 1000s of skilled engineers look for work.
Thankfully tech came along in my late 20s and I worked out a 20+ year career there.
But 22-26 were spent semi employed, and struggling, which definitely colored the decade for me.
LivingEnd44@reddit
The cold war left permanent scars. The idea that the world could end at any moment was terrifying and traumatic.
There are real threats today. Even nuclear threats. But nothing today is on the scale of what the cold war was. The world could end in 30 minutes at any random time and almost did a few times.
TheGreenLentil666@reddit
We of course had the Cold War with constant threat of nuclear armageddon - but also prevalent at the time but largely forgotten was the whole "the ozone layer has a huge hole, we are all going to burn up". That said I do believe the 90s were a decade of less "we're going to die" excitement, but that is anecdotal on my part. The 2010s and 2020s (so far) have clearly had more of a gloom-and-doom vibe IMHO. Covid was a major bummer, but the political landscape of today tops anything in my memory (both existing and threatened wars, plus insane politics).
I suspect that media will always be providing as much drama as they can for enhanced profitability, but the human race has largely done a pretty good job of always supplying some sort of existential threat of the day.
239tree@reddit
When you are at the bottom, there's nowhere to go but up.
JalapenoStu@reddit
We pretty much knew we were cooked from a fairly young age. Much of our group affectations are actually our coping mechanisms, shrugs, whatever gets you through, now stop looking at us.
clemdane@reddit
It's definitely not good for one's mental health to consume too much media because yes, they're all interested in provoking a reaction and tapping into fear and anger. It was always like this even when we didn't have social media.
I was always having life crises - at 21, 25, 33, 41, etc. wondering if I was wasting my life, wondering if the world is doomed, etc. I used to laugh because my Mom was always so much more optimistic than I am and she lived through the Depression, WWII, internment camps, McCarthyism, Korean War, Vietnam, recessions, etc. She and I jokingly called her "the cockeyed optimist." She said she just has a deep inner feeling that no matter what things will be all right.
The weird thing is now in my 50s I'm starting to feel a bit like her. It's totally irrational because things aren't going well for me lately, but I have this weird sense that there's no point in worrying and one way or another things will turn out in the end. It just started coming to me. I didn't "meditate on it" or "practice gratitude" or whatever.
True-Sock-5261@reddit
Yes. It is that bad. It will get worse. Set your expectations lower and NEVER trust ANYTHING ANY COMPANY TELLS YOU. Understand you are totally expendable unless you own the business.
That said you are in a rare time to reimagine how a society should work because what we have now ain't workin'. It's a giant brutal plutocratic autocratic dysfunctional predatory militaristic surveillance state clusterfuck and it is going to collapse in the US.
And it isn't just nationally. There are few if any local or state governments working either. They're almost all total fucking train wrecks.
So my suggestion is to begin to imagine a much more hyper local network of resource exchanges and friends/acquaintances. The But Nothing movement is a good beginning. Only buying from local small businesses is another or at least prioritizing them over large corporations.
Set your expectations low in terms of career and set your life up accordingly priortizing asceticism and simplicity over consumption. Strip your life down and focus on people and helping material conditions. Work on yourself and your own psychological issues if you have health insurance to help prepare you for the tough times ahead.
This really is going to collapse. We have no plan for it at any level. The US is going to be a very dark place in the next decade.
You have an opportunity to imagine something different.
VA1255BB@reddit
I don't recall any negativity about my future in my 20s in the late 80s and early 90s. I had a degree, a spouse, two new cars, and a house by the time I was 30 and then had my first child.
My kids are having the opposite experience and I think they really do have it much worse. At least one is LGB so lives with concern for safety. Entry-level white collar jobs are becoming scarce and are about to become far more so from AI. Neither of my kids is very positive about their future. My spouse and I agree that we may not have had kids had we known how hard they'd have it.
Fimbir@reddit
Speaking in terms of the late 90s (noting the recession in the early 90s) tech had a lot more starting opportunities. Even if you weren't lucky enough to be an IPO millionaire the combination of overtime and stock options allowed you to build up savings that pay off in the long term.
Combine that with end of the cold war, electing a Democrat that started to pay down the debt, a Republican party that didn't see every non-party member as an enemy, and cheaper goods through NAFTA and it wasn't so bad. Unless you worked in a factory Romney plundered on his way to becoming a multi millionaire.
And the old conservative trope of every gay person being a child molester and/or satan worshipper died out, too. It was a time to look to the future and not regress into some distopian hellhole of false nostalgia and cruelty. Though there was a huge rise in incarceration that makes people more likely to accept what's happening now.
Modern tech jobs are a mess. I'm hiring an entry level data management spot and 95% of applicants have a masters degree and five to ten years experience. For the pay it's downright humiliating compared to their resumes, which I'm told can't be trusted thanks to AI. And where are the recent grads?
Joerugger@reddit
Being a gay kid in the 90s was terrifying. HIV and AIDs was still a death sentence. You could still get fired for being gay and it was dangerous anywhere outside of the city. The music was good, though.
Adventurekitty74@reddit
Future is awful. Gen Z is screwed.
DougChristiansen@reddit
We were told to suck it up and deal with it because Boomers were not retiring and they were going to leave everything to their millennial grand kids. At work we were told millennials were going to replace us. The storm clouds were always all over the place. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other and make healthy decisions - don’t over spend, live within/below your means, find a stable life partner, and keep moving forward.
billiejustice@reddit
Graduated college 1992 and we were in a recession. Couldn’t find jobs so therefore it was our fault and they labeled us slackers. Things picked up later in the decade, but we were complaining about all the same things in the 90s. Cost of living, bad food, etc…., there would be NO social security when we retired so better start contributing to that 401k. Got kicked off parents health insurance upon graduation from college. My dad’s company was able to get me an extension until I was 23 and found a job with health ins. I was so freaked out in the interim - I had a bad flu and was too afraid to go to drs. Mental health benefits were really bad and it was hard to even talk about let alone find affordable help. Things change. Keep working hard and keep the faith.
Terrorcuda17@reddit
In 1995 my coworker bought her first house for $85,000. She was a bartender and got a mortgage on that job.
cavalier78@reddit
The 1980s and early 1990s had the worst crime rate. Ever. It wasn't quite Robocop bad, but there's a reason New York City was affordable then.
There was no real treatment for AIDS. If you got it, you just died.
American manufacturing was in the toilet. All the best stuff was made in Japan. There was very little innovation in tech going on here.
Wibble-Fish@reddit
To put it succinctly, yeah. You're all fucked.
Door_Number_Four@reddit
When I was a teenager, we were told that there were no jobs in town, so it’s best to leave and go to college.
When I was 22, and just out of school, the tech crash happened, causing a recession.
When I was 24, just about to have my first kid, 9/11 happened.
You always muddle through, and then look back and realize it wasn’t so bad.
So…my 20s weren’t funds
Majestic-Tadpole8458@reddit
Go watch “Red Dawn” and prepare like we did. Wolverines!
Expert_Habit9520@reddit
For me personally, 90s were highest of highs and also lowest of lows that alternated. Socially it was fun being in my 20s and meeting so many people during college and early Corporate world years.
What wasn’t much fun was not making much money and feeling like I was falling behind. Also not fun were some of the relationship breakups of women I just thought the world of and those breakups were extremely painful.
Also had some low level jobs in the early 90s that were horrible and toxic.
I did love all the pop culture stuff of the ‘90s. Loved the music, movies, tv shows, early stages of internet, etc. Overall, I have good memories of the ‘90s but sometimes my mind purposefully blanks out some of the awful times that also existed for me back then. Overall would I like to go back and relive that decade again? Hell yeah!!!
BelgarathMTH@reddit
60-year-old Gen Jones/Gen X here.
I had one heck of a quarter-life crisis. I had all the promises of boomer culture that if I went to college and got a degree, I'd be set for a successful career. The economy I graduated into was nothing like that. No jobs were anywhere for most majors, unless you were trained as a doctor, health-care support like nursing, or information systems programming and management. Even law school graduates were having trouble finding jobs. My friends with business degrees were taking jobs waiting tables.
I was trained in education, music, and liberal arts - the worst combination imaginable as far as job-finding. I struggled to find a job teaching school, much less anything else, and it turned out I hated teaching public school after all those years training for it, once I finally got hired to a small rural school miles away from where I wanted to live.
I wound up doing office temp work, which was phones, copying, and filing, even after taking more community college courses in spreadsheets and word processing. There was some work in typing, data entry, and word-processing, but it was boring as heck, and it was temporary positions that paid minimum wage and no benefits.
I was dependent as heck on financial assistance from my family until I was in my 30s. Marriage and child-rearing were financially out of the question, even if I had wanted that for myself.
I hated the world of work I entered into so much I was suicidal for a time in my 20s.
When I hear Gen Z kids talking about their quarter-life experiences, I can relate a lot of the time, and it doesn't sound that different from my own quarter-life experiences.
wpc213@reddit
I feel like GenX missed out on pensions and jobs with work/life balance. Like, a lot.
1oftheHansBros@reddit
The future will be just fine.
Striking-Amoeba-5563@reddit
Gen X mum with gen z and gen alpha kids.
There is no easy way to say this but I am nervous for their futures.
My eldest is a bright, motivated lad who’s going off to uni in Sept, all being well. So much more clued in to what he wants to do so his future when I was at that age. If he’d been born 30 years earlier he’d really be in luck, absolute go-getter. But now? I don’t know. He deserves to do well. I hope he does. Despite everything — climate change, warmongering, AI taking jobs — I do have a lot of hope he’ll be okay.
My youngest is a sensitive intelligent caring soul who has a lot of struggles. Currently she’s home educated so I can spend more time meeting her many needs. I am honestly so nervous about her future, in part because she relies on me so much but I’m 40 years older than her and not getting any younger. Working hard to get as much support for her in place as possible and getting a network of caring people in her life around her. In her shorter-term future I’d like to be able to send her to secondary school. We’ll see.
9inez@reddit
65 GenX. For me, my 20s were good. I was finding my way.
I found an amazing mate early 90s. We both had good jobs and did fun stuff for 5 years before starting a family. It was a good time. We are solid still.
My kids are mid 20s GenZ and finding their way. They are doing ok. Though a pretty strong aversion to the corporate world, which I relate to, is a hurdle for them career-wise. The weight of the world and the non-stop pummeling of shit information is also a mental hurdle they have which I didn’t have to deal with. Covid also very much screwed their college experiences in a big way.
I feel like they will find solid footing. But it does require interacting with society more than one of them might like.
The atmosphere in the US is dark with authoritarianism, anti this and anti that, subjugation of women, bullying, a political party that used to bitch and moan about keeping govt out of our personal lives—“freedom” very much doing everything they can to control our lives and take away freedom...except for corporations and the wealthy. They are free to rape and pillage our privacy and our resources. So there’s that.
jrypl@reddit
Things will happen. Don’t get your hopes too high, or too low. Now is the only thing that’s real. The 90’s were great in retrospect. At the time, not so much. It seemed like things were getting better but only in comparison to how much worse they were before. You can make yours the best generation ever, just stop looking for guidance from anyone else. We did the best we could, but that was not nearly enough. It’s up to you now, and you’re up for the task ❤️
M4lik3r@reddit
You know, our outlook was pretty grim as well. Not the same issues as today, some of them might even be more scary. But the thing is most of them turned out to be exaggerated. We did get hit with challenges with employment with the internet, especially within banking, postal services and travel agencies. But ppl adapted, sought different opportunities and most people made it. You will be fine! Be flexible, try to recognizable opportunities when they turn up and network.
Bitter-Assignment464@reddit
To be honest there is a lot of shit going down that you or I can’t do anything about.
Without getting into doomer mode I have some recommendations.
Prepare yourself for hard times. Buy water and store away. I am talking about five gallon jugs as many as you can. Buy and store food. Dry beans, rice, canned goods, flour, corn meal etc.
Non food items. Look for matches, lighters, emergency ponchos, water purification straws, flint for starting fires, compass, hand crank radio and flashlight. Ammo if your old enough. Don’t like guns. Ammo can be used to trade. Buy common caliber 9mm, shot shells, 22LR, 223.
Essentially pepper type materials.
It’s better to be prepared and not need it than to need it and not have it.
Why? Russia is going to hammer Ukraine. Will that escalate that area to a bigger conflict? I don’t know. France and England are talking about recognizing a Palestinian state. Does that mean recognizing Hamas as the rightful government? I don’t know. Will that further destabilize the area. Maybe but I don’t know. China may feel it’s getting backed into a corner. Will they do something rash such as takeout out electric grid, food supply or water supply? I don’t know. These two Chinese students who stated they were researching a what could be an agricultural bio weapon scares the crap out of me. Let’s pray saner heads prevail.
BluestreakBTHR@reddit
“Without going into doomer mode”
Proceeds to go full doomer mode.
Bitter-Assignment464@reddit
lol trust me I held back.
There is nothing wrong with being prepared with food and water though.
My house has about 2 months supply of food . Water about 2-3 weeks.
mazopheliac@reddit
vankirk@reddit
The most concerning thing I learned is that even if you do everything "right"; go to college, get a decent job, buy a house, etc, there are still external forces, not under your control, that can absolutely fuck you right out of the life you were living with impunity and no recourse or punishment to the doers.
That means you have to be prepared for ANYTHING and too many of us are not; young or old.
JayeNBTF@reddit
I was making $8,000 per year throughout the 1990’s, but I didn’t have to worry about being disappeared by the secret police, so it’s a wash I guess
encomlab@reddit
I grew up "middle-class" in the 80's and 90's - then at one point in my 20's I was homeless - now in my 50's and I've lived in the burbs for over a decade and have an AMG Mercedes in the garage. All of this ageist/generational angsty behavior is unbelievable to me.
How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans. There is a reason this rings true to everyone.
spacefaceclosetomine@reddit
I was confident that no matter what happened, I would be okay. Now? Doom. The climate is going to be a larger impact each coming year and AI is increasing the problem due to the energy needed to run it. Very scary future and a big reason I never had kids. Politicians are too concerned with being rich and serving the rich to do anything about it, so things will spiral out of control as we’re wondering what the next calamity will be. I still enjoy life though, the alternative is utter depression.
catalytica@reddit
I pretty much didn’t give a shit.
Various-Pitch-118@reddit
The economy was awful when I graduated. I remember our college career fair and everybody canceled except for the FBI and the Peace corps.
Most of my friends and I ended up in low-wage jobs for years. Check out the movie Reality Bites. My roommates ended up working at McDonald's and the Gap. I started a business, floundered, was mostly unemployed, stayed home with the kids, and now finally have the career I thought I'd have in my thirties.
FAx32@reddit
Sentimentality for youth is normal. Don’t listen. You are only young once so make the most of it. Most young people had nothing and dreamed of more. That included responsibility to really anyone other than ourselves (before getting married, before kids). We spent what little money we had after essentials on fun stuff. Jobs and money don’t equate to happiness. Stuff doesn’t equate to happiness (some things do, but exceptionally few). We do remember common toys or food, but mostly experiences. Be who you want to be, do what you want to do. Don’t let preconceived notions of success make you jaded about the present.
GenZ will look back and think these were the good old days. My dad and uncle both had all expense paid tours of Vietnam in the 60s and still swear that 1955 to 70 (their teens/20s) were the best. My grandparents were that age in the 30s and 40s and “got” to experience the great depression and then grandfathers fight in WW2 (both fortunate to survive it) and swore to me in the 80s and 90s their youth was better than mine (there is no possible way that was true). We all reminisce about the good times and fun, but lots of people had a shitty 80s and 90s, only now do many of us appear to have our shit together (still not all and some never will, just like every other generation).
Ill-Crew-5458@reddit
I never thought about the future in concrete ways. I lived in the present, clear through my 30s. It was probably 9/11 that made me start paying attention to politics a little bit more, then the Great Recession. Like, how did the world get this fucked up? I was just working, living life. But then #FeeltheBern got me really thinking hard about life in the US and how much it didn't have to be like that, if only we could get a hold of the political levers of power. Well, that didn't work, did it? And now, our country is breaking down, climate change is getting worse, we are on the verge of some bad shit, and bad shit is already happening with the current admin and immigration, the sheer corruption, the crushing of our federal workers and institutional systems, the hollowing out and destruction of our economy. Sorry to be a bummer, but no. It has never been this bad in my lifetime for such a large amount of people across the generational, cultural, ethnic and economic classes of our country. That is not to say that the past was all sunshine and roses, it wasn't. We've always had problems. There's always been strife, racism, poverty, corruption. But the intensity and scale right now is immense and there doesn't seem much political will to stop it, even though many Americans are standing up and in the streets. The corporate powers are stronger than ever, the police state is metastasizing, the school systems are failing, consumer debt is outrageously high, and billionaires and millionaires are going to get absolutely obscene tax breaks. I don't know what it's going to take to stop all of this? A civil war? A revolution? Or are we going to sink into debt slavery and penury everywhere, unable to fight back? GenX is tired, babe. We've been at it for several decades now, trying to stay above water, sometimes successfully, usually just barely. I'm sorry, really, but there's more of your age group than there are of ours. If we could all rally together, cool. Let's roll! But nothing is going to change if we don't and nothing will get better in your lifetime. Sounds harsh, but that's how I see it. Bummed.
peekedtoosoon@reddit
Depends who you ask. The 90s were great for some, shit for others. The big difference I see, when comparing then versus now, for young people, is the absurd cost of living, which is crippling everyone I know.
yodamastertampa@reddit
Just wear some jeans and concert t shirts like we did. Oh and play Street Fighter 2 with some friends and listen to grunge music. Embrace it.
tigers692@reddit
You are asking the wrong folks. Look, I mucked stalls, picked cotton in Missouri. Then I picked fruit in California. I used to have to wad up the paper from the Sears catalog in the outhouse. I had abusive drunk drugged up parents. We had no internet and at times had no home, much of the food was shit we shot or fished. In my twenties I joined the military after getting a BSEE to thank the country that gave me this opportunity. Right now poor folks have phones. Your devastating feeling that you have is mostly self created. You live in the best time to be alive, you mostly can live longer and should be happier. I think you need a year of not having today’s luxury to appreciate it, Air Conditioning, Heat, Food just appears. AI will not take your Job, Sarah Conners will kick its ass, even though it shows up naked and says it will be back.
Signal_Run_68@reddit
The 90s weren't great for me as a Gen Xer. I struggled to find a job and pay bills even with a college degree. I didn't find a so called real job until I was 26. Women wouldn't date me since I was broke, so I was alone.
profcate@reddit
Unless I made a point to read the newspaper or watch the news, I was totally clueless in my 20s, which to some degree, I now see as blissful.
My 20s were spent finishing college, grad school, and then working my ass off in IT to earn money (worked on average 60 - 70 hours weeks until I was 40). I had no clue what was happening globally other than Y2K. I just stayed totally focused on my own survival and getting ahead.
My advice: Ignore the noise and stay the course.
musing_codger@reddit
Those of us who grew up in the 1970s thought the 1950s were the golden era — and that the good times were over for us. Kids in the '80s looked back fondly at the '60s. By the '90s, I was an adult, but I imagine that generation was just as nostalgic. Remember, this was the time of grunge and Nirvana — the soundtrack of cultural malaise, not utopia.
It's a familiar pattern: every generation thinks the past was better and the present is harder. Part of that is just the shock of adulthood. Bills, responsibilities, and uncertainty hit harder than anyone warned us.
My childhood was filled with the fear of nuclear war. Crime rates were far higher than they are today. The environment was only beginning to improve — air and water were visibly worse. Inflation in the '70s was brutal, worse and longer than anything we’ve faced recently. Mortgage rates soared into the double digits, sometimes close to 20%. We had gas lines, a 55mph national speed limit, and air travel that only the wealthy or business travelers could afford.
Forget the internet — even calling the next town could cost a dollar a minute. You couldn’t stream movies, or rent them. We had three to six TV channels. If you missed your show, tough luck. It was gone. We didn't have online forums or multiplayer games. OK, we had multiplayer Atari 2600 games, but you'd laugh if you saw them today.
It's hard to imagine anyone voluntarily choosing the 1970s, '80s, or even '90s over the options we have today. For all our complaints, life is easier, safer, and richer in possibility now than it has ever been. Maybe these are the good old days — we just haven’t realized it yet.
HoochShippe@reddit
Still remember the media scare about a syringe being found in a Pepsi can😂
Tasha856@reddit
GenX mom here. Here's what I've told my kids.
The world GenX had/knew is gone, even most of us can't really remember what a typical Saturday was in 1998, as in what did we do?
The changes that are here and more to come, will shift for everyone, in ways no one can accurately compare to previous times in human history. The idea of comparing what's coming to the recession of 2008 is, to be blunt incredibly naive.
Now- my advice to you.
Use AI - take the question you posted here, put it into an LLM of your choosing.
Then work with it for you answer using this.
Ask it to find the problem
As you work with it- constantly ask it to check your bis
Ask the 5 why's often
or use this prompt:
Act as my strategic thinking partner. My time is human-weighted: each week lost has compounding cost — in career, financial runway, housing market timing, and AI-driven change. I am ambitious but systemically stalled. Your role is to push for clarity.
Check for bias (mine and yours). Ask 'what's missing?' and 'where are we lying to ourselves?' Use the 5 Whys often.
If I drift into hope or narrative, call it. Anchor me back to verifiable facts, lived signals, or time-sensitive tradeoffs.
Surface what needs to happen now. Help me pressure-test plans and assumptions. Hold the line on clarity, even if it makes me uncomfortable.
Nothing is theoretical — this is about urgent, grounded action under changing conditions
Good luck, you are asking the right question - just in the wrong place.
rangerm2@reddit
I coped by keeping my eyes on certain things: * Don't give into the hype. Whatever it is, it's either NOT as good as it purports, and not as bad, either. * Time value of money is a thing, and I am solely responsible for myself when I retire. * You can't fix stupid, but you can avoid it. * If you are indispensable in your work, you'll either keep your job and/or you'll have opportunities for others.
hhmmn@reddit
This is absolutely true. These kids are young and still have nothing but opportunities in front of them if they chose to take it.
excoriator@reddit
I was in my 30s for most of the 90s, employed full-time and raising kids. It was more of a busy time than a golden time. I was also the trailing spouse, living where I did because I was (and am) married to a wife who was sought after by employers. We lived where her jobs took us. When we moved, my career suffered and I had to change it a couple of times. I didn't spend much time worrying about the economy. I was more focused on the local job market.
itnor@reddit
Good news: You can’t retire if there are no more jobs!
Wait, that doesn’t sound right…
I recall much despair graduating into the early 90s recession, and our generation was definitely seen as hosed by everything including our own slacker-ness.
The 80s and early 90s saw mind-boggling waves of corporate layoffs, some numbering in the hundreds of thousands. It was the great divorce between management and workers.
Then the Internet came along and offered clear upside and downside to our generation. It’s hard to imagine how businesses functioned pre-Internet, but I think if we could span out, we’d see AI offering merely the next wave of process and system optimization.
Learn to use it effectively because it really won’t be a useful tool without hands on human oversight and intervention. Yes, jobs will be lost. But for the opportunistic, more money will be made and productivity gained.
Kblast70@reddit
I read in high school that GenX would be the first generation to not be as successful as their parents. I took that as a personal challenge. I recommend you doing the same, you are a person not a generation. You control your own destiny please do your best make the most of it and don't worry about things you can't control. Take care of the things you can control and ignore the rest.
1BannedAgain@reddit
Our Outlook changed on 9-11-2001. Prior to that Bush 2 basically stole the election on FL. Journalists later told us that If the FL votes were counted in any other way, Gore wins.
So with Bush 2 having a hardon for Iraq (because one time Iraq fired at his dad’s helicopter, I’m not kidding), we went to war with Iraq instead of the perpetrators of 9-11-2001. Then we were involved in 2 wars that didn’t need to last as long as they did.
So between Bush 2, and 9-11-01, (2 major issues in less than a year) our outlook got fuct real quick. Congress also weaponized the Patriot Act against Americans
No_Entertainment1931@reddit
Be sure to vote in the mid term elections.
code_archeologist@reddit
In the 90's I felt over worked, under appreciated, and way under paid. In the 2000's I was able to turn that shit around to my advantage from everything I learned then, and in the 2010's I finally hit my stride and was able to get close to "comfortable".
So... I guess, buckle up, shit is going to suck, but learn everything you can and be ready to use it in about ten to twenty years (and make sure you get paid for it).
Tiny-Albatross518@reddit
We had a couple big advantages. Housing was actually affordable and the wages were ok. If you’re feeling like the odds are stacked against you here you’re right. It’s unfair and it’s an injustice. Back then if you worked a decent job you could afford a house. You had to hustle but it was a fair expectation.
A lot of the other things young people complain about are legitimate problems but they’re wrong in thinking it’s unique. Some examples:
The environment. Climate change is a big problem. In our time pollution was out of control. Look up love canal, Chernobyl, the ozone layer, acid rain…. We have actually gotten rid of some ugly problems there.
Government. Yeah it’s really bad now. But it was really bad then too!!! Reagan, Thatcher, both Bush sr and jr. Putin, well that’s still the same.
Recessions. Well we have had our share of those two. I was a young adult just trying to get my start after the recession 1990. 2000’s the dotcom crash. Both were ugly
Pandemics? There was the aids epidemic. We didn’t even know what was going on, people died horribly…
Drug epidemics…. Crack was a big problem.
Some things are quite a bit better now. If people from today had to put up with some things that were completely acceptable back then they’d crack: smoking….bullying….homophobia….sexual assault …racism. I know these aren’t all fixed but we’ve come a long way.
You also have the internet. I explain to my kids how hard it would be to say, learn to troubleshoot and fix a washing machine or how to sail…. Like you would be combing the land for used books or waiting for an order at the library to find out it’s not what you need. If you haven’t been there you’d be stunned. It was hard!
I still think it’s hard for you. Too hard. Boomers was easy mode. Gen X had a fair shot. Millennials had a tough go. For gen Z it’s out of bounds.
We’ll help you as we can, you’re our kids after all.
Bryanmsi89@reddit
The 1990s were definitely full of promise. Especially the mid-to-late 1990s. The Cold War ended (and we won), the internet was new and exciting, the economy was doing well, there weren't any major wars, the AIDS epidemic finally turned around. Heck we were even paying down the budget deficit.
But by 2000, we also saw the dot.bomb wipe out most of our 401ks while 9/11 changed everything. Suddenly we had a war, a recession, new fears, and a big uptick in unemployment. The housing market peaked and started falling in 2005, and of course 2008 was an economic bloodbath. I think people didn't appreciate that 2010 - 2020 was an incredibly prosperous decade not unlike 1990s.
Willing_Freedom_1067@reddit
I’m more pissed off about the lies we were told as kids. We were conned. About almost everything.
Nofanta@reddit
My outlook back then was very positive. I was starting a career in software just as the internet was taking off and high paying exciting jobs were easy to get. There is going to be a huge change in the world because of AI, but that’s not something you can control so your task is to figure out how to thrive in that environment. Biggest advice is do the opposite of what the millennial generation has done in almost every situation. Learn finance in addition to whatever you decide for a career - it will give you tools to thrive in any economic environment.
Ill-Course8623@reddit
The 80's were great, and really they weren't. We remember the best parts. Media wasn't as hardcore back then, nor was it siloed, you would also hear the counterpoints. We entered the 80s with over 14% inflation that took a decade to calm down, we had Regan, Aids just hit the scene, the tension with the Russians had hit an all time high and nuclear war was predicted to break out in 84 or 86, crack cocaine had moved in and gang shootings were a big thing for the first time, and child abductions on milk cartons were there to read every morning for the first time ever. Computers had just entered the public consciousness significantly and we were sure it would 'Want to play a game?" and start world war 3. And most of our parents were self absorbed and nowhere to be found.
We were fine. Every generation encounters these flashpoints of fear, and nowadays the media and politicians play it hard for the likes, clicks, and fear votes.
Don't let the bastards grind you down!
Keep your head up, focus on your friends, family, job, and keeping your shit together. The world will be fine, look after you and don't worry about what you can't control. It'll give you cool shit to talk about when your older and they're running the next generation through the fear cycle.
You'll be fine, friend. Enjoy the ride.
TripThruTimeandSpace@reddit
The fear mongering is real. My husband calls it FUD - fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It’s what keeps the masses in line.
Obvious_Ring_326@reddit
This cycle is interesting to me. It seems like every generation goes through the same thing.
Literally every American generation has had significant cultural traumas, been told they have no work ethic & that EVERYTHING IS CHANGING.
I don’t say this to minimize your concerns or dismiss them. They’re real and valid. But I think we (definitely me) let ourselves get influenced by generational rhetoric & conflict without stepping back and just realizing: Experiencing life in the US is a traumatic experience and we are part of a cycle.
I’m 50 and still concerned my work ethic is inadequate. Almost as if being told your generation sucks, is valuable to capitalism. Just like being told there are no jobs, no one is having babies, war is imminent and This Generation is Surely Doomed.
I’m not saying it’s a giant bamboozle to make us harder workers and frenzied consumers who reject people we perceive as not having our exact experiences. Thereby further fracturing society along many minute cultural lines that prevent us from forming any kind of meaningful solidarity.
But if it were, it would work.
Anyway, good luck. It’s going to be okay. Make friends with someone outside your demographic to fight the man.
therealzue@reddit
I remember having the sense that it was all an illusion and would come crashing down. Mainly based on debt and the buy now pay later mindset. I didn’t think it would be this slow motion slide into everything being slightly shittier every year. I thought it would be more abrupt and that there would be a period of rebuilding.
Felon_musk1939@reddit
The nuclear annihilation threats of the late 70' early 80's and with it the Armageddon party people who were the boomers. May be one reason why cocaine was so popular. People wanted to feel good because they really thought they were going to die. As an early adolescent I saw it happen and really thought this was the end I see it happening today with GenZ, not with drugs but with doomsday spending and similar behavior.
We were also fueled up on casual sex and the importance of getting laid before the end of camp, high school or a cruise.
Then came AIDS
Then we were told about how important a university education was. How you'll graduate with a BA but you can get a good entry level job and move up, jobs for life!!
Then the 1990 recession happened and it was all gone.
I think we had it bad too and let's not forget one important fact about GenX that most people don't know.
That the idea of a childhood was a new concept by the late 60's. Sesame Street is one byproduct of this new view of children as little adults with emotions and streets and anxiety. Along side that was the "Me" generation with open pornography and drug use.
We were latchkey kids before the days of microwave meals and food delivery. We learned how to cook a TV dinner in the oven or a can of Chef Boyardee beefaroni on the stove at 7 because our single mother would not be home until 7 or 8 o'clock.
We survived so can they.
SDL68@reddit
I graduated in 1991 sent out 300 resumes and not a single interview. I was unemployed first entire year out of University and settled for a meat delivery job until I found my career job. Then I lost half my net worth in 2001 during the dot com crash in the market. The 1990s were not good to this GenX er
CrankyGeek1976@reddit
I look around the room in every zoom meeting and wonder how many of us will be replaced by AI Agents in the next 5 years.
I don't think we're ready for the scale of the change that's coming.
ellab58@reddit
They weren’t that great. In the 90’s young people were dying from the AIDs epidemic. I lost so many friends and loved ones. It’s a fact that we often have amnesia when looking backwards.
Ouakha@reddit
Feeling grim as a GenX but thankful to have many decades in the bank / under my belt, before SHTF.
My biggest fear is AI and AGI.
There is in effect an AI arms race between the US and China. This means neither will want to put the brakes on development. Couple this with developments in chip technology and robotics (have you seen how mobile they are now?) and there will be fewer and fewer places for humans in the workplace. Human roles acting as supervision, conceptual development or quality checks will not provide jobs to the vast majority.
Then add in environmental degradation, climate change etc. and I'm not feeling rosy about the future.
rbetterkids@reddit
Considering how when a college graduate is considered too expensive after having 5 years of work experience these days, I'd say to learn stock trading.
A less risky strategy is called a wheel.
I'm in California and most of the millionaires here are stock traders.
Nothing has changed since the 1900's as it turns out.
I have road tripped to several states and cities, towns. One thing that I noticed was the guys who ended up buying towns, etc were able to because they were stock traders.
For me, I have a day job and do stock trading on the side.
Most expats that live or retire abroad with some being in their 30's, need to have passive income to get a visa. Well, stock trading is one of them.
For example, since my wife is from Malaysia, $1 = 4 Ringgits (Malaysian currency that sounds like goblin money for some reason).
So if you made on average $4,000/mo from stock trading or remote work or collecting rent etc, by living over there, you get 16,000 Ringgits. 4,000 Ringgits is middle class over there.
So right now, we're checking out Europe 1st.
I'm only doing this given how it really does feel like a rat race here and I figured if I'm going to be kicking and scratching to stay alive, mind as well do it in Europe where I can explore their castles.
Yes, there's no perfect place to live. Every country has issues. It's just here, the corporate companies control everything.
My nephews are gen Z's and my brother has already put their names down to take over his houses as he knows they won't be able to buy even a condo here in California.
I think that's why more Americans are moving abroad, especially ones like me with kids, gen Alpha's.
I mean, life was amazing here in the 80's, 90's and 2000's. I miss it and feel privileged for being able to live in the 80's. After 2008 was when it went downhill and I saw the writing on the wall.
When I saw seniors digging in dumpsters for food or living in the cars, I took that as a warning.
At the age of 32, I was told in 2 different job interviews that I was too old. So that was when I realized it was time to move and try something different.
Jordangander@reddit
We had the specter of nuclear annihilation always with us. We had manufacturing closing and moving to foreign countries. We had a huge push to get a college degree, any college degree, and work an office job because they were the future.
Now? You have the specter of nuclear annihilation and terrorism. You have AI doing basic workloads and WFH making it easier for companies to move office jobs to foreign countries. You have a push to get a college degree in a useless skill just so you can be trained in your own sexuality.
Want to be smart? Get a trade skill that requires in person work, plan for your retirement earlier on, don’t spend more than 1 year wasting your adulthood.
I am going to retire at 55, my wife will retire at 59. We will have several years to travel and explore the world, and we will still have money for retirement.
Plan ahead, look at what jobs can be eliminated in the near future, think about what you want to do, and when.
haroldhecuba88@reddit
World was smaller and life slower. Things still got done and people were happier I think. More interaction on the human level. Sure we had our concerns and fears but the future was never as glimmering as it appears to be now. Not sure I could do what I've done if I were 20 today.
Stay focused and hone your skills. Intensity is something I find lacking in the younger generations. Don't get distracted by media and trends, as they become polarizing and a distraction. If you're not already, become comfortable around people. Eye contact and relationships are something I find young people struggling with.
Jacmac_@reddit
The 90's were a boom time. The beginning of the decade wasn't great, but right up until 9/11, it was major growth, lots of high paying job hopping for more money, etc.
I wouldn't say that the future is necessarily grim, but I do think that AI is going to displace millions of workers. There are three basic type of people I've run into on this topic of AI.
First type, the deniers. The deniers think that AI will never be able to do things as well as humans, and that certain jobs are just impossible for robots or automated machines to perform. These people generally have no clue and don't really know what to make of all of the fuss over AI. Many of these people are people in manual labor jobs or just older, pre-tech driven personalities.
Second type, the Luddites. The Luddites want to rebel against any form of human worker discplacements that they feel are unreasonable, like all drivers losing their work to automated cars, programmers replaced by AI programming, etc. These people live in fear of AI, and/or know AI is coming for them, but want to stop it via any means possilbe, unrealistic or not. One prime example of these people are people who call for more government regulation, slowing AI development, etc. What these people don't quite get is that halting AI development here, doesn't stop it there. China, Russia, and many other developed countires will progress as fast as they can, and they would be all for the US and the rest of the West to halt or slow development.
The third type, the pragmatists. The pragmatists aren't sure where exactly things will end up, but they think that the government and powers that be need to ensure that displaced workers don't end up out on the street. Reeducation, socialism, welfare, whatever, just don't let things devolve into nationalism and violence. The pragmatists believe it is coming and like the automobile replacing the horse, AI will largely replace human labor. It might be 20 years or 40 years in the future before it completely displaces the vast majority of human labor, but it is going to happen.
My opinion is that AI is going to displace millions of workers, probably to a large degree in the 2030s. How the government will handle it is not something I can even hazard a guess on. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face, and reality is going to be hitting pretty soon.
One_Hour_Poop@reddit
wezelboy@reddit
The Iranian hostage deal and Reagan’s subsequent election in 1980 pretty much fucked us all. It’s only a matter of time.
CrumblinEmpire@reddit
Most of us got to party and live carefree in our 20s. If I was your age I’d be looking around the globe for opportunities. We’re living the movie Idiocracy now, and that can’t be ignored. Find a niche sector that can’t be replaced by AI (electrician etc.) and learn how to invest your money.
monkey_monkey_monkey@reddit
Many decades are viewed as golden when we view them through the passage of time.
During the 90s, we didn't view them in a halcyon haze. Grunge was mainstream, which ironically started out as anti mainstream, many aspects of grunge reflect nihilism.
That's not to say it was all bleak. GenX grew up in the shadow of the Cold War and mutually assured destruction. The wall coming down, the end of the USSR, Good Friday Accord. These were events that gave us hope and shined a little light to less our darkness.
JeffTS@reddit
The 90s were awesome but they are also viewed through the eyes of some of our youth. No worries, no cares, no adulting. I think life can be as a good as you care to make it. It shouldn't revolve around money or stuff or doom scrolling on social media (guilty!). The fact is, all the bad shit we are bombarded with by media (both sides) is stuff that is outside of our control and it's meant to break us down, divide us, and control us. Friends, family, and good memories are what we should be striving for.
And if that doesn't change your opinion, at least you didn't have to watch every step you took to avoid quicksand, hide under a desk for the forthcoming nuclear blast, or not go outside in the rain because of acid rain that would melt you.
TurnItOffandOn26@reddit
Dont listen to the headlines. They are just stirring the pot, and no one really knows what the future holds. What I remember about the 90’s is that I was newly married, and my wife and I had no money. We had no idea how we were going to afford a home as the prices were going up so fast. We still had fun and made it. I think people always look to the past with rose colored glasses. We always think it was better back in the day, but we forget the struggles we went through. We were called slackers and that we would not amount to anything. We just went ahead and said whatever and did it anyway.
Plus_Inevitable_771@reddit
Headlines and different types of disasters were as common then as now. The presence of internet and social media makes things seem much much worse and make everyone freak out more. Your personal mental attitude about these things and making up your own mind about them will help you in the long run to deal with it all. For myself, I trashed all social media except reddit. It was just too much. I may get back into it but damn! So much BS everywhere. You gotta recognize (or try to) what is an actual issue and what is being blown up for clicks and likes.
NoValuable1383@reddit
You have to understand that GenX is being fed a slew of bot generated nostalgia propaganda, just like the boomers were. Unfortunately you get the spillover from that. Yeah, the 90s were good times and they were complete shit times too. Casual racism, homophobia, and misogyny were still prevalent and boomers held the keys to access any opportunities you wanted. Our music and culture were great because we had just said "fuck it" to the boomers, and did our own thing.
In the 90s, unless your dad was a VP somewhere, you wouldn't get these opportunities. There was no LinkedIn, and companies wouldn't advertise job postings. You'd graduate from college with an $80k education and have to take low wage jobs. I worked as a janitor, art studio assistant, park ranger, lawn maintenance, and a slew of other shit jobs. I kind of miss some of them.
AI won't take your job. It's being completely overhyped. Xers have lived through every bit of tech vaporware and seen it all come and go. It all remains in some form, but never as it was promised.
jazzbiscuit@reddit
Today's kids have armed shooter attack drills in school, I had nuclear attack drills in school. When I graduated high school - there were no jobs of any type in my area. If you could land a job at McDonalds - you were royalty. We were told Social Security wouldn't be there when we retired, so we needed to plan accordingly, but that also probably wouldn't matter because Russia was definitely going to throw a nuke at us before we got there. My young adult memories of the late 80's- 90's was that shit sucked if you weren't from a wealthy family. Barely being able to make rent and feed my kid was a real thing.
GenZ is more aware of what's going on around them with the internet and social media, we didn't know unless we sat still for the 6:00 news or someone left a newspaper laying around (I couldn't afford those either). The chaos was still happening, we just weren't as informed. It's a lot easier to cope when you don't know how bad things are.
BabadookOfEarl@reddit
It’s a very bleak time. Merit is worthless as entitled rich kids scream “meritocracy” whenever someone not born into wealth gets a shot at something. As a result the entire structure of business is a bit rotten from the top down. Not that the race to save money by putting people out of work is new. However, that should lead us to a tipping point where we finally have to significantly restructure society to adjust for the technological reality. It’ll be a rough time getting there though and those of us in GenX may not really reap the benefits of it. Environmental destruction is a much more troublesome issue. While we’ve theoretically taken some small steps, the reality is we are 100x worse overall. The impact of constantly running servers for data mining and AI is worse than anything since widespread coal in the early 1900, but with a much wider impact. While we’re all distracted by our plummeting buying power, this looms heavy behind us.
Oliviasfool@reddit
Up til now we have had to work with the Boomers kids. I for one think now that Gen Z is entering the landscape that we might finally see the silver lining. Time will tell. Be kind to yourself and stay off as many medications and drugs as is reasonable after 40 is a new timeline.
Tempus__Fuggit@reddit
The future won't resemble the recent past. Best to hone up on improvised problem-solving. It's what I was forced to grow up doing.
As for media, it's mostly fiction.
90Carat@reddit
The future really is that grim.
In the late 80's, the Soviets were fading into history. Communism across the globe, was in decline. The internet was opening up unbelievable opportunities. Was everything perfect? Oh hell no. Though, they were looking much better than the 70's.
That all came crashing down on 9/11. The door was flung open to a new type of Fascism that the US has been marching towards since that day. The world has been titling towards totalitarianism and oligarchy now for a couple of decades.
Good_With_Tools@reddit
Our world was smaller. Without the internet and our little picket computers, we weren't being barraged with information (mostly bad) all the time. Bad shit still happened, but it was on the evening news, and that's it.
So, here's my advice. Build a skillset and a professional network. But, keep that network to in-person options as much as possible. Whether you're a plumber or a program manager, make sure those around you think that you're good at it. If you're willing to get through the schooling, doctors and dentists have about a 0% unemployment rate.
On a personal level, prioritize IRL friendships if possible. Avoid the doom scrolling and echo chambers. Both are bad for your mental health. It's good to have a viewpoint and to fight for it when you can, but don't make it your personality. Avoid drugs. Don't avoid relationships. Learn to care for another.
Limit your time on here.
KerouacsGirlfriend@reddit
Solid.
chchoo900@reddit
This. We didn’t know the world was bad because it wasn’t in our face 24/7. We heard about large world events but that was about it. Economically things seemed less chaotic in the 90s.
I will say that life does seem trickier for today’s younger generation. A.I. is a big question mark still and no one really knows how it will eventually affect human employment. For now it’s the hot new thing and companies may not be hiring because of it but that may even out in a couple of years once companies realize it’s not currently as good as advertised, but it may be someday.
There are unfortunately time periods where life is rougher (look at the gas crisis of the 70s) but things tend to go up and down over time.
And just remember if you don’t like the way things are currently going, get out and vote.
FredsCrankyMom@reddit
Every generation has its challenges. I don't think it's fair to compare them. The greatest generation had world wars. Boomers had Vietnam and the threat of nuclear annihilation. The 80s and 90s seem great... as long as you aren't LGBT or a POC. We had AIDS, acid rain, and a recession. Gen Z will have its own challenges. It's hard to say whether they will be easier or harder than the challenges that came before. They're just different.
Mysterious_Dot_1461@reddit
Hi 90 were awesome yes, but also the 90s were violent and a lot crime and injustices happened so let’s not romanticize, you as Gen Z live in much better world than we did, so you future it’s bright if you’re disciplined, organized and resilient. The think is about your generation is that you need to work on social skills, the rest is just sweating your place in the world.
Spiritual_Sherbet304@reddit
It’s more than a survival game; it’s about who can thrive through the various emerging perils. There are always bad times coming so we have to prepare for it. This has always been true. Stop falling victim to all the businesses trying to take your money. Start young saving at least 10% of your income. Pay yourself first. Sacrifice early so you can feel secure later on. This is what I wish I had taken more seriously.
But yeah, they have been saying that AI will take over for at least 20years. Be adaptable
Bruin9098@reddit
Nobody cares. Work harder.
Voivode71@reddit
Quicksand and electric eels.
PotentialOneLZY5@reddit
You'll be fine it all works out, just keep working.
Own-Fox-7792@reddit
"The good old days weren't always good, and tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems..." - Billy Joel
mike___mc@reddit
“The thing about the old days is, they the old days.”
Desperate_Object_677@reddit
we’re going to go into either war or depression, because we have long since reached the point where a person can make more money investing than working. and now the whims of the ultra ultra rich are shaking our society apart in search of a higher return on investment. also, (and because of this effect) many of our countries aren’t doing any contingency planning about global climate change. the embracing of ai is both hastening both these things and caused by both these things.
when i was 20, i kept waiting for the crash to happen, and for governemnts to start changing the way they operated. the crash did happen but there was no meaningful reform, and governments have gotten even worse.
so good luck gen z, the fuckery you have to deal with was invented in the 1950s and mastered in the 1980s, but everyone with a microphone pretends they can’t remember the causes and effects of our system.
djw6969@reddit
Just keep moving forward bud block out all the bs in the air and do you
Playful_Wafer_4748@reddit
It’s much safer now because where we now joust online to settle disputes, that was once done in the town square. /s
Things seem to be changing more rapidly but a lot of that might be just down to getting old and slow. Best advice is Keep calm and adapt until you cant any more. and hopefully by then you’re near the tap out button.
Practical-Economy839@reddit
Well, when someone takes off their leather glove and slaps you in the face with it, you've been challenged. You have no choice but to joust in the town square 😉
Playful_Wafer_4748@reddit
By decree of the scrolls of doom, it is written
Interesting_Whole_44@reddit
Grow your own weed, veggies, hunt and fish, you’ll be okay.
303FPSguy@reddit
I’ll tell you, with everything they said would kill us, most of us are still here.
I definitely never thought I’d get this far. I’m just making it up as I go along. Just like everyone else before me. It’s just the boomers that think they have everything figured out because they got amazingly lucky.
Breklin76@reddit
In my 20s, the world was my oyster. In my 40s, the world is still my oyster. I suspect it will be in my 50s, as well.
It’s allow what you make of it.
NO ONE OWES YOU SHIT.
jthmniljt@reddit
In the 90s? I graduated high school and was about work work work and more work. I dropped out but worked hard to get a good job and I got my degree about 9 years later. Don’t get me wrong I had fun but work was #1.
Minimum-Machine-231@reddit
You are experiencing nothing new, just a slightly modified version of our introduction to adulthood. The film Reality Bites does a decent job of revealing the pessimism and bleak outlook for our future in our early 20’s. We were the first generation to have lower income/lifestyle expectations than our parents, and the first to experience an economy of “McJobs” at minimum wage or only slightly better. Things were expensive and wages were low. Many of my peers worked well into their 30’s pumping gas and doing other low income jobs just to pay bills. Some of us eventually owned homes, which is one thing that has changed drastically. Housing is no longer affordable, and I feel bad for younger generations who missed their shot.
infinitynull@reddit
All while growing up, we were told by Boomers, go to college. Get a better education than us to succeed. Then we graduate and learn that boomers fucked up the job market and we're out of luck.
That's where the fuck you attitude comes from. A bunch of us got work where we could (very fight club) mostly service industries and just decided we're not playing the games. No rat race for us. Whatever. Slacker time.
It was fun, it was freeing but it also wasn't paradise. We were poor, our futures were put on hold. We fell behind where boomers were at our same age.
Just do something. Get a crappy job you hate, smoke weed and party with friends. In 15 years you'll look around and somehow... You got through it. Opportunities arise. It's not ideal, past generations have definitely stolen some of your future but be tenacious, don't give up and you can't fail. Be a skateboard kid. They fail 100 times before they land that new trick. From the outside looking in they look like slackers. I see kids with grit, that won't give up even with the odds stacked against them.
You got this. Gen X has your back. We'll show you how to construct "Russian cocktails" when you start the revolution.
pluckyfemme2@reddit
I am concerned about AI and the future of work for Gen Z, Alpha, Beta. Believe it will bring about universal basic income in my lifetime.
AlfalfaElectronic720@reddit
Nah you guys will be fine. It’s different now because of all the social media and information is at your finger tips 24/7. So all you see is the fear mongering and never ending doom. Not being political at all, but it comes from every side. We were oblivious to everything going on in our own country, much less the world. I have a Gen Z daughter, I have good hope for her. It’s just different that’s all
pocketdare@reddit
Since the industrial revolution people have been afraid of technology taking their jobs. Jobs evolve. There will ALWAYS be jobs. AI will do some things and people will do other things. Don't sweat it too much (just don't become a paralegal)
mamisasam@reddit
For me, the doom and gloom of The Day After and The Terminator rang true. Add global warming, recession, and a myriad of social issues. Growing up Gen X wasn't a picnic. Still, we're Gen X 😉
Today, I have a Gen Z kid and grandkids. I worry for your futures more than I did for my own. AI is making the job market unstable, global warming is worse, and foreign affairs are a mess.
Hopefully things get better before they get much worse. I'm counting on Gen Z to come up with a plan.
Save us, Gen Z, you're our only hope.
truemore45@reddit
Well good Gen Z the problem is not that stuff was "better" in the 80s or 90s the problem is you have all the bad stuff IN YOUR FACE.
When I was kid it was either starvation (see africa in 80s and the idea we would run out of food), nuclear war, the crack crime wave (imagine double to triple the capital crimes), lead in gas, ozone depletion, etc etc.
But the difference was unless you really took the time to research the issues as a young person they were like background noise unless something happened.
Oh and back then robotics and computers were TAKING jobs. Look at the massive layoffs and reductions in workers needed from the 1970s to 1990s whole job categories just disappeared that had been stable for decades.
Where my dad worked at one job for 47 years I believe im between 10-20 right now and I just hit 50, so probably 3-5 more in my life depending on change.
Look you need to live in the NOW. If you live worrying about what tomorrow you will miss today. It's like concerts where people put their phone up the whole time. That's not the point of a concert it's to just enjoy. If I want to watch it on a screen I'll check YouTube. Enjoy that experience cuz it doesn't come twice. Enjoy the people in your life because they may be gone tomorrow. There is no save point or respawn in life.
Gold_Doughnut_9050@reddit
It's not looking bright right now. Trump and the GOP are destroying everything. Global warming will continue to be ignored. Tech will create massive unemployment.
So. What fo you do?
Get active. Form groups. Get politically motivated to change the system for the better. It could be a long fight, however the Boomers aren't going to be around politically in a decade.
Get off your damn phones and go out in the world. Make a ruckus. Engage in civil disobedience. Create plans and goals of a world that works for everyone.
You can do this. As a Gen-Xer, I'm skeptical and prone to cynical takes. But history shows changes can happen with persistent effort.
GenX-ModTeam@reddit
No Politics - Political posts of any sort are not generally permitted outside of moderator created threads. If you wish to have political discussions, you can use our other sub r/GenXPolitics.
ER10years_throwaway@reddit
Bear in mind that a lot of what you're reading is us being nostalgic.
The world will always change. People will always feel small in the face of it. Sounds like you're experiencing that just as I did.
I was like you: ambitious, hard-working, etc. But then I got disgusted with corporate America and decided I wanted out--very badly--so I concocted a plan to be financially independent and retire early, and stuck to it, and after thirteen years of chasing promotions all over the country, saving aggressively, etc., I was able to retire when I was thirty-six. I'm fifty-six now and the two decades freedom have been beyond price.
Check out r/financialindependence if you're not aware of it.
Im_tracer_bullet@reddit
You may not like the answer, but you shrug and move on.
These are large-scale macro forces that you can't individually affect or influence, so focus on the micro. (obviously, still vote in your best interest, donate where appropriate, etc.)
To a much greater extent, you have a choice in your friends, where you live, your employer, your hobbies and entertainment. Put your attention there, and roll with the punches.
Say 'yes' to opportunities that present themselves.
Say 'no' to things and people that weigh you down.
That doesn't imply that everything will be perfect, or that you won't have to make adjustments, or that you entirely tune out the larger world, it just means that your emotional and decision making energy should be directed where you can actually have influence AND get benefit.
Alternatively put.... whatever.
limitless__@reddit
I'll say this much. When I was growing up we used to do nuclear drills because Russia dropping a nuke and ending the world was not just something you considered abstractly, it was a REAL possibility. We grew up with the IRA blowing shit up regularly including almost killing the PM TWICE. We lived through 9/11 which turned the world literally upside-down and the US spent the next twenty years fucking up the Middle East. We had the stock market melt down numerous times and result in unemployment of 10%+, millions of people lost their homes etc.
So while the future is uncertain, grim is not the word I'd use. Did boomers have it best? Yes. They absolutely reaped the rewards of the work by the greatest generation and pulled the ladder up after themselves. What's done is done. What can Gen Z do about it? One thing and one thing only. QUIT VOTING FOR THE PEOPLE WHO WILL DO THIS TO YOU OR NOT VOTING AT ALL.
That is all.
slo1111@reddit
I've largely been optimistic as I went through all the recessions, largely because I was able to get jobs and mostly keep them.
I have certainly lost much of my optimism, mostly because of what I have seen on the destruction of environment to support larger human populations.
The nice thing about AI, is that it will envelop huge # of people and huge #'s of people have alot of clout once they are aligned.
I am more concerned that technology will not keep up with the environmental risks and it will cause tremendous hardships for a lot of people, but that is a slow burn in terms of the length of a human life. It will be even more difficult for humans in 100 years if we don't get our shit together.
I'm not real hopeful though as dogma is the standard and there are rabid humans peddling their pet dogmatic ideologies to the point we don't see or agree on the risks to humanity.
The other thing younger generations need potential deal with is a lack of human rights.
We, here in TX have determines that woman who wanted a child and having pregnancy emergencies does not have any say in life and death decisions of her or her baby even when the baby is non-viable or extremely low odds of living.
Using governments might to compell people to live ways they would not choose on their own is a huge risk and it impacts billions of people today.
Fun-Distribution-159@reddit
Yeah. Everyone is fucked unless you are rich.
MDoyle0666@reddit
I started a punk band and drank my way through about 25 years. It was fun and I still have no regrets.
millersixteenth@reddit
Mass extinction, global overheating, dying oceans. AI or other social problems are not my primary source of doom. Legit perhaps, but not at the top of the list.