The Doomed Generation

[steve_bank]

It appears I hit a nerve with Politesse.

Yes there was hatred towards communists. After all it was an expressed goal of Russian and Chinese communism to overthrow by force if needed replacing with communism.

It is not like the threat was imaginary, any more than the invasion of Ukraine and taking of Crimea is imaginary.

The point is each generation has to deal with what it is handed. They can either whine and complain, or step up to the challenges.

OWS was a group of young whiners. They camped out in high tech tents with mobile wifi, streaming video, and video games.

Gen D, the decadent generation.

 

[Politesse]

Hit a nerve? I just thought your post deserved a photo glam up, my friend. Brings out the spirit of the times, you know?

 

[Politesse]

Honestly I think half the trouble with Millennials is how well we coped. We'd be making casual conversation about whether we could afford bread that week, but we always looked good, and if we did get our hands on some bread, by the gods we'd serve it up with a quarter of an avocado smashed with zatar crumbles. Gorg! Our parents and grandparents seemingly saw our truculent love of swish and mistook it for quality of life. You'd get NYT articles that were like "Millennials are killing the diamond industry, refuse to buy houses!" and there'd be some photo of a cute goth chick sitting in a coffeeshop living her best life like that wasn't her only meal for the day.

I went almost two years without work during the recession, aside from the odd tutoring job I could pick up and some shitty contracts off Fiver. At one point I interviewed for a warehousing job that opened up... along with 350 other applicants. But we were all lined up outside like it was a Roosevelt fashion show.

 

[Politesse]

Of course, we're getting old now, too! And our kids are growing up in a pandemic. I see the same spirit of creativity and perserverance to survive the times in them that we had to develop to survive ours, and I respect my students greatly. Just like us, they're going to have to reinvent the American economy from the ground up to make a go of it, and if their elders don't throw everything away in a fascist bonfire, I fully believe them capable of the task. The smear job the media does on them is undeserved.

 

[Swammerdami]

A variety of (seemingly conflicting) views have been expressed in the thread and all have merit. The hyperbolic OP over-simplified the complexity of changes. So I want to make two points to wrap up some of the confusion.

(1) Changes "at the margins" attract attention. Suppose a population is split 50-50 between tea and coffee drinkers, and that this then changes to 60-40. 90% of the population has not changed its preference and yet the change may make headlines and cause bankruptcies in the coffee business! Similarly there were young people who felt desperate 60 years ago, and young people doing fine today. There will always be exceptions to trends.

(2) American GINI is rising. This is key to the gloom felt by many young Americans. The gap between good earners and poor earners has risen and continues to rise. GINI rose from 0.35 in 1970 to 0.45 in 2010 and continues to rise. It is via comparisons that people tend to judge their success.

(Bomb#20 will be along to state that GLOBAL Gini has fallen slightly since 2001. But people in west Springfield compare themselves with people in east Springfield, or with their parents. They do NOT compare with Malaysians. People in the Middle Ages lacked flush toilets, hot showers and penicillin, not to mention iPhones and high-speed rail, but people today compare with their parents or grandparents, not with their distant ancestors.)

Wikipedia's  Gini coefficient compares income and wealth inequality INTERNAL to countries. I reproduce the page's first graph below, but the third graph might be especially interesting: In 1975 the top 1% of French people earned 8% of the income, and the top 1% of Americans earned even less than this. By 2012, the 1% of French were still earning just 8% while 1% of Americans earned more than 18%.

In Europe, only Bulgaria is painted with the deep red high-Gini color that the U.S.A. has. In the 1980's Thailand's GINI was higher than the U.S.'s but that country has made huge progress.


]

 

[rousseau]

Of course, we're getting old now, too! And our kids are growing up in a pandemic. I see the same spirit of creativity and perserverance to survive the times in them that we had to develop to survive ours, and I respect my students greatly. Just like us, they're going to have to reinvent the American economy from the ground up to make a go of it, and if their elders don't throw everything away in a fascist bonfire, I fully believe them capable of the task. The smear job the media does on them is undeserved.

Yea, I really don't get these comments that younger generations lack resilience, I have to wonder if those with this idea actually know any young people, even one. I can buy that there is more talk of anxiety and depression these days, but that's only because it's normalized to talk about these things now. Back in the day you just suffered alone and in silence.

The young people I do know (which is a lot of them) are extremely resilient, and I have to think that resilience isn't something that changes between generations, but rather it's a natural reaction to the times. Younger people these days have to be resilient, they have no choice.

It really feels like there's a disconnect here between those in their senior years and the ground reality of young people today. This isn't just a bunch of people that need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, it's people with 7 years of post-secondary education making 25 dollars/hour, and whose rent is over 50% of their monthly income. What they need is money, not resilience.

 

[rousseau]

People need to understand it is good to have ambition but be realistic at the same time. There are only so many jobs that will pay very large wages. Even if everyone could be qualified for the better wage jobs there would not be enough of them to go around for everyone to have one.

I'm right under 50 and manage a retail store. It's just me-no wife or kids. Having a family was never a serious consideration for me and I make enough earning to survive fine on my own. I have a 401 k in addition to social security and and able to save a little more months than not. And I keep up with health and dental

You do the best you can with what you have.

This is true, but for our generation it's multi-factorial. There are now fewer jobs that pay large wages than there used to be, those same jobs are harder and more expensive to obtain. In those jobs there is also much less support for retirement than there once was. And if that wasn't enough our cost of living has gone up, and there is a literal housing crisis worldwide.

It's not just a generation of people who need to look at things differently.

 

[bigfield]

...people in west Springfield compare themselves with people in east Springfield, or with their parents.

Absolutely. Millennials compare themselves to their parents.

Millennials work harder than Boomers, and for less.

 

[southernhybrid]

Seems to me that the older adults are now the so called doomed generation, including a lot of baby boomers

https://www.aarp.org/home-family/your-home/info-2022/americas-homeless-over-50.html

Elder homelessness “is increasing dramatically right now,” says Jeff Olivet, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. “Seniors over the age of 55 are likely the fastest-growing group of people experiencing homelessness … and for many of them, it is first-time homelessness.”

Getty Images

Homelessness Among Older Adults​

Find out more about the crisis of the unhoused and how to help:

Meet 4 Older Adults Who Survived Homelessness: People who went from the streets or shelters to a permanent address.
Housing Resources & Help for the Homeless: Federal, state and local resources for those who are unhoused and those who want to help.
The reasons are complex. As the population ages, more people are at risk of poverty, more will survive the death of a partner and more will subsist on limited incomes while housing costs skyrocket in many communities. Pandemic housing protections and assistance have mostly expired.


In addition, many people with stagnant incomes are of retirement age or working part-time, hourly jobs or positions with little potential for raises, Olivet says.


The growing number of people without a place to live, across all ages, is so significant that on Dec. 19 President Biden released a federal strategic plan to reduce homelessness by 25 percent by 2025. The plan, created by the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, will address a lack of affordable housing, help people in crisis and prevent people from losing their homes in the first place. And it pays particular attention to those who are most seriously affected — people of color, veterans, those who are disabled and older adults.


“There’s been a creeping trend over the last several years where we’re seeing many more older adults” who are homeless, says Richard Cho, senior adviser for housing and services at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). From 2009 to 2017, the number of homeless people ages 51 to 61 grew from 14 percent of the homeless population nationally to close to 18 percent, Cho says. The percentage of people 62 or older that are homeless nearly doubled.

Be honest. Each generation is made up of individuals who have different backgrounds and different opportunities. Some are more likely to become victims of addiction or are never able to find a job that pays enough to support themselves, or they have committed a crime and afterwards, nobody wants to hire them, or they have a mental illness and cannot access adequate treatment.

There is no doomed generation or no generation that did better than their parents, at least not in all or most cases. A lot of us older boomers never made that much money, not even with college degrees but some of us benefitted from inheritances from our parents who learned to live very frugal lives after growing up in the Great Depression, invested well and then passed on some money to their children.

Each generation has challenges, regardless of when they were born. Imo, the biggest challenge we all face is climate change, and even if I die before I'm a victim of it, I worry about my son and grandchildren, so it impacts me in that way. After the recent hurricane that flooded Asheville, NC, and with the current recored breaking heat in the Western US, we all should unite around that issue instead of making stupid generalizations about any generation.

I don't blame my parents for driving cars that got 7 mpg, or for taking us to fast food restaurants or long Sunday drives etc. What did they know? What did our generation know when we were younger, that some of the things we may have been doing might have a negative impact on the world. Fuck. I still see younger adults taking trips by air, wasting food, buying things they don't need, but some of them blame all of the world's problems on boomers or Gen X or whoever. Is it our parent's fault that until recently boomers were the largest generation? Enough with this irrational mentality.

Stop blaming the past for your problems. Humans are the most harmful, dangerous animals on the planet and I'm not sure that can be fixed after all the damage we big brained great apes have done to our habitat, and the habitat of the animals that share this place with us. Stealing a line from what is now an old movie made in 1986... "Ferrus Bueller, Day Off".... "I weep for the future."