Over 40? For me is even worst! You younglings still have time to do something. I have no house, no savings, no retirement plan and no time to do all that! I'm the most fucked! Do you think I expect good things?
We're still using instincts that were designed for the wild.
We're a perfect example of what happens when a predator species becomes overpopulated. They over indulge in a plentiful bounty not realizing they're killing out their food source.
That's why we hunt dear or kill wolves. A balance must exist or everything goes awry.
The Ukraine-Russia & Israel-Palestine wars, and the likelyhood of China going after Taiwan before 2027, and the Koreas continually being a powder keg influenced by all of this. Between all that and me being 23 years old I sincerely think I might witness World War 3, it's terrifying, yet it feels inevitable with our era of false 1st world peace built on a house of cards.
That's not even mentioning the Republican Project 2025, as a trans person I might have to fight for my life.
What do you mean by house of cards? Seems to me like the current political order is the most stability the world has ever seen and is only threatened by an axis of fascist countries that deliberatly wants to plunge the world into war and chaos.
It's been stable based on temporary peace and Mutually Assured Destruction (not just from nukes). For example China-Taiwan are still in a civil war that never officially ended, and China has always wanted to reabsorb Taiwan and Taiwan has always been opposed to. The Koreas are actively still in a cease fire for a war that also never concluded. And the middle east has always been churning with armed conflicts.
The western 1st world countries managed to extract enough wealth to stay far and away from these kinds of conflicts, but they are still heavily dependent on these countries and we'll all feel the impacts if things get worse.
Some of us are doing ok and just trying to keep our heads down and not get caught in the crossfire. Good luck you guys. I wish you better fortune in the future.
I really wish my generation was a bit more optimistic. Yeah shit sucks, don't get me wrong. But have you guys seen all of history? This is par for the course. Yeah the challenges are different but every generation had their challenges. And yeah baby boomers definitely had it better than us, but that doesn't mean there's nothing but bad stuff to come. You have to take life with the good and the bad and make the most of it.
This is an interesting perspective, because in previous generations most of the long term fears were settled by simply doing nothing. They held their breath and it worked out.
The key difference is that the current generations are acutely aware that if we do nothing and just "stay calm and carry on", we're totally fucked. Inaction isn't going to save us this time. We can't put our heads in the sand and just sing ourselves to sleep then expect a good outcome when we resurface.
I think that's a key differentiator. Previous generations were fearful of something happening. Current generations are fearful of nothing happening, because if nothing happens then the world will become uninhabitable by humans.
Yet, the majority of the decision-makers in our society are silent generation/boomers that drove to success by inaction and they're largely doing nothing. We see this and understandably know how fucked we are.
Considering science has only gotten robust enough to prove anything like that far more recently than any good examples of ecological collapse, I'd say this parameter is a little arbitrary.
The best example I can think of regarding ecological collapse is during and after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Their climate decreased in temperature, which reduces crop yields, which weakened the empire and encouraged migration from northern Europe, which brought their collapse (plus like 12 other things lol).
In 535AD, during Justinian's reign in the east, the first black plague happened following a supermassive volcano that left the sky covered in ash blocking the sun. This was a massively ecologically damaging period of history and it caused the death of countless plant and animal life, along with the deaths of half the population of the Mediterranean.
It's not like people of this age were taking soil samples and references trends or whatever, but they certainly understood how things were going poorly.
You need to give articles making predictions about the future a heavy amount of doubt. We may be relatively intelligent as a species, but I genuinely think we way over-estimate our abilities. Predicting the future is hard. The biggest problem is that predictions are based on past data, and cannot account for what might happen that hasn't happened before. Which when faced with a brand new problem tends to be a brand new response.
Look at our lives right now. While certainly not ideal (who could make that claim, in all history?) it's pretty damn nice if you look back in time. Yes lotsa awful stuff MIGHT happen, but that's always been true. And compared to the challenges of the past it's not on any scale we haven't been on before (I mean the Cold War literally could have resulted in the planet becoming uninhabitable due to nukes).
I'm not saying I disagree with you, I'm merely trying to give it a glass half full perspective. I agree some scale of societal collapse does seem like it is a real possibility, but it's by no means guaranteed or necessarily even likely. We don't know what we don't know. Embrace not knowing what the future holds and just enjoy life for what it is today.
This is what gave me some peace: it could all end horribly for me at any minute. Anything could happen. I could get hit by a bus. I could die painfully from some fucked up disease. A fat asteroid could hit the earth. It's all out of my control. Or things could turn out for the better, by some way I never foresaw. The best thing for us to do is to strive to be good people and care for what is in front of us.
I still find it a bit of a mindfuck that humanity is being such a deleterious effect on this beautiful world.
... and I do think that growing up under the threat of nuclear holocaust must have been similarly terrifying.
Most generations don't need to deal with an impending threat to the whole planet. Nuclear apocalypse, sure, but at least there was no pretending that it wasn't a problem.
This is ignoring all of the other ways in which we're fucked.
Another thing that is worse is how we havent had anything recently to inspire hope. The Higgs Boson would have been the Millenial/Gen Z equivalent of the moon landing if the public hadn't been so distrusting of physics because of string theory evangelists.
What's interesting when you look at birthrate declines is not that they are declining, it's that they are declining to NORMAL LEVELS. Everyone is freaking out that the next generation won't be big enough to support retiring Boomers without understanding that there should never have been so many Boomers in the first place.
My GenX existential horror was learning in my thirties that all the western American Exceptionalism ideology I was indoctrinated in as a kid was just a way of keeping us from getting proactive for sake of the future generations, and my parents and teachers and ministers knew this and actively lied to me anyway.
I also think that a lot of bad things about the US that a blind eye was turned to because they seemed to be getting better have since become relevant again because they've started getting worse
Not just those under 40. I do feel bad I sorta got a brief taste of "good times" and worry eventually younger folks will think the post 2000's are normal.
Yeah, I'm juuuust old enough to have a firm memory of when things that were laughably petty were the biggest problems in the world. You mean to tell me the PRESIDENT got a BLOWJOB?!
All the real issues that sowed the seeds for our intractably broken future were sidelined and mostly ignored. Desert Storm, woowoo go world police. LA Riots, oh you crazy minorities and your intolerance for extrajudicial murder. Climate change, what's that?
Desert Storm was the good one. Sadam invaded Kuwait, a large international coalition ended the occupation. Today's analogue would be NATO entering Ukraine, kicking the Russians out, and showing that wars of aggression are unacceptable.
Iraq in '03 was the problematic one. Falsified casus belli, war crimes galore.
Short explanation: The arms Iraqi forces fought with during the Gulf War were largely bought or built by Americans. Isn't that interesting?
Long explanation: It's all connected to the Israel-Palestine issues we are seeing this very day. Iraq was dealt a very nasty hand by the UN after the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, becoming a landlocked country, with lines drawn such that they were made caretakers of ethnic enemies and forced to forsake much of their geopolitical power and resources to tribal rivals. It's difficult to say their claim to Kuwait was justified, but it's certainly just as difficult to say it was unjustified.
On top of that, we had just gotten done with fucking over Iraq due to their failure in the Iraq-Iran war. They had initially allied with the USSR to prop themselves up, and when that went to shit they turned around and tried doing the west and themselves a favor by grabbing a piece of Iran. We were directly supporting them (anybody taking a punch at Iran is a friend of ours!), and had been increasing our support, but when they agreed to a ceasefire we stopped, leaving them war-torn, deeply in debt, and with really nothing to show for their experiment of working with the west aside from all these shiny American weapons of course.
Medium explanation?: Iraq had been engineered to be an Israel-like anti-Arab agent in the region, but when they failed and sued for peace, we left them no other option but to wage another war to survive. When they went in a direction we didn't like, we got all our buddies together (including a surprising number of old enemies) and decimated them. Twice!
Yes and no! It's a difficult initial process if you have no idea but becomes extremely easy once you know how PCs work.
Knowing how to diagnose problems is I feel a more difficult part. It's more complicated than knowing "These parts go there and have cables that connect to the CPU switch, main power and hard drives" because cables and parts, to a huge degree, can only fit where they belong.
I imagine in the line of PC repair work you'll encounter much more complicated issues and often multi-part damage. Also probably a lot of filth, I heard most normal people NEVER clean their PCs, change Thermal Paste or even let some nasty bugs accumulate in their PC.
Bonus points for if it's a laptop instead of a PC. Their tight compact nature makes repairing them hell I'd imagine. BONUS bonus points if you're working on an outdated PC who's parts you can't just easily swap out.
Something called a chimichanga in my neck of the woods. You can get one smothered or dry. You can even get one stuffed with fruit and covered with sweet and spicy sauces
They tell you that the sky might fall They'll say that you might lose it all So I run until I hit that wall Yeah I learned my lesson, count my blessings Look to the rising sun and run run run
But is it worse than tricking other people to work 40+ hours a week doing whatever you say and giving you most of the value they create? Because that’s the other option.
Plus if you buy a bunch of houses you can get them to give back most of the money you pay them.
In comic, dystopian reality, selling drugs (really just weed) was how I graduated college debt-free, and graduating without debt was the only way I could take out/afford a loan for a house.
So apparently, it's true what they say, whether planting or selling trees, the best time to do it was 10 years ago. The second best time is now! (Except don't)
Not too far from reality where I live. One dude already is doing time because he was blatantly dropping cash payments on things like a HOUSE and multiple cars.
I'm 35, and if you squint a bit at the mortgage, I "own" home. With my partner. And we'll be paying it off for another 27 years. And we're the lucky ones of this generation.
Well, the good news is if you have a fixed rate mortgage the crushing amount of incoming inflation may cut that back to like 15-20 years!
I'm a couple years older than you, but my partner and I feel incredibly lucky to own a home as well. We bought an abandoned property back in 09' for 35k and have spent the last ten years fixing it up. If I wasn't able to borrow 20k from USAA back then, I don't think I'd even be able to afford the rent in my neighborhood nowadays.
Once I hit my 40s, massive home diy projects have either become necessities (too expensive to hire out), pipe dreams, or like PA DOT working on route 202 in my youth (never ending with incremental steps that never improve the experience of driving). The energy loss is off the hook, and I’m not a flubbynutter.
ask them why didn’t they have savings to “buy a private yacht yet” at your age, because I would guess it’s roughly similar in the proportion of pay/cost
The century of find out with almost no active participation in the previous century of fuck around.
A lot of "climate collapse global late stage capitalism and food is more and more plastic" stick with very little "convenience products are kinda nifty" carrot
It's kind of bittersweet being a very tail-end Gen X person. On the happy side, I got to do my childhood and teen years in the "fuck about" era, but on the unhappy side my entire adulthood has been in the "find out" era, and I get to remember what it was like briefly living in a world that wasn't entirely going to shit.
Thank you!
This was very well put. Felt like a big puzzle piece just fell in place and this discomfort of not knowing why stuff feels so weird nowadays let go a bit.
❤️🤜
it's kind of affirming to hear you say that. As a gen Z person I feel like we're constantly being gaslit into thinking stuff has always been bad and we just complain more or something
Older millennial here, so about your age, I have really early childhood memories before ozone issues, recessions, and planet fucking, after that it's been one paper straw after another
I feel like I could still join in on all the fuck around going on, but the find out has simultaneously already started and I can't deal with the cognitive incongruence. Most people seem to be just fine with that tho. Must be nice being able to just turn your brain off and keep fucking the planet like that.
