• zerofk@lemmy.zip
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    40 minutes ago

    This is exactly the reason Billy Joel wrote We Didn’t Start the Fire.

    Every generation has its challenges.

  • urthoughtsrbad@lemmy.zip
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    50 minutes ago

    Not all millennials are trying to become emo boomers who talk about how much tougher they had it.

    Last I checked nobody here died in a tower, and everyone here survived Covid.

    • tetris11@feddit.uk
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      14 hours ago

      You’re not wrong, but it was easier for people born 60 years ago

      • LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        Nah. If you were born in 1966, by the time you turned 30 you lived through Vietnam, the AIDS epidemic, the civil rights movement, Desert Storm, and you spent your entire life with nuclear apocalypse hanging over you in the form of the cold war. And the US economy wasn’t doing great either until the 90s.

        • Mrkawfee@lemmy.world
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          1 hour ago

          Aids and nuclear war I agree but for someone born in 1966, they would be too young to be personally affected by Vietnam and the oil shocks of the 70s and by the time the Cold War ended and the 90s came about they’d be earning well . The Simpsons broadcast in 1989 and Homer was a blue collar worker who owned a house on one income with a stay-at-home wife and three kids. That was possible at the time.

          • GalacticRobot@lemmy.world
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            13 hours ago

            No, they couldn’t afford groceries then either. Goodness. Like do people forget the oil crisis in the 70’s? Wonder why so many receipes came out about Jello and microwaves?

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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              13 hours ago

              In fairness, microwaves went mainstream in the 1980s. Most people didn’t have them in the ten years prior.

              There’s a joke in the movie “American Hustle”, taking place in 1978, about the lead character getting a $3,000 “Science Oven” as a bribe.

        • tetris11@feddit.uk
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          10 minutes ago

          True – but it is seemingly less so today for white americans (an exeedingly large demographic) to be able to afford basic lifestyles.

          It does suggest a major shift in affordability if your main christian white majority can’t buy groceries

        • GalacticRobot@lemmy.world
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          13 hours ago

          Shhh, chronically online white youth don’t want to talk about that. Hell if you were a woman you couldn’t even have a bank account on your own until 1974.

          • Hawke@lemmy.world
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            11 hours ago

            if you were a woman you couldn’t even have a bank account on your own until 1974.

            That’s not actually true though. The banks were not required to allow women to open bank accounts but plenty did anyway.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        Was it? Measles and AIDS. Vietnam and Stagflation and Segregation. Nixon and leaded gasoline and crack cocaine. The height of the Cold War. The forty-year run of de-industrialization. Some of the darkest days of the Civil Rights Movement.

        It only seems easy because you didn’t have to live through it.

  • cRazi_man@europe.pub
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    15 hours ago

    Lol @ Y2K being mentioned on par with all this other shit. Never in life have I experienced such a huge nothing burger.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        It was a huge amount of work that paid extraordinarily well. One could argue that Y2K was a kind-of Keynesian program for software developers, spawning an entire generation of 90s upper-income schlubs and mini-millionaire bosses.

        Everyone from Marc Andressen to Mark Cuban owe their personal fortunes to the enormous infusion of cash into the IT sector created by the Y2K business boom. Incidentally, the bottom fell out of the tech market in… 2001.

      • qarbone@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        Yes, but it’s being mentioned alongside things that widely and tangibly affected the (American) populace. Y2K did not have many actual effects for the average person, just a couple of knock-on effects created more from people’s fear of Y2K.

    • Bahnd Rollard@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      There was an immense effort to rectify the issue, same with the ozone crisis. Cant say the same for current issues, most news has to both-sides everything and there are much more (or atleast more prominent) contrarians like the anti-vaxers. Never again will we see a unified front against a global issue because someone will always benifit personally if failure is on the table.

        • GalacticRobot@lemmy.world
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          13 hours ago

          What have millennials put effort into except complain about how much things are worse for them? At Least Gen X had the fortitude to say ‘huck it, I just don’t care and won’t participate’.

    • Herbal Gamer@sh.itjust.works
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      14 hours ago

      It was overhyped but for the wrong reasons; very simply said it was like converting systems to use 64bit instead of 32 so they could handle the bigger numbers we were gonna need.

  • callouscomic@lemmy.zip
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    18 hours ago

    Am a millennial.

    Okay, so:

    Gen Alpha has experienced the pandemic, economic shock and recession around that time, followed by insane inflation, the AI disruption and uncertainty, and climate and extreme weather disruption as well. Not even mentioning wars.

    Millennials have all that, and the Great Recession, the dot com crash, I guess we could mention 9/11, but like most people were not directly impacted by that but rather the wars after, the housing affordability crisis, and I dunno, maybe the Super Bowl Timberlake-Jackson incident, sure chuck that in.

    Gen X has all that, the savings and loan crisis in the 80s-90s, Black Monday, recessions in the 80s, stagflation in their early adulthood and teen years, oil crises, and fucking Milli Vanilli.

    And then Baby Boomers… well… whatever. I’m already tired of doing this. Every generation deals with a lotta shit.

    And again we kinda glossed over wars.

    Let’s have some real fun.

    The late Roman “Are We Seriously Doing This Again?” generation born circa 235-260 CE. They experienced the empire nearly falling apart as emperors were replaced like Walmart greeters, a plague to live through, a shit ton of wars and economic debasement along with political instability destroyed any economy they had, foreign invasions were an average Tuesday, and then I think Rome split into basically east and west and the Capitol lost control.

      • callouscomic@lemmy.zip
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        50 minutes ago

        It’s important to learn history, but “listen to your elders” is just toxic bullshit. Every elder I knew growing up that talked that way was a fucking dick.

    • HerbGrower@slrpnk.net
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      13 hours ago

      Y2K also didn’t really result in anything because it was a fixable problem that got acted upon. Most of us would have been in school around that time too.

      Also don’t really see the problem with 9/11, surely the vast majority of people wouldn’t have been involved in any way or known anyone who was? Of course its a bigger issue for those that were, but it seems odd to stick it in as a generational experience. I didn’t even hear about it until a day or two later when it happened to be on the news before school.

      • callouscomic@lemmy.zip
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        48 minutes ago

        Agreed. I was playing off the meme, but I especially agree about 9/11. Aside from the fear of a draft, unless a young millennial went into the military, or someone lived near the incident in NY or knew people personally affected, most of us were unaffected.

        Also, plenty of worse incidents have occurred where WAY more people died. I have always found the 9/11 obsession to just be toxic nationalist propaganda. If the US actually gave a shit about it, perhaps it wouldn’t have been so fucking hard to give affected first responders the Healthcare they deserve.

    • Tabooki2@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      Y2K was a nightmare for us GenX. Months of overtime and late nights with lots of contractors coding 24/7. I hope I never have to go through that again.

        • Hackworth@piefed.ca
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          18 hours ago

          Oh, we’ve got a few hurdles before then. The 32-bit unsigned counter for network time protocol resets in 2036, the GPS 10-bit week counter resets in 2038, and the old Unix signed 32-bit date also resets in 2038.

    • Guy Ingonito@reddthat.com
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      21 hours ago

      I remember in '99 the radio DJs loved talking about how there was a chance the world would end on new years, so there was a degree of anxiety, especially to dumb kids like myself

    • NABDad@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      I changed jobs in late 99, so I got to go through all the Y2K bullshit in one job, then do it again in the new one.

      One dude at my old job had his panties in a bunch because he said all the U.S. Navy ships were vulnerable and he said WW3 was going to start, but he was generally an idiot anyway, so that was par for the course.

      In the new job I had to certify that DEC impact printers were Y2K certified. Which way basically me putting stickers on all of them saying they were certified because they weren’t smart enough to care what the date was.

      My boss at the new job required us to be onsite on January 1st, which was kind of a drag, but that’s the way it goes. There was nothing for us to do. He stopped at a deli on the way in and picked up an absolutely fantastic pile of food for us, so it just became a casual brunch and we just kind of hung around eating and chatting until he was satisfied that nothing was going to go wrong.

      I’d kill to know what the deli was. I was too young and stupid to save the name.

    • bitjunkie@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      Even as a teenager I was pretty crystal-clear on the fact that anybody who knew anything about how a computer worked also knew that Y2K was not the cataclysmic society-ending event that the fucking braindead news media were making it out to be at the time.

  • BigBoyShuanzee@aussie.zone
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    23 hours ago

    Don’t forget we’re hated by baby boomers, Gen X, Gen Z and younger.

    We’re also expected to keep everything working while also treated like we’re the most entitled.

    • KingPorkChop@lemmy.ca
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      18 hours ago

      Hold up. I’m GenX. I only hate Boomers.

      I got nothing against millennials or younger. I even like whatever they’re calling the new generation with their 67 rotted brains. They’re simple folk, but hilarious.

    • Taleya@aussie.zone
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      22 hours ago

      Who gives a shit what boomers think, genx literally are incapable of giving a shit about anything and genz are in their 20’s, what the fuck you care what a 20-something thinks about you? That’s the glory of your 40’s: you’re fat, old and don’t give a crap

        • Taleya@aussie.zone
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          22 hours ago

          Genx to boomer parents. No. I do not give a shit what my parents think. Chiefly because i am 48 years old.

          • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
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            19 hours ago

            Yeah well there is something wrong with you then. The vast majority of people care very much what their family thinks of them.

            • Taleya@aussie.zone
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              7 hours ago

              Do you regularly have ‘wanting to please your parents’ define your actions as an adult?
              You’re supposed to have your own moral scaffolding and motivation in place by then, it’s a rather large part of growing up

      • Jax@sh.itjust.works
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        18 hours ago

        Ah yes, who gives a shit that we’re divided on fundamental levels like age?

        What does it matter that young people hate older people on the simple basis of age? For that matter, why does it matter if someone is: racist, a misogynist, a misandrist, homophobic, transphobic? Who cares!

        Smoothbrain

        • Taleya@aussie.zone
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          13 hours ago

          Mate you need to get off the outrage pipe and go outside.

          A flippant comment about the subtle art of not giving a fuck or living your life under fear of how others perceive you did not warrant that response.

    • Victor@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      Don’t forget we’re hated by baby boomers, Gen X, Gen Z and younger.

      What? Why? Everyone seems to like me lol. You’re telling me they actually secretly hate me?

    • Guy Ingonito@reddthat.com
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      21 hours ago

      I certainly don’t feel hated by Z.

      I did mention skibidi toilets and 6 7 in front of a group of gen alphas and they literally cringed at me though lmao

      • Glytch@lemmy.world
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        20 hours ago

        Yeah, but it’s fun to make the Alphas cringe. Why would I want a bunch of teenagers to think I’m cool?

    • isekaihero@ani.social
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      22 hours ago

      So much this. It boggles my mind that I was considered an “essential worker” and had to work every single day of the COVID shutdown when everyone else was staying home and social distancing. But I never got a raise or a bonus. I’m treated like dogshit stuck to my boss’s shoe. Collectively Millennials are the current backbone of the United States workforce and we are expected to keep society running but we are treated like shit and are paid a fraction of what our boomer parents were making at our current age.

      • doingthestuff@lemy.lol
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        18 hours ago

        I’m genx, same both wife and I worked extra jobs during COVID, never worked from home. My boomer parents lived 100x better than me even during their "poor"years. Now retired, they still make quadruple what I do. I make less than I did 25 years ago, and that’s not even making adjustments for inflation. I also have no savings, can’t save when you can’t afford to live. This economy is fucked. We also lived through all of those market upheavals and also the one in the '90s. It’s been straight downhill since the boomers gen.

  • BarnWolf@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    Not to mention the many “once in a lifetime” nature events that have happened as well.

  • Bluedragon012@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    So, when do we get… A break? Like did Karma get really high and forgot to help us out or? Do we get that peaceful life yet? Or are we doomed to forever being the witnesses and victims to this horrible time line?