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?
I know, right? Who decided that things get better after 40?
As a GenXer pushing 50 I can guarantee that things have always been tough and they’re not getting better.
You will own nothing, and you will love it! 😠
We’re in the same boat. I started training a few years ago. At least i want to look good, while going down.
omg I didn’t even went into looks! I’m now even more depressed! lol
Oh no - i actually meant “feeling fit”, that’s where i wanted to go with my comment. Please don’t depress ‽
I don’t know, my premium notebook is arriving tomorrow, that’s pretty exciting.
Yeah i bought a pen that have red blue and red colors well as a pencil and I’m pretty stoked about it
Quit bragging
It sucks to be a pesant
and yet we essentially live in the best of times.
Sad we can’t find a political way for everyone to have enough of what we have.
primal needs to hoard are strong in humans.
Sad we can’t find a political way for everyone to have enough of what we have.
It’s called communism.
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.
Humans destroyed this balance.
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No, Jerry, we’re not going to implement The Purge to bring back Malthusian population cycles. We’ve already got the Demographic Transition at home.
Hear me out …
Bring back Gladiator battles
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.
It is normal. It’s been this way for ± 15 years. Certainly the entirety of my adulthood and I’m nearly 30.
If it’s any comfort, 99% of human existence before us was worse. 100 years ago no one cared what you thought if the powers that be wanted to send you to war. Don’t even get me started about your life if you were a woman or minority. You don’t like it? There must be something wrong with you, off to the insane asylum for shock therapy.
That’s not the present yet, but a simple reminder that fascism is lurking and war will come because of food, water and mass migrations.
You’re also diabolizing the past. But that’s another matter.
How is that different than now?
We claim we won’t force you into the military, but if there’s not enough people who want to go to war, we’ll draft you.
If you’re a woman or minority, we won’t kill you outright, but you’ll have reduced quality of life without a conformative man to vouch for you. Bad job selection, lowered wages, political/legal/policing discrimination, doctors assuming malingering and not giving healthcare, etc.
People are still slapped with mental illness diagnoses and denied personal agency too. We shut down asylums, but we created mass homelessness. If you’re a social rebel or outcast, you get a mental illness label that stops you from gainful employment, allows all authority figures to disregard you entirely, and if you make too much noise we’ll send you to a psychiatric ward, give you court-mandated anti-psychotic injections under threat of jail, and even remove your power of attorney or make you a ward of the state.
Oh, and involuntary shock therapy still exists, by the way.
That normalization scares me so much. I’m just young enough to not really have lived before it but I also have a good memory and I have that early 90s slide into horror world seared into my awareness for my entire life. And that deep scariness of everyone around me my age and younger, accepting it as normal haunts me and hurts friendships. That and poverty forcing me into terrible situations.
the post 2000s are normal now. what came before is no more normal now than what came before that. it’s just the past now. it was a different way for things to be that will likely never be again. just like we’ll never be medieval again.
As someone who came of age in the 80s/90s, that’s not true. I can’t describe the pre and early internet-as-we-know-it days, but they hit different. No anxieties over being always-reachable basically.
46 checking in, and yep, shit is on fire. GenX knows what’s up.
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?
Well Obama did wear that tan suit
Without the American flag pin (because it was on his other suit). It’s a shame he hated America so much.
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.
There hasn’t been a “good one” since WW2.
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!
Not quite. First, the vast majority of Iraqi equipment was Soviet, and the vast majority of the stuff that wasn’t Soviet was French.
French contractors even built the air defense network and control center.
Certainly there are tensions in Iraq as a result of it coming in to being as a constructed nation - nowhere did I say otherwise. However that doesn’t justify a war of aggression against a neighboring country.
Further, Iraq’s casus belli had nothing to do with having a potential ‘claim’ to Kuwait’s land. Kuwait sovereignty pre-dates by centuries. The real reason was Kuwait’s refusal to write off Iraqi debt and refusal to lower its oil product (it was producing above its OPEC quota - depressing prices and hurting Iraq’s exports).
It is true that Saddam thought the West was using OPEC and Kuwait to undermine Iraq. That may be true. Putin thinks the West is using Ukraine to undermine him - so should we stop supporting Ukraine and let Russia annex it?
Every day I wake up exhausted trying to look for a silver lining but more often not finding it until sleep.
You can sleep!? Shit, that’s pure gold you got right there.
We should have listened to uncle Ted
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
Tbf it was slowly going to shit back then too.
Eh. It didn’t really start going to shit until 2001. Things stayed pretty darn good after 92. Not a lot of decades with that track record.
I mean, in the 90s we bitched about mostly distant global things because things were pretty good in general for most. And we had time to worry about less-catastrophic domestic things like Mumia or Peltier or what have you.
Now things aren’t so good and we end up bitching about far more local things because things around us are so bad.
It’s a great trick
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You are on lemmy.ml. AFAIK that is the only Lemmy instance still doing that. Just saying.
substitute the redacted with a synonym for female dog, used in 70s-era nomenclature to mean to complain
I’m pretty sure it’s lemmy.ml itself that is doing it.
And honestly, that’s *a really bad thing*
Can confirm. It’s .ml
Server editing posts… it’s just not cool
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My point was that climate change was still occuring in the background, but I can of course appreciate the fact that it wasn’t in the public zeitgeist in the same manner.
@ObviouslyNotBanana Oh, well, it was, but it hadn’t reached “we’re fucked” levels yet. It was still in the “we can stop this” stage. Again, this kind of got fucked up post-2000.
We realized the powers with the most to gain short-term by continuing their global warming emissions weren’t going to budge unless forced, and since government had already been captured long before I was born, no-one was going to force them.
So we knew even in the eighties, climate was going to kill us, but Reagan believed the biblical apocalypse was going to occur in his term via nuclear holocaust. But he wasn’t willing to first strike and be personally responsible for hundreds of millions of casualties.
But he was so sure, he felt environmental conservation (what it was called then) was silly.
my whole childhood in the 90s was the “ozone layer is dying” but at the same time optimistic outlook on life?
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As a zillenial (to young for millennial to old for gen Z) I can tell you that if feels basically awful only ever knowing the ruinous aftermath of the “fuck around” era
Outside of my immediate friends and family, whom I cherish, I couldn’t be fucked anymore. Everything is so shit all the time. I hope things get better of course and I look out for others when I can. But I’m just trying to keep me and my own afloat at the moment.
What year were you born? This might be me. We reached the door just as it slammed shut
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.
70s and 80s were shit. The 30s and 40s? Thanks, I’ll take today.
My method is hoping that I’m just old and western enough that I’ll be dead before the real bad shit hits me. I’m 35 though, so… let’s say there’s a smidge of optimism in there.
I can’t smoke cigarettes fast enough to keep up
Just a smidge?
I’m 27. Could you perhaps spare a drop or two of that optimism? You apparently have truckloads of it lol.
I spent my 20s basically in poverty. Whatever income I earned got sucked away by renting a home with insane heating costs, like $300 / month to keep the house at 55 in winter.
At 35 I applied for a government job in civil service. Fucking changed my life forever.
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.
Oh I realized that in my 20s
I was particularly credulous.
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
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Conservatives are well known for acting against their own self interest.
i thought that too but then dan and phil announced the gaming channel is coming back yesterday
“This is the worst things have ever been!”
“You mean this is the worst things have ever been … so far!”
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=bfpPArfDTGw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I like how hard this bot works
Bought my house right before the new housing crisis. I’m locked in so cheaply that I may not ever move.
Gonna ride my residual income as far as I can take it. I’m done breaking my body for a world that doesn’t care.
Same. Refi’d into 3% and not going to budge. It’ll be interesting to see if our loan servicer ever changes, because who in the world would want to buy a loan with such a low interest rate?
Same here. Bought in 2018 which was supposed to be at some all time high. Then refinanced it during COVID with a total monthly payment of $1500 on a 3br2ba house. When we bought the house we thought we were making a dumb decision, now I’m some sort of genius for getting lucky. I can’t imagine trying to rent these days.
My landlord just raised my rent 33% with only two month’s notice so I’m moving back to my parent’s place so I can keep my old rent price. I’m glad they own their house
It’s nice when your parents are willing to let you rent/stay with them.
Time I had some rule alone
Also, Feliz el año del Niño! Gonna be a great 16 months for weather. Especially in Texas!
