Millennials grew up in the 90s, possibly one of the “best” decades in modern history: good economy, closest we’ve gotten to “world peace,” comparative political stability and “quiet” (the biggest scandal in US politics was Monica Lewinsky), and problems existed but generally seemed to be getting better with time not worse. The 90s were an optimistic time, especially considering the snowballing disaster of a 21st century that followed.
Edit: also advancements in science and technology were bright and exciting, without the constant existential dread of “what calamity have we unleashed this time?” The biggest tech/science-advancement ethical debate I remember was about cloning people, which is a genuine sci-fi-esque moral quandary but ended up being generally moot in reality.
Yeah, but us millennials were only teenagers at best, toddlers at the youngest. Not really enough time to do anything with it. So while we got to experience a cool time in our youths, we had it all ripped away as soon as the .com bubble burst, and then 9/11 hit, along with other mixed events, like the Unabomber, Columbine, etc. We were also the first in line to get sent to Afghanistan.
Meanwhile Gen X got to live their adult lives during the 90s and make a name for themselves.
Sure, some aspects of the 00s were shit, but that felt like a bump in the road: things were still on the up-and-up overall, and the general expectation was that we could change the future for the better, resolve the world’s issues, and live better lives than our parents. That all came crashing down sometime around 2010 with the Great Recession, failure of Occupy, and realization that Obama wasn’t the knight in shining armor we’d literally hoped for. So the difference is that Millennials remember a pre-9/11 world and the less-great-but-still-hopeful early 00s, whereas Gen Z doesn’t.
Someone recently asked why the devil admitted he’d lost the fiddling match with Johnny. They said “If he’s the devil why didn’t he just claim he’d won?”.
I’d never asked myself that before. It had never occurred to me that the devil might cheat in a contest.
It made me realize that the dominant view of how people operate has changed in our culture. We now tend to assume people are slimeballs. The shittiest, back-stabbiest, most underhanded dishonest stuff now seems like normal behavior. Not even consciously necessarily. We just assume everyone is a barely-held-together antihero just looking for an excuse to take the gloves off and do nasty shit, and that we’re only good to our tight inner circle while it’s okay to treat the rest of the world like garbage.
It’s our zeitgeist. I’m finally starting to grok that word’s meaning, after having lived through four decades.
Satan doesn’t punish. Satan’s whole job is temptation. Anyone tempted would technically be punished by god.
I assume the mixup has to be resultant of the constant game of religious Telephone. Not really surprising. It’s pretty awkward to frame your spotless savior who is the living embodiment of Love as also doing deliberate premeditated torture, even when it’s written right there. And comparatively simple to expect it from someone who’s supposed to embody unpleasantness.
What’s hell all about, then? I always understood from Christian theology that it was a place controlled by Satan where Bad People are tortured for an infinite amount of time after death.
I’d say that we’re all fucked. There’s going to be at least one global population correction in the next century. Even if we are able to push it back through mitigation, new development, geoengineering, luck and pluck, the zoomers are going to see it by midlife and everyone’s life will be defined by it the way Dresden hit Kurt Vonnegut.
At least where I live as a millennial you could have had a really nice childhood - until you finished school. Most struggled to find a job. Businesses would hire you as unpaid intern at best, etc. All while your parents (the boomers) expected you to have house, car and family in your twenties.
Our biggest environmental worry was landfills growing to cover the entire planet. We were all convinced this was our fate and that we had to recycle everything mainly to protect ourselves from having to live on ever-expanding waste dumps.
This is generally what I came to say, except to add that Gen Z is giving me (old millennial) some hope. We were frogs in the pot, but it’s a rolling boil and zoomers like Greta, David Hogg, and the 12 year old who interrupted COP28 seem alright.
Ultimately, I’m determined to break the cycle of previous Gen calls current Gen lazy. These kids are alright and I wish we had left them better.
The rich won’t be allowed to lose. The whole system is bullshit. You can do everything right, get sick cuz fuknature, have to sell everything off for medicine and still die, younger than you should, in debt and penniless. It’s not even necessary, the Cruelty is the point. That’s capitalism. It’s about control, and capitalists need to be looked at like they have a mental illness. Most our jobs are bullshit and don’t matter. The national debt doesn’t matter. Money isn’t real, it’s a vehicle for resource allocation, not a store of value, but try getting someone not ready to hear that to even think about our social systems as something mutable and not organic or ordained. Nope. Society was designed, by people, and it’s working exactly as it’s intended, which is, fucking great for them and fuck everyone else.
At the end of the day, your physical body has had just one goal. Survive. Everything I have to do to achieve that end is justified by existence itself. Building a system that puts itself in the way of people simply surviving is building a system to fail. When it comes to politics, and by that I mean, do-whatever-you-want-as-long-as-it-doesn’t-hurt-someone-else and then policies, and for policy I just ask “is this the best we can do?”
We have a living constitution, a living body of law. Current laws have been bought and paid for, just like judges, representatives, senators…
The deviation from where we started to where we are was a process of the living and still is for today’s legislators, or more accurately, today’s lobbyists who actually craft the laws and have them at the rest in case the Overton window moves to the point they’re feasible.
Millennials generally had hope and lost it.
Gen Z never had any hope.
Millennials grew up in the 90s, possibly one of the “best” decades in modern history: good economy, closest we’ve gotten to “world peace,” comparative political stability and “quiet” (the biggest scandal in US politics was Monica Lewinsky), and problems existed but generally seemed to be getting better with time not worse. The 90s were an optimistic time, especially considering the snowballing disaster of a 21st century that followed.
Edit: also advancements in science and technology were bright and exciting, without the constant existential dread of “what calamity have we unleashed this time?” The biggest tech/science-advancement ethical debate I remember was about cloning people, which is a genuine sci-fi-esque moral quandary but ended up being generally moot in reality.
Yeah, but us millennials were only teenagers at best, toddlers at the youngest. Not really enough time to do anything with it. So while we got to experience a cool time in our youths, we had it all ripped away as soon as the .com bubble burst, and then 9/11 hit, along with other mixed events, like the Unabomber, Columbine, etc. We were also the first in line to get sent to Afghanistan.
Meanwhile Gen X got to live their adult lives during the 90s and make a name for themselves.
Sure, some aspects of the 00s were shit, but that felt like a bump in the road: things were still on the up-and-up overall, and the general expectation was that we could change the future for the better, resolve the world’s issues, and live better lives than our parents. That all came crashing down sometime around 2010 with the Great Recession, failure of Occupy, and realization that Obama wasn’t the knight in shining armor we’d literally hoped for. So the difference is that Millennials remember a pre-9/11 world and the less-great-but-still-hopeful early 00s, whereas Gen Z doesn’t.
Someone recently asked why the devil admitted he’d lost the fiddling match with Johnny. They said “If he’s the devil why didn’t he just claim he’d won?”.
I’d never asked myself that before. It had never occurred to me that the devil might cheat in a contest.
It made me realize that the dominant view of how people operate has changed in our culture. We now tend to assume people are slimeballs. The shittiest, back-stabbiest, most underhanded dishonest stuff now seems like normal behavior. Not even consciously necessarily. We just assume everyone is a barely-held-together antihero just looking for an excuse to take the gloves off and do nasty shit, and that we’re only good to our tight inner circle while it’s okay to treat the rest of the world like garbage.
It’s our zeitgeist. I’m finally starting to grok that word’s meaning, after having lived through four decades.
This is beside your point but a related question to the first part is, why does Satan punish bad people? Shouldn’t he appreciate that about them?
Satan doesn’t punish. Satan’s whole job is temptation. Anyone tempted would technically be punished by god.
I assume the mixup has to be resultant of the constant game of religious Telephone. Not really surprising. It’s pretty awkward to frame your spotless savior who is the living embodiment of Love as also doing deliberate premeditated torture, even when it’s written right there. And comparatively simple to expect it from someone who’s supposed to embody unpleasantness.
What’s hell all about, then? I always understood from Christian theology that it was a place controlled by Satan where Bad People are tortured for an infinite amount of time after death.
Oh yeah I don’t disagree that gen z is fucked
I’d say that we’re all fucked. There’s going to be at least one global population correction in the next century. Even if we are able to push it back through mitigation, new development, geoengineering, luck and pluck, the zoomers are going to see it by midlife and everyone’s life will be defined by it the way Dresden hit Kurt Vonnegut.
How much of a name did you make for yourself by 22?
At least where I live as a millennial you could have had a really nice childhood - until you finished school. Most struggled to find a job. Businesses would hire you as unpaid intern at best, etc. All while your parents (the boomers) expected you to have house, car and family in your twenties.
Our biggest environmental worry was landfills growing to cover the entire planet. We were all convinced this was our fate and that we had to recycle everything mainly to protect ourselves from having to live on ever-expanding waste dumps.
I thought we gen X were the youngsters in the nineties :-)
Am millenial. Can confirm the first part.
This is generally what I came to say, except to add that Gen Z is giving me (old millennial) some hope. We were frogs in the pot, but it’s a rolling boil and zoomers like Greta, David Hogg, and the 12 year old who interrupted COP28 seem alright.
Ultimately, I’m determined to break the cycle of previous Gen calls current Gen lazy. These kids are alright and I wish we had left them better.
I don’t think they’re lazy but I do think they’re paranoid and cynical. Perhaps understandably, but not helpfully.
I thought you were saying this about Millennials and Gen X and I was going to agree, ha. Understandably but not helpfully apathetic
I at least feel like millennials have been so relentlessly screwed by older generations and the portion of ours who got lucky that it’s not our fault.
am zoomer
That hope died 9/11/2001.
2008 financial crisis ripped the last vaneer off.
The rich won’t be allowed to lose. The whole system is bullshit. You can do everything right, get sick cuz fuknature, have to sell everything off for medicine and still die, younger than you should, in debt and penniless. It’s not even necessary, the Cruelty is the point. That’s capitalism. It’s about control, and capitalists need to be looked at like they have a mental illness. Most our jobs are bullshit and don’t matter. The national debt doesn’t matter. Money isn’t real, it’s a vehicle for resource allocation, not a store of value, but try getting someone not ready to hear that to even think about our social systems as something mutable and not organic or ordained. Nope. Society was designed, by people, and it’s working exactly as it’s intended, which is, fucking great for them and fuck everyone else.
At the end of the day, your physical body has had just one goal. Survive. Everything I have to do to achieve that end is justified by existence itself. Building a system that puts itself in the way of people simply surviving is building a system to fail. When it comes to politics, and by that I mean, do-whatever-you-want-as-long-as-it-doesn’t-hurt-someone-else and then policies, and for policy I just ask “is this the best we can do?”
I don’t think I see the best we can do anywhere.
Do you think that society was designed by people who are alive today?
We have a living constitution, a living body of law. Current laws have been bought and paid for, just like judges, representatives, senators…
The deviation from where we started to where we are was a process of the living and still is for today’s legislators, or more accurately, today’s lobbyists who actually craft the laws and have them at the rest in case the Overton window moves to the point they’re feasible.