Sure seems like it, they really have zero respect and think they are God’s gift despite most of them having zero world experience and generally being weak willed and cowardly
shareI think the whole practice of categorizing and defining people by generations is arbitrary and dumb. As are troll threads like this whose entire purpose is obviously just to bait people. Anyway, old people have been bitching about how "the young have no respect anymore" since the days of ancient Greece and Rome.
shareReally? You were born back in Greece and Ancient Roman times? Do tell.
shareDismissing anything you disagree w or take offense to as a troll thread is really pathetic. My purpose isn’t to “bait” people whatever the fuck that means. I’m aware that it’s a cliche to say the youth have no respect anymore. Now it’s finally true.
shareyou are the troll
shareI get it though and there are people like that of every generation. That said, Gen Z and Millennials tend to have more schooling and have had a lot of ideals rammed down their throats which simply don't exist in the real world. They get into the workforce and they are surprised when their boss doesn't care about their feelings and things don't work and they are expected to produce results.
I get it because in the last couple of years my workplace have started doing surveys wanting to know how we feel about the company, the workplace in general, the managers etc etc. Of course I don't expect anything to come of it and it doesn't but I am older and know it's all bullshit. A younger person who has been brought up with those expectations is going to see it as a binding contract of sorts that their company will change.
Not entitled, but angry. The deck is stacked against them. It is so much harder to make a go of it now.
And they're right. Western countries are in decline, and the older generation is the one to blame.
shareOuch.
shareWell, that's why it's been customary for every generation--when they reach their teens and twenties--to start questioning the flaws of the previous generations and fix their mistakes. But this is what GenZs and millennials do. They sit down on their ass, with millennials well into their 30s now, waiting for the "older generation" to fix everything. Meanwhile, Boomers, GenXers, Greatest Generation and Depression Era Babies were already trying to change the world when they were in their 30s. GenZs and millennials are so stupid, they will go to their grave crying and whining about the state of the world while blaming the older generation.
BTW, the biggest contributors to the decline of Western civilization is social media, which was distorted from what it was originally (see: MySpace) into what it is now (Facebook). Mark Zuckerberg--a millennial--is on record admitting that he won't fix the problems with Facebook because it would hurt his bottom line. He allowed NeoNazis, Russian oligarchs and other bad actors to have the run of the platform, wreaking havoc on a global scale. All millennial-owned and run platforms have this issue, where bad actors are allowed to sow seeds of dissent and wreck elections.
What deck is stacked them? GMAFB.
The WW2 generation, Baby Boomers and GenX lived with the terror of impending nuclear war for 40 years. Boomers and GenX suffered through AIDS, the homeless crisis, soaring crime rates, divorce and child pregnancy. All three of us also grew up with things like acid rain, toxic waste dumps, second hand smoking, cancer-causing agents in foods, etc.
We didn't have the CONVENIENCES of this generation, either.
So, what "deck" is stacked against them? They are the first generation to have it better and easier than any generation before them. The problem isn't that any deck is stacked against them but that they haven't had enough decks stacked against them that would force them to grow up and stop wanting everything so easy.
How about the "deck" of decades of stagnated wages against massive inflation on housing alone? How about the "deck" of being prevented out of higher paying positions due to baby boomers holding onto them for decades? How about the "deck" of much higher entry requirements for any job outside of menial work? How about the "deck" of immigration and outsourcing suppressing wages? How about the "deck" of increased regulations that make it harder to start and run businesses?
And that's just the financial/job related issues alone, I'm not going to pretend that any generations have had it all handed to them on a silver platter, of course every generation has had its own struggles, and I'm not going to pretend millenials are free of any shortcomings (the swathes of people with useless degrees alone proves that) but they are the first in a long time to have a be worse off financially than the preceding generation, and financial wellbeing is ultimately the cornerstone to enabling a successful, rewarding life as it basically enables people to live the lives they want to live, pursue hobbies they want to, visit and live in places they want to, create what they want to create and maintains their independece from others. I'm not gonig to blame every single baby boomer on the planet, but the baby boomers in power have definitely screwed over future generations by doing everything they can to hold onto their wealth and power instead of helping the next generation with it. “Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in” after all.
Here's an article about the issues millenials face:
https://money.howstuffworks.com/personal-finance/financial-planning/millennials-first-worse-parents.htm
How about the "deck" of being prevented out of higher paying positions due to baby boomers holding onto them for decades?
Yeah, boomers not retiring and not training replacements is a factor into why millenials don't have the same opportunities as boomers. Boomers haven't saved for retirement and are now holding onto jobs years after they should have retired. Less available jobs means less younger people getting hired which means the wealth stays concentrated in the older generations.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/24/baby-boomers-us-labor-force/
https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/baby-boomers-becoming-the-fastest-growing-
I also agree to an extent that creating businesses is what should be the foundation of creating generational wealth, but it has been undermined by all the things you listed as millenials being responsible for. It's harder to start and maintain a business from the ground up due to increased regulation that's often been designed by bigger corporations to suffocate competition, so you can tell people to "muh bootstraps" all day long, but the game is being increasingly rigged against their favour. Millenials don't want to work garbage part time "gig" jobs, but they have to because there's often no other choice for them, or other businesses can't offer a better deal, same for selling stuff on Etsy/Amazon. I do like the idea behind Kickstarter to break away from the traditional investor structure and provide a new source of funding, but I think it's got enough problems with accountability that I won't go into them here. Lastly, there's the experience issue, the same hiring opportunities just don't exist like they did for boomers, meaning a lot of millenials won't get experience in workplaces and enough experience to start businesses of their own, like most of the people you listed did, you also admitted that millenials are basically competing on a global marketplace for skilled labour, which is just doubly screwing them over while enriching big corporations.
I'm sure millenials will survive, but they've definitely had a less-than-great hand dealt to them.
"Boomers haven't saved for retirement and are now holding onto jobs years after they should have retired"
Well, that's a sweeping statement if I ever heard one! Don't know how true it is, though.
It's a generalisation as much as every comment about every generation is, but it looks like there's going to be a retirement crisis of some kind in the future:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/09/baby-boomers-face-retirement-crisis-little-savings-high-health-costs-and-unrealistic-expectations.html
"It's a generalisation as much as every comment about every generation is."
Well, I don't know about that, Bugin. I'm friends with many early-edition Baby Boomers, and I don't think I've ever heard any of them making disparaging assessments of any member of the "War Baby" generation. On the contrary, they show a great respect and even admiration for them, as a rule.
A friend of mine belongs to a family which is comprised of War Babies, Baby Boomers, and a few X-Generation folk. I think when people start to talk about this non-issue, they forget that such a scenario is quite possible. After all, a man and his wife generally don't limit themselves to just one baby. At the very least there are two. And the first one may have been born, (may have been "generated") a half dozen years before the second one, or less. It becomes a little harder to generalise about the flaws of an entire fabled "generation" when one of its members is your big brother or sister.
Come to think, maybe that's the impetus for this phenomenon. Younger people whining that their elder siblings get all the goodies and they get nothin'.
Alright, granted that's a bit far-fetched. But one thing I will say is that people in the the latter generations really should look harder for the real reasons why they're not successful. I'd suggest they start with their own habits and lifestyle. It's usually a good place to begin.
We're in a thread about "generations", there are always going going to be disapraging assessments of each of them in here. Lest we forget that many of the original hippies were Baby Boomers, I'm sure they would have some harsh judgements on previous generations.
Also, I'm not going to pretend that millenials are perfect and free of blame, they took up massive student loans on useless degrees and seem very eager to spend money on garbage, but I think they are a generation that they system has basically failed, so I understand why they are the way they are. That doesn't mean I have to like them or share their sentiment, but I at least understand why they have it.
Yes, the good-natured teasing of the older generation by the young has always been popular, at least in our western culture. In the 50s the so-called "Beat Generation" did begin to take it a bit further, when they weren't smoking pot and lounging around in underground jazz clubs like Ned Flanders, that is. And even before that, so I've read, the 23 skidoo bunch would take the mickey out of their stodgy elders, (who no doubt did something similar, but more discreet and respectful, to theirs.)
It's true that Baby Boomers were noted for being openly disdainful of their parents and elders. Although, they were usually less interested in showing their disdain, (except by their clothes and hair etc), instead preferring to just get into the weed and free love that was all around. When they grew up, of course, they lost interest in all that. It was too much trouble and it was pointless anyway.
You concede that Millennials are not blameless, but then you illustrate that with a pretty minor example of their foolishness, and then quickly follow it with an excuse for it. I'm going to take a guess and tag you as either a "former" Millennial, or a parent of one, defending him/her?
I take issue with the notion of "useless" degrees. I grew up in a time where the idea of learning for it's own sake was respected, and having a liberal arts education made you a well-rounded and thoughtful person who could be trained and relied on.
And the cost of higher education was much less, and I think it's a travesty that getting a Bachelor's Degree in any field can be crippling for the average person.
Oh sure, I think learning for the sake of learning is great, and if people just wanted to go to university because they wanted to, that's great. My issue is that people are pressured into going to university and take on massive loans for degrees that won't pay off in the long run. Basically, I think you should go to university if you think it's a wise investment and your degree will pay off, or if you can afford to and want to.
i think the system in place now where you're basically expected to go to university for any degree is silly, since it leads to so many people going to university who just see it as something they have to do to get a job that they haven't really thought about, rather than actually wanting to be there to study and learn, or making sure the job market for that degree is worthwhile. It's just lead to a lot of people with a lot of degrees that aren't useful that they didn't really want and that they paid a lot of money for, and weird hiring practices where people are expected to have more qualifications for jobs that wouldn't have any a few decades ago.
It's not just a sweeping statement. It's fatuous nonsense.
And it's the type of fatuousness that's very typical of millennials and GenZs.
Why? Well, as I said in a previous response, they're delusional. They're unable to negotiate reality. One of the symptoms of being unable to negotiate reality is indulging in "folk theory." Folk theory is this thing that people come up with to explain why things are the way they are. More often than not, these theories have no basis in reality. It's just this silly notion that people agreed is true.
In the case of millennials and GenZs, in trying to understand why their economic outlook is so poor, they would rather indulge in this fantasy that it somehow all has to do with Baby Boomers. Sometimes I get angry when I hear this nonsense but most of these days, I just pity them. They're completely mental--divorced from reality--and don't see it. I can totally see these guys in their 70s and 80s dribbling about "Boomers" decades after the last Boomer has passed and their legacy completely buried and forgotten.
Yeah, boomers not retiring and not training replacements is a factor into why millenials don't have the same opportunities as boomers. Boomers haven't saved for retirement and are now holding onto jobs years after they should have retired. Less available jobs means less younger people getting hired which means the wealth stays concentrated in the older generations.
I can tell that you've been out of the labour market long for so long that you don't know what's going on in the world anymore and think everything is the same as it was 30-50 years ago and millenials are causing all of their own problems. I'm telling you why millenials have worse financial prospects than previous generations. It's well documented and I've given you multiple sources on where I'm getting my information from, all you can do is tell everyone else to pull themselves up by their bootstraps by "creating businesses". Bear in mind jobs in each generation aren't, and never have been, helmed by businesses created by people in that generation, they've been working for previous generations in established businesses.
Also, again, maybe you can't read far enough before getting angry and ignoring the rest of my comment, but NOBODY WANTS TO WORK GIG JOBS. They are often the only option for people.
Also, GenX (GenY are millenials) were employed around the time Boomers should still have been in their positions and they weren't entering the labour market in as bad conditions as they are now.
The deck has been stacked against millenials in 4 major ways:
1. Harder to get meaningful employment which means harder to start businesses in those fields
2. Harder to start businesses due to increased regulations
3. Stagnated wages compared to inflation
4. Many blue-collar jobs Boomers thrived on have moved overseas
For arrogance and entitlement I don't think you can go past the original Baby Boomers. The activist ones that became semi-revolutionaries, political activists and feminists. They were born during the war and up until around 1949. They were really arrogant in your face arseholes who thought they knew it all.
Actually the Baby Boomers were born between 1946 and 1964.
share"Actually the Baby Boomers were born between 1946 and 1964."
Nope.
.
I have my own take on who the Baby Boomers were based on experience. The ones who were born after 1950 were quite different to my "original" Boomers. Nowhere near as politically active and much more likely to just sit around smoking dope and goofing off. Then the ones born after 1960 were quite different again.
But why do you call people born after 1960 "Baby Boomers", Quasi? The term refers to babies born immediately after the Second World War. They were "boomers" because there was a boom, or explosion of family-making, (read, "sexual activity") right after that war ended when the troops came home. Gestation only takes nine months. To be strictly accurate, baby boomers are people born in the nine months after September 1945, when the war ended. Taking into account the fact that some troops didn't actually get back home until a couple of years after the war, that makes a very slight adjustment. But a baby boom still going on in 1964? Nope. In fact, for the average soldier aged ~25, the idea of starting a family at age 44 would be a bit iffy.
shareI'm just using the generally understood definition of the term. I agree with your take on it that it is worse than useless.
OK. And I agree it's worse than useless, because it's not just incorrect, it's misleading. Pity that there are so many terms in common use today that are misleading also.
Not that it matters really, I suppose. It's just another artefact of commercialism.
You're right and you're wrong.
You're right that it's inaccurate to refer to Boomers as having been born between 1946-1964. Unfortunately, that's what's become the official line now which I agree should be changed to something more accurate.
Now, here's where you're wrong:
To be strictly accurate, baby boomers are people born in the nine months after September 1945, when the war ended.
Interesting, Minababe. I see what you're getting at. They weren't called "Boomers" until they started, well, booming, so to speak. But I don't know, about capping it at 1955. Were there US troops still stationed in Europe and elsewhere, by 1954?
Let's round out gestation to one year, (sorry, ladies).. and say 10,000 troops returned to the US every year from 1945 on. And they were all randy. Then, theoretically, there would be 10,000 births in 1946, followed in 1947 by 10,000 more births, and so on. By 1955, there would simultaneously be thousands of ten-year old kids, plus thousands of newborns, in the world. Note I say, "in the world", because the boom wasn't confined to the US. Other western countries were involved in WW2 too, y'know. ;)
But a lot more than 10,000 men returned to their homes each year after 1945! I don't know of course, but I expect the entire armed forces personnel of all the countries involved arrived home within about a year of each other.. and started making babies.
But I see what you're saying, about the inclusion of latecomers in the definition. So, the term Baby Boomer came to include not just people who were really part of the birth boom in the year after the war, but anybody who later came to be part of the social effect which those early ones had.
Hmmmm, well..... I'm a stickler for semantic accuracy, and I still say that the term by definition should refer only to a sudden world-wide phenomenon of short duration, viz, "boom". Subsequent generations, the X-es, the Y-es, and the Zeds, all arrived over an extended period of many years, and their arrival wasn't precipitated by any particular event, such as a war.
Interesting, isn't it, that after the baby boomers grew up, when later "sociologists" decided to group people into categories according to their date of birth, they started with "X", three letters before the end of the alphabet. It's almost as if they don't expect any more after that. Maybe they know something we don't?
Interesting, isn't it, that after the baby boomers grew up, when later "sociologists" decided to group people into categories according to their date of birth, they started with "X", three letters before the end of the alphabet.
Well, I didn't know that. Still, they then went on to follow the letter sequence to its slightly ominous end. They could have just come up with another term altogether. I don't know what, though.
shareThey couldn't have come up with another term because that was the name that stuck in the public consciousness to the point where Generation Xers were even identifying themselves as such.
And I don't understand why the public decided to go down the alphabet for subsequent generations. The thing about the "X" is that it wasn't meant to represent them being towards the end of something (like the alphabet). In math, "X" is used in algebra to stand in for an unknown number that has to be figured out. For example, for a very simple algebra equation that you had to solve, you don't write "? + 3=5" You write "X + 3=5."
It seems that when Copeland wanted to title the book, he--like everyone else--was trying to grapple with what to call twenty-somethings because at the time, no one could figure out what catchy thing to call them. So, he used X in that mathematical sense of, "Well, we have to call them something, so let's just add 'X' as a placeholder." To him, it was just a title but like I said previously, the mass media and the public latched onto it as in, "A haaa...that's what they're called," and before long even Generation Xers were identifying with that label, because "X" had a kind of cool, edginess about it (sort of like Malcolm X).
Yes, that's right, Minababe. Very natural to call them "X". Almost mandatory, really, to use that convention then.
And I suppose the sheep mentality of people was a factor in adding the "Ys" and the "Zeds" that came after them. I think the decline in creativity and originality probably started to make its presence felt around about then.
Well at least you got the time period right, Quasi. Stupid Wiki claims that the baby boom lasted from 1941 to 1964! Good god, how randy were those returning servicemen that they were still making babies 23 years after the damn war ended!
But of course there's a reason why those dates were chosen. It's purely and simply to expand the market for "Baby Boomer" merchandise.
No contraceptive pill back in those days of course but you're right those born in the early 1960's were absolutely nothing like those born during and a few years after the war.
No pill but most people knew how to stay out of trouble. We've been doing this stuff for a long time, now! :)
There's a huge difference between people born in the early 60s and baby boomers. In fact, there's even a very significant difference between "War Babies" (born between '39 and '45), and "Baby Boomers", (born between 1945 and ~ 1948.)
Exactly. These generational tags are pretty much useless as tools for categorising people.
They're not just more arrogant and entitled, they're delusional.
Case in point: they think they invented everything--including the internet--and belittle the very generations who created all of this technology, culture and social progress as being the ones too stupid to understand it or as not having been the ones who invented it.
For example, I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to put my fist through a screen every time I hear one of these stupid brats talk about how middle age people don't know how to use smartphones or the internet. Beyotch, we (Generation X) were younger than you are now when the internet and all this digital technology came out. Not only that, the Greatest Generation invented the internet, computer technology and telecommunications; the Baby Boomers created the World Wide Web, smartphones and digital cams; and GenX built the websites and created P2P and MP3s. Millennials and GenZs are literally the only generations that not have contributed anything in any way, shape or form to the internet or technology but denigrate everyone older than them as being too stupid to know how to use it because they literally believe all of this innovation is theirs and not anyone else's.
Another fist-through-my-screen-moment: constantly being "corrected" on the history I lived through or being asked in a patronizing way about whether I know of something that was of my generation's time culturally. For example, my niece tells me that her kid is always telling her stuff like, "Have you ever heard of Biggie Smalls...he was this popular rapper..." And she always has to go, "Of course I know about that person/music genre/movie/fashion trend. That was my period." But her kid (who is GenZ) condescends to her all the time about her own childhood and adolescence.
When I was a kid, I never, ever, ever, like, ever did this to my elders or saw any of my peers do it. We never went up to our parents, teachers, coaches and say stuff like, "Oh, you know how to work a touch tone phone, right?" or "You've heard of JFK, right? He was this president they killed..."
Yup, good point. I think a lot of that comes from the fair number of boomers and younger greatest gens who refuse to adopt modern tech and insist everyone still do things the old way. An example of this would be the lady I work with who is not even 60 yet but refuses to do anything online (which she thinks is the antichrist) that she doesn’t have to. I was cleaning up my work space and I started throwing away phone books and she flipped out. Refuses to do online banking or anything on the internet that involves giving personal info. I told her everything about her is already online, I can just Google her and instantly get all of that. Another coworker is only 52, she is perhaps even more old fashioned. Refuses to use a debit card or pay any bills online. Hates self check out as it “destroys jobs” which I kind of get, but still a bit silly. I think you’d be surprised how many old people (75+) refuse to use the internet and don’t have computers.
shareMB, that may be because those boomers et al can remember a time when it was not uncommon to have city-wide electrical blackouts. They know that all this magical technology that we all take for granted, and that Gen-Xers and Mills are so dependent on is itself dependent on power stations continuing to run and little batteries continuing to be produced.
To make a movie reference, most apocalypse movies have a world war or some natural cataclysmic event that brings society to an end and takes us back to primitive lives. Today, it wouldn't require such a world-shaking catastrophe to do that. Just a simple power blackout. Boomers know this better than anyone except Greatest Gens, I think.