Being born in the early 80’s… we’ve seen a lot.
I was working in Tech when the Tech Crash in 99 happened, working in the only large Investment bank that went bankrupt in the 2008 Crash and living in Britain when Brexit won the Leave Referendum.
That’s unlucky as heck. I always think about how I decided last minute to go to get an associates instead of going to the typical four year. I ended up graduating and getting a job right before the financial crash. A pretty significant amount of my friends were still in college and couldn’t get jobs for years if ever (at least related to their degree)
Yep, I was one of those people who couldn’t get a job. Super cool to go back to your grocery store job you had as a seasonal gig during college to work full time after you got a degree and no one was hiring. Then I actually tried to move up the corporate ladder there just to be blackballed by all the non degree having half brain dead people working in management there that were intimidated by me passing them up at the next level.They would promote way less qualified people over me with the excuse that they were worried I would leave if I got in a career job. The 1st 3 years after college was fucking dark. To get an office job, I had to work at this shady ass limo company for a while, then they went belly up, and I had to work in a warehouse. Finally like 5 years later, I got an actual job in my field. I always said that I wished I just worked full time after highschool. Could have bought a house in the correction, and even if I worked some shitty wage slave gig out of highschool, I’d be 100x more well off than I am today. Houses in my town were at least somewhat affordable then, (6-700k) now they are 1.8 mil +.
Well, after my first crash and being out of a job for 6 months because of it, I’ve always been very prepared for that kind of situation so when Lehman Brothers went down I was just fine because I had plenty of savings (and was even asked back after a month because the division I was working with was bought by a Japanese Brokerage and remained operating) and similary when Leave won, not only had I “just in case” financially protected my savings from the hit on the British Pound if Leave won, but I could and did chose to leave Britain before the actual Leave date because I expected that country to increasingly suffer from the effects of leaving the EU.
So in a way, after the first one it wasn’t too bad.
Its getting uncomfortably accurate
Correct. When I was living in Reno there was a doomsday DATE people decided on. It was a huge thing. A bunch of people just bought in. People euthanizing their pets, just madness. Day came. Nothing happened. It’s amazing what people fall for. It’s very sad.
- “Oh no everything will crash at the end of 1999 !”
- “Wait nothing happened… but that because it will definitely happen in fact at the end of 2000 ! Because there’s no year 0, we start at year 1, you see”
It was difficult to deal with the disappointment after all the hype 😢
Millions of man-hours were put in to keep Y2K from happening. In their coverage of New Year’s Eve 1999, ABC cut to the Y2K control room where people were amazed nothing was happening.
The only recognition all of those folks got for all of their work to keep the lights on and the planes in the air was the movie Office Space, and people who were disappointed they didn’t fail.
For all the verbal fellatio Office Space receives I was expecting it to be a god-like ultimate peak of human culture type deal but in reality it was a mid movie humor and plot wise. Its not bad but its very catery to a specific audience I wasn’t part of. I can see it being one of the first and few relatable films for white collar cubicle boglins at the turn of the century which feels like pretty much the sole reason of why I have to see it occasionally referenced 25 years later.
You’re right that it’s one of the few relatable films about that, but what gives it the staying power is that it is still relevant for the sort of work they’re doing. All of the things they talk about are the same 25 years later, except now they don’t know I’m not wearing pants since it’s on Zoom. Silicon Valley is in the same vein, and created by the same guy. I expect him to make “Home Office Space” shortly.
It must have felt very weird to be working to prevent Y2K while everyone else was hoping for a good show, and in the end see people be disappointed instead of impressed because nothing happened 😅
Watching things crash is always more interesting than watching things work perfectly as usual…
Meanwhile mid-40s walking through world ending pollution:
This place is so much better without all the cigarette smoke!
I also appreciate the restoration of our ozone layer. I remember there was a time (when above a certain latitude at least) my skin would fucking burn in less than 5 minutes under direct sun, it’s a lot better now but it seems weird we all just kind of collectively forgot about that time when we all nearly ended the world to such a degree that we could feel it outside, then we all reversed course and fixed it mostly.
I wonder if we would be more motivated to fix our current issues if they caused skin burns.
I’m tired of living through “interesting times”.
Except it’s not interesting anymore. It’s been a cycle of the same bullshit over and over again.
“Shouldn’t have wished to live in more interesting times” -Tav, Baldur’s Gate 3
Young me in 2012 “I want to live through interesting times” 🤔 rather than being bored. Little did I know.
GenX here… first time?
We got lulled into thinking everything was going to be fine. Then we got whacked with all the tech outsourcing, dot-bomb, 9/11…etc. but at least we had cheaper college first and that gave us a foot in the door without as much of the crushing college debt that millennials got.
At least four end of days. Y2K, Maiyan 2012, Rasputin’s 2013, and that Christian Fundie quadruple moon eclipse one.
Meanwhile gen-x: So have we. Plus growing up during the Cold War, Iran hostage crisis, and 9/11.
Yes it sucks.
You could afford a house and got a free or cheap education
The state has sold off everything in your lifetime to keep your taxes low, including housing. Which you bought and now own.
Millennials are generation rent with a government renting back what it sold as taxes rise.
And the cold war is still going on, what is it about Gen X that makes them think it stopped. Putin is at war in Europe right now. The cold war only ever paused.
Proxy wars didn’t stop with Vietnam, the cold war didn’t stop with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
You get to experience the events of the world while being comparatively rich.
You got to experience the only decade or so without a cold war threat while millennials experience the threat of Russia and an increasing threat from China.
And millennials were told as children the world would burn if we did nothing. Gen X and the Boomers did nothing.
Yes it sucks.
But you had it good, and politically you’ve fucked us recently. After being previously politically apathetic.
We’ve got a world to repair and it remains to be seen if Millennials will actually move past apathy into fixing it with Gen Z or continuing to fuck it up like Gen Z.
You still had to be not poor to take advantage of all that. College was cheaper, but nowhere near cheap. Homes were possible, but many lost them in the crash. It wasn’t like the boomer and earlier days where you could support a family to retirement on one job needing only a GED.
You still had to be not poor to take advantage of all that.
Yeah, randomly shitting on individuals of older generations is just not productive.
Yes, the society as a whole benefitted from better economic conditions, borrowed from tomorrow, and pulled the ladders up behind them… but we don’t know that user. Plenty of people in “the good times” did not have it good.
For all they know, that particular GenX or Boomer was destitute and desperate.
For all they know, that particular elder was in the protests and on the picket lines and fighting this shit every step of the way.
We need solidarity. Every generation, every age, everyone and anyone who is willing. Don’t blame the individuals for the groups.
