SekrayrayIt Sucks to Be 33--Millenials born in 1990-91 have objectively had to compete harder for everything
The AssmanThere’s also the recessions, wars, and plagues. The world hasn’t chilled the fuck out since we were ten.
Not trying to invalidate your feelings, but all those things have happened repeatedly for millennia and were much more severe before now
It sucked to be 33 back then too
Sorry you’re getting downvoted.
It’s a good point, but I think it gets lost to most by comparison of the immediately preceding decades. The period from 1950-2000 represented unprecedented opportunity and calm to most white people in America. Things getting back to “how it was before” makes everyone feel like the world has gone shitty.
My wife and I talk about this now and again in reference to our Boomer parents. They try to act like they had it hard, but when we reflect on the global catastrophes we’ve had to weather as young adults (ones that have had real personal implications) it turns out our Boomer parents are the real “Summer children.”
Boomers did have the Vietnam War, where almost 60K Americans were killed, hundreds of thousands were wounded, and millions of Boomers were drafted to go to war. By comparison, over the entire 20 year war in Afghanistan, 2.4K Americans were killed, and our military was all volunteer. Over the 70s-80s there were also multiple pretty bad recessions and some inflation rates that rivaled 2023, and the oil embargo in the 70s had transportation at a standstill. The HIV epidemic killed thousands in the 80s, and per capita deaths for many major diseases, were significantly higher than today. Back in the 70s and 80s, automobile accident deaths and violent crime rates were also significantly higher than today. For Boomers as kids through young adults, measles was common, with hundreds of thousands of cases per year and high rates of death or permanent disability.
And these were just some of the bad things that happened during a period of relative peace and prosperity. All this to say we should always fight to improve our society, and don’t just blindly accept bad things as inevitable or insurmountable. The past just wasn’t all sunshine and roses, and people really need to get over that.