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.
this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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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)
Seen it all happen from a "safe" distance. Damn you're unlucky in a way.
The goofy part about this type of generational cock contest meme is that we all live through it together. Every generation alive has gone through horrific shit and every generation has gone through periods of peace. Some for longer than others.
I'm a millennial and I have been pretty lucky if I may say so myself. Compared to what young people and kids go through today, us older generations had it good.
Yes, our times of youth also brought on wars and economic struggles and what not, but they came in intervals.
Nowadays it is all happening at the same time and at lightening speed.
And us peeps, boomers, Gen X and millennials sit here all smug about it, like we went through ANYTHING comparable to what young people go through today.
We had it good. We are lucky to all be in our 30s and up during this stretch of history. I feel for the youths of today. They are the ones going through some shit in their formative years.
The 2020s are happening to all of us, but the kids of today have way more worries thrust upon them than any of us old fucks ever did.
We had a lot of things pretty good. Since we don't have TV, I've spent the last year every weekend creating a 2.5 hour block of tailored programming to recreate the experience of Saturday morning cartoons for my kid, with selections from ~60 of the best (and some bad) cartoons from the last several decades, animated music videos, unearthed funny old clips, and modern indie animations, often with seasonal themes. Halloween is the most fun.
My toons are objectively better than the Saturday morning block ever was, and it takes hours every week to gather clips, edit, and manage where we're at with every show. I sometimes wish I could share it with a larger crowd but it's really not worth the expense, legal exposure, or effort - not to mention it's more special since it's just for my kiddo. I get to share the culture with him, with the crusts cut off. They don't have to put up with commercials, bad reception, or the constant ear-splitting blare of homophobia that was the nineties.
All that to say, that's the big picture too. Every generation we try to make things a little better for the young ones. Sometimes we're pretty envious of them, but we'd be failures if things were completely better when we were kids - and they'll have to work hard too, because in some ways we have been failing.
Haven't boomers been drafted to Vietnam by force? Like you had to go there to die, no options.
I think being forced to fight a war is pretty worse than most issues of people that age now.
At least we are talking about young people who live in active combat zones right now. I'm just taking the euroamerican centristic view on the matter.
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.
I remember people following Harold Camping's doomsday predictions. They sold their houses, bought RVs, preached that The End is Nigh, etc. The day came and went like any other. He revised the date a couple of times, but of course world didn't end. I just can't believe people are that gullible.
41 years old and I've lived through 4 once in a lifetime economic events, one impending societal collapse (Y2K), a global pandemic, and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. I vote Giant Meteor 2025, just get it over with already.
There's a few genocides in there too. Also I sleep in an abandoned house for like 6mo after the housing bubble burst. Whole neighborhoods where a light never turned on. All speculation market.
Honestly I could have written a novel worth of things, but I wanted to keep it short.
I thought it was the dotcom crash and great recession, in addition to the ones you mentioned war on "terror" and pandemic.
2000 dot com crash, 2008 housing bubble, 2020 COVID recession, 2025 tariff downturn and looming crash. (That's not including the recessions from the 80's and 90's)
I count Afghanistan and Iraq separately, they were two very different wars and fought for different reasons. Afghanistan was because of 9/11, Iraq was oil and regime change.
What if the world has ended multiple times before but since this is a simulation, we just have no memory of the actual cataclysm because the operators of the simulation restored the server using backups so all memories of the event were purged? 🤔
What if this happens every Thursday?
- "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.
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...
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.
The same group of Americans all worried about the anti-Christ found the one guy who matches the profile and decided to make him President. Twice.
Accelerationists and bigots make up a large chunk of that bloc, and “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” make up the rest.
(The oligarchs that bought him don’t count in the same group as the plebeians.)
Religious accelerationists are beyond my understanding. Provoke God into action? And how exactly do you plan to avoid God's judgement? I mean religious extremists often give impression like they think their God is stupid and you just need to find a loophole in the rules.
They were made in God's image and they are morons therefore God is a moron. - Moron Thinking
Moron Logical Fallacy - A moron who has the unfounded belief that they are smarter than anyone else and anyone who claims otherwise is a moron.
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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.
The weird thing is that it worked too well. Like Y2K, it was fixed so it became a nothing burger. Now everyone thinks it was an overreaction and don’t want to keep fixing things.
I remember people talking about not curing covid as fast because then people wouldn’t take the next pandemic as seriously.
This is a great point on how regulation can work and how we, as a society, need to do better celebrating our accomplishments.
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Still better than what most of the people before us lived through. It's just that our parents were especially lucky with the time period they lived in.
The idea that people before us lived worse lives is one often used to obscure the clinical nature of standards we attribute to quality of life such as lifespan, infant mortality, food security, and housing. This is because it allows corporations to trivialize the impact of doubling the workload by normalizing the 40 hour work week and housework and child care, what used to be two people's worth of work, into one.
Are we living 'better' lives? On paper, sure. Are we living happier lives? That's hard to say.
Most of the people worked 24/7 on their farm and had to give most of their crops to their feudal lord from which they were completely dependend for land and protection against bandits. And later people worked 7 days a week 10-12 hours in factories.
And alone the medical development clearly is a great improvement in happiness. Just imagine that newborns surviving until infancy was the exception rather than the norm. And women died regularly during childbirth. Tooth problems were causing tremendous chronic pain and often lead to death. Only cancer was a lesser problem because people simply didn't live long enough for it to be very prevalent.
I am not saying things could be better now. But we don't have to romanticize the past. For me it is rather motivating to see how far we have come already and that we also can overcome the challenges of our time.
I dunno I prefer not being murdered for practicing (or even converting from) the wrong religion, dying of plague or famine, or being enslaved for economic convenience. But maybe that's just me.
That really doesn't narrow it down, if we are talking about the past or present.
Yes but I'd much rather prefer wandering through a bountiful forest to a stream crammed with fish, build a lean-to from what's around me, and sleep cozy and warm under pine boughs on a moss mattress.
Agriculture broke us.
And be always afraid of being killed by a tiger or other predators. Constantly worrying about not finding enough food. Having insects crawl all over and inside you while sleeping or a snake choking you to death.
Yeah I call bullshit. What's stopping you from living your dream if it's that great?
Private property laws and the collapse of the biosphere
R.I.P. saimen choked to death on a larger than a average black python one Saturday night in the truck stop.
And squandered the shit out of it.
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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.
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If I had a dollar every time some looney came up to me saying it's the apocalypse in X day... I dunno like 12 dollars?
Which isn't a lot because inflation is getting out of hand.
But it's weird that it happened twice.
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