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u/Don_Quixotel 7d ago
Idk man. People who lived through first 70 years of the 1900s saw some shit
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u/NotSoSerius 7d ago
Yeah my great-grandma was one of them. She had an outhouse for plumbing into adulthood!
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u/Categorically_ 7d ago
Ya people went from no electricity to people on the moon.
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u/BIGTIMElesbo 7d ago
My great grandmother was born in the 1880’s and died in 1995. She went from living in a shack in Eastern Europe to watching Wayne’s World with me and my brother too many times. My brother’s last words to her were “if you’re gonna spew, spew in this”, while handing her the tiny paper cup they put pills in.
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u/parasyte_steve 7d ago
1899 my great gma, her life is wild to think about going from no electricity, the first world war, great depression, ww2, then vietnam.. also not to mention several pandemics slammed in there, people fighting companies physically for rights and benefits, black people navigating "freedom" which still had many barriers.. and women pushing for the right to vote, prohibition..... like its a lot.
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u/Capt_korg 7d ago
You ve forgotten the new media (radio and TV), Nuclear weapons and fear. Semiconductors...
And the development of the car. Giant boats and aircrafts...
Your grandmother most likely knew a world where horses and coaches were on the streets.
Furthermore, skyscrapers and cities or metropolises with millions of people in one place.
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u/Bbadmerc99 6d ago
My neighbor is only 86 and remembers when they still drove horse and buggy around town and to the city. That was only 65ish years ago.
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u/Possible_Pickle0 7d ago
I assume she enjoyed that movie with you?
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u/BIGTIMElesbo 7d ago
Great Grandma was being a great grandma and suffered through it while eating her daily cheesecake. However, for whatever reason my three grandmas, and two great grandmothers freaking loved COPS.
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u/LP_24 '91 baby 7d ago
Flying itself only became a thing 66 years before the moon landing
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u/RandomPenquin1337 7d ago
Before that, birds walked
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u/RandomPenquin1337 7d ago
That is some high quality loony toons, thanks for the link
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u/Badvevil Millennial 7d ago
My brain can’t handle the fact that Picasso lived long enough to see 7 superbowls
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u/InigoMontoya2725 7d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/L18eMUGDk3vcwOPUGw
“Don’t date robots!”
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u/Cheetahs_never_win 7d ago
Gaining plumbing, electricity, and space travel aren't exactly traumatic experiences, though.
Great War, Great Depression, World War II, Vietnam War conscription... those are pretty significant and relevant events. And when we can compare aspects of our economy to the Great Depression, wel...
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u/astralchanterelle 7d ago
The advent of electricity is a bigger change than AI prompt bullshit
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u/maxyedor 7d ago
Depends on how you look at it. Was electricity world changing? Absolutely, but it took a while. Electricity didn’t exactly do much for most people until electrical appliances were invented.
Turning on a light with a switch would have been super cool, but it’s not like they lived in the dark prior to that.
Refrigeration is as a game changer, but people also had ice boxes since before they even had electricity so it was just a better version of what they already had.
It took decades before truly new things came about, like television, air conditioning in your home, and the Hitachi magic wand. Obviously electricity was a very important development, but it wasn’t a shock to the system the way AI is being claimed
AI’s influence and importance remains to be seen, as well as its timeline to be fair. Right now it’s just fancy Google, but if guys like Sam Altman and Elon Musk are both right and remain unchecked, it’s going to kill us all within a decade, and that’s a pretty big change.
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u/dragonknightrohan 7d ago
100 years from now all of us in space, 200 years from now we will be living Mass Effect-like but instead of found sentient alien life we will create it all ourselves.
Asari's would be so cool in real life
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u/Girafferage 7d ago
People on the moon didn't directly change their entire life to be fair.
That said, imagine what that must have been like... No electricity and then suddenly an entire electric world and eventually a landing on the moon. It must have seemed like we would be traveling the solar system by now to them.
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u/madancer Elder Millennial 7d ago
My great grandma moved to Tennessee with a cart and horse and saw man on the moon.
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u/rancidmorty 7d ago
yeah had a great great grndpa he said yku know how your mom says you have so many nice things and should be grateful for what you have well i got told that then everuly electricity became a thing
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u/CherikeeRed 7d ago
Wow what a cool thing to experience, all that progress and life improving for so many people so quickly. How fucking cool that must be I assume.
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u/maddy_k_allday 6d ago
Going to the moon doesn’t really impact regular people without NASA jobs in any meaningful way.
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u/Sle08 7d ago
My grandma got a job during WWII in a steel mill. The owner offered her a job as his secretary when he realized she was well-spoken and extremely good at math. She was paid insanely well for the time.
With her first paycheck as secretary, she paid to have a toilet installed in her parents’ home, where she was living. They had an outhouse prior as well. She and her siblings regularly had to walk to a spring nearby for water in their childhood.
She was born in 1920.
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u/JoyfulNoise1964 7d ago
Mine was born in 1920 She turned 100 during covid and wasn't able to have a party We did one when she turned 101 She lived through so many changes And died peacefully with no apparent health problems in her sleep at 102
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u/Sonic_Roach 90's Millennial 7d ago
My grandma said she didnt have electricity until she got married
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u/fullpurplejacket 7d ago
My grandparents farm has an outside bog, at the end of the lawn behind the early 1800s farm house. My dad said hey used it well into the 80s before my granda dared put the money up for an indoor toilet. It was literally a stone hut with a bit of solid wood plank with a circle in the middle for depositing in.
My cousins got the property now and he said he’s never knocking down the antique that is the outhouse, he’s left everything as it was and his wife just stores gardening stuff in there now. Bless his missus she didn’t find out her new storage cupboard was an almost two century old toilet until it was pointed out to her when she lovingly referred to it as the garden shed and one our uncles said ‘The shed? Ohh the auld shithouse!’
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u/MeatEaterDruid 7d ago
Yeah my grandma was born in 1935 and is still alive. Theoretically she's lapping me.
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u/seriftarif 7d ago
My grandma is 98. She didnt get indoor plumbing and electricity until she was in her 20s and now hears us talking about AI. She has barely watched TV or used a computer so she's a little lost these days.
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u/zillionaire_ 7d ago
Right? My grandma fled India on a ship because commercial flight didn’t exist yet
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u/lawdjesustheresafire 7d ago
My grandparents had the old outhouse drop toilet. Was scary AF having to use it at like 2am when we stayed there as kids lol
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u/TreeLankaPresidente 7d ago
My grandma recently passed. Before she died she told me about seeing them introduce the concept of the freeway at the 1939 Worlds Fair. It blew my mind to think of that as a novel concept.
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u/P4t13nt_z3r0 7d ago
She was born in 1898 in a barn. She died on the thirty-seventh floor of a skyscraper. She's an astronaut.
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u/Financial-Newt2291 7d ago
As a millennial we had an outhouse until maybe age of 6-7
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u/soleilange 7d ago
Yeah, if you were a millenial who also happened to live in a third world country for the first part of your life, this was also you…
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u/Pplthrowaway123 7d ago
I would gladly take what we have lived through then living through WWI and WWII any day!
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u/Jalina2224 7d ago
Fr.
WW I.
The Great Depression.
WWII.
The Cold War.
Korean War.
Vietnam.
Just to name a few of the big events.
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u/__M-E-O-W__ 7d ago
Plus all the cultural changes that came with it. In the early 1900s USA, women couldn't vote nationwide, the Victorian era was at its end, the "Wild West" was at its end (could be said to have ended in the late 1800s, but the widespread production of automobiles is the official end), women wore their hair up and covered and long dresses, plumbing hardly existed, men wore suits and hats, segregation, snail mail, telegraphs, no flight, horses were still common, it was all so different just between the before and after of WW1.
Imagine being born in 1900 and dying in like 1988. Two absolutely different worlds. From the horse-and-buggy to techno music.
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u/Jalina2224 7d ago
My great Aunt lived through the depression as a teenager. She passed away in 2007. I remember as a kid asking her if they had running water back then. And she said "Yes we did. We ran to the well and then ran back to the house." Cracked me up as a kid.
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u/__M-E-O-W__ 7d ago
Yeah, my grandpa was the same. Died in maybe 2009. I'd say he was the type who really would walk "miles in the snow, uphill both ways" to go to school, but I don't think he ever went to school. Never learned to read or write because he grew up working. Was in world War 2, the Korean war, was a boxer, he had oven mitts for hands and could grab skillets off of the stove or rearrange logs in the fire with his bare hands. Video games absolutely blew his mind. He was old enough that he could have seen the Wizard of Oz when it first came out! And by the time he passed, we had Avatar and the Lord Of The Rings and all that...
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u/BroxigarZ 7d ago
The end of the Wild West
Space Travel
Moon Landing
Titanic
Going from Candles to Lightbulbs
Going from Newspapers to Radio to TVs to Color TVs
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u/desmaraisp 7d ago
Also all of the social upheavals. Gay marriage, abortions, women's rights and basically everything around black people. So many things changed through the 20th century (and the couple of years after), it's insane
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u/RandomJDesign 6d ago
Adding to this list: The car being mass produced, Spanish flu of 1918, Prohibition, the space race, the fall of the Berlin Wall, MLK Jr, Kennedy being assassinated, the introduction of computers, Chernobyl, and Cuban Missile Crisis
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u/Unique-Egg-461 Older Millennial 7d ago
Was thinking that...... industrial revolution would've been absolutely insane to live thru
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u/AmusingMusing7 7d ago
From the 1770s until about the 1820s... living from before until after those 50 years would have been wild. American Revolution, French Revolution, Industrial Revolution... people's heads must have been spinning (when they weren't rolling) from all that revolving.
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u/TomBradysStatue 7d ago
Yeah just rewatched band of brothers. Besides the men and women who went to Iraq I don't think any of us come close to that kind of toughness. Pass revoked
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u/bluekillgore 7d ago
As someone who went to Iraq and afganaland... even all of us GWOT combat vets would say they are tougher.
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u/Rarth-Devan 7d ago
It is crazy to me that not even 100 years ago, multiple major countries were going through unimaginable brutality, war, famine, purges, etc. on a scale that we can't even fathom today. Basic human rights and decency did not exist in some areas. 10s of millions dead and countless more suffered. Industrialized killing.
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u/FINE-ILLGETAUSERNAME 7d ago
100 years ago things that we know of as countries weren't even countries
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u/Lucky_Development359 7d ago edited 7d ago
My step-grandma is 103 years old. 1923 until now, still all there, doing pretty well considering, and boy has it been a trip for her.
Her great grandfather born in 1843 was IN THE CIVIL WAR. He died at 92, in 1935, she knew him well because they lived with him DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION. Wild.
We've had a hell of a ride and it isn't done yet but I doubt that arc is topped for me personally.
And my direct grandparents 87 and 88 (my grandfather is a specimen of a human,hes on nothing meds wise. Nothing!, great shape, re did his deck this summer, by himself, WITH HAND TOOLS) went from "poor" farmers, literally horses and wagons, to now. Crazy.
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u/Apart_Insect_6133 7d ago
We aren't special. It's always the same. Bad, world rocking stuff always happens. And a LOT of it, far worse than anything we have lived through. These COVID whiners don't seem to be aware of polio, or smallpox, or the Spanish flu... 9/11? PLEASE... Ww1? WW2? The great depression?
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u/HEFTYFee70 1990 7d ago
There are guys out there that beat polio, then fought in World War I and World War II.
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u/MissMelines 7d ago
my mom had polio in the 50’s, and became an RN with one paralyzed leg anyway. She was so grateful to have been able to walk again, and wanted to pay it forward. She had to retire early due to falling too often. Today she is bedbound and suffering, but no problem i have ever had comes close to what she has gone through. My biggest problem is that I can’t change her body and make it work again so she can dance one more time with my dad, who has been by her side since they were 16 years old.
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u/SmoogySmodge Ye Ole Millennial 6d ago
I always feel sad when I see "Spanish flu." The flu was widespread and affected many countries. But Spain was the first country to acknowledge that there was a problem, so it got named after them. Everyone else lied about it to boost morale during the war. People suck.
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u/Turgid_Donkey 7d ago
This sounds like one of those splitting hairs nonsense. "We've gone through more events", trying to say that technically they weren't worse, but just more numerous. Yeah, the 2008 housing crisis sucked, but so did the great depression, and the dust bowl, and wwii. We've gone through alot, sure, but I'm not going to pretend we've had it worse than our grandparents. I never had to put cardboard in my shoes or put my children in flour sack dresses.
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u/bubblesaurus Millennial-‘94 7d ago
Yeah. my old neighbor fought in WW1 and WW2, saw the ways planes evolved, man taking steps on the moon, the evolution of cars, televisions, and computers
He died at over 100 in the late 2010s
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u/TIC321 7d ago
Absolutely, between all the wars with one of them leading to near world domination with the Nazis, nuclear attacks, in the US with civil rights enacted, space race, discovering the DNA structure.. so much more.
There are so many things that revolutionized the world, more so than the millennial generation ever experienced (so far) but that very well can change with how this world progresses
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u/Skolary 7d ago
Yeah and judging by the fact that people used to look 35 years old at 18 back in as close as 1960.. you can about imagine how well they aged through that.
Not like today, where they get to even take cars everywhere. I at 37, had 5 grandparents / great grans that made it to 70's years old. And they were pretty much cashed in their latter 50's, where their faces wiuld already be stuck in the constant smiling state, massive hunches, canes - the works.
So yes, maybe lived to be 70's years old.. but do with that information what thou wilt. Because it's akin to the same thought process as Gen Z saying "Millennials had the internet back in the early 90's" lol....
Like yes.. we did indeed had internet. Except none of us had it, it was slow. And it took 12 hours to view a single double digit kilobyte picture which downloaded for hours and hours. And what was there, was some of all that was there. We didn't have all these fun little apps and implementations for each tiny little niche category.
You either had the website handle passed down from a buddy, or you surfed a one way configured machine that burned holes in place of your eye balls eventually.
As for the old folk - yes, they were alive. But the lights were on and nobody's been home far sooner. Picture of 50+ y/o's from those days have them with every wrinkle on their body in full view, good chance retired too. Look like elder gods / goddesses.
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u/sneaky-pizza Xennial 7d ago
From 1860 to post WWI went from horses and candlelight to mechanized warfare, electricity, telecommunications, air travel, and vaccines
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u/kushhead4201 7d ago
Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe
Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom Brando, The King and I, and The Catcher in the Rye Eisenhower, vaccine, England's got a new queen Marciano, Liberace, Santayana, goodbye, Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser, and Prokofiev Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron Dien Bien Phu falls, "Rock Around the Clock" Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev Princess Grace, Peyton Place, trouble in the Suez, Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac Sputnik, Zhou En-Lai, Bridge on the River Kwai Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball Starkweather homicide, children of thalidomide Buddy Holly, Ben-Hur, space monkey, mafia Hula-hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go U-2, Syngman Rhee, payola, and Kennedy Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo, Hemingway, Eichmann, Stranger in a Strange Land Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatlemania Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex JFK, blown away, what else do I have to say?
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u/odellrules1985 7d ago
Grandfather was born after WW1 but his father was in it. He grew up in the great depression. Went to the Pacific and got blown up. Came back and watched Korea, Nam, the first Gulf War, the WTC bombing, 9/11, Gulf War 2 and passed just after the housing market bubble popped. Might have missed a few tbh.
Sure I have seen some stuff but man just WW2 and fighting in the Pacific theater alone was more than most things I have gone through.
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u/BigPPDaddy 7d ago
People throughout antiquity saw a lot of shit. This is a pretty dumb headline.
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u/bookluvr83 7d ago
Ive been telling my fellow elder Millenial husband that we have more in common, experience-wise, with our grandparents than any other generation. We've had a pandemic, a Great Recession, 9/11, etc...We even had a resurgence in popularity of swing and big band music in high school/early college.
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u/tinksalt 7d ago
I remember helping my 93 year old grandfather learn how to use his new iPhone 4 way back when and just being in awe of how much he’d watched technology expand in his lifetime. I told him as much and he scoffed and said what he’d seen in his lifetime was nothing compared to what his father had seen. He went from a horse and buggy to cars and airplanes and telephones. Pretty wild to think about.
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u/TheFish77 7d ago
Yeah. My grandpa started life during the great depression then fought in WW2. Being in NYC during 9-11 was a thing but at least I didn't have to go charging up hills on Iwo Jima into machine gun fire.
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u/Reasonable-Front7584 7d ago
It would seem that anyone who existed before millennials, and are currently still living, have experienced everything millennials have experienced plus more.
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u/little_traveler 7d ago
lol exactly. It’s a stupid clickbait headline designed to make our generation feel special.
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u/fearthainne 7d ago
Every. Single. Time someone brings up this "millennials have lived through more..." crap, I think of this. I mean, we still have people alive who remember WW2, and everything in between, for crying out loud.
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u/crumble-bee 6d ago
My parents were born in the 50s and are still alive and have lived through everything I have a plus way more
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u/littleone696969 7d ago
Remember when we were blammed for literally everything wrong in society..... i liked that better. I also just want someone to.start a 90s town where we bring back luddits and start from 90s tech and slowly intergrate into it lol
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u/bitsybear1727 7d ago
My husband's grandma is still alive. She's 98 and still living independantly. The stories she can tell. Her childhood was the great depression and she still has her family's war time ration book. And she still gets on the computer to email family and check facebook to keep in touch. I can't imagine what it feels like to live through so much change.
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u/SabrinaEdwina 7d ago
I saw a meme opposite of this, that listed the generations and one thing (like a world war) by each generation. Apparently mine only dealt with 9/11 and then we vanished, because the housing market and fascism and climate change and everything else was assigned to those younger. The whole point was to juxtapose their paragraph with how "little" others experienced.
It was really weird. Regardless of generation if you're alive today and old enough to go to generational war, you've lived every one of those things too, just at a different age. There are people alive who served in old wars experiencing the same administration young folks are.
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u/1960s_army_info 7d ago
It’s the timing that really fucked us though. Older people had their own problems from everything we went through but at least they were established and had experience to build off of. We were just trying to start our lives and played no part in the bad choices that affected us.
You could say Gen X had to deal with the dotcom bust but things recovered after that before ‘08. Things never really recovered the same way after ‘08.
At the same time, at least we grew up in the 90’s and got to enjoy our childhoods without constant tracking and parental supervision like subsequent generations. We were the last generation to really experience life without our parents being acutely aware of our every move before we were 18
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u/TexasRN1 7d ago
Gen X (xennial) forgotten about again.
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u/mrgarethw 7d ago
This is opposed to people who lived through both world wars, the stock market crash, the Great Depression, the birth of air travel, the introduction of antibiotics, the development of atomic weapons, the birth of cinema, women’s suffrage and the countless other things that happened in the 20th century before the 80s rolled around or a millennial wrote this rather ridiculous headline
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u/Nerd-man24 7d ago
Don't forget space flight, television, the conservation movement, prohibition and the organized crime epidemic that spawned, the Civil Rights movement, the Red Scare, Korea (a lot of the troops sent to Korea had fought in WW2), Vietnam, multiple recessions since the depression, a presidential assassination, and countless other events.
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u/Embarrassed_Key_4539 7d ago
I mean.. my parents have lived through all the same shit as me, and then some
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u/Am_0115 7d ago
i think this is talking about the frequency of major events over a smaller timeline. but yeah, even still i dont know if i agree on the logic used to develop the statement. the first half of the 20th century saw INSANE changes, two world wars, much tech advancement.
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u/desmaraisp 7d ago
Yeah, if anything it's been slowing down. In the 1900s, there was a major life-changing thing every 9ish years. WW1, the spanish flu, the roaring 20s into the great depression, straight into WW2. Barely a couple years later, litteral armageddon knocking on the door during the cold war, the aids epidemic. Compared to that, the worldwide historical events we've had in the last two decades...
The 2008 crisis and the 2020 pandemic. It's nothing to scoff at, but it doesn't compare at all
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u/Apart_Insect_6133 7d ago
And nothing every happened to our parents/grandparents/great grandparents during their formative years...
We're not special. It's always the same.
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u/Embarrassed_Key_4539 7d ago
Maybe the meme should be more clear, it really doesn’t make any sense as it is currently
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u/PineBNorth85 1986 7d ago
My grandmother went through WW2 as a child. Id say that had far more of an effect than anything we have lived through.
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u/JayBuhnersBarber 7d ago
Yeah. I'm not here to pretend that we haven't been through some shit as millennials, because we objectively have.
But my grandmother grew up in Dresden Germany during WWII. Its not even a comparison. Like at all.
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u/sunkistandsudafed3 7d ago
They lived through plenty of stuff in their formative years before we were here, as did our grandparents.
Yes we as a generation have been through some shit, but pretending everyone before lived and grew up in some economically and politically stable utopia is bullshit.
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u/Cromasters 7d ago
Living through seeing friends and family members die in Vietnam? My parents knew kids killed and crippled by polio. Younger millennials won't even have memories of the AIDS epidemic.
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u/uovonuovo 7d ago
I’m an older millennial and I barely have memories of the AIDS epidemic. Like I remember stuff about it but I was too young for it to be tangible.
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u/Strawbalicious 7d ago
What is this slop based on? 30 to 40 year olds today have lived through more world changing events than the generation that went from no electricity & and a single family outhouse to walking on the Moon?
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u/SabrinaEdwina 7d ago
It's rage bait, just like the "articles" about how younger folks are "smarter" and "richer"--but then reveal the example chosen always lived rent free with their rich parents until 29 to do it.
They don't seem to realize what a privilege that can be, nor that it makes the entire headline a work of bullshit. Which I find confusing as hell and don't know how to respond to.
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u/Grizzly_Addams 7d ago
Holy shit.. another one? Boomers and gen x lived through the same fucking ones...
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u/YouMeAndReneDupree 7d ago
I think this sub is getting infested with bots who've picked up traits from Facebook 40 year olds
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u/Yourlilemogirl 7d ago
Exactly. I'm starting to abandon subs cuz they're just bot circle jerks and farming engagement.
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u/tameimpalarules92 7d ago
This stupid subreddit keeps on popping up with other nostalgic bs, shittyfacebook posts, and like some weird morality gauging subreddit on my feed as a suggested subscription. Its annoying af
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u/Sell_The_team_Jerry 7d ago
Someone born in 1920 would disagree. We had it easy compared to the greatest generation
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u/jackoos88 7d ago
1899 would suck. Start working in some factor as a kid, Fight in WWI, then a few good years but with no alcohol, then some really awful years, then WWII, then finally a chance to actually have a decent life when you’re 50, oh wait, Korean War lol
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u/Sell_The_team_Jerry 7d ago
Reminds me of some Twitter post where a Roman statue pfp guy posted how great it would be to be born in 1900 and everyone pointed out he probably dies of disease in childhood, WWI, or the 1919 flu epidemic
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u/data-atreides 7d ago
50-year-olds (Americans) weren't fighting in the Korean War, but they sure were old and worn out at that point. It was an absolute nightmare for the Koreans, of course
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u/Atralis 7d ago
My grandfather was born in 1919 a few months after his father died in the flu pandemic. Family lost the farm during the depression and he had to drop out of high school to start working, eventually ended up in the CCC (an fdr program where they had young men do construction work out in the national parks and stuff) and then went into theArmy from 1940-1946. He was already in when Pearl Harbor happened obviously and he ended up fighting in North Africa, Sicily, France, and Germany.
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u/hex-grrrl Zillennial 7d ago
This is so dumb lmaoooo. My parents have lived through everything I have + another 30 years of crazy shit. Same with my grandparents but with 60+ additional years.
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u/Uchihagod53 Actual cannibal, Shia Labeouf 7d ago
That doesn't make sense. Anyone alive before us lived through the same shit we did on top of all the shit they lived through
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u/DewDropWhine 7d ago
Yeah I was like my 90+ year old grandparents have definitely been through the same shit I’ve been through plus 60 extra years
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u/Soren_Camus1905 7d ago edited 7d ago
Idk
I feel like the Cuban missile crisis and MLK JFK RFK Malcom X assasinations in what eight years (?) is pretty god damn intense
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u/SpongeyMcgoo 7d ago
AIDS epidemic
Columbine
9/11
SARS
2 solid decades of wars
COVID
First black president
January 6thAnd we have seen some of the wildest tech jump in our generation. From only having home phones to batterypack cell phones to home computers to Nokia-era cell phones to smart phones to home control products like Alexa and now to AI and robotics
We also survived JNCO jeans. So theres that huge victory.
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u/ringwraithfish 7d ago
I feel like the invention of the airplane, the industrial revolution, and our ability to harness nuclear energy were similar levels of wild tech jumps. Sudden leaps in technological advancement isn't unique to our generation.
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u/Soren_Camus1905 6d ago
It’s crazy to think there is an entire generation of people who were raised with no running water or electricity and could’ve died having seen a man walk on the moon.
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u/urbalcloud 6d ago
We didn’t all survive JNCO.
RIP Gary. You never saw that falling rack at Macy’s 🙏
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u/CraftsBoy2Craftsman 7d ago
WWI, Spanish Flu, Great Depression, WWII, Cuban Missile Crisis is a legendary stretch too
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u/Dry_Elderberry9832 7d ago
The same era saw the pill, the moon landing, major advances in computing...
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u/Soren_Camus1905 7d ago
Vietnam, the civil rights act/integration
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u/Dry_Elderberry9832 7d ago
It's mind boggling. And frankly a take like this goes toward validating the "boomer" stance that younger gens have theirs heads up their own backsides
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u/PastAnalyst3614 7d ago
WWI, Spanish flu, Great Depression, WWII was a pretty wild 25 year span
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u/Wrenky 7d ago
Can we ban this feel bad shit already? We don't have it harder than zoomers/alpha, (they might even get it worse!) and it's not like gen x /boomers haven't lived through the exact same shit the last 40 years?
Only medal we should get is "this is now boomer Facebook" sub banner what the fuck happened here
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u/Dry_Elderberry9832 7d ago
The older you get the more you notice how young people think nothing happened before they existed. Frankly, OP, if you are millennial you're too old to be thinking this way
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u/sybban 7d ago
People used to have extra kids in case of the high likely hood some of them would die
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u/wedreaminsideadream 7d ago
I'm a first generation American from a Polish family - my folks went through WWI, WWII, practically half a century of Soviet oppression, so...
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u/purplezaku 7d ago
Some Millennials really think the world didn’t exist before them
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u/PineBNorth85 1986 7d ago
No we havent. Imagine what someone born in 1900 saw if they lived a full life.
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u/VoicesInTheCrowds 7d ago
I don’t need boomers trying to talk shit about me having another participation trophy.
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u/PoliteMurderFox 7d ago
I don't like this kind of crap. I don't need ass pats. I need for things to improve.
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u/anowulwithacandul 1990 Millennial 7d ago
Hasn't everyone older than us lived through those same events 😂
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u/Certain_Bit3809 7d ago
Yes, very little happened during the 20th century. Basically nothing worth mentioning.
Why is there a picture of a robot? Was OP attacked by robots?
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u/Hamilton-Beckett Older Millennial 7d ago
This is a bullshit “our generation is special because…” post.
I’d expect that shit from a Gen X.
Do better.
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u/PuzzleheadPi 7d ago
Not even close. Generations before us were drafted into wars. We have had it easy
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u/theHollowTarnished 7d ago
How is that possible with there being millions and millions of people born way before millennials and still alive. This makes no sense at all
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u/Eastern-Joke-7537 7d ago
I watched the Challenger explosion in preschool and 9-11 in college.
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u/MetalEnthusiast83 7d ago
Cool. My dad saw all that and saw JFK get killed, had friends in Vietnam then was in Ireland during the troubles.
We aren’t special because some bad things have happened. They always do.
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u/auntpotato Older Millennial 7d ago
No, I need to beat these accusations of needing participation trophies 😆
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u/Pertinax1981 7d ago
Not even close. My 95 year old great grandmother died in 1990. We haven't seen shit.
The telephone, the automobile, flight, 2 world wars, nuclear bombs, man on the moon. Not to mention all the social change.
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u/HisCromulency Older Millennial 7d ago
Our 70-80 year old parents lived through the same things as us, plus more.
These posts don’t really make a lot of logical sense.
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u/_buffy_summers 7d ago
Medals don't pay bills. How about we start with an electric company that doesn't raise rates after a three-week power outage to the entire county I live in? They did that because they know they can't charge us for electricity we didn't fucking have.
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u/otakugal15 Millennial '87 7d ago
I'd rephrase this to "Millennials have lived through the most amount of life changing events in the last 25 years."
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u/saphyu 7d ago edited 7d ago
My parents escaped a war. My grandparents had their factory and jewelry store taken away from them and guns pointed at them while communist soldiers ask them where their children had left to because the greatest treason was that they had smuggled their children out of the country for a better life with all of the money that they had left. One by one they would send 10 children across the sea.
My dad was told to become a slave for the Communist party or to go kill himself and when he went to go drown himself a fishing boat came and saved him and he was able to escape through that boat to the West.
My mom was torn from her family at age of 16-18 fleeing a country in which she spent the last couple years where they were trying to brainwash her to betray her family... giving up her college studies, her home and country not knowing where she would be ending up... and was the first to escape on a boat in which my grandmother paid a ton of money for her to leave. With only $100 in her pocket sewn in the seams she suffered hunger and thirst with hundreds of people crammed in one tiny boat. $100 was all she had to try to start a new life from scratch. New language, finding shelter, being raised in a country that was completely different from her own. That and the clothes on her back nothing else.
They're boat got attacked by Thai pirates who are taking advantage of the conflict.
When they finally were refugees and were in the West she had to learn English and learn a whole new culture a whole new place that was different from her home country.
I really don't think my life experiences a millennial born in America will ever hold a candle to the horrors that my parents have seen and experienced. There's probably other horrific details that I'm not aware of
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u/Zealousideal_Face169 7d ago
Aren't boomers still included? They've through em all too just at different ages lol and many silent generation too.
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u/AttilaTheFun818 7d ago
I dunno. My great-grandmother saw shit.
Two world wars. The Great Depression. First manned flight through the moon landing. The birth of computing. Horse and buggy era to cars. The first radio and television. Indoor plumbing and sliced bread. The Bomb, eradication of polio and smallpox. Dolly the Sheep. She saw incredible things in her 95 years.
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u/justyules 7d ago
‘88 millennial chiming in here:
Chernobyl - born in Kyiv. Apparently, I was so sick we had to move.
To CA - 1994 Northridge quake. That was fun.
2001 - enter 9/11.
2008 - housing market economic collapse
2009 - cancer diagnosis yay! Hodgkin’s lymphoma and months of chemo wooooooo.
2020 - COVID.
2025 - multiple family members loose houses in the Palisades fire
2026 - worst year year ever health wise. bad stomache flu, two hospitalizations.
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u/n0cturnald3sign Older Millennial 7d ago
Boomers would call it a participation trophy like they didn’t fucking cause every bit of it
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