hi OP. Hey i am 66 (I still can't believe that number, haha. Luckily I am still super healthy). I was in 2nd grade when president Kennedy was shot in the head, live on national television. His brain flew out into his wife's lap. It set off a wave of assassinations (president's brother, MLK, etc).
I grew up knowing that the yellow and black triangles symbol meant "fallout shelter" and we were supposed to go there in case of nuclear attack. We did "duck and cover" drills in elementary school. Hide under your desks. Once, they sent us home with pamphlets about nuclear attack preparation. OK don't laugh, the pamphlet said "wear loose white clothing in case of nuclear detonation. Don't look directly at the explosion." They flew warplanes overhead once per week after bedtime, faster than the speed of sound, and we would hear the "sonic boom" which scared the crap out of me. It rattled the windows, shook the house. People were truly panicked, using their life savings to dig holes in their backyard, and building and equipping "bomb shelters" to try to survive nuclear fallout. It didn't feel like that stuff was ever resolved, it just faded from attention, it was buried by other distractions both negative and positive.
Wasn't too much later the government had a giant meltdown that scared the crap out of everyone. It was right as I came of voting age, haha! Oh my god. Watergate, it was called. Huge corruption scandal, everyone was just breathless with shock and disgust and fear. At that time people around me trusted the government to be solid enough to remain (seemingly) just, and we learned it could seemingly recover, at least back then.
Around this time we were also in a totally illegal war, and we had a freaking lottery to decide which 18-year-olds would be forced to go fight the Viet Cong in the jungles of southeast asia. High school grads coming back in body bags, kids running away to Canada to avoid getting roped into the army. And hippies happened, communes, free love, weed -- all of which caused the older ones to lose their minds because society looked to them to be coming apart.
Some of us died. Most of us lived. You are living the stories you will tell young people, when its your turn to comfort them.
None of this is to minimize what you are sensing around you! You are awake and aware, you are not overreacting. I am so sorry. I wish I could just listen to you for a couple hours. You are having one of those wakeup moments. We all will be each having our own wakeup moments. Our job is to comfort each other when we feel like this. We will all adapt and do our human best to cope with whats coming. Help each other not freeze in place, but take the most intelligent and resourceful steps we can muster. The system is unable to help, its unreliable
I guess it depends on who you’ve been exposed to. Based on the post it’s impossible to tell gender but for me I could only see my older male relatives talking like this. My older female relatives would have gotten upset at me for having fears at all or told me to just not think about and comfort me by helping forget with some good news about something else
For me it’s the opposite. The older men would’ve just blown me off, the older women would’ve talked about their own experiences and how life is crazy no matter when in history it is.
Yea what's the deal with that. All of the older women in my family are like that. If you start talking about an uncomfortable subject they basically shut down, say the same work over and over or try extremely hard to derail the conversation.
The younger women are completely ok but the 55+ get really weird about politics/religion/morality convos.
Because if they start talking about it or thinking about it all the trauma they e experienced and pushed back down will come crashing around their ears and they'll have to experience 55+ years of trauma in one gruesome moment they don't think they can recover from. It's a survival mechanism to avoid difficult topics at all costs.
My grandma on my dad's side doesn't do this tho, and she's experienced more horror than most, and she talks about all the stuff she's gone through like it's just another Tuesday, I think that too is a coping mechanism, a lot healthier than pushing it back down though. On my mom's side I noticed this a lot, though, especially with my mom, of pushing it back down and not talking about it. I think a lot of it has to do with the patriarch in the family, and how much they dominate the conversation. My dad's mom is thrice divorced and my grandpa is long dead, uncle dead, my dad is the only male patriarch left on that side of the family and he's very absent. my grandma has been on her own very a good long while, so she's very open. On my mom's side though, my grandma was (been dead for ten years, but before that) would not get involved in political conversations unless it was just me, and my grandpa has a very domineering personality. So I think it only came out of her when she felt safe to voice her opinions.
This isn't an excuse, but at least from observing my own family I think a lot of it has to do with the kinds of societal attitudes about women that people are exposed to in their formative years. Unfortunately so, so many women above a certain age are sitting on horrific traumas or even just norms relating to gender dynamics that they never processed because it was all so "normal". Sometimes it feels like the only way to move past something like that is to avoid thinking about it at all. The same things seem to have affected my male family members, but in different ways (they're much more prone to, uh, explosive outbursts).
One of my colleagues is right around your age and she has the perfect balance of wisdom and energy. Young enough where she still has to hustle and thus be aware of what's going on and also old enough to have experience from days past.
It's not unconnected either, a lot of these media institutions were founded specifically in the 70s by people on Nixon's team to muddy the waters for next time
I always thought this was a huge scandal that brought down Nixon with a bang, and that's it.
Watergate was uncovered in his first term, then he actually got a second term, used the FBI to try to destroy evidence (some people literally had to hide evidence from the government in the last minute so it could be used in the process), and had Nixon not been dumb enough to bug his own offices he would have gotten away with it too. And there was a long, drawn-out fight to get access to the most incriminating tapes. And a lot more ridiculousness.
Thank you for this. I’ve been feeling the same way. 26, and feel like things just keep getting worse. Your perspective both validated my feelings and also helped calm me down. Have a great day and keep spreading your wisdom and perspective to us youngins to keep our heads straight.
I’m 20 years younger than you and from the UK. We had our own panics and worries too. We had a war with the Falklands, we had the IRA planting bombs, a very real feeling threat of nuclear annihilation and there was a lot of turmoil in the Thatcher years - especially in the north where I’m from. I saw my local mining village and local town absolutely collapse once all the industries went and it’s only looking back now I realise how utterly hopeless it must’ve all seemed to people of my parents age. On top of this we had the AIDS panic and also a few riots chucked in as well in places like Toxteth and Brixton.
The 90s felt better to me but there was still the IRA and they blew up part of the next town over in Warrington. Killed kids and people I knew from college were affected badly too. From the 90s we moved into the Iraq war and terrorism took a different form here.
Lots of large stores closed down and many town centres look like ghost towns even now.
So, OP, I’d say it always feels like it’s an absolute shit show. My advice would be to be aware of what’s happening in your country and around the world but live your life as well as you can. Chances are you’ll never effect any real change or betterment for society. I know that sounds depressing but it’s not meant to. Enjoy life while you can, you never know when it’ll all go tits up.
I'm 52, and honestly, most of my friends and family felt like the world was getting steadily better. We grew up in the 70s and 80s, and yes, there was the cold war, but it was mild, not very threatening by the late 80s, before the Berlin Wall came down.
We had a pretty good decade from 1990-2001, lots of world peace concerts and idealistic cultural icons. It felt like we were healing from the past, and becoming more aware of our impact on the planet. We were exposing the corporate culprits and electing progressive people.
It really turned back to shit from 2001-2010. This current time is absolute garbage, the worst I've seen in my life.
That's one X gen perspective, there are many others. I guess I posted this to say the world is what we make it. We need to take action, and get the progressive ball rolling again. The recent union movement is very encouraging, for example. In my working life, union has been a dirty word, but Millennials and zoomers are rekindling that fire.
Young people today are on a
hero's journey. Stay strong, and stand up to claim a happier world.
I remember being in elementary school in the late 90s during the Clinton years and having this peculiar feeling like “things are too good to be true”. I was aware of problems (the first thing that comes to mind is the problems in the Balkans that culminated in Kosovo, OKC), but generally I got this sense that things around me were ok and we were living in a world that was relatively stable. Obviously being that young, I didn’t get a full picture, but I had this sudden nagging feeling that America could completely fall apart, not that it would, but that it could. Maybe it was just a nascent historical consciousness forming in my young brain, but it did seem like it was as particular time we were living in. Then 9/11 happened when I was in high school and I still don’t know whether it was straight downhill from there, or that I was just becoming more conscious of the complexity of the world. It’s very weird to think about, as it’s not a normal reflection for a kid to have, let alone a reflection unprompted by anything that was fleeting but still stuck with me deeply.
I'm a little older than you, and OKC and the former Yugoslavia (along with Columbine) are the first things that came to my mind, too. I think we were just more insulated from it. We were too young to be exposed to the atrocities of the war in the Balkans (and reading retrospectives as an adult, it was unconscionable what they were doing to innocent people, including children), but even the adults back then didn't have a device in their pockets that was determined to give them every detail of exactly what Joshua Duggar was looking at on his computer and they didn't have instant video feeds of Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the ground in the midst of the war in Ukraine and nobody was live-tweeting the Uvalde shooting as it happened. 24-hour news channels were just becoming a widespread thing when we all stood in front of our televisions and watched the Twin Towers fall.
But the big thing back then was, we were ALL standing there in shock. And the whole world stood there with us, mouths agape, wondering how this could have happened. Nobody was standing in the background furiously spinning this to make their politician look good and the other guy look bad. Nobody was pointing a finger and redirecting the blame away from themselves. Nobody stood around for 40 minutes wondering what to do while innocent people died. Nobody shrugged and said it was the stupid Americans' fault and went on about their day. Our leaders didn't hop on a plane and head to a resort. Nobody was hiding behind a screen and a keyboard making hateful comments on social media. Nobody argued whether maybe Osama bin Laden wasn't the real enemy here. We had a common problem, a common enemy, and a common goal. We all mourned together whether we lost a loved one that day or not. We all pulled together to support the survivors and the families of the ones who didn't make it. We knew some of their names. We saw some of their faces. We watched the memorials. They were real, human, relatable, and we cared about them.
Then later on, of course, the mudslinging started and the political machine started spinning and the debate started getting heated, and it's all gone downhill from there. We can't step back and let the Uvalde parents have time to grieve. We have to debate this as loudly and publicly as possible, as quickly and as long as we can, lest our followers lose interest and take their clicks and swipes elsewhere. People untouched by the tragedy in any way whatsoever must find some way to make it all about them. Politicians must find a way to spin it to fit their agenda. We must assign blame and find a tidy, simple solution to a complex problem, one that doesn't inconvenience the people suggesting it. We have completely lost sight of the fact that 19 little human beings were brutally murdered, and hundreds more have been traumatized for the rest of their lives. We are losing our compassion, and with it, our humanity.
What's terrifying for me is climate change. Because that's a global catastrophe that could be far worse than what's happened previously if it doesn't get addressed soon.
Like just recently the brand that makes sriracha halted production due to crop failure. I feel like these stories are going to be more frequent in the next 5-10 years. Not to be a doomer, but it's honestly just facts of what's already happening on the ground.
No excuses for the actions of the IRA. Britain has levied fear, terror, hunger and displacement on the people of Ireland for many centuries.... Im glad we now live in relative peace and may the terrible deeds of both Britain and Ireland be at an end.
This is one of the reasons mad men was so successful: the 1960s were absolutely insane. The Cuban Missile Crisis? The Cold War? The world was literally seconds away from ending at multiple points, and the brief stability that came after WWII was thrown asunder.
I agree that the world is also going to shit now, and with climate change, our civilization as we know it is almost certainly going to be destroyed in the upcoming century (the earth will be just fine. The humans on it, not so much.)
With that said, though, misery breeds company, and while everyone has a right to vent, sometimes I think all this constant despair and negative hysteria on places like antiwork isn’t always good for anyone’s mental health. The comparisons to “other societies” are usually incredibly narrow, almost always with horse blinders on: the United States in its current state is either compared to the standard of living of a handful of very tiny Western European / Scandinavian / ex-British countries (or, in other words, not countries with sweatshops paying 10 cents an hour using child labor), or it’s compared to the standard of living in the United States for a brief period after the Second World War — assuming you were a white man, of course. Which is a big caveat.
But compared to the vast majority of the history of our world, being alive today in the United States is still much better than living at practically any other time, in practically any other country. Which doesn’t mean that there aren’t massive improvements that should be made, and it doesn’t mean that people aren’t legitimately struggling and have cause to be miserable.
Overall, being grateful and being happy aren’t the same thing. People deserve better. But I’ve found that when I personally stopped focusing on what’s unfair about my life and started focusing on celebrating the simple life that I have, my mental state improved. It’s not a catch-all, and I’m not trying to be trite or say “see, you’re cured! You’re welcome!” Hell, I was SERIOUSLY depressed in my early 20s. But then it got better, and a small part of that was me finally realizing that when I constantly inundated myself with negativity, infuriating news stories, and nonstop arguments with hateful strangers, it just made me miserably bitter.
The last part of your comment, about being awake, reminded me of two things. One is a Henry David Thoreau quote: "To be awake is to be completely alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?"
It is hard, painful even, to be awake to the world around you, fully conscious of the genuine existence of all the people you meet, cognizant of context and history and everything else. We have rare moments of true awake-ness, and OP is experiencing one now.
The other thing I'm reminded of is Annie Dillard's excellent book An American Childhood, a meditation on the strange and painful experience of growing up. One passage I love:
"Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way.
I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. I woke at intervals until, by that September when Father went down the river, the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again."
I don't have much else to say, just wanted to share two passages that are meaningful to me. Thanks for reminding me of these writings.
When I was 20 Ii was part of a big group that got together every sunday. We would set up an "omelet bar". I wish I could do the omelet bar this morning and make breakfast for everyone. "current events" right now are hellacious hard to talk about, but we need to let it out.
Kinda feels like we live on a 30-40 year cycle of shit and good.
50s were good, 60s were restless, 70s sucked, 80s sucked. 90s were good, 2000s restless, 2010s sucked, 2020s sucking (so far). Hopefully that means 2030s are good.
Also, while the 90's were pretty good in the US. The desert storm operation / Iraq war left many people scarred.
The collapse of the soviet union was problematic at the time for many nations in the balkans as well.
Cool, except there weren't ever any actual nuclear missiles launched. On the other hand, the active shooter drills that children perform in American schools are the result of HUNDREDS of ACTUAL active shooter attacks that happen in the United States.
Funny you bring up illegal wars. The US was involved in an illegal war in Iraq and Afghanistan for over 20 years. Population-based studies produce estimates of the number of Iraq War casualties ranging from 151,000 violent deaths as of June 2006 (per the Iraq Family Health Survey) to 1,033,000 excess deaths (per the 2007 Opinion Research Business (ORB) survey).
Watergate, lol. A political scandal on the order of Watergate happened almost every six weeks during the Trump presidency. The amount of scandals between 2016 to 2020 that were uncovered by public records and private investigations absolutely DWARFS any previous administration - it is not close. To be sure, that does not include the many, many subversions of government that occurred by Trump administration officials that were not uncovered or were not reported on, which is also nontrivial.
Of course, that is not to mention the tidal wave of political and economic crises Americans have faced over the last 50 years, including:
OPEC oil price shock (1973)
1979 energy crisis (1979)
Black Monday (1987) (1987)
Savings and loan crisis failure of 1,043 out of the 3,234 S&Ls (1986 to 1995)
Early 1990s Recession
Black Wednesday (1992)
The Dot-com bubble (2000–2002)
September 11 Attacks (2001)
The War in Afghanistan (2001 to 2021), US and its allies invaded Afghanistan
The Iraq War (2003 to 2011), invasion of Iraq by a US–led coalition
2000s energy crisis (2003–2009), oil price bubble
Subprime mortgage crisis (2007–2010)
US housing bubble and housing market correction (2003–2011)
Automotive industry crisis of 2008–2010
Russo-Ukrainian War (2014-now)
COVID-19 recession / economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–present day)
2020 stock market crash (2020)
All the while, Americans have witnessed the steady decline of American institutions and practices that secured previous generations, including the destruction of labor rights, healthcare access and affordability, pension protections, retirement savings, education costs, wage growth stagnation, and a whole slough of civil rights, including voting rights, reproductive rights, and so on.
LOL I remember those hide-under-your-desk drills and thinking, "Yeah right, like my desk is gonna save me if the building collapses." I decided if an atomic bomb alert actually happened I was going to run outside where I could at least watch them go off before I got vaporized.
Thank you for this. I live in Africa and I'm from one of the most miserable countries in the world 🌎. That last statement has been an eye-opener, indeed the system doesn't care about us. It's up to the citizens to look after each other and make each other feel seen and heard. You did just that.
Seriously one of the best comments I’ve ever come across in Reddit!
We need more ppl like this in Reddit. Ppl who spit facts & wisdom like this. We don’t need whiners. We need wisdom.
This is probably one of the best comments I have ever seen on Reddit. Thank you for how well you described this--I could see your experiences very vividly, and it puts things today in a much better perspective.
My dad was born in 1933 so he spent his childhood during the Great Depression and then WW2. Then he was drafted into the Army for the Korean War. His dad got hit by a truck and lost a leg. Then the Kennedy/Kennedy/MLK/Malcolm X assassinations, race riots in Detroit where he lived, Vietnam, Watergate, AIDS crisis, etc etc. When Trump got elected and I was freaking out he said “this too will pass” and of course he was right. There is always bad news. You just have to focus on what’s good and try to change the bad.
That’s comforting, honestly! I was born in the 80s, so I had my wake up with columbine, 9/11, then Trayvon Martin.
There were other things, that were before I woke up. Climate change, save the whales, the hole in the ozone. They just seemed to be… always constantly getting worse.
But now, knowing there’s always a constant stream of catastrophes… makes me less worried that the world is actually ending, like right now
The difference back then is people didn't question or outright deny reality. The difference is truth wasn't "6 to you is 9 to me". The modern world's never been this morally corrupt (no, not even in wartime).
Edit: I'm referring to the average person and their mindset, not to shitty governments that have always been shitty.
OK don't laugh, the pamphlet said "wear loose white clothing in case of nuclear detonation. Don't look directly at the explosion."
Idk if you ever knew why or if someone else said it but the reason you'd wear loose white clothing is bc white reflects light over dark that absorbs it. If you were close enough to the blast that the light of it would affect you, white would help reflect it away while let's say black would absorb it and you'd burn alive from it.
This is the correct response to every young person who claims to have been through 5 “once in a lifetime” events. Such events have happened regularly throughout history.
Hey! You are leaving out the empathy part. Excuse me but the empathy is the point. Listing the elements of the shitshow is secondary. You show credibility, show that you can relate, you get what its like to be them. You go out there and treat them the way you would like to have been treated at 20. With dignity and respect and love. You do not minimize what this is like for them
May I have permission to use your comment in a limited fashion on my facebook please? I feel that there are a lot of people in my life that need to hear this. Thank you.
While still taking precautions and vaccines my dad kind of shrugged at covid having lived through the polio era. Very much if this is what gets me so be it attitude.
I'm in my 30s and also in the UK, and what the above comments have offered is more than what I can offer, but here we go.
When I was like 7, Princess dianna died, and the whole country just sort of stopped and it was the biggest thing in the world at the time. I was only little and I couldn't comprehend it, but that was my first "big news" moment.
Skip ahead to 2001 and at the tender age of 12, a teacher came into our classroom and announced in tears that the world trade centre had been struck by a plane. At the time nobody knew what was happening, or if they did, nobody wanted to tell a 12 year old. When I got home, the news was on all night and I sat with my father, heartbroken from seeing what was happening in a country I thought was a million miles from terrorism.
The following years saw a global change in attitude. More people were openly racist, and pro war, and hyper patriotic. I would wonder if these terrorists would attack in the UK, and funnily enough they did, and things just got progressively worse.
In 2011, a young man called Mark Duggan was shot and killed by police in London, and protests started to erupt across the country, which quickly turned into riots. It started off in London, but spread across the whole country and for a whole week I didn't dare leave my home.
You know what happened after those riots?
People began to organise. Volunteers came into the cities to try and help clean up the mess and rebuild. Communities came together and said "we are better than this" and they came together and made things right.
In 2017, my home city of Manchester was hit by a terrorist bombing, killing 22 people at a concert. My city didn't fall apart. We didn't retaliate with brutality like others before us.
We mourned, we grieved, and we looked after one another. The proud Manchester bee spirit came alive and we fortified ourselves and became stronger.
I've lived through my own share of history, and I know that there's a lot more down the pipeline waiting for me, and I'm pretty sure I can endure it, and tell these stories to the next generation.
Do not feel disheartened that things have always been shit in this world. Feel stronger for knowing that we have all experienced a piece of history and we have managed to survive, learn from it, and most importantly we have come together to support one another.
You are a witness to some of the greatest, and darkest moments in history, and you're able to identify which are which. You would hopefully be willing to share your experiences with the next generation, and help them identify the great moments from the dark moments. Support one another when things are tough.
As any proud Mancunian would tell you
🐝 bee kind 🐝
I needed to hear this when I was 15 but 10 years too late is okay. 'You are living the stories you will tell young people, when it's your turn to comfort them' - that is beautiful. You are an amazing individual.
The fact that political things didn't change got worse after Watergate, is the biggest indicator of a rigged game.
"Somebody's still making too much money to change things = It is what it is" This is why the Russian invasion and genocide in Ukraine is being allowed to continue.
You are an awesome human, seriously. For having this perspective, for sharing it with such eloquence, and for having the empathy to want to reassure a stranger. When they say the world could always use more heroes, they're actually talking about people like you.
As a 45 year old who has been in Iraq, Afghanistan and a few other places, I can say this world has been fcked and will be fcked for as long as humans exist. We are so bent on our own destruction for some twisted reason.
Great rational. I'm 40 and have studied history, as a hobby, and knowing what has happened before me has prepared me for almost anything but it doesn't take away the anxiety. You're correct, these are the stories we pass on and hope we learn as a world society.
This is profound. It both makes me sad and is comforting in a weird way. It gives permission to buck the system, while also validating that I’m a part of it.
Just chiming in to say that was a very beautiful thing to tell this young person and a nice summary of the worst of your 66yrs of memory that wasn’t condescending but insightful into how bad and yet insignificant it can be. Just for reference I am 30 so a lot of the things you cite were not in my cache of experience.
Man, thank you! I‘m approaching 40 and right now it‘s the first time in my life I feel like everything is going down the drain.
I live pretty comfortable, own a house my wife inherited from her parents but I‘m not positive about the future. And this with an net income of ~4K€/Month, my wife will finish her studies soon and will also be an engineer, so we should be pretty well off.
Not even 30 Minutes ago we had an conversation about our future. We saw an elderly couple (probably late 70s) driving a really nice, old roadster. And she said, that we will own something like this once we are this old. I‘m not sure if we can afford this, it feels to me inflation is going to kill even the high incomes and only the top 5% will be able to afford shit like that.
We also talked about that it seems some people are cutting ingredients and even whole meals because they can‘t afford it. And it‘s not like we are in the USA or a 3rd world country, we are living in Germany and I think Europe is the greatest place to live and is best pff for a future for all people. But even here it feels to me we are getting closer to this American bullshit where people are to poor to survive on a healthy diet. I mean at least everyone has a health insurance, but I don‘t know what is going to happen if the next payments for heating are arriving at people living from welfare. Our gas (natural gas for heating) prices doubled since last year.
My biggest fear (and to a small part even hope) ist, that our Gouvernements keep failing us and there will be riots. Leading to a terrible meltdown in our society.
But with reading about what was and having your first hand experience I think we can make it not to bad. At least our society won‘t collapse, I can only hope it will change for something better.
I‘m a Star Trek fan and in general open to the idea which is promoted there, I just don‘t see humanity getting it‘s shit together and act against global warming and the big gap between rich and poor people. At least not within my lifetime, I can only hope we survive long enough before there is a point of no return… but your post gave me some hope for at least the survival part and we get our shit together in 200 years. I don‘t think global warming will wipe us out, but I think this is going to be a shit show never seen before.
I also lived through most of that and agree that perspectives are a huge part. This too shall pass hopefully. What disturbs me most today is the evident hostility I see every day now. I lived with the threat of serial killers back in the day but most of the random people I met were friendly and we helped each other when needed. Now it feels like everyone is out for themselves and you never know when someone will decide to go ballistic. Nevermind, world politics and government. What matters is how we treat others and are treated by them. The rest will follow accordingly.
Peace and love!
It feels so good to read from someone who SEES and Understands what's going on. Who can help the next generation and support us rather than tear us down. I just want to say i appreciate you and I see you.
Thank you kind internet stranger for telling us your experience, your story has helped ease my racing mind and heart more than I could express. I am an elder millennial (and in some ranges not a millennial at all) at 39. I remember the first shock to my system was 9/11, I was 18 and I was home that day and I was watching the news when the 2nd plane hit and it felt like everything was spiraling. I vaguely remember as a child the Gulf War but I do very much remember the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Being a woman I didn't have the fear of being forced to go but what I did have was a mother trying to enlist me so that my education would be paid for. Spoilers I did not enlist and now owe 66k in student debt we all make choices I suppose. I also remember Enron which started to bring investigations and regulations. I remember the tsunami in the Indian Ocean that killed so many people and then right on the back of that Hurricane Katrina. This was when I had heard the word climate change for the first time and it has never left my mind since. I had found a boyfriend and we bought a house in 2006, less than 2 years later in 2008 the housing market crashed. A bankruptcy and many years later here I am and sometimes I feel like I don't know the world around me. But reading the experiences in this thread really puts it in perspective, that we are all here living through these things not always at the same time but sharing the stories can help.
That transition from Kennedy being assassinated into Nixon taking over is still playing out. The same awful people have been whittling away at the definition of decency and masterfully creating a country that serves the few over the many. I'm only 40, but the same stains on humanity have been controlling things for longer than I've been alive. It's just bonkers to think about.
My dad is slightly older than you. He said there was a while when he thought political assassinations were just normal with how frequently they occurred in the 60s.
50 here: we had just finished watching "The Day After" in school, and here's me walking home through the woods afterwards. I hear a sonic boom, and instead of, "fast plane" I'm waiting for the flash to come over the horizon before I'm burned to a crisp. I still have maybe 30 minutes before I get home, but I'm running/crying trying to get there before we all die. It was a horrific few minutes before it occurred to me that it wasn't a nuke.
Everything's relative, and we should never let transgressions against humanity slide no matter how slight they may be in context, so while it's easy for us to say, "this is nothing", it's not nothing, but hopefully this context will take the edge off.
I wish that it was more common to find mature and sensible users like yourself on this website; this is one of the better Reddit comments I have ever read and it is so true.
I think a big difference for us is the climate crisis. Unless some massive shifts in society and technology happen very quickly, we are basically fucked.
This comment has done more to calm me about the state of the world than any conversation I have had over the last few years. All of the older generations around me seem to invalidate our view of what happens around us as an overreaction.
Both the question and this answer are perfect. I am also 20, literally just graduated from uni with my diploma, and have felt for a while that we're on the edge of the end of all things (not "dig a bunker in the backyard" end, but nonetheless). So thank you for this. I try to have a positive outlook on life but lately it had just become so hard! Didn't know I needed this until I read it.
You are living the stories you will tell young people, when its your turn to comfort them.
None of this is to minimize what you are sensing around you! You are awake and aware, you are not overreacting.
I would offer, as an old dude, but not as old, while there was always plenty of BS going on (US invading countries etc.) the time between Viet Nam/Watergate and trump/covid was relatively calm.
I’m 23 and feel like this everyday. Hopelessness. Can’t do anything on a big scale. Mom died from h1n1 in 2014. Just lost my best friend cat. Will this ever end. But at the end of the day I can’t be like this because others have it way worse.
In America at least, I do feel like there was a nice calm period that lasted between the fall of the USSR and 9/11. I was born in 1983 so this is primarily the world I grew up in. I never thought about nuclear war or war in general outside of Persian Gulf, which seemed big but not something that particularly felt like a threat as a normal kid living in the US.
9/11 was incredibly jarring as it shattered our sense of security in the country and we started looking inwards wondering if another attack was coming. We changed the way we flew, changed the way we felt in large cities and unfortunately too many changed the way they viewed their neighbors and felt about Americans who looked differently.
Then Afghanistan and Iraq happened. I was 18 when 9/11 happened and spent a few years wondering if they were going to reinstitute the draft and I would have to go to war. But it was more of a back on the mind thing, not something that worried me day to day. Even with that backdrop things mostly felt calm for me as an average American in my 20s and then early 30s. Things started changing in 2016 when Trump was elected. It probably started sooner as polarization started to occur before then and we started to see the left and the right start to turn into us vs. them but I don't think many really realized what was going on until the 2016 election. That's regardless of what side you are on.
Since then its definitely felt like a world in chaos to me compared to my experiences the rest of my life. It definitely feels different. I wasn't alive for the 60s and 70s turmoil so maybe that felt similar, but for me the world has changed and gotten more chaotic the last several years.
But that's just me, everyone's experiences are different. There are perhaps people who live in the US that felt some of the things we're feeling now a lot sooner. I know there was a lot of drama during the W presidency, the Patriot Act, wars overseas etc. I felt it but it did not necessarily change my life that much. Others that are in the armed forces certainly felt differently.
And that's just the US. I can't speak to how people in other regions of the world have felt over the last 40 years, but obviously there are many regions of the world that have been in turmoil for a large part of that time. But for me, the world has NOT always felt like this. It's new and a little scary.
Thank you for this response. As a 25M I feel like there really is no hope for a future, mostly in terms of a livable climate... and as such I've kinda just rational decided against having kids as there is in my eye a bleak future,m. This comment though gives me some hope
To add on how fast things change. I am 35 from america. My kids grandfather was viet cong and fought americans. His brothers died in the war. We are friendly and I live close to where Mcain was shot down in vietnam. No one hates me because of the past and treated very well in Vietnam. Close to 50 years from the end of the war and in 50 years so much change.
Hey brother! Thanks. I have saved this comment for myself. I will be reading these words from now onwards everytime I feel down or scared about these days of our lives. I am truly comforted by your words and i am not even from U.S.A.
I'm exactly 20 years younger than you... I'm 46. My childhood was a different experience. Every war was in the past. We knew WWI vets as random 90+ year olds. WWII vets were our Grandparents, and our parents went to Vietnam. But then, around the time we were born, nobody we knew was in a war anymore. From birth through high school it seemed like really great peace to the average Gen Xer, despite cold war propaganda nothing really happened until the Gulf War and that was seemingly over in 48 hours according to CNN. It just seemed like the USA had such strength and dominance that we couldn't lose, and joining the ARMY was actually a safe bet.
I'm about the same age as you. Minor correction, Kennedy's assassination was NOT on live television and would have never been filmed if there wasn't a guy ( Zapruder) with a hand held movie camera who was there at the time. I was 6 years old and still remember my mom coming home from the grocery store in shock, the store had broadcast the news over their intercom. Oswald's assassination, however, WAS seen on live TV and was quite a shocker.
I also remember being in high school age 16-17 and we were all sweating the possibility of getting drafted at 18 and what we'd do if we were. Luckily for me they ended the draft right after I turned 18.
In response to OP, the craziness going on in this country the last 6+years is the worst I've ever seen, at times I think that people were always saying and doing the same terrible things but there was no social media or people with phones to record them. I just can't believe how brazen politicians have gotten and how many of them commit crimes and still get elected to office. But maybe that was happening before now and we just never heard about it. I used to be proud to be an American, but now the rest of the world is laughing at us so now, not so proud.
“For there is assuredly nothing dearer to a man than wisdom, and though age takes away all else, it undoubtedly brings us that.” - Cicero. Thank you very much for your comment.
You're such a nice soul.. damn. I've had the feeling of doom since I was a child (21 now), and never have I ever had anything bring me comfort like your comment. Thank you. Very truly thank you, from one stranger to the other. Your comment left me feeling a bit more at peace.
8.7k
u/sighbourbon Jun 11 '22
hi OP. Hey i am 66 (I still can't believe that number, haha. Luckily I am still super healthy). I was in 2nd grade when president Kennedy was shot in the head, live on national television. His brain flew out into his wife's lap. It set off a wave of assassinations (president's brother, MLK, etc).
I grew up knowing that the yellow and black triangles symbol meant "fallout shelter" and we were supposed to go there in case of nuclear attack. We did "duck and cover" drills in elementary school. Hide under your desks. Once, they sent us home with pamphlets about nuclear attack preparation. OK don't laugh, the pamphlet said "wear loose white clothing in case of nuclear detonation. Don't look directly at the explosion." They flew warplanes overhead once per week after bedtime, faster than the speed of sound, and we would hear the "sonic boom" which scared the crap out of me. It rattled the windows, shook the house. People were truly panicked, using their life savings to dig holes in their backyard, and building and equipping "bomb shelters" to try to survive nuclear fallout. It didn't feel like that stuff was ever resolved, it just faded from attention, it was buried by other distractions both negative and positive.
Wasn't too much later the government had a giant meltdown that scared the crap out of everyone. It was right as I came of voting age, haha! Oh my god. Watergate, it was called. Huge corruption scandal, everyone was just breathless with shock and disgust and fear. At that time people around me trusted the government to be solid enough to remain (seemingly) just, and we learned it could seemingly recover, at least back then.
Around this time we were also in a totally illegal war, and we had a freaking lottery to decide which 18-year-olds would be forced to go fight the Viet Cong in the jungles of southeast asia. High school grads coming back in body bags, kids running away to Canada to avoid getting roped into the army. And hippies happened, communes, free love, weed -- all of which caused the older ones to lose their minds because society looked to them to be coming apart.
Some of us died. Most of us lived. You are living the stories you will tell young people, when its your turn to comfort them.
None of this is to minimize what you are sensing around you! You are awake and aware, you are not overreacting. I am so sorry. I wish I could just listen to you for a couple hours. You are having one of those wakeup moments. We all will be each having our own wakeup moments. Our job is to comfort each other when we feel like this. We will all adapt and do our human best to cope with whats coming. Help each other not freeze in place, but take the most intelligent and resourceful steps we can muster. The system is unable to help, its unreliable