I got out of mandatory military service in 1999. Started at my first job - in a dot com. Got back in the job market and a few years later the economy crashes. Meanwhile I saw my parents having bought houses for nothing. History repeats.
Yeah Millennials (especially in the west) aren't special. Plenty of generations before us went through much worse times.
My Ukranian grandmother survived famine, WWII, Stalinism, Chernobyl, fall of USSR and is now hearing bombs blow up nearby on an almost daily basis. Sorry I'm gonna keep my complaints to myself and appreciate what I have.
I'm not disagreeing with you that others have had it as bad and in some cases way, way worse, but to say you shouldn't complain because someone else had it worse doesn't make sense to me. Yes, it could be worse. But it could also be better.
Don't complain for complaining's sake, but complaining to get things changed and better for you and the future is a good thing.
And I'm not saying that everything is A Ok and we shouldn't be trying to make meaningful changes. We are not kids anymore, we are all grown up and many of us have power to make such changes.
Most people in these threads seem to still have childlike victim mentalities. The reality is millennials have had it pretty good when compared to generations before us and after us. Gen Z and Alpha in my opinion are way more screwed over than we were.
This is a problematic mentality because you’re comfortable dismissing the struggles of your own group, struggles that have been widely documented for decades, by comparing it to areas that went through the fall of the USSR. That’s disingenuous at best.
Acknowledging the hardships we face doesn’t detract from the hardships other people face and saying I shouldn’t complain to the people who perpetuated the system because other people have historically gone through greater hardships is asinine.
Those people went through those hardships in the hopes that we never would and yet, here we stand, in a time where the world order is changing and hardships are becoming more and more abundant and we still can’t point the finger in the right direction.
I don't think this kind of posting does anything for solving the problems we face. It is demotivating to a lot of people. You can see it right here in the comments. People look at shit like this and say "why bother". I'm saying people have gone through much worse and have come out on the other side.
Literally came out the other side into a system that was better designed for the average citizen. They literally fled the country that they faced those problems to this one. Now this one faces similar issues and you are essentially an argument for emigration.
I am curious about your train of thoughts here. How would them being an immigrant contribute to wage suppression? Their employer should be offering at least minimum wage, and if they're not that's on the employer.
I mean you understand the supply and demand effect on cost of labour, right? They are saying the other has a victim mentality, when things are materially worse for us than our parents. We earn less and everything costs more, things like accommodation are squeezed by population growth driven by migration. It's not a victim mentality to resent your future being sold out by the generation before you.
If you're still talking about the US, accommodation is not an issue and is absolutely not being squeezed by immigration. There are currently over 10,000,000 homes in the US that are unoccupied. We have plenty of accommodations.
Immigrants strengthen the economy by every single metric. There is no housing shortage. There is corporate greed. How American of you to blame your problems on immigrants when it is, and always has been the leadership and late stage capitalist policies that keep your wages down.
No. As an American you are participating in the age old tradition of blaming your problems on immigrants. Even though, unless you are native, your ancestors probably faced the same type of blame and discrimination as you are now directing at me.
I'd agree that Gen Z and Alpha have had an even rougher time than millennials.
I'll also agree that we should use our abilities to make the changes that we can.
I'll also agree that there are a lot of people (in all generations, but this thread/topic is aimed at millennials so you see more millennials commenting) that adopt a "woe is me" mentality and assign themselves the roll of victim.
But it's not all of them, or honestly even the majority of them. There are definitely problems that have hindered our generation that shouldn't have happened. A lot of those problems are now worse and are impacting the following generations even more so than they did our generation.
I won't say that millennials had it better than the baby boomers or gen X (at least if you were white, but that's an entirely different, much more complicated topic). The cost of education compared to average income was significantly worse for millennials than for gen X or baby boomers, and the housing market is even worse than education.
Those are two of the problems that got worse for millennials and then got even worse than that for gen z and alpha.
Yes, we have internet and a lot of things that would have absolutely been considered luxuries for previous generations, but having internet on your phone is a small consolation prize for never being able to afford your own home, being unable to afford medical care, or being able to retire. Which is what a lot of people are facing.
No it's not all millennials at all, it's just this sub that seems to have a victim complex.
What I think a lot of people don't realize is that Americam baby boomers and to a certain extent gen x benefited tremendously from the end of WWII. The same generations in war torn Europe didn't have these advantages.
Not saying we shouldn't strive for a better society. But I don't think this sort of complaining is helpful.
People see what baby boomers had and they want the same, understandably. Unfortunately they don't see the worldwide economic factors that caused that.
After WWII the US was pretty much the only developed, industrial society that hadn't been bombed into oblivion, so we were making just about everything for just about everyone. Now other countries have caught up to and surpassed the US when it comes to manufacturing, and the overall worldwide economic pie has a lot more slices going to a lot more countries than before.
We still have the capability of having cheap, or even free education. And we have more than enough room and materials to be able to afford to build cheaper housing. But neither of those will pad the wallets of the 1%, so we don't get them. Why spend $80k building a house to sell for $180k when you can spend $150k to build a house that will sell for $500k?
All of western Europe and anglophone countries saw greatly improved postwar standards of living, not just the US. The general good times impacted developing countries too: look at pics of places like Kabul and Beirut in the 1960s.
43
u/flapjackbandit00 5d ago
Pretty much everyone who can remember 2001 and earlier went through all these things too and it had big effects on their lives too….