Baby Boomers vs. Generation X vs. Millennials

a friend had a Magnavox Video Writer, with a printer built into the monitor! Magnavox is not a brand I normally associate with hi-tech

https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/physical-object/magnavox/102646025.lg.jpg

over time I've come to the opinion that millennials were the last generation of the past not the first generation of the future

for example you can't say that someone born in 1984 really "grew up" with the Internet, certainly not in the way my daughter and her peers have in the smartphone/tablet era

a lot of millennials still grew up with newspapers, network TV shows, pre streaming service media environments

But a lot would have been online by tween/teen years right?

IO otm. I barely survived middle school as it is. I am so so glad I didn't have to deal with social media or anything online until after I was a teen.

yes, but that's a decade or more of really the most fundamental developmental years not being on it, a big distinction

sorry to be lazy, but can someone sum up to me the view of "millennials"

roughly 1981-1996. at a spritely 40.9781 years of age, i am one of the oldest "millennials". *reporter voice* but also, what the fuck does that even mean?

― z_tbd

speaking as someone who was assigned gen x at age 18 or something, "millenial" to means that you're clinically depressed, you love spongebob, and you hate capitalism

that last bit might not be true, everybody i know hates capitalism

i don't think "gen x" actually exists. it's the most transphobic generation (well consider the crap we were fed growing up). it's boomers without the good bits. it's people whose affected apathy and nihilism turned out to be as much of a pose as the boomers' affected idealism.

i don't think x-aged people here represent gen x, any more than i think, like, kurt cobain represented gen x. we're all outliers. anomalies.

i managed to get a stable marriage and a career and a house, and if i'd been cisgender, maybe even if i could've kept pretending to myself i was cisgender, maybe i could've kept it, maybe i could've been like some of the people i knew, slowly getting more isolated and alienated from everyone and everything around me, my nameless fears hardening into paranoia, my struggle to tolerate the intolerable crushing me more and more with each passing year. maybe i shouldn't judge the people i knew - not people here, to be clear - who did that.

i don't think millennials have the same "opportunity" that people in gen x did. i think we slid in under the wire. whatever comes next, y'all might see some of it. i can't even imagine what might come next, myself.

Oh god I just remembered friendster and how crazy it felt at the time to find people from childhood etc.

Not being on social media prior to adulthood is a generational gift imo. A really great young social justice person that I know got burned hard a while back because a political enemy found a teenage-era post of his that used iirc an anti-gay slur. It was many years in the past by that time but it didn't help him; he lost his job and his up-and-coming political relevancy for a while, which sucked. (Anti-gay bigotry also totally sucks obv and I think teens are on track now to do better generally, but the early 2000s were a brutal time where change was happening in different spaces at different times.)

― Ima Gardener (in orbit)

i used to be really afraid of someone digging up my old edgelord usenet shitposts where i said awful things

i needn't have worried; i was never in a position where anyone was going to bother with that shit

i guess someone could try it now. it wouldn't be hard to find lots of awful things i've said. hell, i still say awful things sometimes. i don't mean to.

the main way i feel like i as a gen-x person differ from millennials is my tendency to shake my fist at the cloud

i am a paranoid digital packrat. i save _everything_. i'm trying to figure out actually how to back up my personal stuff to the cloud so i don't lose decades of shitposts in a catastrophic drive crash, but i've reached the age where technology confuses me and/or i'm too entitled to actually figure out how it works anymore

bring back dos 5.0, i knew how to use dos 5.0

I was lucky when between 1996 and 1998 writers would submit their stuff on floppy.

I think I started emailing corrections and accepting drafts in fall '98.

IO otm. I barely survived middle school as it is. I am so so glad I didn't have to deal with social media or anything online until after I was a teen.

I do wonder if it would've been worth the extra bullying I would almost certainly have got via social media if it existed to be able to meet more like-minded people outside of school, my teens were a pretty lonely time. maybe not

Recently I am realizing that a bunch of current software that seemed daunting at first is at root (not in re directories) software I used in the 90s… I actually feel like all those years learning Filemaker pro are relevant lol

"Every girl in NYC but me was dating Moby and hanging out at Teany, his vegan tea parlor on Rivington Street."

https://annekadet.substack.com/p/friendster#%C2%A7whatever-happened-to-friendster

Wait wtf lol - In 1999 I bartended with the woman he dated and opened Teany with. She went to NYC one weekend and came back gushing about this DJ she had met but never mentioned who it really was. She quit not long thereafter and moved to NY. Found out he was the DJ in question when I read a profile of the shop online a couple years later.

I completely forgot about that whole thing until your post.

i forget how i digitized the cartoons tbh

Industrial-sized scanner? I worked in a CC RTVB lab in the mid-'00s and we still had one of those tanks.

I do wonder if it would've been worth the extra bullying I would almost certainly have got via social media if it existed to be able to meet more like-minded people outside of school, my teens were a pretty lonely time. maybe not

― Colonel Poo

it's weird because when i first got on the internet in september '93, it just seemed completely revolutionary. i was a weird autistic kid, i didn't have a lot in common with the other people in my suburban town... i did the BBS scene, but it was all kids in my class who were into pirating games my computer was too slow to play... the internet opened up a world for me of people who were weird in kind of the same ways i was weird. and some of that was good, and some of that was bad, and i didn't, you know, really differentiate. on top of that i was always a lot better at communicating in words than i was talking face to face. i honestly thought the internet was like the best thing ever to happen.

and now it's easy to look back and see all the ways it was terrible, all the ways in which i got it wrong, in which most people got it wrong. bullying, yeah, i was a huge fucking bully online. cycle of abuse and all. i thought it was a good thing, the way i was behaving, because people were WRONG on the INTERNET. like a lot of them were just complete assholes. doesn't justify what i did, but they were.

it's just that it only went so far. is what i regret about it. there wasn't anything i could find when it came to the trans stuff. it was there, but it was buried deep to where i was never able to find it. i don't know if it would've done me any good to know, back then, when nobody would've accepted me. i know people who knew, and they had a terrible time of it. it just seems like a betrayal of the promise of the internet... you could be anyone you want on the internet, you could be a _dog_ on the internet, but if i was a girl...

i don't blame generation x or anyone there. there were a couple of people who knew, you had people like mary ann horton, but just structurally... that knowledge didn't get out there, when i was young. i know some of these people know and they're, like, to me they're really young, and they're saying "is 30 too old to transition" and i smile and laugh and it's good, but like. 43 fucking years. it was fucked up. the generation, the times i grew up in were really fucked up, in ways i didn't understand.

XP... when it finally died, my boss went over to Fry's Electronics and spent maybe $150 of his own money for a more practical plug'n'go replacement which served for years afterwards.

xxxp Weirdly, Friendster carried on in the Philippines long after the rest of the world had decamped to MySpace

I and all of my 4 siblings are boomers. My oldest sister and brother were born in 1946 and 1947, my middle sister in 1951, and I and my younger sister in 1955 and 1956.

Out of the 5 children, 3 are living in the real world, including my oldest and middle sisters and I. My older brother is in Trump land in a golf paradise in NC, and my younger sister is in some conflicted world in between.

My niece and her fiancee, millennials who are in the tech industry, live 8 blocks from me in SF and are aligned with my views, are getting married in August, and the family is getting together. It will be interesting to see all of the interactions

We are mostly conflict-avoidant as a family though, I think because my siblings and I all lived together as children in a very small house

This is kind of a truth bomb. Millennials and Boomers are pretty much the same.

If you're a boomer, millennials are all 20-year olds wasting their money on frivolities like iPhones.

If you're a zoomer, millennials are boomers.

― papal hotwife (milo z), Thursday, May 9, 2024 1:20 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Man, they're really coming for Gen X on TikTok these days. I guess the Boomers got too old? I love that there is barely any retaliation though. Stitches I've seen have mostly been along the line of 'Okay. Whatever'

I did get a good laugh at that comedian who spent part of her set begging for Gen Z to join Millennials against Gen X. Lol good luck, lady.

I suspect there will be a fracturing within millennials when some more of them start inheriting property but as of now I support an anti-gen x coalition if you're so rad why don't you give us your houses

I don’t have a house!

lol most of us dont have houses. So weird how millenials think economic downturn happened to them first.

We had lower expectations

My nephew, who is Very Online (wherever the kids are online these days, I think Discord + idk), still asked to be hospitalized last year for depression/self-harm impulses partly informed by isolation and loneliness, so while I have fantasies of how much better my life would have been with the internet ages 12-20, I wouldn't say it's perfectly protective.

i watch all of these. i can't help myself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l457OuUXn24

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkGPIhxdfXc

lol at anybody getting a house, all our folks are gonna be transferring their wealth to their end of life care unless they're the lucky ones who go in their sleep or on the back 9.

Scott those are awfully bleak. Just endless "marriage is hell" and cynicism vibes, I can't take it.

that's actually just America. in human form.

We had lower expectations

― sarahell, Friday, May 10, 2024 8:48 AM

Ain't that the truth.

The folx my age I know offline are just awful--Trump-loving types driving pickup tanks and posting garden hose memes.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPRwg7Xud/

I love watching all these old news clips for the 90s.

Jeez

Some pretty tendentious points about divorce near the end of that clip..

lol at anybody getting a house, all our folks are gonna be transferring their wealth to their end of life care unless they're the lucky ones who go in their sleep or on the back 9.

I have this terminally online boomer guy on FB (knew irl through an old job) who likes to go on and on about how "The Biggest Wealth Transfer In History" is beginning as his generation dies off and gives everything to their struggling heirs. It's all I can do to not chime in and tell him how most of said wealth will be going to the banks, mortgage companies, healthcare industry etc. and basically what's left for anybody else is garage sale shit (books, furniture, DVDs etc).

...and CLOTHES! Jesus Christ boomers love stockpiling clothing.

xp to Tracer
Idk I think that clip is trying to do a lot. The guy who said: "The parents passed uncertain values to their children, and economic uncertainty too" -- first of all we got the values they were trying to force on us, we just didn't find them very valuable. We can talk about the economic impacts of your generation's decision-making, though, by all means.

the thing i don't like about generational thinking in general is it ignores so much, of course all boomers aren't white guys who own a chevy dealership and a pontoon boat, there are plenty of boomer living in poverty, even the imagined generational wealth numbers are skewed by the rich, and the reality is that they maybe on whole doing better but no for millions of boomers

https://thehill.com/business/personal-finance/3991136-nearly-half-of-baby-boomers-have-no-retirement-savings/

Xers did have one advantage over millennials (and millennials over zoomers) - education costs. My first semester was in 2000, by 2010 when I went back after an eight year layoff tuition and fees were ~4X higher (and I didn't have all the ancillary housing/food/etc. costs).

I would like to formally apologise for my gen x poverty erasure

I still think the generational handover of property is shaping up to become a significant divide within generational cohorts that kind of undermines the whole generational identity politics thing entirely but maybe the situation in the US is different and in any case I was primarily talking about the upper and upper middle classes (I suspect there might still be more generational than class solidarity even within this cohort right now but I can imagine that changing in all kinds of ways). of course if the property bubble finally collapses all of this will be moot

my expert advice as someone with no money? buy some shares of a good health care ETF or index fund. this one is good: Health Care Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLV)

its the only way you will ever make any money off of boomers who are all going to start spending their trillions to stay alive forever. its a win/win for the savvy investor.

https://money.usnews.com/investing/articles/best-health-care-etfs-to-buy-now

Boomers were the generation that got hit first with declining real wages/deindustrialization/deunionization. Right as the first wave are becoming full adults circa 1970 is when shit started to go south. The Silent/Greatest generations (specifically, the white members of those generations) were the beneficiaries of the midcentury economy.

in retrospect maybe replacing class politics with generation politics was a bad idea

xpost the Roger & Me era

Xers did have one advantage over millennials (and millennials over zoomers) - education costs. My first semester was in 2000, by 2010 when I went back after an eight year layoff tuition and fees were ~4X higher (and I didn't have all the ancillary housing/food/etc. costs).

Boomers were the generation that got hit first with declining real wages/deindustrialization/deunionization. Right as the first wave are becoming full adults circa 1970 is when shit started to go south. The Silent/Greatest generations (specifically, the white members of those generations) were the beneficiaries of the midcentury economy.

Xers did have one advantage over millennials (and millennials over zoomers) - education costs. My first semester was in 2000, by 2010 when I went back after an eight year layoff tuition and fees were ~4X higher (and I didn't have all the ancillary housing/food/etc. costs).

― papal hotwife (milo z), Friday, May 10, 2024 11:25 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah im definitely wrestling with the idea of talking my kids out of going to college.

Seriously everything related to kids is way more expensive now … the tax credit and pre-tax maximum for childcare is super low compared to the cost of childcare