I’m over 40 and struggling not to conclude life on this planet peaked 30 years ago
The 90s were seriously such a bop.
The Matrix was right.
At this point we can only hope the Matrix is real and they reset this simulation soon because what we’re seeing are the side effects from the uprising outside.
9/11 was suppose to be the reset point, but the simulation kept running for some reason.
You might even call it an Mmmbop.
If you were a kid in the 90s, sure. Your parents shielded you from all the chaos.
The 90s also had terrorism (IRA, WTC bombing, German and French hijackings, Israeli settler massacre, sarin gas attack in Japan, Oklahoma City bombing, bombings of US service members in Saudi Arabia, PKK suicide bombers in Turkey, Dagestan bombing in Russia (possibly a Putin-orchestrated false flag)). It had the ongoing AIDS epidemic, which was terrifying. It had the first Gulf war. It had the LA riots of 1992. It had the columbine shooting.
It’s much worse today
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That was 10 years ago.
The dream of the 90s is alive in Portland.
Put a bird on it.
Hey, at least you got to enjoy humanity’s peak as a teenager. I was a kid, so I never got the chance to fully appreciate the 90s. My memory of almost anything pre-1993 is incredibly hazy. My strongest childhood memories didn’t take hold until the decade was almost over.
Lucky you. I got at best the earliest of the 2010s…
Yep. It peaked right around Ronnie Reagan’s sell-out to the wealthy. If folks want a better quality of life they will have to take it back from the rich.
I remember agreeing with that back in 2021 when it was posted, and now, well…
I landed a job a job at a company that’s circling the drain, I feel like a parasite feeding off a host until it’s gone and I move to a new one
I’m a public librarian. Just dreading the day we are defunded. They’ve already attacked our national orgs.
Maybe this varies geographically, but our town’s libraries are directly funded by the town. We recently improved a millage for renovations. I hope they would be pretty insulated from… sillyness.
Most libraries also have significant federal funding, and rely on resources maintained with federal funding, even if state and local funding is higher
Absolutely this. Our federal money actually comes through the state org which takes care of a whole bunch of stuff like our inter library loans and access to Kanopy/Libby.
Jeez, that’s a brave thing to openly admit right now. And I work in public education.
I have 'iterally been saying to my classes (especially as my various NIH/NSF/.gov links are breaking during class) “pretend nothing is happening outside the walls of this school, just for a few minutes”.
Oof, “active shooter” vibes, shelter in place :/
In the US, I blame a lot of this in public education. So much American Exceptionalism hard coded into generations and if you question any of it, you get put down by the other students and teachers.
I envied the education of developing nations because those school systems acted like they had something to prove with their students.
Please don’t blame this on public education, wholesale. I get that there are plenty of issues with public education, but there are teachers, departments, entire schools, and entire districts that put kids and their ability to realistically navigate the real world. I’ve worked with many teachers would would (and have) told politicians to fuck off than keep their teaching cert by abandoning their beliefs.
I’m proud to have worked for years in a school where teachers were comfortable telling students that American exceptionalism is a lie and that blindly believing anything different is a quick way to fall behind.
What the hell does “realistically navigate the real world” mean anymore. I had teachers, therapists, and guidance counselors all working to make sure I had a safe and useful education. Meaning, because I was misdiagnosed, that they would never risk my unhappiness(or their metrics) by allowing me in classes there I might fail because, by their own words, “if you fail at that class, you may be unhappy”. Fuck that shit. I succeed at their goals, not mine and I’m miserable.
I called up my old school recently to try and get them to send me a document stating that because I never fulfilled the basic state requirements, I did not actually graduate. They refused, but accidentally admired that I tested proficient in science, but was still placed in remedial classes. I doubt they think I remember those meetings in grade school, but I do. I remember being calmly explained that I would do better in this class or that class, but they never really explained what “practical” or “modified” or “academic” meant. I remember those meetings. When I talked to my school, I could tell they weren’t expecting me to remember the day we took the HSPA test and how I was pulled out of the regular students and placed in the remedial area despite being told I was declassified or how I shouldn’t have passed because I deliberately failed the writing section. It’s all fucking theater. They’ve been passing everyone for decades regardless of merit and now this country is a joke.
I’m so sorry to hear this and I’m really sad to hear how your “role models” failed you like that. It sounds like your school said that your diploma was proof that you’re ready to succeed in the world while merely trusting standardized tests to determine how successful you’d be.
I hope you’ve since felt more proud in your daily life.
Absolutely know the feeling
When I quit a few years ago are my last employer, I was thinking, I’m the rat leaving the sinking ship
Fucking card house still hasn’t collapsed somehow and old employer is now my main customer.
So…not much changed, besides that I don’t have much security anymoreBut hey! Illusion of freedom, when being self employed! ;-)
A while ago, I was talking to my mum and offhandedly said that I’d have to move north at some point in my life, due to climate change. For me, that’s just a given, with record hottest summers coming in regularly and current summers already incapacitating me for weeks at a time.
But my mum’s reaction was basically “What’s this about now?”. She’s lived in her childhood town or close-by for basically her whole life. And she’s old enough that she doesn’t have to worry about the aftermath. But yeah, that was still brutal, how different our realities were in that regard.
The Upper Peninsula is starting to look quite nice this time of year…
Not just those under 40.
Plenty of my gen X friends have come to accept that they will never retire like the boomers. A lot of millennials never thought they would.
That’s something that noone should accept, much less whole generations. I’m not working for someone else for my whole life.
What’s the alternative?
A bunch of pissed-off seniors with nothing left to lose.
Working for yourself 😅
Well, interestingly, gen z men are the Trumpiest demographic:
https://www.axios.com/2025/04/11/american-gen-z-podcasts-trump-harris
I guess the meme still holds true, but their concerns about the future are very different. TBH I can totally understand them becoming disillusioned with other old politicians following old voters who will just “do nothing at let it all happen.”
This is the saddiest shit ever. Young men being angry at the « Men » will vote for the men that will sold them to the bone mill in a heart beat.
There’s a Turkish proverb : and the forest vote for the axe because they where made of the same wood
What a great proverb. Thank you for that.
I know a surprisingly large amount of MAGA/Trump adjacent fans because of my type of work.
- They’re all single dudes. Maybe divorced. Maybe never went on a date.
- There’s Joe Rogan involved.
- After a few beers, they all will unprompted share their views on Jews, blacks, trans, lesbians, or some other racist shit then back off and pretend it’s just a joke.
- Tell them anything involving empathy “Sorry your dog died” is met with silence or coldness.
- They all don’t give a shit about anybody else besides themselves. And often see themselves as the victim. “Oh Trans person was brutally beaten? Yeah it’s a violent world like one time some guy threatened me gotta stay strapped.”
- They may not like Trump’s antics. But to them, the Democrats aren’t helping THEM. Remember that lack of empathy?
They may not like Trump’s antics. But to them, the Democrats aren’t helping THEM. Remember that lack of empathy?
Thats the main one though. Truth is there are a lot of working class white Americans with no representation. Working class minorities tend to band together to weather the worst of it, and are maybe somewhat represented by candidates who come from minority backgrounds. But the working class whites? All they have is the orange clump and a sea of sick media posts from a deranged billionaire telling them that immigrants are the cause of all their woes.
And from a historical context, its not the least bit suprising. A demographic of young men with dwindling prospects, crumbling social support structures and animosity towards the establishment, if only we had seen this before…
The government will work for the betterment of ALL, or else you get the fashists again…
They may not like Trump’s antics. But to them, the Democrats aren’t helping THEM. Remember that lack of empathy?
Unless they make 6 figures that point is true though. Not that Trump is going to help them either. But at least he pretends to care about them, whereas the Democrats outright said that their life reality of rising prices and stagnating wages is fake because the stock market is making new record bubble numbers.
At this point, it’s gotta be in the high six-figures with the decades of unending price gouging.
Depends where you live I guess, but low 6 figs in SF might get you a parking spot so you can live out of your car in peace
I worked in local government for nearly a decade and through covid. A lot of cops and former cops in elected positions. This mostly check out.
I would add they overwhelmingly believed homeless people deserved it and/or were subhuman.
It’s hard to stay empathetic about homeless when you deal with the worst of them on a daily basis. I worked in parks and my team was constantly getting attacked and cleaning up their urine and feces, blood and needles. There were people offering them access to services every week and the worst ones always refuse. Most people who work in parks are kind introverted people who love plants, and want people to enjoy green space . just seeing my team get punched in the face or their arm broken made it really hard to feel any empathy towards homeless. I really had to work at it.
I mean most people don’t have empathy for the opposite political party, imagine trying to empathize with someone who shits on your desk every day.
Some of them are obviously mentally ill, a few are just down on their luck, but also some of them are violent criminals who carry weapons. It was pretty typical to find some that had open warrants for arrest in other states.
I was an inspector for a health department and was directly involved with efforts engaging the sanitary conditions of homeless encampments. I coordinated with the parks departments, transportation departments, etc in responses.
The thing is homelessness subjects people to the violent criminals people blame homelessness on.
That said: I am not going to touch the organizational culture that sends its staff out into situations where they’d provoke being attacked. If there is any question of safety concerns I blame the employer, public or private, that subjects field staff to such dangers without necessary precautions. It seems rather backwards to then redirect blame in such a manner.
I totally agree with you-. It’s one of the reasons why I quit - I just couldn’t make things safer or change the attitude of leadership.
I spent a ton of time trying to get the police to help protect my team. Or to get leadership to redirect the police. The police answer was, they didn’t want to enter the parks because it was too dangerous for police because there were plants and trees that made it harder to see danger. Yet They still expected the lowest paid workers to go there and work. I had a day when they basically ignored one of my employees who was getting racist threats as he was picking up trash and accused him of wasting police resources - this was the kindest hardest working 65 year old guy, who wouldn’t have called the police unless he was truly scared for his life.
I basically realized one of my team would have to be killed for anything to really change. Unfortunately it almost happened to another team that handled janitorial services- guy got stabbed. They did start a special team to deal with encampments after that, but there was still no changes in the issues at the parks.
They did start a special team to deal with encampments after that,
This is indicative of why homelessness continues to get worse: action isn’t taken until literal violence: completing the self-fulfilling prophecy
Just wanna say I appreciated reading about this perspective.
Who are the positive role models? Weve got all these young guys watching sniveling cucks like andrew taint
Literally everybody else. They don’t lack role models, they just actively seek out the sociopathic assholes who reminds them the most of themselves.
It’s easy to paint a picture on a blank canvas.
They misattribute monetary policy that bids up home and asset values using cheap debt and facilitates massive bailouts with federal government policy. The CPI doesnt include asset prices so cheap debt can flood into asset prices without slowing down the devaluation of their salary, it also does subjective inflation deductions to goods based on perceived quality changes, and excludes much of the shrinkflation thats happens to goods and service quality.
Something as basic like getting support for a flight is now talking to a chatbot with perpetually larger than expected call volume, you pay extra for seating, you pay extra for baggage; and your seat is so small now you also may as well be standing. Free range chickens used to just be called chicken, and eggs could be eaten uncooked since they werent swimming in ecoli, but according to the CPI you’re significantly better off now; so the nominal value of a boomers house is now worth significantly more due to all this perceived wealth.
But are they actually trumpy? Or tatey which happens to support Trump right now
Tate will probably be the next leader of the Republican party
Don’t even joke about that.
Trump is pretty old, so we will find out soon enough I guess.
See ‘normative alexithymia’
Hell, I’m 46 and it’s really hard to not be cynical these days. I want to believe there’s still good people out there but I run into so many assholes.
I’m also 40 something. Oh for the dizzy optimism of the 90s…
I will forever seethe that I missed out on the 1990s, especially considering how IT was a money printer back then & the rave scene was top notch. I just about caught the tail end of the old internet as well, even that has gone to complete corporate dogshit.
And owning a house wasnt a Pipedream : (
I got in on the 90’s dream and had a house with a handshake and a smile, lost it eventually because of family medical problems. Probably will never own a home again.
'Murca.
Ah the rave scene really was amazing. Have you seen the tiktok videos? The music and feeling will stay with me forever
Don’t use tiktok lol, I’ve seen a few old clips passed around on forums and stuff uploaded to youtube though, shit looked great. Meanwhile the smallest rave gets shut down pretty quickly by the police these days : ( also pretty envious of pints being far more affordable back then, I barely even go to spoons as a student as it just costs way too fuckin much. I guess one upside of the modern day though is party drugs being cheap, pure and plentiful but that can obviously also have significant drawbacks.
I joined and deleted tiktok just to download the videos! I’m properly old now I swear everything was just better back then
Thats the way to use it lol, and I hear that a lot : ( most annoying this is we should be able to have a world where no one wants for anything anymore but alas no line must perpetually go up.
Optimism? Do you remember the entire grunge movement? GenX is full of apathy and pessimism. I still remember the day Kurt died, it was a defining moment in our lives.
Uhh, ok hmm…so I learned in life if everyone you see is an asshole, you’re the asshole.
Think about it this way: there are countless good people in your life but as a society we get taught to get fixated on the worst to complain about. Maybe it’s more entertaining. Maybe we sync to it cuz maybe we have similar features in ourselves we don’t like … which ever the reason it’s personal why we do this. But in doing so It’s easy to discount the good people by ignoring them and what they do. We notice every mistake and bad person out there.
And how do you think that makes good people around you feel?
Well they stop coming around. They get drained from being ignored. They put up boundaries where they don’t want to be around assholes fixated on the negative and don’t spend their time on assholes.
And that’s how we become assholes telling on ourselves by admitting everyone is assholes.
It’s the shoe smells like shit every where you go analogy.
Uhh, ok hmm…so I learned in life if everyone you see is an asshole, you’re the asshole.
I lived by this phrase until I realized that most people are so blitheringly stupid that they are by default “assholes.” I still treat everyone with respect and compassion, but I don’t feel connected or very sympathetic to anyone anymore because now I know the truth and it’s dark and if you don’t see the broad, creeping darkness that is covering everything right now, you’re choosing willful ignorance over community. You can still build community and make things better even accepting that there are lots of terrible assholes out there who will also benefit from your efforts.
Lack of curiosity, willful ignorance, science denial, choosing emotionally-pandering media, tuning out and not caring about anything outside of their immediate stimulation-sphere, creates a whole lot of people who aren’t even thinking themselves better than you, because they’re not thinking. People are training themselves broadly to not think and we’re living in the effects of this decision.
Every time you choose to surround yourself with media and people whom would never argue or disagree with your notions, every time you say “I can’t deal with this” every time you sneer at someone’s personal story, every time you spend an hour scrolling social media, every time you avoid learning new things, you are pushing that “societal asshole meter” higher and higher.
And all of this doesn’t even begin to touch on the very real, very prevalent people who are fucking hateful. Again, you can choose to be blind to other people’s hate if you’re not of the demographic that experiences being hated for arbitrary reasons, but there are plenty of people who are hated and bullied every day by people who are indeed, evil. We can’t be afraid to call a goddamn spade a spade.
And people (like you) who are trying to convince us that spades are not spades, are upholding an unfair and deeply oppressive system because they have either privilege of class, race or ignorance.
Don’t come here trying to gaslight me. 50% of our country are hateful bigots, it’s pretty hard to avoid running into at least one every day.
Then what are you doing to chase off the other 50% who aren’t?
I surround myself with good people.
That’s the exact opposite of what you’re claiming in your first post. Now look who’s gaslighting. And you claim you were the victim of gaslighting. Yep, called it. you are the asshole.
You are misinterpreting what I said and I’m not going to waste any more time on you.
I think they’ve got it the wrong way around. The under 40s have a chance of rebuilding after the war. Yes, there are hard times ahead but they are young enough to come out on the other side.
At 49, I’m quite sure I either won’t make it through the coming storm at all or at least won’t be able to enjoy the aftermath for long once things get better again.
The under 40s are going to be the ones fighting the wars, as always. Even if there is an other side for humanity after what’s coming, no one alive today will ever have a peaceful life ever again.
I’ll take prison or a bullet to the head before I decide to fight for a nation that has pulled the rug out from underneath me.
I hope more young people see it this way, maybe we’ll actually get to a point where we can watch all these leaders duke it out in person because no one will fight for them
In my 30s, feel the same way. Why would I offer myself to the meat grinder for a nation that bitches about me all the time?
Wait til they hand you the gun, play good boy til they let you touch the weapons
Then, aim them at the most superior officers possible and open fire indiscriminately
You do the world a favor and are likely to have your end come suddenly from a direction you don’t see
Gen Xer here (born in '67). I would encourage young people to NOT join the military at this point in the timeline. It’s not about serving your country any more, it’s about a bunch of greedy fucks using you to further their fucked up, anti-working class, anti-humanity agenda.
I assumed we were talking about a civil war against fascism
The under 40s will be sent to die at the front
(i am under 40)
My parents just stopped watching the news about anything and just sit thinking everything will be okay. Its starting to get difficult to have a relationship with them because they are so out of touch with reality. They even go to protests but for them its just a thing to go do because they’re not doing anything else. They have zero understanding of any of the reasons they’re happening other than trump bad.
Idk man, I’d kill just to have mine agree on the trump bad part. You do you, but tuning out our shit news cycle is low on the offense scale for me. It can be much worse.
My Mom is so disappointed that my kids are not active, do not goto protests. She wants to leave a better world for them but is no longer able to help make that happen, so needs to see her grandchildren turn the world around.
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In effect the relative lack of news back in the day was how people could feel optimistic, at least in the US and Western Europe. We could be pretty oblivious and happy about USSR going away and all seemed just fine because the news barely covered the bad stuff and the Internet was barely a thing and we didn’t get a whole lot of global exposure.
Things can get better and we have to work at it, but we don’t need to be hopeless. If we can’t believe good things can happen, then what would be the point anyway…
If we can’t believe good things can happen, then what would be the point anyway…
Two things:
- Being kind to others, making their lives a bit less painful and hopefully a bit more joyful.
- Spite. Opting out would be making the lives of the bastards who are inflicting the bullshit on the rest of us too easy.
I don’t expect things to get better within my lifetime and I’m not yet 40. All that I’ve witnessed in my lifetime is an accelerating decline in financial stability for people who work for a living and continual degradation of the quality of basic goods that people are able to afford.
I managed to not get totally fucked during the pandemic after having been set back probably about a decade and a half by The Recession. Now, my field is getting hit by regular layoffs that don’t actually benefit anyone but make the line go up. Shit is not looking good in the near future.
Exactly, in times of doom, you have to believe and hope, much more than ever before.
lol, the other day my Boomer Dad said, “Everything will work out. You have to think positively.”
Based on WHAT? Nothing has “just worked out” for at least 25 years.
As a cohort, Boomers ushered in this paradigm, and remain completely oblivious to the world. I will probably never stop heaping culpability at their feet.
At this point we have to contend with small wins like Die Linke getting almost 10% of the vote in Germany, Elon Musk getting bullied out of politics, and Carney winning in Canada.
I won’t contend with small wins anymore. I want it all, heaven or hell
PEACE JUSTICE AND ANARCHY
Unfortunately Musk didn’t get bullied out of politics, his office was always meant to expire at the beginning of May. He achieved what he set out to do: dismantling federal government completely to make deruglation, tax avoidance and corruption much easier.
This is just him doing the typical right wing martyrdom whining whenever somebody criticises them.
Die Linke (Formel SPD) used to be close to a majority in our parents time.
Idk what you mean by that, the SPD was always centre left, at least since Bismarck times. Sure, they moved to be basically no-opinion-at-all centrism recently, but it is not like they were the shining sunshine of socialism before.
The Die Linke of today is popular for the positions of the SPD of the past.
Maybe you are older than me. In the last ~20 years that I was old enough to understand the news, the SPD was always the center-left party and the Left/PDS the far left (for a non-fringe party) one. Fugging hell, my conservative grandma voted SPD because she dislikes Merz for his AfD bullshit back in January, and she is everything but left-wing.
I am not that old, but the social Democrats of old wanted e.g. a wealth tax and maximum income taxes that are much higher than today’s. I don’t have a long list of examples.
BSW was a mistake maybe
Dutton getting his arse absolutely handed to him in Australia, ditto palmer
I am over 60 and I can plainly see everything it fucked.
I’m quickly catching up to your age and I don’t really understand either why it would be a young people thing either. (not that I’m not still young of course, my white hair are just an affectation)
It’s just a matter of looking around.Welcome to the age of the smartphone, where we’re more informed while being more misinformed and where we’re all connected but can’t actually connect. We’ve hit the point where people can watch something, stare the truth in the eye and say “that’s a lie” or be told an obvious lie that could be disproved in less than a minute and say “that’s so true.”
There’s no easy way out of the hole now either. If the government stepped in, the people spreading lies would simply lie and say the government was misleading people and people would gobble it up, and there’s no way I’d trust anything privately owned to tell me the truth.
Our huge problem here is that we’ve ignored warning signs for so long, that the entire system is broadly fuuuuucked. We always said “well the education system here sucks, I’m sure someone will fix it eventually.”
Then we said “Well the heathcare system here sucks, I’m sure someone will fix it eventually.”
Then we said “The internet is becoming weird, it’s making people think different because of algorithms and outside influence, I hope someone fixes it eventually.”
Then we said “Corporations are consolidating power and making the wealth-gap much wider, we’re losing our entire middle-class and educated people… is someone going to fix this?”
The whole time not wanting to admit what we all know somewhere deep inside, which is nobody is coming.
Agreed, we’ve spent so long waiting it’s all we’re conditioned to do. We believed our elected officials would do what’s in the country’s interest but here we are.
We as a nation need to bury both political parties and get this train back on the tracks because while Dems are far better than maga they’re still corpo bootlickers.
am 40. still feel this way.
over 50 and felt this way for over half the millenia and before that felt it likely to be that way given how things were going.
Everyone over 40: “Yup, social media has really fucked those kids’ brains up”
I am well over 40 and I agree with OP. Then again, I didn’t give up my empathy at the door to adulthood.
Whereas the reality is that things are so fucked because these idiots get their news from Facebook. The Trump administration admitted to making a mistake deporting Kilmer Garcia - they’ll never find out because they’re too busy sharing OAN articles about that trans women they bullied out of fencing.
Social media was a mistake. User age has nothing to do with it.
Judging by the typical Facebookfeed, I’d strongly argue the opposite.
I have seen so many 50+ year olds that waste several hours a day doomscrolling Facebook say this unironically.
I’m glad to see folks talking on here. Makes me feel better knowing we’re here all going through it. Gives me that Band of Brothers vibe “We stand alone, together.”
Kind of feels like there’s two kinds of people out there right now in the US. Once you think we’re fucked, and the ones who think they have enough generational wealth that “their” kids won’t be fucked.
There’s probably a sizeable third pool out there that are just watching propaganda and going everything is fine everybody’s overreacting or I don’t care it doesn’t affect me. I think even that pool’s shrinking a bit.
There’s also people who are absolutely going to get fucked but are still living in a comfortable dream-world where they think someone is going to come make everything normal again.
There are whole swathes of us who are still foolishly optimistic enough to think we can pull ourselves out of this nose dive too.
I fear we’re into parachute territory, we’ll need to rebuild the plane from parts after we touch down.
Please don’t let it be a Lost sequel…Please…
optimistic enough to think we can pull ourselves out of this nose dive
To be precise, they think someone else is going to pull us out of the nose-dive, and that because we’ve had a lifetime of comforts and status-quo, there’s no chance of bad things happening to them personally… that’s just stuff that happens on TV, right???
Some of us know its fucked and are just trying to get by.
