My parents once asked me why I didn't have enough savings to buy a house yet.
I almost lost my shit.
The only people my age that I know who own their own house are also drug dealers.
Guess I should sell drugs if I want a house.
I had a legitimate talk about doing this with my girlfriend. As much as I hate how sketchy it is, it still just seems sooo tempting.
But is it worse than tricking other people to work 40+ hours a week doing whatever you say and giving you most of the value they create? Because that’s the other option.
Plus if you buy a bunch of houses you can get them to give back most of the money you pay them.
Depends on whether you sell harder stuff too I guess.
Funny fungus is cheap, quick, easy and low stakes with decent margins if you're careful. Or so I've heard
Just accept the fact you’ll never own a house and will forever live in a shoebox.
A whole shoebox? Luxury. My 27 brothers and I lived in a bit of rolled up newspaper on the street.
In comic, dystopian reality, selling drugs (really just weed) was how I graduated college debt-free, and graduating without debt was the only way I could take out/afford a loan for a house.
So apparently, it's true what they say, whether planting or selling trees, the best time to do it was 10 years ago. The second best time is now! (Except don't)
I'm not sure if selling weed alone would be good enough in a legal state. I could corner the market on LSD tho. Ain't nobody got that 'round here!
I mean if you can work out how to synthesize it. I believe it requires a fair bit of equipment and chemistry knowledge.
And then get to sell the stamps you made yourself and nobody knows if you fly or cry, when taking it? You better already have a trusted distributor, already in the game, waiting. Probably you should not distribute it anywhere to close to home. You'll want to have any issues related to it, to exist preferably in another universe.
There are many more things to consider and plan beforehand, unless the plan is not to sell drugs.
I wasn't suggesting to actually do this. I was trying to point out that it's quite difficult to make in the first place....
i figured - i was also trying to back up your point.
english is not my native language, sorry for the misundertanding
I think I remember reading there's a legit tek somewhere out there; the catch is that there are also a lot of fake teks, either because they're supposed to be satire, or because someone's trying to look good on a random forum and they know no one will actually try it due to equipment requirements. Additionally, I think you can technically do it with stuff at home, but the quality and yield would probably be shit, which is something you don't want to fuck with when it comes to ergot.
You don't necessarily have to use ergot though that is probably simpler. I believe there is a total synthesis.
Not too far from reality where I live. One dude already is doing time because he was blatantly dropping cash payments on things like a HOUSE and multiple cars.
The feds had a FIELD DAY with him.
Damn I just thought about it and the only home owner friend I have that isn't a drug dealer, is a cop.
I think you're on to something.
My guy sold weed until he owned a house then had a kid. He figured he pressed his luck long enough. He also had an effective laundry.
I'm 35, and if you squint a bit at the mortgage, I "own" home. With my partner. And we'll be paying it off for another 27 years. And we're the lucky ones of this generation.
Buying a home with saving, fucking lol
Well, the good news is if you have a fixed rate mortgage the crushing amount of incoming inflation may cut that back to like 15-20 years!
I'm a couple years older than you, but my partner and I feel incredibly lucky to own a home as well. We bought an abandoned property back in 09' for 35k and have spent the last ten years fixing it up. If I wasn't able to borrow 20k from USAA back then, I don't think I'd even be able to afford the rent in my neighborhood nowadays.
Once I hit my 40s, massive home diy projects have either become necessities (too expensive to hire out), pipe dreams, or like PA DOT working on route 202 in my youth (never ending with incremental steps that never improve the experience of driving). The energy loss is off the hook, and I’m not a flubbynutter.
Seriously. Our house is 175 years old and hadn't had much work done to it since the last major renovation in the 1920s. People ask me if I renovated it myself. I laugh and explain that no, a crew of full time professional carpenters, roofers, masons, demo experts, plumbers, electricians, plasterers, and painters spent over a year on it. I just don't think anyone has any concept of how much work is involved in real renovation.
Fortunately interest rates stated low enough that I could keep borrowing more and more and more money to pay all those people. But now I'm trapped and can never sell.
Pay off over 15 years if you can or you'll pay about double the total value just from interest.
I do like that theory. Unfortunately my wallet disagrees with it.
Thankfully we've locked it in for 2.2% for 20 year, and semi-realistically we should be able to pay it off before that runs out. But the official period is 30 years, since that's the legal maximum.
Gotcha. Well consider adding a couple hundred bucks towards principle each month--it would still make a gigantic impact over the term of the loan.
ask them why didn’t they have savings to “buy a private yacht yet” at your age, because I would guess it’s roughly similar in the proportion of pay/cost
LOL when my father asked me how much savings I had, I immediately knew that our life experiences were vastly different.
My daughter is buying a house at 24. People are still buying houses with mortgages.
To keep your sanity you just have to lower your expectations.
I, for example, am really stoked for the burrito I ordered. Fuck, it’s good to be alive.
I'm stoked about having learned how to repair PCs in my last 6 hour hyperfixation, and then actually fixing two PCs.
Oh man, that's the good shit right there! Ride that dopamine wave.
I am! I am also sleep deprived lmaooo.
First time in years though I felt genuinely content with my life and it's over something as insignificant as this!
Recently took apart and repaired a broken clothes washer that I couldn’t afford to replace at the moment so I feel this same sense of dopamine hitting.
Feels good lol
Is it hard? I've built several PCs and repair seems like a good line of work for me, but I know nothing about the individual components of the parts
Yes and no! It's a difficult initial process if you have no idea but becomes extremely easy once you know how PCs work.
Knowing how to diagnose problems is I feel a more difficult part. It's more complicated than knowing "These parts go there and have cables that connect to the CPU switch, main power and hard drives" because cables and parts, to a huge degree, can only fit where they belong.
I imagine in the line of PC repair work you'll encounter much more complicated issues and often multi-part damage. Also probably a lot of filth, I heard most normal people NEVER clean their PCs, change Thermal Paste or even let some nasty bugs accumulate in their PC.
Bonus points for if it's a laptop instead of a PC. Their tight compact nature makes repairing them hell I'd imagine. BONUS bonus points if you're working on an outdated PC who's parts you can't just easily swap out.
You ever had a deep fried burrito? That shit is life changing and good enough reason for me to keep going.
Something called a chimichanga in my neck of the woods. You can get one smothered or dry. You can even get one stuffed with fruit and covered with sweet and spicy sauces
i was and still am confused that chimichanga isnt a universal term
if i may ask are you from southern usa area?
Chimichanga is definitely the preferred nomenclature.
Ever had a wet burrito with melted cheese on top and inside?
If you had written "hot burrito with melted cheese on top and inside", i would be craving it now.
I was eating one while typing it, lol. Thanks taqueria de anda for providing me with my wet burritos when I get the munchies.
Ok now i want a wet one too
As someone who ate a burrito a few hours ago, I am no longer stoked
They tell you that the sky might fall They'll say that you might lose it all So I run until I hit that wall Yeah I learned my lesson, count my blessings Look to the rising sun and run run run
The century of find out with almost no active participation in the previous century of fuck around.
A lot of "climate collapse global late stage capitalism and food is more and more plastic" stick with very little "convenience products are kinda nifty" carrot
It's kind of bittersweet being a very tail-end Gen X person. On the happy side, I got to do my childhood and teen years in the "fuck about" era, but on the unhappy side my entire adulthood has been in the "find out" era, and I get to remember what it was like briefly living in a world that wasn't entirely going to shit.
it's kind of affirming to hear you say that. As a gen Z person I feel like we're constantly being gaslit into thinking stuff has always been bad and we just complain more or something
Thank you!
This was very well put. Felt like a big puzzle piece just fell in place and this discomfort of not knowing why stuff feels so weird nowadays let go a bit.
❤️🤜
Tbf it was slowly going to shit back then too.
Eh. It didn't really start going to shit until 2001. Things stayed pretty darn good after 92. Not a lot of decades with that track record.
I mean, in the 90s we bitched about mostly distant global things because things were pretty good in general for most. And we had time to worry about less-catastrophic domestic things like Mumia or Peltier or what have you.
Now things aren't so good and we end up bitching about far more local things because things around us are so bad.
It's a great trick
My point was that climate change was still occuring in the background, but I can of course appreciate the fact that it wasn't in the public zeitgeist in the same manner.
@ObviouslyNotBanana Oh, well, it was, but it hadn't reached "we're fucked" levels yet. It was still in the "we can stop this" stage. Again, this kind of got fucked up post-2000.
We realized the powers with the most to gain short-term by continuing their global warming emissions weren't going to budge unless forced, and since government had already been captured long before I was born, no-one was going to force them.
So we knew even in the eighties, climate was going to kill us, but Reagan believed the biblical apocalypse was going to occur in his term via nuclear holocaust. But he wasn't willing to first strike and be personally responsible for hundreds of millions of casualties.
But he was so sure, he felt environmental conservation (what it was called then) was silly.
Older millennial here, so about your age, I have really early childhood memories before ozone issues, recessions, and planet fucking, after that it's been one paper straw after another
I feel like I could still join in on all the fuck around going on, but the find out has simultaneously already started and I can't deal with the cognitive incongruence. Most people seem to be just fine with that tho. Must be nice being able to just turn your brain off and keep fucking the planet like that.
I really wish my generation was a bit more optimistic. Yeah shit sucks, don't get me wrong. But have you guys seen all of history? This is par for the course. Yeah the challenges are different but every generation had their challenges. And yeah baby boomers definitely had it better than us, but that doesn't mean there's nothing but bad stuff to come. You have to take life with the good and the bad and make the most of it.
The bad is starting to look more and more like an impending global societal collapse with every passing day though
Yeah I don't know about "par for the course"
What other generation had the threat of scientifically proven ecological collapse looming over them?
scientifically proven ecological collapse
This is a pretty specific thing, but the general "we're all doomed" vibe is definitely not unique to today. Boomers and older had the threat of nuclear annihilation looming over them, and before that... well, disease and famine and death and destruction due to war have historically been the norm.
Imagine how you'd feel living in the Americas in the 16th or 17th centuries and either watching the destruction wrought by European settlers firsthand or, maybe worse, watching your peers die en masse of the diseases introduced by those settlers. Imagine living in Eurasia in the 13th century and watching the Mongol army sweep through.
None of this is to say that today's challenges aren't real and serious. Just that we're not the first to face such challenges.
I think the doom is real, but we're all looking at it through 6" x 3" magnifying glasses that condense all the shit into one giant nugget, and then the easy thing is to comment on that nugget because, well it's right there, and last winter was unseasonably warm and there were some pretty catastrophic wildfires, and the ocean is doing weird shit, and it's easy to think that that's all there is, but you can still take a walk in the woods on a sunny day, and say hi to some people, and maybe make a friend.
For now
The greatest and silent generations saw some shit
And the stupid fucks still decided to have kids.
By your logic, the first humans should've stopped having kids and died out the first time they faced any sort of existential issue. Life's hard yo, that doesn't mean it's not worth living.
It really isn't worth living.
No matter how easy, hard, successful or failure of a life you live, the end result is identical.
That's life. What value you assign it is up to you to decide. Philosophy is how I find my value, for others it's religion. Ultimately, that's something you have to figure out for yourself.
oh fuck off with this anti natalist bullshit. do you not watch movies because they have an ending too?
I get to remember that ending.
But go ahead and have kids so you can watch em slave for wage massa, Pay 10 grand a month to rent a Pod, and deal with 150°F winters yeah boiiii life is sooo goOoOd!!!
Fuck outta here, sadist.
Considering science has only gotten robust enough to prove anything like that far more recently than any good examples of ecological collapse, I'd say this parameter is a little arbitrary.
The best example I can think of regarding ecological collapse is during and after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Their climate decreased in temperature, which reduces crop yields, which weakened the empire and encouraged migration from northern Europe, which brought their collapse (plus like 12 other things lol).
In 535AD, during Justinian's reign in the east, the first black plague happened following a supermassive volcano that left the sky covered in ash blocking the sun. This was a massively ecologically damaging period of history and it caused the death of countless plant and animal life, along with the deaths of half the population of the Mediterranean.
It's not like people of this age were taking soil samples and references trends or whatever, but they certainly understood how things were going poorly.
Find the good in eat. We can finally get rid of society's parasites. Landlords
The ozone layer depletion was a very serious threat. The solutions were a lot easier though.
At least for me, that was ongoing when I was in elementary school, so I'd still count that as part of "this generation"
Gen Z and younger at least got to not have to worry about that though, you're right
I mean, they literally thought WW1 and WW2 would start the apocalypse.
Nuclear armageddon was a daily fear of the Cold War, and almost happened several times.
The difference now is that we know all we need to do to ruin Earth for human life is to do nothing.
This is an interesting perspective, because in previous generations most of the long term fears were settled by simply doing nothing. They held their breath and it worked out.
The key difference is that the current generations are acutely aware that if we do nothing and just "stay calm and carry on", we're totally fucked. Inaction isn't going to save us this time. We can't put our heads in the sand and just sing ourselves to sleep then expect a good outcome when we resurface.
I think that's a key differentiator. Previous generations were fearful of something happening. Current generations are fearful of nothing happening, because if nothing happens then the world will become uninhabitable by humans.
Yet, the majority of the decision-makers in our society are silent generation/boomers that drove to success by inaction and they're largely doing nothing. We see this and understandably know how fucked we are.
Inaction isn’t going to save us this time.
It won't, but it will sustain profits, and that's what terrifies me: we're gonna watch the world burn so some rich bastards get an even better return instead of doing something to save our species. sorry about your future kids, profit margins and people wanting to roll coal seemed more important at the time.
Yeah I think that nails it. That fear of nothing changing except the slow crumble getting worse while we watch more people metaphorically drown in the onslaught of horrors.
Excellent point.
You need to give articles making predictions about the future a heavy amount of doubt. We may be relatively intelligent as a species, but I genuinely think we way over-estimate our abilities. Predicting the future is hard. The biggest problem is that predictions are based on past data, and cannot account for what might happen that hasn't happened before. Which when faced with a brand new problem tends to be a brand new response.
Look at our lives right now. While certainly not ideal (who could make that claim, in all history?) it's pretty damn nice if you look back in time. Yes lotsa awful stuff MIGHT happen, but that's always been true. And compared to the challenges of the past it's not on any scale we haven't been on before (I mean the Cold War literally could have resulted in the planet becoming uninhabitable due to nukes).
I'm not saying I disagree with you, I'm merely trying to give it a glass half full perspective. I agree some scale of societal collapse does seem like it is a real possibility, but it's by no means guaranteed or necessarily even likely. We don't know what we don't know. Embrace not knowing what the future holds and just enjoy life for what it is today.
This is what gave me some peace: it could all end horribly for me at any minute. Anything could happen. I could get hit by a bus. I could die painfully from some fucked up disease. A fat asteroid could hit the earth. It's all out of my control. Or things could turn out for the better, by some way I never foresaw. The best thing for us to do is to strive to be good people and care for what is in front of us.
I still find it a bit of a mindfuck that humanity is being such a deleterious effect on this beautiful world.
... and I do think that growing up under the threat of nuclear holocaust must have been similarly terrifying.
Most generations don't need to deal with an impending threat to the whole planet. Nuclear apocalypse, sure, but at least there was no pretending that it wasn't a problem.
This is ignoring all of the other ways in which we're fucked.
Another thing that is worse is how we havent had anything recently to inspire hope. The Higgs Boson would have been the Millenial/Gen Z equivalent of the moon landing if the public hadn't been so distrusting of physics because of string theory evangelists.
For me, the first world (i.e. the part of the world allied with the US) had a common enemy to get behind and that allowed people to live in peace for 1.5 generations or so. When the USSR collapsed, that bogeyman suddenly disappeared and the infighting started nearly instantly.
I think the Internet is partially to blame.
The negative stuff happening in the world seems to spread so much faster and get so much more publicity that it's easy to end up in a constant negative spiral
Yeah I think you're dead on. I'm evidently not alone in thinking that the age of information is driving a lot of consciousness of worldwide issues on a scale we've never seen before. People in the Middle Ages only knew the small world they lived in on the scale of a city or region. If that city or region was prospering, their life was likely pretty damn nice.
These days, we're aware of all issues everywhere. And if you don't create that perspective for yourself, that can be incredibly overwhelming. You have to give in to a certain sense of wilful ignorance because you literally cannot be involved with every one of those problems. Not clicking on all the doom and gloom news articles has done wonders for my mental health. I guess you could say this thread was a moment of weakness.. :p
What's interesting when you look at birthrate declines is not that they are declining, it's that they are declining to NORMAL LEVELS. Everyone is freaking out that the next generation won't be big enough to support retiring Boomers without understanding that there should never have been so many Boomers in the first place.
Boomers without understanding that there should never have been so many Boomers in the first place.
its literally in their name too: 'baby boomers'. too many in too short a time and they have dominated politics for the better part of a century now
baby boomers definitely had it better than us
Dunno, man. Boomers in my home country went through such shit time that they think that becoming literal nazis still isn't the worst thing to happen in their lifetime. They did get free housing before that, though, so I'm not sure they actually had it worse overall...
As someone that's been around for some of history it's bad now. Just the cost of living stuff is dark. Grown adults are sharing bedrooms because they can't afford to rent a room by themselves on a full time wage. People have raised entire families on a single factory workers wage for hundreds of years before now, now two people with decent jobs can't afford one kid. It's dark.
"some history" lol all you're doing is describing things as Not As Bad As The Great Depression
It's a different situation but I don't think 'not as bad' really works here. The average house during the 30's was only twice the average wage, you could absolutely support a family on a single income. Other things were bad, like the unemployment rate, but it was temporary.
The issue in this post is that what we're dealing with is 'life' being unattainable for the majority of people. For people in their 20's now it's always been that way. They can't move out, they can't get an education, they can't get a career going, it's grim.
When Fallout Boy did the cover of We Didn't Start the Fire, all hope was lost.
Was it that bad?
Maybe it’s not everyone’s cup of tea but I love it haha, basically a custom made “This is fine” meme in song form for our generation.
I wish the events were chronological and they missed a few BIG things
But all in all I enjoyed it quite a bit anyways.
I've thought of the 1975's Love It If We Made It as this generation's We Didn't Start The Fire.
gen z didn't need a song to know who started the fire. now we all have anxiety because we're the ones who gotta put it out
The Ukraine-Russia & Israel-Palestine wars, and the likelyhood of China going after Taiwan before 2027, and the Koreas continually being a powder keg influenced by all of this. Between all that and me being 23 years old I sincerely think I might witness World War 3, it's terrifying, yet it feels inevitable with our era of false 1st world peace built on a house of cards.
That's not even mentioning the Republican Project 2025, as a trans person I might have to fight for my life.
What do you mean by house of cards? Seems to me like the current political order is the most stability the world has ever seen and is only threatened by an axis of fascist countries that deliberatly wants to plunge the world into war and chaos.
It's been stable based on temporary peace and Mutually Assured Destruction (not just from nukes). For example China-Taiwan are still in a civil war that never officially ended, and China has always wanted to reabsorb Taiwan and Taiwan has always been opposed to. The Koreas are actively still in a cease fire for a war that also never concluded. And the middle east has always been churning with armed conflicts.
The western 1st world countries managed to extract enough wealth to stay far and away from these kinds of conflicts, but they are still heavily dependent on these countries and we'll all feel the impacts if things get worse.
China has always wanted to reabsorb Taiwan and Taiwan has always been opposed to
Technically, the mainland and Taiwan both claimed to have rightful rule over the other, although sentiment in Taiwan gradually changed to favor independence instead.
I'd support Taiwan taking over China but that just seems very, very, very unlikely.
But yeah, the way it's been handled is both sides willfully ignoring the fact they are two countries, which is an inherently unstable position.
It'd be like if Puerto Rico claimed all of America it's own and America was very upset about that while also ignoring it.
It's most threatened by the climate change it has brought about. The lurch towards fascism doesn't help, but climate change will exacerbate that along with many other problems.
My GenX existential horror was learning in my thirties that all the western American Exceptionalism ideology I was indoctrinated in as a kid was just a way of keeping us from getting proactive for sake of the future generations, and my parents and teachers and ministers knew this and actively lied to me anyway.
I also think that a lot of bad things about the US that a blind eye was turned to because they seemed to be getting better have since become relevant again because they've started getting worse
Oh I realized that in my 20s
I was particularly credulous.
Conservatives are well known for acting against their own self interest.
Not just those under 40. I do feel bad I sorta got a brief taste of "good times" and worry eventually younger folks will think the post 2000's are normal.
Yeah, I'm juuuust old enough to have a firm memory of when things that were laughably petty were the biggest problems in the world. You mean to tell me the PRESIDENT got a BLOWJOB?!
All the real issues that sowed the seeds for our intractably broken future were sidelined and mostly ignored. Desert Storm, woowoo go world police. LA Riots, oh you crazy minorities and your intolerance for extrajudicial murder. Climate change, what's that?
Well Obama did wear that tan suit
Without the American flag pin (because it was on his other suit). It's a shame he hated America so much.
Desert Storm was the good one. Sadam invaded Kuwait, a large international coalition ended the occupation. Today's analogue would be NATO entering Ukraine, kicking the Russians out, and showing that wars of aggression are unacceptable.
Iraq in '03 was the problematic one. Falsified casus belli, war crimes galore.
There hasn't been a "good one" since WW2.
Short explanation: The arms Iraqi forces fought with during the Gulf War were largely bought or built by Americans. Isn't that interesting?
Long explanation: It's all connected to the Israel-Palestine issues we are seeing this very day. Iraq was dealt a very nasty hand by the UN after the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, becoming a landlocked country, with lines drawn such that they were made caretakers of ethnic enemies and forced to forsake much of their geopolitical power and resources to tribal rivals. It's difficult to say their claim to Kuwait was justified, but it's certainly just as difficult to say it was unjustified.
On top of that, we had just gotten done with fucking over Iraq due to their failure in the Iraq-Iran war. They had initially allied with the USSR to prop themselves up, and when that went to shit they turned around and tried doing the west and themselves a favor by grabbing a piece of Iran. We were directly supporting them (anybody taking a punch at Iran is a friend of ours!), and had been increasing our support, but when they agreed to a ceasefire we stopped, leaving them war-torn, deeply in debt, and with really nothing to show for their experiment of working with the west aside from all these shiny American weapons of course.
Medium explanation?: Iraq had been engineered to be an Israel-like anti-Arab agent in the region, but when they failed and sued for peace, we left them no other option but to wage another war to survive. When they went in a direction we didn't like, we got all our buddies together (including a surprising number of old enemies) and decimated them. Twice!
Not quite. First, the vast majority of Iraqi equipment was Soviet, and the vast majority of the stuff that wasn't Soviet was French.
French contractors even built the air defense network and control center.
Certainly there are tensions in Iraq as a result of it coming in to being as a constructed nation - nowhere did I say otherwise. However that doesn't justify a war of aggression against a neighboring country.
Further, Iraq's casus belli had nothing to do with having a potential 'claim' to Kuwait's land. Kuwait sovereignty pre-dates by centuries. The real reason was Kuwait's refusal to write off Iraqi debt and refusal to lower its oil product (it was producing above its OPEC quota - depressing prices and hurting Iraq's exports).
It is true that Saddam thought the West was using OPEC and Kuwait to undermine Iraq. That may be true. Putin thinks the West is using Ukraine to undermine him - so should we stop supporting Ukraine and let Russia annex it?
46 checking in, and yep, shit is on fire. GenX knows what's up.
It is normal. It's been this way for ± 15 years. Certainly the entirety of my adulthood and I'm nearly 30.
If it's any comfort, 99% of human existence before us was worse. 100 years ago no one cared what you thought if the powers that be wanted to send you to war. Don't even get me started about your life if you were a woman or minority. You don't like it? There must be something wrong with you, off to the insane asylum for shock therapy.
That's not the present yet, but a simple reminder that fascism is lurking and war will come because of food, water and mass migrations.
You're also diabolizing the past. But that's another matter.
How is that different than now?
We claim we won't force you into the military, but if there's not enough people who want to go to war, we'll draft you.
If you're a woman or minority, we won't kill you outright, but you'll have reduced quality of life without a conformative man to vouch for you. Bad job selection, lowered wages, political/legal/policing discrimination, doctors assuming malingering and not giving healthcare, etc.
People are still slapped with mental illness diagnoses and denied personal agency too. We shut down asylums, but we created mass homelessness. If you're a social rebel or outcast, you get a mental illness label that stops you from gainful employment, allows all authority figures to disregard you entirely, and if you make too much noise we'll send you to a psychiatric ward, give you court-mandated anti-psychotic injections under threat of jail, and even remove your power of attorney or make you a ward of the state.
Oh, and involuntary shock therapy still exists, by the way.
the post 2000s are normal now. what came before is no more normal now than what came before that. it's just the past now. it was a different way for things to be that will likely never be again. just like we'll never be medieval again.
As someone who came of age in the 80s/90s, that's not true. I can't describe the pre and early internet-as-we-know-it days, but they hit different. No anxieties over being always-reachable basically.
That normalization scares me so much. I'm just young enough to not really have lived before it but I also have a good memory and I have that early 90s slide into horror world seared into my awareness for my entire life. And that deep scariness of everyone around me my age and younger, accepting it as normal haunts me and hurts friendships. That and poverty forcing me into terrible situations.
Every day I wake up exhausted trying to look for a silver lining but more often not finding it until sleep.
You can sleep!? Shit, that's pure gold you got right there.
Over 40? For me is even worst! You younglings still have time to do something. I have no house, no savings, no retirement plan and no time to do all that! I'm the most fucked! Do you think I expect good things?
I know, right? Who decided that things get better after 40?
As a GenXer pushing 50 I can guarantee that things have always been tough and they're not getting better.
We're in the same boat.
I started training a few years ago. At least i want to look good, while going down.
omg I didn't even went into looks! I'm now even more depressed! lol
Oh no - i actually meant "feeling fit", that's where i wanted to go with my comment. Please don't depress ‽
You will own nothing, and you will love it! 😠
and yet we essentially live in the best of times.
Sad we can't find a political way for everyone to have enough of what we have.
primal needs to hoard are strong in humans.
We're still using instincts that were designed for the wild.
We're a perfect example of what happens when a predator species becomes overpopulated. They over indulge in a plentiful bounty not realizing they're killing out their food source.
That's why we hunt dear or kill wolves. A balance must exist or everything goes awry.
Humans destroyed this balance.
No, Jerry, we're not going to implement The Purge to bring back Malthusian population cycles. We've already got the Demographic Transition at home.
My method is hoping that I'm just old and western enough that I'll be dead before the real bad shit hits me. I'm 35 though, so... let's say there's a smidge of optimism in there.
Just a smidge?
I’m 27. Could you perhaps spare a drop or two of that optimism? You apparently have truckloads of it lol.
I spent my 20s basically in poverty. Whatever income I earned got sucked away by renting a home with insane heating costs, like $300 / month to keep the house at 55 in winter.
At 35 I applied for a government job in civil service. Fucking changed my life forever.
I can't smoke cigarettes fast enough to keep up
I don't know, my premium notebook is arriving tomorrow, that's pretty exciting.
Yeah i bought a pen that have red blue and red colors well as a pencil and I'm pretty stoked about it
Quit bragging
It sucks to be a pesant
Bought my house right before the new housing crisis. I'm locked in so cheaply that I may not ever move.
Gonna ride my residual income as far as I can take it. I'm done breaking my body for a world that doesn't care.
My landlord just raised my rent 33% with only two month's notice so I'm moving back to my parent's place so I can keep my old rent price. I'm glad they own their house
It's nice when your parents are willing to let you rent/stay with them.
Same here. Bought in 2018 which was supposed to be at some all time high. Then refinanced it during COVID with a total monthly payment of $1500 on a 3br2ba house. When we bought the house we thought we were making a dumb decision, now I'm some sort of genius for getting lucky. I can't imagine trying to rent these days.
Same. Refi'd into 3% and not going to budge. It'll be interesting to see if our loan servicer ever changes, because who in the world would want to buy a loan with such a low interest rate?
Some of us are doing ok and just trying to keep our heads down and not get caught in the crossfire. Good luck you guys. I wish you better fortune in the future.
We should have listened to uncle Ted
Also, Feliz el año del Niño! Gonna be a great 16 months for weather. Especially in Texas!
i thought that too but then dan and phil announced the gaming channel is coming back yesterday
be thankful if you don't live in a concentration camp blockaded on all sides and have clean water / electricity. yet.
You should come with me to the end of the world
Without telling your parents and your friends
You know that you only need say a word
So we might live at the end of the world
70s and 80s were shit. The 30s and 40s? Thanks, I'll take today.
My parents once asked me why I didn't have enough savings to buy a house yet.
I almost lost my shit.
The only people my age that I know who own their own house are also drug dealers.
Guess I should sell drugs if I want a house.
I had a legitimate talk about doing this with my girlfriend. As much as I hate how sketchy it is, it still just seems sooo tempting.
But is it worse than tricking other people to work 40+ hours a week doing whatever you say and giving you most of the value they create? Because that’s the other option.
Plus if you buy a bunch of houses you can get them to give back most of the money you pay them.
Depends on whether you sell harder stuff too I guess.
Funny fungus is cheap, quick, easy and low stakes with decent margins if you're careful. Or so I've heard
Just accept the fact you’ll never own a house and will forever live in a shoebox.
A whole shoebox? Luxury. My 27 brothers and I lived in a bit of rolled up newspaper on the street.
In comic, dystopian reality, selling drugs (really just weed) was how I graduated college debt-free, and graduating without debt was the only way I could take out/afford a loan for a house.
So apparently, it's true what they say, whether planting or selling trees, the best time to do it was 10 years ago. The second best time is now! (Except don't)
I'm not sure if selling weed alone would be good enough in a legal state. I could corner the market on LSD tho. Ain't nobody got that 'round here!
I mean if you can work out how to synthesize it. I believe it requires a fair bit of equipment and chemistry knowledge.
And then get to sell the stamps you made yourself and nobody knows if you fly or cry, when taking it? You better already have a trusted distributor, already in the game, waiting. Probably you should not distribute it anywhere to close to home. You'll want to have any issues related to it, to exist preferably in another universe.
There are many more things to consider and plan beforehand, unless the plan is not to sell drugs.
I wasn't suggesting to actually do this. I was trying to point out that it's quite difficult to make in the first place....
i figured - i was also trying to back up your point.
english is not my native language, sorry for the misundertanding
I think I remember reading there's a legit tek somewhere out there; the catch is that there are also a lot of fake teks, either because they're supposed to be satire, or because someone's trying to look good on a random forum and they know no one will actually try it due to equipment requirements. Additionally, I think you can technically do it with stuff at home, but the quality and yield would probably be shit, which is something you don't want to fuck with when it comes to ergot.
You don't necessarily have to use ergot though that is probably simpler. I believe there is a total synthesis.
Not too far from reality where I live. One dude already is doing time because he was blatantly dropping cash payments on things like a HOUSE and multiple cars.
The feds had a FIELD DAY with him.
Damn I just thought about it and the only home owner friend I have that isn't a drug dealer, is a cop.
I think you're on to something.
My guy sold weed until he owned a house then had a kid. He figured he pressed his luck long enough. He also had an effective laundry.
I'm 35, and if you squint a bit at the mortgage, I "own" home. With my partner. And we'll be paying it off for another 27 years. And we're the lucky ones of this generation.
Buying a home with saving, fucking lol
Well, the good news is if you have a fixed rate mortgage the crushing amount of incoming inflation may cut that back to like 15-20 years!
I'm a couple years older than you, but my partner and I feel incredibly lucky to own a home as well. We bought an abandoned property back in 09' for 35k and have spent the last ten years fixing it up. If I wasn't able to borrow 20k from USAA back then, I don't think I'd even be able to afford the rent in my neighborhood nowadays.
Once I hit my 40s, massive home diy projects have either become necessities (too expensive to hire out), pipe dreams, or like PA DOT working on route 202 in my youth (never ending with incremental steps that never improve the experience of driving). The energy loss is off the hook, and I’m not a flubbynutter.
Seriously. Our house is 175 years old and hadn't had much work done to it since the last major renovation in the 1920s. People ask me if I renovated it myself. I laugh and explain that no, a crew of full time professional carpenters, roofers, masons, demo experts, plumbers, electricians, plasterers, and painters spent over a year on it. I just don't think anyone has any concept of how much work is involved in real renovation.
Fortunately interest rates stated low enough that I could keep borrowing more and more and more money to pay all those people. But now I'm trapped and can never sell.
Pay off over 15 years if you can or you'll pay about double the total value just from interest.
I do like that theory. Unfortunately my wallet disagrees with it. Thankfully we've locked it in for 2.2% for 20 year, and semi-realistically we should be able to pay it off before that runs out. But the official period is 30 years, since that's the legal maximum.
Gotcha. Well consider adding a couple hundred bucks towards principle each month--it would still make a gigantic impact over the term of the loan.
ask them why didn’t they have savings to “buy a private yacht yet” at your age, because I would guess it’s roughly similar in the proportion of pay/cost
LOL when my father asked me how much savings I had, I immediately knew that our life experiences were vastly different.
My daughter is buying a house at 24. People are still buying houses with mortgages.
To keep your sanity you just have to lower your expectations.
I, for example, am really stoked for the burrito I ordered. Fuck, it’s good to be alive.
I'm stoked about having learned how to repair PCs in my last 6 hour hyperfixation, and then actually fixing two PCs.
Oh man, that's the good shit right there! Ride that dopamine wave.
I am! I am also sleep deprived lmaooo.
First time in years though I felt genuinely content with my life and it's over something as insignificant as this!
Recently took apart and repaired a broken clothes washer that I couldn’t afford to replace at the moment so I feel this same sense of dopamine hitting.
Feels good lol
Is it hard? I've built several PCs and repair seems like a good line of work for me, but I know nothing about the individual components of the parts
Yes and no! It's a difficult initial process if you have no idea but becomes extremely easy once you know how PCs work.
Knowing how to diagnose problems is I feel a more difficult part. It's more complicated than knowing "These parts go there and have cables that connect to the CPU switch, main power and hard drives" because cables and parts, to a huge degree, can only fit where they belong.
I imagine in the line of PC repair work you'll encounter much more complicated issues and often multi-part damage. Also probably a lot of filth, I heard most normal people NEVER clean their PCs, change Thermal Paste or even let some nasty bugs accumulate in their PC.
Bonus points for if it's a laptop instead of a PC. Their tight compact nature makes repairing them hell I'd imagine. BONUS bonus points if you're working on an outdated PC who's parts you can't just easily swap out.
You ever had a deep fried burrito? That shit is life changing and good enough reason for me to keep going.
Something called a chimichanga in my neck of the woods. You can get one smothered or dry. You can even get one stuffed with fruit and covered with sweet and spicy sauces
i was and still am confused that chimichanga isnt a universal term
if i may ask are you from southern usa area?
Chimichanga is definitely the preferred nomenclature.
Ever had a wet burrito with melted cheese on top and inside?
If you had written "hot burrito with melted cheese on top and inside", i would be craving it now.
I was eating one while typing it, lol. Thanks taqueria de anda for providing me with my wet burritos when I get the munchies.
Ok now i want a wet one too
As someone who ate a burrito a few hours ago, I am no longer stoked
They tell you that the sky might fall
They'll say that you might lose it all
So I run until I hit that wall
Yeah I learned my lesson, count my blessings
Look to the rising sun and run run run
The century of find out with almost no active participation in the previous century of fuck around.
A lot of "climate collapse global late stage capitalism and food is more and more plastic" stick with very little "convenience products are kinda nifty" carrot
It's kind of bittersweet being a very tail-end Gen X person. On the happy side, I got to do my childhood and teen years in the "fuck about" era, but on the unhappy side my entire adulthood has been in the "find out" era, and I get to remember what it was like briefly living in a world that wasn't entirely going to shit.
it's kind of affirming to hear you say that. As a gen Z person I feel like we're constantly being gaslit into thinking stuff has always been bad and we just complain more or something
Thank you! This was very well put. Felt like a big puzzle piece just fell in place and this discomfort of not knowing why stuff feels so weird nowadays let go a bit. ❤️🤜
Tbf it was slowly going to shit back then too.
Eh. It didn't really start going to shit until 2001. Things stayed pretty darn good after 92. Not a lot of decades with that track record.
I mean, in the 90s we bitched about mostly distant global things because things were pretty good in general for most. And we had time to worry about less-catastrophic domestic things like Mumia or Peltier or what have you.
Now things aren't so good and we end up bitching about far more local things because things around us are so bad.
It's a great trick
My point was that climate change was still occuring in the background, but I can of course appreciate the fact that it wasn't in the public zeitgeist in the same manner.
@ObviouslyNotBanana Oh, well, it was, but it hadn't reached "we're fucked" levels yet. It was still in the "we can stop this" stage. Again, this kind of got fucked up post-2000.
We realized the powers with the most to gain short-term by continuing their global warming emissions weren't going to budge unless forced, and since government had already been captured long before I was born, no-one was going to force them.
So we knew even in the eighties, climate was going to kill us, but Reagan believed the biblical apocalypse was going to occur in his term via nuclear holocaust. But he wasn't willing to first strike and be personally responsible for hundreds of millions of casualties.
But he was so sure, he felt environmental conservation (what it was called then) was silly.
my whole childhood in the 90s was the "ozone layer is dying" but at the same time optimistic outlook on life?
Older millennial here, so about your age, I have really early childhood memories before ozone issues, recessions, and planet fucking, after that it's been one paper straw after another
I feel like I could still join in on all the fuck around going on, but the find out has simultaneously already started and I can't deal with the cognitive incongruence. Most people seem to be just fine with that tho. Must be nice being able to just turn your brain off and keep fucking the planet like that.
I really wish my generation was a bit more optimistic. Yeah shit sucks, don't get me wrong. But have you guys seen all of history? This is par for the course. Yeah the challenges are different but every generation had their challenges. And yeah baby boomers definitely had it better than us, but that doesn't mean there's nothing but bad stuff to come. You have to take life with the good and the bad and make the most of it.
The bad is starting to look more and more like an impending global societal collapse with every passing day though
Yeah I don't know about "par for the course"
What other generation had the threat of scientifically proven ecological collapse looming over them?
This is a pretty specific thing, but the general "we're all doomed" vibe is definitely not unique to today. Boomers and older had the threat of nuclear annihilation looming over them, and before that... well, disease and famine and death and destruction due to war have historically been the norm.
Imagine how you'd feel living in the Americas in the 16th or 17th centuries and either watching the destruction wrought by European settlers firsthand or, maybe worse, watching your peers die en masse of the diseases introduced by those settlers. Imagine living in Eurasia in the 13th century and watching the Mongol army sweep through.
None of this is to say that today's challenges aren't real and serious. Just that we're not the first to face such challenges.
I think the doom is real, but we're all looking at it through 6" x 3" magnifying glasses that condense all the shit into one giant nugget, and then the easy thing is to comment on that nugget because, well it's right there, and last winter was unseasonably warm and there were some pretty catastrophic wildfires, and the ocean is doing weird shit, and it's easy to think that that's all there is, but you can still take a walk in the woods on a sunny day, and say hi to some people, and maybe make a friend.
For now
The greatest and silent generations saw some shit
And the stupid fucks still decided to have kids.
By your logic, the first humans should've stopped having kids and died out the first time they faced any sort of existential issue. Life's hard yo, that doesn't mean it's not worth living.
It really isn't worth living.
No matter how easy, hard, successful or failure of a life you live, the end result is identical.
That's life. What value you assign it is up to you to decide. Philosophy is how I find my value, for others it's religion. Ultimately, that's something you have to figure out for yourself.
oh fuck off with this anti natalist bullshit. do you not watch movies because they have an ending too?
I get to remember that ending.
But go ahead and have kids so you can watch em slave for wage massa, Pay 10 grand a month to rent a Pod, and deal with 150°F winters yeah boiiii life is sooo goOoOd!!!
Fuck outta here, sadist.
Considering science has only gotten robust enough to prove anything like that far more recently than any good examples of ecological collapse, I'd say this parameter is a little arbitrary.
The best example I can think of regarding ecological collapse is during and after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Their climate decreased in temperature, which reduces crop yields, which weakened the empire and encouraged migration from northern Europe, which brought their collapse (plus like 12 other things lol).
In 535AD, during Justinian's reign in the east, the first black plague happened following a supermassive volcano that left the sky covered in ash blocking the sun. This was a massively ecologically damaging period of history and it caused the death of countless plant and animal life, along with the deaths of half the population of the Mediterranean.
It's not like people of this age were taking soil samples and references trends or whatever, but they certainly understood how things were going poorly.
Find the good in eat. We can finally get rid of society's parasites. Landlords
The ozone layer depletion was a very serious threat. The solutions were a lot easier though.
At least for me, that was ongoing when I was in elementary school, so I'd still count that as part of "this generation"
Gen Z and younger at least got to not have to worry about that though, you're right
I mean, they literally thought WW1 and WW2 would start the apocalypse.
Nuclear armageddon was a daily fear of the Cold War, and almost happened several times.
The difference now is that we know all we need to do to ruin Earth for human life is to do nothing.
This is an interesting perspective, because in previous generations most of the long term fears were settled by simply doing nothing. They held their breath and it worked out.
The key difference is that the current generations are acutely aware that if we do nothing and just "stay calm and carry on", we're totally fucked. Inaction isn't going to save us this time. We can't put our heads in the sand and just sing ourselves to sleep then expect a good outcome when we resurface.
I think that's a key differentiator. Previous generations were fearful of something happening. Current generations are fearful of nothing happening, because if nothing happens then the world will become uninhabitable by humans.
Yet, the majority of the decision-makers in our society are silent generation/boomers that drove to success by inaction and they're largely doing nothing. We see this and understandably know how fucked we are.
It won't, but it will sustain profits, and that's what terrifies me: we're gonna watch the world burn so some rich bastards get an even better return instead of doing something to save our species. sorry about your future kids, profit margins and people wanting to roll coal seemed more important at the time.
Yeah I think that nails it. That fear of nothing changing except the slow crumble getting worse while we watch more people metaphorically drown in the onslaught of horrors.
Excellent point.
You need to give articles making predictions about the future a heavy amount of doubt. We may be relatively intelligent as a species, but I genuinely think we way over-estimate our abilities. Predicting the future is hard. The biggest problem is that predictions are based on past data, and cannot account for what might happen that hasn't happened before. Which when faced with a brand new problem tends to be a brand new response.
Look at our lives right now. While certainly not ideal (who could make that claim, in all history?) it's pretty damn nice if you look back in time. Yes lotsa awful stuff MIGHT happen, but that's always been true. And compared to the challenges of the past it's not on any scale we haven't been on before (I mean the Cold War literally could have resulted in the planet becoming uninhabitable due to nukes).
I'm not saying I disagree with you, I'm merely trying to give it a glass half full perspective. I agree some scale of societal collapse does seem like it is a real possibility, but it's by no means guaranteed or necessarily even likely. We don't know what we don't know. Embrace not knowing what the future holds and just enjoy life for what it is today.
This is what gave me some peace: it could all end horribly for me at any minute. Anything could happen. I could get hit by a bus. I could die painfully from some fucked up disease. A fat asteroid could hit the earth. It's all out of my control. Or things could turn out for the better, by some way I never foresaw. The best thing for us to do is to strive to be good people and care for what is in front of us.
I still find it a bit of a mindfuck that humanity is being such a deleterious effect on this beautiful world.
... and I do think that growing up under the threat of nuclear holocaust must have been similarly terrifying.
Most generations don't need to deal with an impending threat to the whole planet. Nuclear apocalypse, sure, but at least there was no pretending that it wasn't a problem.
This is ignoring all of the other ways in which we're fucked.
Another thing that is worse is how we havent had anything recently to inspire hope. The Higgs Boson would have been the Millenial/Gen Z equivalent of the moon landing if the public hadn't been so distrusting of physics because of string theory evangelists.
For me, the first world (i.e. the part of the world allied with the US) had a common enemy to get behind and that allowed people to live in peace for 1.5 generations or so. When the USSR collapsed, that bogeyman suddenly disappeared and the infighting started nearly instantly.
I think the Internet is partially to blame.
The negative stuff happening in the world seems to spread so much faster and get so much more publicity that it's easy to end up in a constant negative spiral
Yeah I think you're dead on. I'm evidently not alone in thinking that the age of information is driving a lot of consciousness of worldwide issues on a scale we've never seen before. People in the Middle Ages only knew the small world they lived in on the scale of a city or region. If that city or region was prospering, their life was likely pretty damn nice.
These days, we're aware of all issues everywhere. And if you don't create that perspective for yourself, that can be incredibly overwhelming. You have to give in to a certain sense of wilful ignorance because you literally cannot be involved with every one of those problems. Not clicking on all the doom and gloom news articles has done wonders for my mental health. I guess you could say this thread was a moment of weakness.. :p
What's interesting when you look at birthrate declines is not that they are declining, it's that they are declining to NORMAL LEVELS. Everyone is freaking out that the next generation won't be big enough to support retiring Boomers without understanding that there should never have been so many Boomers in the first place.
its literally in their name too: 'baby boomers'. too many in too short a time and they have dominated politics for the better part of a century now
Dunno, man. Boomers in my home country went through such shit time that they think that becoming literal nazis still isn't the worst thing to happen in their lifetime. They did get free housing before that, though, so I'm not sure they actually had it worse overall...
As someone that's been around for some of history it's bad now. Just the cost of living stuff is dark. Grown adults are sharing bedrooms because they can't afford to rent a room by themselves on a full time wage. People have raised entire families on a single factory workers wage for hundreds of years before now, now two people with decent jobs can't afford one kid. It's dark.
"some history" lol all you're doing is describing things as Not As Bad As The Great Depression
It's a different situation but I don't think 'not as bad' really works here. The average house during the 30's was only twice the average wage, you could absolutely support a family on a single income. Other things were bad, like the unemployment rate, but it was temporary.
The issue in this post is that what we're dealing with is 'life' being unattainable for the majority of people. For people in their 20's now it's always been that way. They can't move out, they can't get an education, they can't get a career going, it's grim.
When Fallout Boy did the cover of We Didn't Start the Fire, all hope was lost.
Was it that bad?
Maybe it’s not everyone’s cup of tea but I love it haha, basically a custom made “This is fine” meme in song form for our generation.
I wish the events were chronological and they missed a few BIG things
But all in all I enjoyed it quite a bit anyways.
I've thought of the 1975's Love It If We Made It as this generation's We Didn't Start The Fire.
gen z didn't need a song to know who started the fire. now we all have anxiety because we're the ones who gotta put it out
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The Ukraine-Russia & Israel-Palestine wars, and the likelyhood of China going after Taiwan before 2027, and the Koreas continually being a powder keg influenced by all of this. Between all that and me being 23 years old I sincerely think I might witness World War 3, it's terrifying, yet it feels inevitable with our era of false 1st world peace built on a house of cards.
That's not even mentioning the Republican Project 2025, as a trans person I might have to fight for my life.
What do you mean by house of cards? Seems to me like the current political order is the most stability the world has ever seen and is only threatened by an axis of fascist countries that deliberatly wants to plunge the world into war and chaos.
It's been stable based on temporary peace and Mutually Assured Destruction (not just from nukes). For example China-Taiwan are still in a civil war that never officially ended, and China has always wanted to reabsorb Taiwan and Taiwan has always been opposed to. The Koreas are actively still in a cease fire for a war that also never concluded. And the middle east has always been churning with armed conflicts.
The western 1st world countries managed to extract enough wealth to stay far and away from these kinds of conflicts, but they are still heavily dependent on these countries and we'll all feel the impacts if things get worse.
Technically, the mainland and Taiwan both claimed to have rightful rule over the other, although sentiment in Taiwan gradually changed to favor independence instead.
I'd support Taiwan taking over China but that just seems very, very, very unlikely.
But yeah, the way it's been handled is both sides willfully ignoring the fact they are two countries, which is an inherently unstable position.
It'd be like if Puerto Rico claimed all of America it's own and America was very upset about that while also ignoring it.
It's most threatened by the climate change it has brought about. The lurch towards fascism doesn't help, but climate change will exacerbate that along with many other problems.
My GenX existential horror was learning in my thirties that all the western American Exceptionalism ideology I was indoctrinated in as a kid was just a way of keeping us from getting proactive for sake of the future generations, and my parents and teachers and ministers knew this and actively lied to me anyway.
I also think that a lot of bad things about the US that a blind eye was turned to because they seemed to be getting better have since become relevant again because they've started getting worse
Oh I realized that in my 20s
I was particularly credulous.
Conservatives are well known for acting against their own self interest.
"This is the worst things have ever been!"
"You mean this is the worst things have ever been ... so far!"
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I like how hard this bot works
Not just those under 40. I do feel bad I sorta got a brief taste of "good times" and worry eventually younger folks will think the post 2000's are normal.
Yeah, I'm juuuust old enough to have a firm memory of when things that were laughably petty were the biggest problems in the world. You mean to tell me the PRESIDENT got a BLOWJOB?!
All the real issues that sowed the seeds for our intractably broken future were sidelined and mostly ignored. Desert Storm, woowoo go world police. LA Riots, oh you crazy minorities and your intolerance for extrajudicial murder. Climate change, what's that?
Well Obama did wear that tan suit
Without the American flag pin (because it was on his other suit). It's a shame he hated America so much.
Desert Storm was the good one. Sadam invaded Kuwait, a large international coalition ended the occupation. Today's analogue would be NATO entering Ukraine, kicking the Russians out, and showing that wars of aggression are unacceptable.
Iraq in '03 was the problematic one. Falsified casus belli, war crimes galore.
There hasn't been a "good one" since WW2.
Short explanation: The arms Iraqi forces fought with during the Gulf War were largely bought or built by Americans. Isn't that interesting?
Long explanation: It's all connected to the Israel-Palestine issues we are seeing this very day. Iraq was dealt a very nasty hand by the UN after the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, becoming a landlocked country, with lines drawn such that they were made caretakers of ethnic enemies and forced to forsake much of their geopolitical power and resources to tribal rivals. It's difficult to say their claim to Kuwait was justified, but it's certainly just as difficult to say it was unjustified.
On top of that, we had just gotten done with fucking over Iraq due to their failure in the Iraq-Iran war. They had initially allied with the USSR to prop themselves up, and when that went to shit they turned around and tried doing the west and themselves a favor by grabbing a piece of Iran. We were directly supporting them (anybody taking a punch at Iran is a friend of ours!), and had been increasing our support, but when they agreed to a ceasefire we stopped, leaving them war-torn, deeply in debt, and with really nothing to show for their experiment of working with the west aside from all these shiny American weapons of course.
Medium explanation?: Iraq had been engineered to be an Israel-like anti-Arab agent in the region, but when they failed and sued for peace, we left them no other option but to wage another war to survive. When they went in a direction we didn't like, we got all our buddies together (including a surprising number of old enemies) and decimated them. Twice!
Not quite. First, the vast majority of Iraqi equipment was Soviet, and the vast majority of the stuff that wasn't Soviet was French.
French contractors even built the air defense network and control center.
Certainly there are tensions in Iraq as a result of it coming in to being as a constructed nation - nowhere did I say otherwise. However that doesn't justify a war of aggression against a neighboring country.
Further, Iraq's casus belli had nothing to do with having a potential 'claim' to Kuwait's land. Kuwait sovereignty pre-dates by centuries. The real reason was Kuwait's refusal to write off Iraqi debt and refusal to lower its oil product (it was producing above its OPEC quota - depressing prices and hurting Iraq's exports).
It is true that Saddam thought the West was using OPEC and Kuwait to undermine Iraq. That may be true. Putin thinks the West is using Ukraine to undermine him - so should we stop supporting Ukraine and let Russia annex it?
46 checking in, and yep, shit is on fire. GenX knows what's up.
It is normal. It's been this way for ± 15 years. Certainly the entirety of my adulthood and I'm nearly 30.
If it's any comfort, 99% of human existence before us was worse. 100 years ago no one cared what you thought if the powers that be wanted to send you to war. Don't even get me started about your life if you were a woman or minority. You don't like it? There must be something wrong with you, off to the insane asylum for shock therapy.
That's not the present yet, but a simple reminder that fascism is lurking and war will come because of food, water and mass migrations.
You're also diabolizing the past. But that's another matter.
How is that different than now?
We claim we won't force you into the military, but if there's not enough people who want to go to war, we'll draft you.
If you're a woman or minority, we won't kill you outright, but you'll have reduced quality of life without a conformative man to vouch for you. Bad job selection, lowered wages, political/legal/policing discrimination, doctors assuming malingering and not giving healthcare, etc.
People are still slapped with mental illness diagnoses and denied personal agency too. We shut down asylums, but we created mass homelessness. If you're a social rebel or outcast, you get a mental illness label that stops you from gainful employment, allows all authority figures to disregard you entirely, and if you make too much noise we'll send you to a psychiatric ward, give you court-mandated anti-psychotic injections under threat of jail, and even remove your power of attorney or make you a ward of the state.
Oh, and involuntary shock therapy still exists, by the way.
the post 2000s are normal now. what came before is no more normal now than what came before that. it's just the past now. it was a different way for things to be that will likely never be again. just like we'll never be medieval again.
As someone who came of age in the 80s/90s, that's not true. I can't describe the pre and early internet-as-we-know-it days, but they hit different. No anxieties over being always-reachable basically.
That normalization scares me so much. I'm just young enough to not really have lived before it but I also have a good memory and I have that early 90s slide into horror world seared into my awareness for my entire life. And that deep scariness of everyone around me my age and younger, accepting it as normal haunts me and hurts friendships. That and poverty forcing me into terrible situations.
Every day I wake up exhausted trying to look for a silver lining but more often not finding it until sleep.
You can sleep!? Shit, that's pure gold you got right there.
Over 40? For me is even worst! You younglings still have time to do something. I have no house, no savings, no retirement plan and no time to do all that! I'm the most fucked! Do you think I expect good things?
I know, right? Who decided that things get better after 40?
As a GenXer pushing 50 I can guarantee that things have always been tough and they're not getting better.
We're in the same boat. I started training a few years ago. At least i want to look good, while going down.
omg I didn't even went into looks! I'm now even more depressed! lol
Oh no - i actually meant "feeling fit", that's where i wanted to go with my comment. Please don't depress ‽
You will own nothing, and you will love it! 😠
and yet we essentially live in the best of times.
Sad we can't find a political way for everyone to have enough of what we have.
primal needs to hoard are strong in humans.
We're still using instincts that were designed for the wild.
We're a perfect example of what happens when a predator species becomes overpopulated. They over indulge in a plentiful bounty not realizing they're killing out their food source.
That's why we hunt dear or kill wolves. A balance must exist or everything goes awry.
Humans destroyed this balance.
No, Jerry, we're not going to implement The Purge to bring back Malthusian population cycles. We've already got the Demographic Transition at home.
Hear me out ...
Bring back Gladiator battles
It's called communism.
My method is hoping that I'm just old and western enough that I'll be dead before the real bad shit hits me. I'm 35 though, so... let's say there's a smidge of optimism in there.
Just a smidge?
I’m 27. Could you perhaps spare a drop or two of that optimism? You apparently have truckloads of it lol.
I spent my 20s basically in poverty. Whatever income I earned got sucked away by renting a home with insane heating costs, like $300 / month to keep the house at 55 in winter.
At 35 I applied for a government job in civil service. Fucking changed my life forever.
I can't smoke cigarettes fast enough to keep up
I don't know, my premium notebook is arriving tomorrow, that's pretty exciting.
Yeah i bought a pen that have red blue and red colors well as a pencil and I'm pretty stoked about it
Quit bragging
It sucks to be a pesant
Bought my house right before the new housing crisis. I'm locked in so cheaply that I may not ever move.
Gonna ride my residual income as far as I can take it. I'm done breaking my body for a world that doesn't care.
My landlord just raised my rent 33% with only two month's notice so I'm moving back to my parent's place so I can keep my old rent price. I'm glad they own their house
It's nice when your parents are willing to let you rent/stay with them.
Same here. Bought in 2018 which was supposed to be at some all time high. Then refinanced it during COVID with a total monthly payment of $1500 on a 3br2ba house. When we bought the house we thought we were making a dumb decision, now I'm some sort of genius for getting lucky. I can't imagine trying to rent these days.
Same. Refi'd into 3% and not going to budge. It'll be interesting to see if our loan servicer ever changes, because who in the world would want to buy a loan with such a low interest rate?
Some of us are doing ok and just trying to keep our heads down and not get caught in the crossfire. Good luck you guys. I wish you better fortune in the future.
We should have listened to uncle Ted
Also, Feliz el año del Niño! Gonna be a great 16 months for weather. Especially in Texas!
i thought that too but then dan and phil announced the gaming channel is coming back yesterday
be thankful if you don't live in a concentration camp blockaded on all sides and have clean water / electricity. yet.
You should come with me to the end of the world
Without telling your parents and your friends
You know that you only need say a word
So we might live at the end of the world
70s and 80s were shit. The 30s and 40s? Thanks, I'll take today.
That's a bit dramatic
Damn you sound like you have a rough time.
Time I had some rule alone
ihaveihaveihave end of history fallacy
oh hey its my other lemmy account! hii <3