I am more appalled that they think many of us older gen people actually experienced the “good ol days.” When do they even think that is? Lmao Nobody else outside their generation has ever experienced these same troubles ever?
GenX here - I’m not blind. I’m two shakes away from becoming a full-blown communist myself, from what I have seen.
Capitalism is violently coercive and lethally exploitative. It’s only purpose is to concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a tiny proportion of people, and it does so exceedingly well.
Capitalism is the worst and most unethical of political tools, sadly it’s also the most efficient at what it does.
The thing about capitalism is that it swallows up and commodifies any ideology that tries to fight it. If you don’t believe me, go buy a book on communism and enroll at your local university to meet like-minded people and learn more.
Capitalism is a virus.
Ah the good old days. I do miss stagflation, the SNL crisis and the boot of Reagonomics on my neck. Fun times.
Yeah, I’m a millennial but I hear (and feel) the same things. And I know Gen X are big on griping. I think it’s human nature to gripe. And that’s not to suggest that things aren’t shit. It’s just human nature to gripe about how shit things are, because sometimes it feels like the only recourse we have.
“Good old days”
Terms and conditions apply. Mainly that you were a white cis-het male and were christian or at least willing to go along with the charade. And didn’t get drafted into war. And didn’t have to work in a coal mine or some other dangerous line of work.
Not necessarily. I’m a millennial. My dad bought our family home when I was a baby and was able to support our family of 6 and pay off the mortgage before I finished my GCSEs. We lived off supermarket budget brands, hand me downs and clearance goods, but we never went hungry or cold. We’re ethnic and religious minority. My dad immigrated to the UK when he married my mum and he worked as a bus conductor for most of his life. My parents’ siblings here were all able to get council flats or houses. So I’m able to remember a time where things were a lot better. Never mind buying a house in London, I can’t even afford to rent and there are no council homes. Especially given that the UK is heading back to the racism levels of the 80s again :(
In Eastern Europe people seem to love capitalism because the “old days” were living in the Soviet bloc and they think things are much better now than they used to be. Wonder how long it’ll be before they too begin to recognise severe capitalist decay
My impression is that Zoomers in the USA have been told that the abysmal, violently upward-distributing societal scheme prevalent in America in the 21st century is “Capitalism” and everything else is “Socialism” which “doesn’t work.”
That is not so. The world has a vast spread of free market capitalist countries, and none of the other ones have a model similar to America’s. What is most telling is that other countries kept the model that America came up with after World War 2, while America destroyed it and refashioned is as corporatism starting in the 80s.
It’s as if someone had replaced “We The People” with “We The Corporations.” It’s telling that a lot of people measure the welfare of the commonwealth by stock market indices, because those measure the welfare of corporations.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
Millennials and zoomers are essentially the “hard times make good men” crowd like the greatest generation.
Unfortunately, I’m not too confident on “good men make good times” this time around.
I’m late 30s myself. Here is how I see the generational situations:
My parents’ generation: if you got any college degree or went into any skilled trade, you would have no problem purchasing a home.
My generation: if you picked certain well-paying majors or trades, you would be able to own a home.
The generation currently coming out of school: you will not afford a home without inherited wealth/family assistance.
It went from nearly anyone could get a home, to those who made just the optimal choices could get a home, to basically no one can get a home. I work with people who graduated with the same degree I have, yet because they happened to be born a 10-15 year later, they’re locked out of home ownership. I look at the cost of housing and compare it to their salary, and there’s just no way to make it work. To buy a home around here as a young person, you either need family money or you need to be a married couple, both working full time in high-paying STEM fields.
This is a super accurate general breakdown, maybe the clearest I’ve seen honestly. Completely matches what I’ve witnessed through life (with all the acknowledgements that it doesn’t portray everyone’s experience of course, and lots of the rest of my words here suffer from the same).
What I’m realizing more and more, and want to expand on your points with - is how badly we all misunderstand the “family money” thing. I was slow to grasp it, because when/where/how I grew up, that sounded like opulence.
These days it’s table stakes. A lot of us have it, built-in, a lot of us don’t. I never had that help, scraped and scrapped to take my family to stability. Now that I’m here, I can see - no one here is like me. Roughly everyone I meet, in the world I fought to enter, is somewhat at ease. They don’t have especially high income jobs. They didn’t fight and struggle and strategize to own a home here. They typically can’t even be convinced it’s not roughly this easy for most. And they didn’t inherit huge wealth, either - they have no idea they’re “special”.
The degree to which one’s parents had stability themselves is becoming a stark dividing line in the US. I expect that line grows sharper and wider in the near term.
Edit - the troubling thing I’m trying to point out, is the vast communities of families all across the US who had just enough of a boost to make their lives feel, in every (shallow) way, like the stable affluent days of decades prior - the thoroughly taught “American Dream”. The people with money to spend live in a cloistered fiction, accidentally (from their perspective), and this seems super bad news for the current state of affairs.
Millennials are anticapitalist for the opposite reason. We DO remember the good old days.
Not all of us. I was born in the late 80s, and grew up pulling food out of garbage cans because my family didn’t make enough money to feed all five of us.
Did you some how think that I meant poverty didn’t exist?
In my experience, people who refer to any era as ‘the good old days’ are ignoring large amounts of inequality that existed in that time period.
I mean I put it in quotes for a reason, but it’s pretty obviously the case that a lot more people’s material conditions were better 40 years ago than today.
If you put it in quotes, it’s not showing up on my end.
Yeah fair, apparently not. I dunno man, it’s just annoying being on the internet. Why do I have to caveat some dumb comment with a bunch of antecedents so you don’t assume I thought 1998 was a classless utopia.
It’s pretty obvious what’s meant by the comment. We got to see a world that mostly functioned as anticipated where average folks with a bit of graft could earn a decent living and take care of their family. That doesn’t mean every one of us experienced it. We still know what the world looked like then, and we know what it looks like now.
And I’m also pretty sure you knew what I meant too
The problem is that there do exist people who think '98 was some kind of utopia. They unironically say they were actually good old days. I’ve had multiple people tell me, IRL, without a hint of sarcasm, that everybody had it good in the '90s unless they were lazy.
On the internet, nobody can see how you walk, so if it talks like a duck, you assume it’s a duck. I only know what you write, I cannot read your mind.
Certainly the 90s were more stable and prosperous for more people than today, but to say those were the good old days means you would have to ignore:
- Extreme urban decay
- Unchecked police violence against minorities
- Vile homophobia in the mainstream and no recognition at all of trans people
- The rise of commodified suburban housing, stores, and restaurants
- Our government’s Imperial ambition becoming completely unchecked in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union
There were never good old days.
EDIT: also, isn’t that when school shootings really took off?
America’s decline really started with Richard Nixon. I’m not an expert though.
In the Netherlands, the 90’s were pretty good. I’m sure there were downsides,but there always are.
The economy was good. We had a firm social safety net, maybe even too firm. That is now only a shell of its former self.
The general acceptance of the gay community was on the uprise. The media was becoming gay positive, because of some key public figures. Trans not so much, only in the form of “drag queens” and such.
Some things that are bad today, were bad than. Environmental issues, animal rights, gender equality, institutionalized racism.
Most things are getting better now, but the economy is shit. That is fully to blame on capitalism. There are voices in power for change, but not enough.
A long time ago, I heard someone say that a Swedish drunk laying in a gutter knows more about American politics than the average American college graduate - it is true.
My comment was very US-centered. I apologize for that.
Most of us were like “holy shit, Nintendo 64. Whoa, PlayStation. Dude, you got a Dell! It’s got a SoundBlaster! Check out this new Internet thing! It’s got the World Wide Web! I’m gonna gel my hair and skateboard listening to Korn on my Discman with antiskip while eating 3d Doritos”
And if you asked us about world events we would have been like “gulf war was lame”
We were too young to really have known about how bad shit was getting, and the internet was just taking off and info did not travel like it does today. Video on a computer was an novelty (lots of windows loyalists called Apple’s QuickTime a gimmick and that it’d never last; until they got a video player themselves) and it took hours to download a few MB. There was no YouTube or TikTok, no live streams, barely any “feeds”, nothing was pushed to you, no WiFi even. Going on the computer was a purposeful activity you spent a slice of your day doing, like reading a book or gaming.
We did not have the window to the world we have now. We all like to pretend that it’s getting worse; and it IS, but also we’re just now waking up to the lie we were told our whole lives and just how deep that lie goes.
Not everyone is American
Nor am I?
Violence in general was out of control in the 1980s & 90s where I live, if you look at crime charts you can see a sharp drop since I was growing up here. It used to be ROUGH.
I’m obviously not saying the past was perfect, I’m saying we remember a world where a lot of families got on pretty well with 1 parent working paying for a home, cars, vacation, hobbies, etc.
I also took a pretty US centric view of your comment. If you’re from a country in which the 90s were indeed The Good Times, just ignore me.
In the US, there were probably more people living stable middle class lives than there are today but there was still a very large and mostly ignored underclass, and there always has been.
Yeah I really don’t see how my comment would lead anyone to believe that I thought that wasn’t the case? Obviously
What I mean is that it wasn’t the good times for the millions of people.
The extreme urban decay of the 90s is to the extreme urban decay of the 20s just as Office Spaces hell of office cubes and meaningless work is to the deeper, darker hell of gig work and poverty.
Shit was shit, its just that shit wasn’t as shit as it is now.
I brought up how Office Space is supposed to be about a hellish environment… I’ve never had a cubical to myself, or a computer I can leave at work at 5pm. Its 2026 and I find myself wishing for the hell that Peter finds himself in, as its far, far more comfortable than the hell we have now.
I hated that movie the first time I watched it. Found it terrifying.
The work and environment wasn’t the scary part, but how much people were willing to do something they felt hatred towards without protest.
I think you were just too young to see the flaws. As was I. I didnt hear about Rodney King until I was 13. But it happened when I was 2 years old.
(And it still happens)
Millennial here. I don’t remember that either. I feel like my life has been in survival mode from one once in a lifetime crisis to the next and my dad died from issues from agent orange exposure in Vietnam and my mom died from early onset Alzheimer’s after she worked hard her entire life and lost everything after 2008 not because she didn’t work hard and save but because she was layed off at the height of the Great Recession and burned through her deflated 401k and then began to get sick and lost her home and moved in with me but I couldn’t access healthcare for her in this evil system and her slow horrible death was beyond traumatic for my small family. Things keep getting more expensive and corrupt everyday. When is it time to burn this mother down? And hold the pedofile parasite class accountable and take our power back? I don’t think we want much just the ability to live in a system with integrity and to not have to worry about being cast on the streets to die in squalid conditions
I think it going to be folks like you, who choose to say “Fuck it, we ball”, rather than get up and go to work.
Or someone whose fam was kidnapped or murdered.
Its gonna pop off.
i’m 36. i have young coworkers and i try telling them that even 10-15 years ago it was not like this.
Maybe not in the “developed” countries, but capitalism been fucking the rest of the world for a long while.
Also, are you forgetting the economic recession in 2008? That also wasn’t terribly fun. Millenials haven’t had a great go at this “good old days” either. Maybe when we were children, but it’s not like we were out buying houses then.
Also, 10 years ago was 2016, which is when all this awful really dove off a cliff for those in the “developed” world.
it’s difficult to explain concisely, it boils down to this; ten years ago i could rent an apartment while serving tables, today i cannot.
I am GenX and in my 20s lived stuffed into houses with 2 other couples so that we could make rent, I am not sure why people think we were skating on minimum wage, it was shit. If you put 6 wage earners in a house you can make it today too.
On college cost, that is absolutely true I do agree, it’s gotten so expensive it is not an automatic choice among my kids. Those who went straight out of school mostly didn’t have to borrow, nor did I pay much, they got scholarships to cover it.
Never attribute to stupidity what can be adequately explained by capitalism.
You know what’s even funnier/saddening? When people who never experienced “the good old times” will still defend inequality and conservative values because those promise a full blown lie of “we actually bring prosperity” while accusing the left of “defending their elites’ privileges”
Those “good old days” were propped up by strong unions, excellent public education, high taxes on the ultra-wealthy, and not much regulation beyond not letting another stock market crash happen (See also: rivers literally on fire in Ohio and elsewhere).
So, 3 Good Things, and 1 really Bad Thing (that makes a lot of money). We’re currently speed running back towards the Bad Thing, we’ve effectively killed unions, public education has long since been gutted, and taxing the ultra-wealthy at all is basically un-American. So…
Growing up, I didn’t even know how powerful unions were.
My mom worked at a factory and hurt herself when I was a kid. She couldn’t work for months. The union was why I was able to still get food and do hospital visits. She healed up and went right back to work.
With my first kid, my wife’s job decided her pregnancy was interfering with their need for labor so they fired her. They made it ABSOLUTELY CLEAR it wasn’t a pregnancy-related firing over and over again, but that she wasn’t meeting expectations… Because her body hurts from being pregnant. No legal protection either.
Growing up, I didn’t even know how powerful unions were.
To give you an idea of their power: The Star Wars Christmas Special was mainly sponsored by the United Garment Workers union.
What gets me is that the vast majority of Americans actually believe they still have these protections when they don’t. Like, they aren’t even AWARE of the problem.
Go to any work related discussion and you’ll hear people going on and on about how you can’t get fired for this or that or you’re entitled to one thing or another and 90% if the time they are totally incorrect.
The worst thing capitalism did was convince us we didn’t need unions.
They’re close to getting reminded that unions are the compromise.
Sometimes there are even laws which do legally protect people, but those laws aren’t enforced. Many such cases
The ultra wealthy weren’t even really taxed that much back then due to loopholes. There’s a reason why many 20th century oligarchs have their names on libraries, public university buildings, and hospitals.
You’re confusing means for ends.
What you’re focusing on was that the rich never actually ended up paying those 90% marginal tax rates on their income. But the point of those taxes wasn’t to raise revenue; it was to force changes in behavior. Them donating to all those big hospitals and universities wasn’t a bug, it was a feature. The goal was to force rich people to spend or give away their money instead of hoarding it. Which is ultimately the goal. I ultimately would rather have someone make and spend a billion in a year than make and save a billion in a year. I actually don’t mind if the rich have extravagant homes and yachts, as they have to hire a hell of a lot of people to build and maintain those luxuries.
High marginal taxes also encouraged companies to give better pay and bonuses to their workers. That was actually the origin of the large end-of-year bonus corporate America traditionally gave out. If your company is sitting on a large pile of extra profits at the end of the year, rather than paying the high marginal tax rate, it made sense to give the extra cash out as a large Christmas bonus to employees.
What you’re talking about wasn’t a loophole. It was the entire purpose for having those high rates.
I wish zoomers were anti-capitalist because they understood that the “good old days” were only “good” because of the exploitation of the global South.
