The Group Responsible for All of Our Troubles
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, October 26, 2025 11:08
VIEWED: 3583
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I think it's kind of hard to lump people all into "generations". First and foremost, because nobody seems to agree on them and exactly when they begin and end. It's all rather nebulous.
You might have noticed that in Soph's video, she completely ignores the existence of "Generation X". Most scales put me on the tail end of GenX. Some also include my brother who is 2 years younger than me. None of them that I've seen include my brother who is 4 years younger than me.
But that being said, I think it's absolutely ludicrous to put any of my brothers and I in the Millennial group. We didn't have cell phones in high school. People had pagers in high school back then, but if you got caught with one you were suspended for a week (yanno, because only drug dealers needed pagers). The columbine shooting happened after two of us were out of high school. 9/11 happened after all of us had graduated. We were in our late 20's and early 30's by the time America had its first black president. As children, we all grew up in houses that didn't even have an answering machine. MTV only played music videos, until I was in Jr. High and they invented the reality TV genre with the first season of "The Real World". The late 90's were when I first got into the job market, and even without a college degree, I had jobs being practically thrown at me from a temp agency with my skills that were quite a bit more pay than any jobs I've worked in the last decade (at a time when gasoline was cheaper than water by the gallon, and everything else was cheaper because of it).
So, I'm not sure why Soph doesn't include GenX in her video. I'm certainly not a Boomer myself, and I will never benefit from the great times of that generation, or retire with any pensions or meaningful 401k plans or great health coverage. But I'm certainly not a Millennial either. I have nothing in common with a kid in college today, or one that graduated in the last 5 to 10 years either, for that matter.
I can't really blame her there though. When's the last time you ever heard anybody even talk about Generation X? It seems as though we're already the forgotten generation, even though most of us are still alive today.
As for saving, yeah, you can't just throw an entire generation under the bus. My grandma was born and raised to be frugal to the point that she knows how to patch socks. Not all of her kids took those lessons to heart, but my old man is GREAT with his money, and my step-mom was a perfect match for him in that regard. I learned a lot in the 5 years I lived in my grandma's basement, and I learned a lot from my dad.
But my mom and step-dad on the other hand, well... by all rights should be destitute right now. I remember my step dad saying one time something along the lines of "I'll always be in debt. It's the American way.". And they were, and they are, but somehow after having to refinance their main home, having to sell their yacht they couldn't pay for when the bottom fell out in 2008, having to draw nearly all of the equity out of a paid for cottage summer home, having to sell both of their properties and their business in a fire sale from a distance because they up and moved halfway across the country at the drop of a hat, then having to sell that property from a distance because they moved to the east coast at the drop of a hat.... They're still doing fine.
Don't get me wrong. I'm glad they're doing fine. I've already let them know that I hope they have enough for my mom to survive when he's no longer with us, because I can't afford to put her in a home and there's no way I'm ever living with my mother. But seriously, WTF?
Had they had a single responsible bone in their body, they should have comfortably retired with millions to their name given the luck they had at the time they were born. They're not destitute, but I get the feeling
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A yacht? A vacation home? Selling two properties and a business? And selling another property? It sounds to me like they were very well-off at one time and have been squandering their wealth ever since! I have no idea how anyone could make so many dumb choices in a row and not learn anything from the previous dumb choices!
Social Security and Medicare will be tapped out in a few years anyway, so that safety net they were relying in will be no more ... unless Congress and the WH decide to find more funding for it. (Eliminating the cap on Social Security taxes and negotiating better drug prices from the pharmas would be two straightforward laws.) so people of my generation who've been way too free with their money may get their comeuppance in the near future anyway, with or without Soph's grotching.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND
America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
A yacht? A vacation home? Selling two properties and a business? And selling another property? It sounds to me like they were very well-off at one time and have been squandering their wealth ever since! I have no idea how anyone could make so many dumb choices in a row and not learn anything from the previous dumb choices!
Yeah. The "yacht", they didn't even know was a yacht when they bought it. When they made "boat buddies", one of them let them know that their boat was considered the smallest class yacht. It had a bedroom and kitchen below deck. The "vacation home" was something that my parents got from my uncle when I was still a kid. It wasn't much to speak of and didn't cost all that much. The point was, they had it paid off at one point, but had to put a new mortgage on it as well as losing most of the equity of their main home just to keep their business afloat when the bottom fell out after 2008. Besides that cottage, they never actually "owned" anything they had in their lives. The bank did.
As to why they never learned? They had my old man subsidizing it for many years by paying an outrageous amount of child support until my brother was 24 (which would have gone on forever if my old man didn't retire early to put an end to it). After that, credit has never been a problem for them. It wouldn't surprise me if in the end they have no more than 20% down on their new place and nothing to their name other than social security payments every month.
I hope they're doing better than that, but this has always been my concern with them. If I sound a little bitter now it's because I'm in the current state I'm in and I get to watch them skate on by after being horrible shepherds of any wealth they might have once accumulated.
Quote:
Social Security and Medicare will be tapped out in a few years anyway, so that safety net they were relying in will be no more ... unless Congress and the WH decide to find more funding for it. (Eliminating the cap on Social Security taxes and negotiating better drug prices from the pharmas would be two straightforward laws.) so people of my generation who've been way too free with their money may get their comeuppance in the near future anyway, with or without Soph's grotching.
Not making me feel any better here, Sigs. I don't imagine I'd make it much past 70 years old myself in the end, but since I likely won't have anything saved up by the time I reach retirement age, it would have been nice to have some basic form of health insurance and a few bucks coming my way since I've been paying all my life for their social security payments.
Plus, if they stop paying it out I have no clue what's going to happen to my brother.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND
America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Signym is spreading this falsehood, this myth: Social Security is going broke.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Social Security and Medicare will be tapped out in a few years anyway, so that safety net they were relying in will be no more ... unless Congress and the WH decide to find more funding for it. (Eliminating the cap on Social Security taxes and negotiating better drug prices from the pharmas would be two straightforward laws.) so people of my generation who've been way too free with their money may get their comeuppance in the near future anyway, with or without Soph's grotching.
Not making me feel any better here, Sigs. I don't imagine I'd make it much past 70 years old myself in the end, but since I likely won't have anything saved up by the time I reach retirement age, it would have been nice to have some basic form of health insurance and a few bucks coming my way since I've been paying all my life for their social security payments.
Plus, if they stop paying it out I have no clue what's going to happen to my brother.
Fact: No doubt, Social Security faces funding challenges, but not immediately and not bankruptcy. Benefits are paid through payroll taxes collected from current workers and their employers, and the program currently operates with a surplus of about $2.8 trillion.
Yet with a rising number of retirees and a drop in the birthrate, that's changing. The latest projection has the combined Social Security trust funds that pay retirement and disability benefits running out of cash reserves by 2034.
But that wouldn't leave Social Security bankrupt and unable to pay any benefits. Even if Congress does nothing to shore up the system by 2034, Social Security will be able to pay out 79 percent of promised benefits until 2090.
More at www.aarp.org/retirement/social-security/info-2016/debunking-six-more-m
yths-about-social-security.html
or www.fool.com/retirement/2018/06/06/2018-social-security-trustees-repor
t-the-5-things.aspx
or www.ssa.gov/OACT/TR/2019/tr2019.pdf
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Yeah. I've read that it should still be around by the time I retire. I remember the scare that people under 55 around 10 or so years ago wouldn't get any and it was going under. Most info about that scare seems to have been wiped away from the internet completely, as strange as that is.
I don't ever count on anything though. Maybe I'll have to work until I die. Whatever.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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According to Turchin (2003, 2005), virtually all empires arose in geographical areas where major ethnic groups came into contact with each other. Intense between-group conflict acted as a crucible for the cultural evolution of extremely cooperative societies, which then expanded at the expense of less cooperative societies to become major empires. Their very success was their undoing, however, as cultural evolution within the empire led to myriad forms of exploitation, free riding, and factionalism. That is why the center of the former Roman empire (for example) is today a cultural “black hole” as far as the capacity for cooperation is concerned. Turchin, a theoretical biologist who specializes in nonlinear population dynamics, has marshaled an impressive amount of empirical evidence to support his thesis about the rise and fall of empires as a process of multilevel cultural evolution, with profound implications for interactions among modern cultures and their consequences for human welfare in the future.
More from www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/522809 about
War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires by Peter Turchin
Ultrasociety How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans by Peter Turchin
Historical analysis shows that long spells of equitable prosperity and internal peace are succeeded by protracted periods of inequity, increasing misery, and political instability.These crisis periods--"Ages of Discord"--have recurred in societies throughout history. Modern Americans may be disconcerted to learn that the US right now has much in common with the Antebellum 1850s and, more surprisingly, with ancien régime France on the eve of the French Revolution. Can it really be true that there is nothing new about our troubled time, and that similar ages arise periodically for similar underlying reasons? Ages of Discord marshals Structural-Demographic Theory and detailed historical data to show that this is, indeed, the case. The book takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through American history, from the Era of Good Feelings of the 1820s to our first Age of Discord, which culminated in the American Civil War, to post-WW2 prosperity and, finally, to our present, second Age of Discord.
www.amazon.com/gp/product/0996139540/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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I can't argue that. I think it's just human nature to suck ass.
Maybe the real problem is that we don't live long enough? I think if we all grew to be 400 years old before we died that we'd have a much different outlook on every aspect of our lives. Not only would we have seen a whole lot more of things such as these "ups and downs" before we die, but we'd live with those before us who had seen even more to tell us about in their own lives.
We'd probably also give a lot more credence to what the "old folk" have to say about things too. I'd imagine that if 400 were the average lifespan there would be wildly varying ages of natural deaths (ie: not accidents or suicides).
As long as you stayed "young" for a good deal of those 400 average years, I couldn't imagine people not wanting to actually live a lot of them. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd like to think that a lot of self-destructive behaviors many of us have today would not exist on the scale they do if we had to take care of our body for 4 to 5 times longer than we do now.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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interesting point. It's obviou that over centuries, societies rise and fall. However, I think that culture and poliics are mostly driven by economics. In the grand scheme of things, as wealth becomes more uneven there's more for people to fight about. Also, the wealthy quite consciously use "divide and conquer" to maintain their position, because if the rabble ae busy fighting each other then they won't focus on the eltie.
Hubby and I have often discussed society as a living entity. Each society has its members (cells), division of labor (organs), language, memes, assumptions, and rules that are carried from generation to generation (DNA), self-protective response (immune system), energy and material needs (food) etc. Societies, like individual beings, are born, live, grow, senesce, and eventually die.
We, as its individual cells, live far too short a lifespan to even notice the lifespan of the organism to which we belong. If, as SIX said, we lived hundreds of years we might have a better view of these long-term changes that occur over hundreds or thousands of years, and we might have more respect for the future, instead of treating it as some terra incognito just waiting to be exploited.
*****
There IS something to be said for getting older btw. especially if you maintain an active learning process. It was hard for me to remember that the people that I worked with - who seemed fully-adult, who had jobs and houses and children - didn't remember the Vietnam war, or any of the many other wars that we engaged in. Didn't remember the oil shock, or "Silent Spring", or the assassination of Kennedy, or the hard times when the steel mills went bust in the midwest. Didn't remember the MANY stock market and real estate booms and busts, the S&L crisis, or stagflation. Nixon's first visit to China. The cuban missile crisis. Iran Contra, Watergate. For them, so many things were a "first". It's hard to put things into perspective if you have nothing to compare it to. Our culture disrespects history. The past is dead, and corrupt. The future is always glorious and full of promise. But those who don't learn from history ... well, they'll laways be taken by surprise!
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND
America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .
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Yeah.
I often think about how bad it must have been in the Great Depression. I don't even know anybody old enough to tell me any real stories about it, and even if they did, how much credence could you give somebody on their memories of events that unfolded nearly 100 years ago now. My Grams grew up post-GD, and her family didn't have a ton of cash so they made due with what they had and made it last a lot longer out of necessity, as I imagine most people from that time had learned to do.
If we lived 400 years, I'd have plenty of people to tell me exactly how bad it was in comparison to anything I've seen in my life, even if I wasn't alive through it.
I think this huge change in perspective that would happen if we lived for hundreds of years on average would change the way the entire world operated. Likely, for the better.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Here's a group of average Americans enjoying a fine day at Disneyland. Somehow I don't see them or anyone else evolving into a higher order of human being any time soon, even if they lived to be 1,000 years old. The only things that keep human society in a relative state of order and safety are the police, the courts, and prisons.
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