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[MaximumZero]

tl;dr Svarte Troner is in over his head.

Aren't we all?

[Zrk2]

tl;dr Svarte Troner is in over his head.

Aren't we all?

Yes. Exams fucked with my head hard, and I still he discontented because of my exam-season hangover.

[Svarte Troner]

tl;dr Svarte Troner is in over his head.

Aren't we all?

Yes. Exams fucked with my head hard, and I still he discontented because of my exam-season hangover.

Judging by the second half of that statement, I'd agree.

3/4 of my exams were bullshit, but relatively easy. It's that last one that I failed that's going to fuck me up.

[SalmonGod]

Its complicated and housing requires practical knowledge and work skills few have, among several other things.

In any event, this leads right into a shifting of attitudes away from belief in the world being a meritocracy. Fewer people seem to believe that what you get is a result of how hard you work. Rather than intelligence and work ethic, it now seems to be about ownership. Ownership = reward, and little else. If you're rich, then things are awesome for you, but if you're not.... Lots of people aren't believing the game is fair as readily as people once did. Perhaps it's the high rate of un/underemployment, or the increases in the price of food, or how banks and large companies got bailed out while the rest of us didn't....

Point being, there's an increasing notion that the game is rigged, due to the current economy, in favor of the rich. Maybe it's just my view, but I see this as largely generational.

I'm hoping more people realize that it's a cyclical thing, with the awakening of our generation being that we can't afford to let the cycle continue anymore.  In previous iterations, it meant the poor in a region got fucked over.  Now with globalization and this level of technology, it means the planet gets fucked over.  Unfortunately, I don't think that level of awareness is spreading like it should be.  I push for it as much as I can.

[Zrk2]

tl;dr Svarte Troner is in over his head.

Aren't we all?

Yes. Exams fucked with my head hard, and I still he discontented because of my exam-season hangover.

Judging by the second half of that statement, I'd agree.

3/4 of my exams were bullshit, but relatively easy. It's that last one that I failed that's going to fuck me up.

It isn't really that, it put me in a mood where I was unhappy with my life as it is, and while I've taken some steps to change it, I'm still not pleased with myself. I think the exam stress was just a catalyst to bring it out.

[Pnx]

Its complicated and housing requires practical knowledge and work skills few have, among several other things.

In any event, this leads right into a shifting of attitudes away from belief in the world being a meritocracy. Fewer people seem to believe that what you get is a result of how hard you work. Rather than intelligence and work ethic, it now seems to be about ownership. Ownership = reward, and little else. If you're rich, then things are awesome for you, but if you're not.... Lots of people aren't believing the game is fair as readily as people once did. Perhaps it's the high rate of un/underemployment, or the increases in the price of food, or how banks and large companies got bailed out while the rest of us didn't....

Point being, there's an increasing notion that the game is rigged, due to the current economy, in favor of the rich. Maybe it's just my view, but I see this as largely generational.

It's always been rigged, it's sort of the nature of capitalism that money grants the ability to make money.
It gets doubly bad when you realise that money also grants political influence, though this is hardly new. This is something that's in the roots of western democracy. Parliament used to be a cash for laws type of thing, and the inalienable right to the "pursuit of happiness" in the declaration of independence is commonly thought to be code for, "getting rich".

[Frumple]

Not really capitalism so much as th'nature of resources in general. Most of th'time, the more you already have, th'easier it is to get more.

But... meh. Two AM, melancholy. I don't want to get rich, I just want to be able to feed myself without basically fellating some horribly fucking immoral company (Which is most of them. I really should throw up a rant thread about the morality of resource acquisition and use at some point...) or being utterly goddamn miserable in the process. Hell, I could take a little shaft if it meant avoiding the latter, but 9-5 bullshit is just... th'stuff I've messed around with so far akin to that is just soul-sucking. Fate literally worse than death to me, and most of the stuff that innit like that is either scummy as fuck (so deep throat, in this metaphor, which I refuse to do) or just a complete mismatch with my personality.

Too late t'think about anything else to say on that subject. Thinking on it, trying to find ways around it... just makes me so tired. Physically and existentially.

[SalmonGod]

It's not the nature of resources but the premises by which we lay claim to them.  The idea that a person can own and control things that they do not directly possess, need, or relate to in any fashion is a very recent one in human history, and everything else follows from that.  If that idea were invalidated in the general culture, then unreasonable hoarding of resources would have no basis for legitimacy.

But now I'm steering this into stuff almost everyone here has probably seen me go on about before, and is less relevant to the whole generational topic.  I'll try to stop. 

[LordBucket]

It's very interesting to me to see people here on bay12 who are so much younger than I am talk about "how much change" there's been and how it must be difficult for some people to adapt to it.

I was born in 1976. I was on the internet before this thing you call the "web" was particularly well known. I grew up with 2400 baud modems and 12" green screen monitors and payphones and tape drives and mainframes as big as cars. I grew up with the cold war, and the war between VHS and Beta and had a record and cassette player. I remember rotary phones and fax machines and was excited about these new skates with four wheels in a row rather than in two rows of two.

And yet despite all that, I'm disappointed with the lack of change. Where's my flying car? Where's my jet pack? Why is there no moon base?

9/11 wasn't a big deal and neither was the fall of the Berlin wall.

A lot of the technology changes are fairly trivial. People carry cellphones. Cars have GPS and have fewer straight lines in their exterior. People use their real names online instead of handles. All computers have mice now and video games have better graphics and they're called consoles rather than video games.

None of this is a big deal. The only times I've experienced "future shock" were the first time I saw one of those billboards at a mall that vertically rotate through different ads every few seconds and the first time I saw someone casually pull out a touch screen PDA and used their finger to slide it around. And in both cases I just got over it.

The vast majority of change has all been cosmetic. Daily life hasn't changed all that much. There's been more social change than technological change. Homosexuality isn't viewed as a mental disorder anymore. People are no longer embarrassed to get a divorce. People are scared about school shootings and terrorists. I grew up going to school every day thinking the Russians might nuke us at any moment, resulting in the death of the majority of the human race due to nuclear winter...and even in that environment we did not scan or pat down people at airports and we didn't panic and call the SWAT team or the bomb squad any time a high school kid pulls a prank at school.


I grew up watching Star Trek. The original Star Trek. I grew up watching 2001. A lot of us expected space travel and human genetic engineering and flying cars and terraforming and daily shuttle service to Mars to be commonplace by now. But no, instead of flying cars we ended up with hybrid "electric" vehicles that still burn gasoline anyway. Instead of people taking the shuttle to Mars we ended up with people playing angry birds on their cellphone. Instead of going to the doctor to engineer your baby to be superstrong and immune to disease we ended up with obesity and AIDS. Nobody had AIDS when I was a kid. "Childhood obesity" wasn't an expression that people used in daily life.

I don't mean to complain...yes, there've been improvements. Now, if your car breaks down you no longer walk half a mile to a payphone, you just call AAA on your cellphone. Email is way more convenient than postal mail. Google is better than a 26 volume encyclopedia set that weighs 50 pounds and doesn't have the information you want anyway. And both microwave ovens and automated teller machines are damned convenient. We didn't used to have those.

Sure...there've been improvements. But did we really need AIDS? Was it really more important to build military bases and spend trillions of dollars killing people in other countries rather than terraform Mars? Are we really happier whining and complaining about the "right to work" rather than just having robots do everything?

Yes, there have been changes. But Star Trek was made ten years before I was born and we still don't have orbit-to-ground teleporters. I'm still typing this message by hand rather than dictating it to a sexy interactive female computer persona. I still can't hop on a shuttle to Mars, or book passage to neighboring star systems.

How am I supposed to have a difficult time adapting to things like cell phones and GPS?

[SalmonGod]

I think that mass communications and information accessibility has been a big bigger deal than you think.  Yeah, it's a different kind of technology than the flashy stuff you're talking about or space travel.  A lot of that stuff exists, but it's suppressed by entrenched business interests or just not economically viable on a large scale.  That doesn't mean what we've got isn't significant.  You're right that there's been more social change, but that social change has been largely driven by technological change.  People are organizing in ways that weren't possible 20 years ago.  When Alexandros Grigoropoulos was shot in Greece in 2008, there were literally thousands of angry people on the streets in less than half an hour.  That's a huge change in social dynamics.  You went on a tangent about fear culture.  That's driven by the expansion of mass media.  You also measure things by comparison to Star Trek a lot... well that show inspired the invention of the cell phone.  And speech-to-text has been around for like 10 years.

[ragman le bon]

Generation X I suppose, United(but not for long!) Kingdom. At the age where my generation is now starting to run things! Really, anyone aged thirty six has to accept the fact that they are now an adult! and that we're old enough to make decisions. Protaganists on tv shows are starting to be younger than me. These are more observations about my own life, but this is probably the point when you realise a lot of things about life, and aging etc. Though if I'd got married and had kids in my early twenties maybe I'd have grown up a lot sooner? Or maybe not!

[LordBucket]

You're right that there's been more social change, but that social change has been largely driven by technological change.  People are organizing in ways that weren't possible 20 years ago.

Sure, yes. A lot of the social change is made possible by technology, as you say.

But...the net effect, from my point of view, is that the world feels smaller because the overall scope hasn't changed all that much, but things happen more quickly. 20 years ago if somebody was shot and we wanted to get the word out, we'd have published it in an underground newspaper and it would have taken days for the news to spread. Now, it goes on twitter, and as you point out, you can have your mob organized in half an hour.

What was once a group project requiring organized and determined action by a group of radicals is now no more complicated than calling up a friend for lunch. What was once separated by days is now separated by minutes. Those "far off" Russians in that "foreign country on the opposite side of the world" of my youth have becomes people you play games with online and it doesn't even matter where they live. You can interact with them just as easily as your neighbor.

The world is no larger, but the ease of communication makes it feel smaller.

That's not a bad thing. I'm not saying I want to go back to using smoke signals. I like email. But the nature of life and change feels less grandiose than it used to.

You also measure things by comparison to Star Trek a lot

Star Trek was an inspiration to my generation. The current generation is inspired by what? American Idol? Fear Factor?

Again...not intended to exclusively disparage the changes I've seen. Some things have definitely changed for the better. Some things...maybe not so much. But even the things that have changed for the better have mostly been a matter of convenience and comfort, rather than matters of awe and majesty.

My parents generation cried when for the first time in recorded history, humans beings set foot on a world besides planet earth. My generation cried when the first shuttle launched and the nations of planet earth that once lived in fear of planetary genocide through mutually assured destruction set side their differences to work together to build an international space station.

The current generation cries when somebody says mean things about Britney Spears.

[SalmonGod]

I agree with your criticisms up to a point.  Yeah, there's a lot of shallow stupidity in our culture, but there was in the era that you're comparing it too, also.  Star Trek was an inspiration to your generation.  We have our equivalent works of cyberpunk and space opera.  The previous generation was awed by the mere prospect of space travel, and they made it reality to a very limited extent.  I think my generation's equivalent is awe at the prospect of transhumanism and a blurring between virtual space and reality, and those things are now being realized to a limited extent.  The major difference is that no one work is so monolithic to our culture, because culture has diversified and expanded so very much.  The comparison of accomplishments... refer to my previous posts where I describe how completely fucked over we've been.

[Gamerlord]

I consider my generation to begin at around 1990 and ends whenver those annoying idiots who yell out 'fag' and stuff on online multiplayer were born.

[Scoops Novel]

That's the thing, isn't it? All the discussion we're having refer to the bits of our generation we've come into contact with, or at least have grown up to an extent. With a generation like mine, you have a very strong feeling that they grow up quickly but that the vast swath of them are still spending their time doing that. One thing the internet has certainly achieved is showcasing humans are morons, as TvTropes put it. It's the reason Bay 12 is a bay, not a ocean.