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Author Topic: How's your generation doing?  (Read 45766 times)

anzki4

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Re: How's your generation doing?
« Reply #45 on: December 22, 2012, 01:48:26 pm »

I too have used my username pretty much since I first started using Internet. One scary note however is that once I was playing Toribash, I met someone else nicknamed anzki4 and he said he had used it for his whole Internet life. It also turned out he was from Finland too and he too first used the name on Runescape :o

Goddamn identity-thief...

Oh! And I'm generation Y, born in 1994.
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Scoops Novel

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Re: How's your generation doing?
« Reply #46 on: December 22, 2012, 01:51:26 pm »

Good point. That's something I've noticed as well; one tenant of bullying is that they'll attack anyone different, and that's still too true, but there's also now the flip side of looking down on anyone normal, despite the hypocrisy's such people usually have.

Does everyone born from 1994-1996 remember Runescape? That and dragon-fable were some of my first online games.
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Dutchling

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Re: How's your generation doing?
« Reply #47 on: December 22, 2012, 01:52:44 pm »

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« Last Edit: March 07, 2019, 11:51:13 am by Dutchling »
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Euld

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Re: How's your generation doing?
« Reply #48 on: December 22, 2012, 02:06:28 pm »

Also a Generation Y here I think, born in 1987.  I can report that a lot of my friends (myself included) have high ambitions but zero motivations.  Although there are plenty of my friends who are totally motivated and have managed to get that 9-5 job, 2.5 children, loving wife/husband, two story house with picket fence.  Really sucks when I've never held a job that paid more than minimum wage and friends of mine the same age are having their second child already.  I also suffer from sheer lack of motivation, and pretty much torments me every day.  I have no idea why this is a problem for me.

MetalSlimeHunt

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Re: How's your generation doing?
« Reply #49 on: December 22, 2012, 03:37:06 pm »

Although there are plenty of my friends who are totally motivated and have managed to get that 9-5 job, 2.5 children, loving wife/husband, two story house with picket fence.
Less and less people are seeing this as the objective of life as the generations pass. It was big for the Greatest and Silent generations, and the Baby Boomers were the product of it, so many of them wanted to replicate it. That so many failed lead to much of X rejecting it, and Y further rejecting it. The trend will probably continue with Z.

I certainly want none of those things. I'd be happy with a job in the field I'm interested in, no children, being single, and living in an apartment. I'm not the only one, either.
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Really sucks when I've never held a job that paid more than minimum wage and friends of mine the same age are having their second child already.
Protip: Children are not a measure of success. In fact, having enough children is usually an indicator of failure.
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Scoops Novel

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Re: How's your generation doing?
« Reply #50 on: December 22, 2012, 04:05:09 pm »

Despite the recession, clueing in that maybe excess wealth is not something to aspire too or respect is being unsurprisingly slow to materialize, as seen in bloody professional football. I suppose the problem is that people are comfortable and don't see a need, but it grates when we fall to asking for funding drives for the homeless. I understand that it can get an less dull empathic kick and agree that it's a step in the right direction, but it doesn't mean i have to like it. Rational assessment in emotional situations is not something we do very well. People don't seem to think there's much they should or at least can do, which we need to grow out of quickly.
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PanH

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Re: How's your generation doing?
« Reply #51 on: December 22, 2012, 04:10:22 pm »

Protip: Children are not a measure of success. In fact, having enough children is usually an indicator of failure.

That really depends on the culture where you live. The place were I was born had generally families with 3-7 children (do you know a family with 10 children ?  :P), and is a very rich one. That's an exception, caused by old nobility's culture and very strong christianism (but not traditionalist).

I think (and I hope) that as generations pass, the diversity of objectives grows, rather than only rejecting old ones (and indeed a part of it rejecting old ones).
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Zanzetkuken The Great

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Re: How's your generation doing?
« Reply #52 on: December 22, 2012, 04:33:20 pm »

Not sure which generation I would be classified in.  I was born in the mid 90's and have had 48kbps only on the best of days, with download speeds of 2.8-5 kbps.  And I am willing to go up into the mountains and become a hermit if society begins to collapse.
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Aklyon

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Re: How's your generation doing?
« Reply #53 on: December 22, 2012, 05:51:39 pm »

Dragonfable is much more recent than Runescape, though.
 I know because I have screenshots from the first but not from the second on this computer, copied from our previous one. To get my runescape pictures (if I had any to keep anyway) , I'd need to find a time traveller and extract them from our years-gone previous-previous-previous computer, the one with windows 98 on it. (though technically I don't fit in your grouping Novel, 1992 here)
« Last Edit: December 22, 2012, 05:55:04 pm by Aklyon »
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itisnotlogical

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Re: How's your generation doing?
« Reply #54 on: December 22, 2012, 06:21:14 pm »

I kept using different usernames based on whatever I was currently obsessed with (zomgazombie12 for Resident Evil, ganon1024 for Zelda, etc.) and it got to be a pain in the butt remembering all those things I used to be interested in. I decided that itisnotlogical would do for everything that wasn't email or Facebook.
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penguinofhonor

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Re: How's your generation doing?
« Reply #55 on: December 22, 2012, 08:22:53 pm »

Although there are plenty of my friends who are totally motivated and have managed to get that 9-5 job, 2.5 children, loving wife/husband, two story house with picket fence.
Less and less people are seeing this as the objective of life as the generations pass. It was big for the Greatest and Silent generations, and the Baby Boomers were the product of it, so many of them wanted to replicate it. That so many failed lead to much of X rejecting it, and Y further rejecting it. The trend will probably continue with Z.

I certainly want none of those things. I'd be happy with a job in the field I'm interested in, no children, being single, and living in an apartment. I'm not the only one, either.

Still rejecting it here. I see what it did to my grandparents. When my grandma's kids and grandkids die, nobody will remember her name. When she's gone from her office job, people will be sad for a little while, but there's nothing she's doing that isn't completely replaceable. In eighty years, my grandma will pretty much never have existed.

She's not a dumb woman. Could she write? Could she make art? Could she make discoveries to improve mankind? We'll never know, because she settled down into a job that paid okay like everyone is supposed to. I don't want that for myself. I don't want that for my peers. I don't want that for my kids.

I think people get that now. But I don't think we know how to solve it. In a world with billions of people, not everyone can have the kind of success we're familiar with. Not everyone can be Stephen Hawking or Lady Gaga. But what can we all be? I fear that we'll only find out once Gen Y is too old to do it.
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MetalSlimeHunt

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Re: How's your generation doing?
« Reply #56 on: December 22, 2012, 08:30:11 pm »

Menial tasks are not as important any more. Hard labor and repetitive motion have already been mostly given over to the realm of computers and robotics. Western civilization has become a service economy, but even that will not last. What comes next is not easy to predict. We don't know exactly where we're going, but trust me, we're going.

We don't even have a looming specter of nuclear war to give us an exit if things go to shit. It's weird, knowing that rapid extinction may well be off the table.
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Aklyon

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Re: How's your generation doing?
« Reply #57 on: December 22, 2012, 08:33:26 pm »

It's weird, knowing that rapid extinction may well be off the table.
Then again, look at how many people believed in The Mayan Doom. We might end up with extinction via overpanic.
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Crystalline (SG)
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Frumple

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Re: How's your generation doing?
« Reply #58 on: December 22, 2012, 08:37:51 pm »

It's weird, knowing that rapid extinction may well be off the table.
Hey, we can continue to cling to the whole potential environmental problems! We've got that, I'd say.

'Course, the problem with that is that with nukes we had a pretty good idea what'd happen if things actually did go down, and then whens and whys and hows of it going down. Environmental issues, we're still kinda' guessing in a lot of ways and not really sure how bad it's going to get. Guess that makes a difference.

S'also probably not quite a culturally, hrm... pervasive. Yeah, that'll work. S'not as culturally pervasive a worry, yet. Predictions fulfilled as predicted or worse a few (more) times and kick people in the ass and we might start worrying about it more unilaterally.

Kinda' makes me wonder what kind of reaction it'd cause. Nukes seemed to do well to leading toward, what, xenophobia? Other stuff? Whereas biosphere degradation is more of a widespread, pan-continental/national problem. Less PvP, more PvE :P
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SalmonGod

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Re: How's your generation doing?
« Reply #59 on: December 22, 2012, 10:52:16 pm »

Menial tasks:  I don't think people are rejecting menial work.  We only reject making it the defining feature of our daily lives.  We still understand that it's necessary.  We don't have the resources to automate everything yet.  I do think the realization is spreading that we could do much, much better.  The company I work for could easily afford to hire triple the workforce working half the hours for twice the pay, and still rake in ridiculous profits.  Then we'd actually have enough time in our days to do meaningful things with, instead of coming home every day angry and exhausted, and having just enough time to do chores/run errands and relax for an hour or two before bed... and we'd have less homeless starving people.  It's a bullshit existence that might have arguably been necessary before, but most certainly isn't now.  I know my generation is very pissed off that we're still living like this, but we don't feel like we have the power to do anything about it yet.

Edit:  It also doesn't help that a lot of the work we do is completely worthless, superfluous bullshit that is held up purely for the excuse of having work to do, because it's the only way to survive.  Increasing amounts of work becoming obsolete -> growing population that needs work to justify its survival -> fluff everything with stupid frustrating beaurocracy and unnecessary procedures

Edit Edit:  Ok this is what I started typing up yesterday.  I didn't end up changing it too much.  I could go forever.  I'll just put this out there.

I was born in '83.  My earliest memory is the first time I played a computer game, at 2 1/2 years old.  I feel like the defining feature of my generation is that we have witnessed a great deal of social and technological change, often going hand in hand with each other.  A lot of the following perspective deals exclusively with middle-class kids who were lucky enough to be early adopters of consumer technologies.  I know a lot of it will probably be controversial and there will be lots of individuals with contradicting cases.


Technology: 

Witnessing the infiltration of computers into every aspect of daily life, and the sophistication of mass communications/media.  Those of us who had access to technology early on in our lives have a very intuitive feel for technological advancement, and aren't much phased by it.  We've gone from rotary phones and commodore 64s to the smart phones and augmented reality of today without much trouble, while many of us have parents who need a 2-page step-by-step manual on hand just to log into their e-mail, no matter how many times they do it.  On the flip side, younger generations are used to mature/intuitive interfacing and a general high quality of sleek polish to everything, and can have a lot of trouble coping with older or just unpolished stuff even if it has other good qualities.

Some of us remember what the internet was like in the mid-90's and are keenly aware of how it has evolved.  Most people were afraid of the internet back then.  Seriously.  People thought I was crazy for visiting chat rooms online, and were convinced that some internet stalker was going to kill me in my sleep and that my parents were horrible for allowing me on there.  So it was a very different community overall.  It was a refuge for people who didn't fit in wherever they were in meatspace.  In retrospect, I refer to it as The Ignorance Filter that made the "good old days" of the internet what they were.  I met the best friends of my life on the internet in those times, and I remember the internet as a whole being as liberal and friendly as Bay12 is today.

We also witnessed the sophistication of advertising and PR.  We were immersed in media from an early age.  Helicopter parents didn't exist back then.  Cable Guy wasn't joking when he said the tv was our babysitter, and I'll comment more on this later.  We remember when advertising was still rough and campy in production value, and our resistance to it kept pace as it advanced.  The weaker media of our youths sort of vaccinated us against the media we find as adults.  We're now accutely aware of the nature and science of advertising and propaganda, and 25-35 is officially recognized as the most difficult age group to influence.  We're highly cynical and filter manipulative media without even thinking about it.  Most of the older generation didn't see it coming.  Younger generations didn't get the same vaccination that we did, having been born into a more sophisticated media environment.

We also understand to an extent what life was like before technology took over.  When we were little, our grandparents were still doing farm work the old-fashioned way, and told us stories about what it was like to survive a winter with nothing but sweat and firewood.  We understand how that's changed, and we're concerned about stuff like where our food comes from.  We tend to find that older generations value hardship too much and younger generations value it too little.  I think we're also more concerned with preservation, as older generations are enamored with a future they don't understand, and younger generations seem completely disconnected from the past.


Social Change: 

We've witnessed the utter collapse of the premises on which previous generations built their lives.  Our parents and grandparents worked their asses off and gave themselves completely to their jobs.  Most of our grandparents did alright, but most of our parents have seen all their work completely invalidated by economic cycles, while their bosses cut ties and run away with all the fruits of their labor. 

Generations before us grew up with drastically cheaper education and far less economic inequality to crush their opportunities, and those opportunities were many.  While my generation was only old enough to witness the drastic changes of the last 30 years, our parents were old enough to take advantage of them.  Using my dad as an example:  He grew up as a poor farmer, but was able to afford a college education up to Masters level on a McDonalds income while raising me.  When he finished his degree, he didn't even have to job hunt.  Employers contacted him, and quickly landed a great career as a pharmacokineticist.  He was also an early techie and did core maintenance and IT work for his very large corporate employer before they had official positions handling those things, and he enjoyed great benefits just for being basically computer literate before most people.  Obviously, things don't work anything like that today.

Thus we've seen how the balance between luck and hard work really plays out.  Growing up, we were fed all these promises by our parents and teachers that the changes that were happening all pointed to a bright future, and all we had to do was work hard, go to college, and follow our dreams to be successful.  We saw how things worked out for our parents and it was easy to believe.  The majority of us who honestly believed and acted on that advice are back to living at home now, competing with recent middle-age layoffs for minimum wage jobs that used to be for high school kids.  Some of us are keeping our recently laid-off parents fed and sheltered now with those jobs.

Meanwhile, our grandparents think we're the laziest, most entitled generation the world has ever seen.  We're also expected to see a drop in our life expectancy compared to the several generations before us, that saw steady increases.

We've also seen the consequences of social progress and compromise.  I see my parent's generation as being very socially progressive compared to my grandparents.  My parents ended normalization of the nuclear family, brought us our first gay celebrities, and the sexual revolution of the 80s.  At the same time, they came from deeply religious backgrounds (their parents were the generation that added "under god" to the pledge of allegiance) and wanted to reconcile these changes with tradition. 

I think religion is falling out of favor with my generation, because we've seen that these things just cannot work together.  The mixed messages we received resulted in large amounts of confusion, alienation, and outright rejection.  Consequently, We also saw the rates of divorce and working moms simultaneously skyrocket and are recognized as the generation with the largest amount of "latchkey kids".  When not in school, we raised ourselves on tv, video games, and internets while both parents worked.  We were the last generation where it was widely accepted for kids to play outside alone for long periods unsupervised.  So we alternated between vegetation and adventure.  By the late 90's fear culture and urban sprawl made this risky, as it's now really easy to get accused of negligence.  So we ended up stuck in vegetate mode more often than not.  We weren't able to do much.

We're much more likely to see expansion of civil rights, especially to include gay rights, and sexual liberation as positive things, but we've also seen the religious right retreat further and further into insane depths of reactionary fundemantalism as a result, so we're highly critical of religious lifestyles and militant about religion being something that doesn't belong in the public sphere.  We basically saw our parent's attempts at holding religious beliefs while pushing social progress as complete failure, and don't put the same kind of effort into reconciling the two.

We're stuck in a rough spot and other generations, younger or older, don't seem to sympathize with us very much.  It's easy for me to understand why, despite many of us being really very passionate, we're seen as such an apathetic generation.

We also have a unique perspective on the evolution of modern conflict.  We were young enough to hear stories from people who fought in wars that still took place on battlefields, while the war we see today is nothing but assassination and terror campaigns carried out by machines against people with no hope of escape once the crosshairs find them, much less retaliation.  We're acutely aware of how the world has shifted from warfare of blood, sweat, and tears to pure information, and the implications of that shift (it's less about defense and democracy and more about enforcing compliance with ideological purity and established powers).  I've never looked at statistics on it, but I remember there being a recruitment crisis in the military around the same time that I was of prime age.  When a recruiter called me, I just repeated "Not interested" about 20 times until they hung up.  Information warfare spreads across all spectrums, from media to economics to politics and activism.  We saw the rise of file sharing/piracy on the internet and thought it was the glorious future, then suffered as the established order made it clear that it's not the future they want, and fed us a ton of easily debunked falsities to justify the excessive crackdown.  The Patriot Act was passed when we were young adults, and we saw it used to crush dissent (and file sharing) across the country instead of fighting terrorism.  As a result, I think we're the most passionate about information freedom, and net neutrality/privacy are the issues we're most willing to throw down on... or that might just be the most blatant personal projection in this post :P
« Last Edit: December 22, 2012, 11:58:29 pm by SalmonGod »
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