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[Owlbread]

The 1990s were pretty horrible. Rwandan genocide, Afghan civil war, the Yugoslav wars (genocide there too), war in Chechnya (google Grozny), collapse of the Eastern Bloc countries and all the hardship and instability that followed it, rise of Islamic extremism. I suppose we were quite sheltered over in the UK with the (as it turned out, rather misguided) post-Thatcher, advent-of-Blair optimism and the economic boom.

I suppose all generations do that though, with the rose tinted goggles and such. How many older people now are getting nostalgic for the 1970s? When it was a dark, shit time. My grandmother was always nostalgic for the 50s even though they still had rationing and people were dying of TB.

[SalmonGod]

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 t least have grown up to an extent.

It's something I've become quite fascinated with over the last couple years, going hand in hand with my obsession with memetics.

[Scoops Novel]

Generation Y. Just you wait until we start running things.

Here's another problem. What with how long it's going to take before older generations take a back seat due to people living longer, I'm worried it will take an inordinate amount of time for this to happen.

[DJ]

I'm from Bosnia, and I guess I could call mine the Screwed Generation. Starting at 1980, and still continues with no end in sight. The defining event was definitely the war in the early 90's. The war itself wasn't as damaging as the corruption that followed in it's wake. The economy is a bad joke, with ~50% unemployment in the general population and ~80% for the young. This has triggered torrential emigration, and I'd say that about a third of the people under 30 have left for greener pastures. The ones that remain turn to crime because there's no other way to make any money. In my small town of 12k people we've had a murder, two rapes, an armed robbery that turned into a big shootout with the police, half a dozen muggings and two dozen burglaries just this year. The worst of the casualties, though, is hope - everyone here, myself included, thinks that things will just keep getting worse and worse.

[Pnx]

And I'm guessing there's a lot of people using drugs to escape how miserable they are... right?

It seems to be a pretty similar story across almost the entire former eastern bloc. I think the biggest disappointment for this generation has been how the fall of the Soviet union didn't lead to the magical age of peace and prosperity we all hoped it would.

[DJ]

Yeah. I personally use weed and videogames to forget where I live for a little while.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

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?

The changes you want are impractical and always were. Flying cars and jetpacks have both been invented, but they aren't practically useful. There's no moon base because we don't have much incentive. At the end of the day, the moon isn't that useful to us right now. I support the expansion of civilization, but this just is not happening until we have a reason to make it happen.

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

You crazy. 9/11 was definitely a big deal, perhaps not in the "ultimate tragedy" way it is portrayed as, but definitely as a defining aspect of US activity over the past decade. To say that the Berlin Wall falling wasn't important is just plan ridiculous. That was the death knell of the Soviet Union, the most significant political change in the past 50 years. Eastern Europe went from oppression and want to nearing the quality of Western Europe in 20 years because of that.

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.

Then you expected something that real scientists never thought was going to happen.

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.

People had AIDS when you were a kid. People had AIDS when your parents were kids. Nobody talked about it, and that's why it spread so far, and why we have to work so hard now to keep it down. If not for HAART it would be a pandemic by now.

And you neglect that we do have genetic enhancement these days. Gene therapy is a big thing, and it has made medical strides that were impossible before. That it isn't your perfect superpower-endowing fantasy is not the fault of the world.

Childhood obesity may not have been talked about, but it was growing even then. Yours was the age where fast food became a standard of American life.

Sure...there've been improvements. But did we really need AIDS?

We didn't ask for AIDS. HIV mutated all on its own.

Was it really more important to build military bases and spend trillions of dollars killing people in other countries rather than terraform Mars?

We don't have what it takes to terraform Mars yet. That's part of why we're doing all the missions we are. Curiosity, Odyssey, Opportunity, MRO, and Express are all active on Mars at this very moment. Exploration, Colonization, Assimilation. We haven't even finished the first step, so why do you expect the third?

Are we really happier whining and complaining about the "right to work" rather than just having robots do everything?

Robots can't do everything. They can't even do most things.

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.

There were never going to be any teleporters. That is fantasy.

I'm still typing this message by hand rather than dictating it to a sexy interactive female computer persona.

There's speech-to-text software if you really want it. It's pretty good these days, truth be told. Now, if you want to be creepy about it I can't really help you, but that's what the internet is for.

I still can't hop on a shuttle to Mars, or book passage to neighboring star systems.

If you were seriously expecting FTL/near-FTL to be developed and standardized in 30 years, you are totally divorced from reality.

But the nature of life and change feels less grandiose than it used to.

There's more change now than ever. How you perceive it's grandness is a state of mind.

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

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.

You are acting like a bigot and I reject how you characterize my generation. This isn't even worth a response. For fucks sake man, you sound like me as a bitter thirteen year old.

[nenjin]

Gen X. I'd mostly agree with what Red King said about us on page 1. We're kind of a generation of self-interested hedonists. Not always in a self-destructive fashion, but in a way that generally claims a significant portion of our motivation and goals. We're not achievers because achievement isn't the metric we learned how to measure life by. Comfort, happiness, peace....those are I think what motivates a lot of my generation.

[Scoops Novel]

I agree with MetalSlimeHunt, but with the caveat that people our age don't seem to be thinking much bigger then Britney spears, at least here in England. Bloody bone-cold hell, i had someone who I'd once had an argument over fox-hunting and damn near everything else with dismiss this board, and likely the medium in general, as "internet" arguments. You live in damn England, your in my generation and frequently use the internet and that's what you think of it. No wonder i get the feeling that the usual use is for cat videos.

[Svarte Troner]

Britney Spears is so ten years ago.

[Korbac]

Oh for gosh darn sake. Can't we avoid insulting each other in what should be a harmless topic!? 

AFAIK most of my actual *year* tends to be pretty decent. Obviously you tend to get a general distribution of things like chavs and intellectuals, but most of the people my age I know tend to be decent people - certainly not the type which swear at you over the internet for 'prawning' them (that came about 5 years later.)

[Flying Dice]

Ah, I see. The darned young'uns are all excited over their pop stars and their hippity-hop instead of fighting the Man and going to the Moon. That's clearly what's wrong with my generation and those younger than me, that our (generally, not personally—I couldn't possibly care less about the popular culture of my generation) focus is on the things that society deems important in the present day, rather than what society deemed important a few decades ago. But of course the shallow, stupid things today are so much worse than they were back then. I couldn't possibly be detecting a hint of rose tinting, could I?

That aside, the obvious bit about idiots having always been there but current technology allowing them to be far more vocal, etc. etc.

[TCM]

From my experience, this is how I very briefly feel about my (90's kids) generation:

As we become teenagers and young adults, it's becoming evident that this generation knows more than any previous American generation, but thinks less. This is bad, as I can listen to two sides of a debate from peers of my generation and not know what the fuck their logic is functioning on. I blame Internet.

[dei]

I'm going to be as brief as possible while being more polite about my stance on my generation. Seeing as I was born in nineteen-eighty-seven I see myself as being part of Generation Y and as such I find myself to be one of the misfits who was left behind by said generation. The only things I enjoy of this generation are the video games of nineteen-ninety-four to two-thousand-and-eight, the music that doesn't sound like the horrid bastard child of a sleazy ghetto brothel and an ecstacy-laden rave, and the pornography that has women which are actually attractive - which is quite rare seeing as I don't find most human women to be attractive what-so-ever, though that is mostly due to their personalities and their being too damn thin.

The anime isn't that bad either though I find myself not enjoying most series that are being released out of Japan as of late. I like what Japan made from two-thousand-and-six and prior, but that is a tangent I will go on later for the sake of being brief. I apologize if I have offended someone with this post, I truly am. I just think that honesty is the best policy and that even a white lie damns you to pain, suffering and regret.

[Mr Space Cat]

From my experience, this is how I very briefly feel about my (90's kids) generation:

As we become teenagers and young adults, it's becoming evident that this generation knows more than any previous American generation, but thinks less. This is bad, as I can listen to two sides of a debate from peers of my generation and not know what the fuck their logic is functioning on. I blame Internet.

This. Born in'96, 16 here. The vast majority of students at my high school seem more than content to spend their free time on their phones, doing I dunno what.

I find it hard to believe that whatever they might be doing on their fancy shmancy smart phones are so important that they can't walk down the halls without looking at it the whole way. 

They just seem content to underachieve and stop right there. Scrape by the bare minimum and go back to lookin at  da phones.

My comp sci teacher summed it up well: before technology such as internet, smart phones, etc, people had to actually seek out a way to pass the time, such as reading books or drawing or riddles or music or creativity-stimulating stuff like that. There's so much stuff now that's just activities of consuming, rather than creating, and as a result teenagers are "thinking less", I guess you could put it.

I could probably rant on this more about how the underachieving attitude irks me, but I'm tired at the moment. PTW.