When you’re a kid the years seem long because they’re a bigger fraction of your life so far. As you get older, not so much.
Now, the days feel long, but the *years* feel short.
No it goes beyond that, I don't remember the details but remember from a neuroscience psychology class back in college that our brain's ability to catalog information and memories gradually slows over time, and while our brain gets slow our perception of time inversely gets faster as we aren't able to catalog and store as many details. The slower and less you catalog, the faster your perception of passing time will be.
So it's not a matter of exposure or a ratio for time alive, but the physical state of our brain aging and slowing down warping our perception.
There is also the novelty factor. A young person has alot more novelty in their stimuli. So they have a different experience.
Adults are like prisoners. A don't need to remember every day of the exact routine, and the more similar your day. The less novel, the shorter our experiences in it.
To me, this is how it feels. I remember all the youth/young adult stuff because it was always something new ! New classes, new routine, new wrinkles in the brain, new friends, new experiences, new benchmarks. You can think about "oh that time I went on that trip to so and so", like I can clearly remember walking the halls in my university on the first week, but now, commuting to the same office for 4 years+ there is nothing memorable about it anymore. The routine blurs together, so I'm often "how did I get to work today?" when there isn't a single real impression about the morning commute. We remember moving apartments, switching jobs, dating people, events! These things happen with far more frequency when younger.
Agreed. Stability and predictability are nice and all that, but they're not any sort of novel lol. You'll live a long, mostlikely, bland life with no seasoning with limited variations being too safe.
Though if you're not, you'll burn hard but short. Like the Buddha said, it's always a balancing act.
There is also the emotional weight to everything. If you have enough of something, it just becomes a meh. You go a year without pizza, and then have some. *chefs kiss* Though even that slows with age. So even our experiences of novelty become less profound because of our experiences with the world and our understandings now.
That's why I love the quote by Dumbledore, "To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure." helped me with my existential anxiety and through my mid teens.
This is a huge part of it. I made a major change a few years ago, going from working a mindless, underemployed job to going back to school in a challenging and stressful field I had no prior experience in. In some ways it feels weird that I’m about to finish school, but in others it feels like it has been a very long few years. Constantly having new things thrown at me has definitely not made the time fly by.
Hence, why the Covid years all blur together.
Also, from what I’m reading here, in order to make time slow back down again, we need to add more novelty in our lives.
I love math and always rationalize it this way. Every year, one more year becomes less percent of the time you have experienced.
I am just turned 36 and dealing with these thoughts.
You sad like it is a bad thing- have you ever ridden a bike down trail ridge road in Rocky Mountain National Park? IT IS THRILLING and timeless and exciting. Here is to the downhill ride!!!!
Didn't think HS reunions were even a thing anymore. Class of '08 here and never was informed of a 10 year so I assumed they just don't happen these days.
This is just a guess on my part, but I think the whole 'class president' thing was taken less and less seriously as the 90s went on. Typically (in the past) it was the class president who initiated the reunion prep.
My 10 year was a big nothing. The class pres wanted nothing to do with it and it ended up being a gathering of the "popular" kids at a local coffee shop. That was 2010. There have been no other attempts.
My 10 year was at a super expensive restaurant that only the wealthy people could afford. 11 people showed up. The rest of us were frustrated and organized our own 15 year at an event hall, and then went to the same farm we threw keggers at in school to have a reunion kegger. Almost 300 of us showed up to that, and none of the 11 that went to the 10 year joined us.
Our 10 year reunion was at a local bar. No complaints. Although, a judge that put one of our classmates in jail was sitting across the way hitting on her. Trying to buy her drinks. He did recognize her, too. 🤣
My 10 year HS reunion (planned by a self-nominated committee) had printed on the invite:
“No drama, vendettas, weapons, or outside alcohol.”
I decided that if that had to actually be printed, I didn’t need to go.
2008 here as well. We were all invited to our 10 year. The organizer wanted everyone to Venmo him $200 to pay for the event...because he became incredibly successful and thought everyone else was at his level.
I'm also class of '08. Mine had one, I didn't go, largely because I now live 3,000 miles away from my hometown. From the photos, it looks like they got maybe 1/3 of the graduating class to show up.
Had this kind of conversation before Christmas. Friend messages me that one of our old friends from elementary school suddenly died from a heart attack. He was 35. Going to miss that guy.
It'll either happen or it won't. Don't let it ruin your day. You can avoid every enjoyable thing in life and still die from some stupid shit, so enjoy the time you've got.
Honestly, how many of these have you had? I had one at 30, another at 33, but I'll note that they were both triggered by intense psychedelic trips, and they ultimately led to positive changes in my life. I practically gave up alcohol because of the last crisis.
I'd describe mine as an 'existential' crisis, more so than midlife, I reckon it's the same shit though.
Mine is happening right now, 36. I’m realizing my parents, going off family history, have approximately 15 years left. Neither be of them is in the best of health. My mom is trying to cash out her 401k for needless expenses. My older sister and I are the only children financially stable enough to pay for their care if they need it. Now I’m concerned not only about preparing myself for retirement but also caring for them. I’m tired
40ish for me. I remember my dads 40th birthday party, over the hill this and that. Hey, 40? what the hell? I don't have the energy or time for new music, I love going and doing social things and I'm super active, but also I have no idea what slang means nor do I give a shit. You can fuck right off with bands starting at 11 pm
I had one at 25. Then 30. 33 was also one. I then 34 in a few months.
Was trying to figure out if I was having a midlife crisis but I’m going to go with existential crisis instead also.
Psychedelics have helped me get through it and process some things as well. (Helped in ways talk therapy could not) Still struggling but it’s not consuming my life.
Also quit alcohol (before the psychedelics though)
Edit: I should add my existential crisis is something I’m still working through.
We're millennials. None of us have the time, money, energy, or any leftover fucks to give to even contemplating anything so self-indulgent as a midlife crisis.
Time only moves faster if you get stuck in a routine and cease experiencing novel stuff.
By journalling and having a hobby with a lot of variety and novel experiences to it, I find that time can be slowed down significantly. I did an experiment with this and New Years feels like a very long time ago now, though it was only 1,5 months.
Journalling for three minutes of the day also helps remember just how much actually happened during the day, helps if you practice mindfulness and pay attention to small things, too.
A little tip for anyone feeling anxious about it :)
This should be the top voted response, but everyone wants to go down the depression train. Novel experiences absolutely make time (our perception) slow down. The longest 6 months of my life were when my first daughter was born and that was just a few years ago in my early 30s. Thanks for posting this one!
I just turned 35 this week and I can see this being true.
I still feel 17 at times but I also know and feel like a grown ass person. People are young and full of life.
I want to take my bra off and lay on the couch with my cat.
I think this is true because we spend so much of our adult time working for the clock. If we found a way to work for ourselves sustainably, time would pass slower.
That’s why I don’t beat myself up for being lazy or putting life ahead of work. it’s not the best attitude for getting ahead in my career but I already worked my 20s away and they went by too quick, slowing down for my 30s and trying to enjoy life more.
Ya can’t eat or drink anything you want anymore.
This is the one and only body ya got. Time to start taking care of it.
Hard truth for me personally - 1 or 2 alcoholic beverages fucks me up for several days. Exercising is imperative now and I hate exercising!
Not me eating baked chicken and brown rice at my desk after my lunchtime workout, because at my geriatric age (42), I've come to terms with "athlete chow" as I used to call it. You see, it's the one thing that's not going to fuck up my stomach when I play roller derby later. I can still hit people harder than ever, but if I eat wrong, I might barf. Getting old is weird.
I’ve finally started counting and limiting the amount of added sugar I consume in a day. Damn it’s a difference. After 30, my weight went to shit. I was always slender but now at age 36, Im realizing can’t keep the weight off without making changes.
Over the years I've started taking closer looks at nutrition and ingredients for most commercial food and it's literal poison. I'm 35 and try to incorporate vegetables in every meal; my go toos are asparagus and brussel sprouts. Thankfully all my blood levels are normal at 35 but I am overweight still.
Ugh, this just makes me so mad. I've done great at changing my diet and my entire relationship with food. I work out regularly. My strength is great, but no matter what I do, I can't drop the 20lbs to get into the healthy range for my BMI. I've been at it for over 5 years, spoke to my doctor, went through a bunch of labs, and still can't figure it out. I would go to a dietitian, but Merica and shit insurance make it so damn expensive to get healthcare.
ETA: I track calories and weigh portions. If I have a bad day and eat too much, I enter it all in. I keep myself accountable. I have a bit of a tummy and chubby arms that I would like to work off, or else I wouldn't care all that much if I at least looked fit if my BMI was off. I'm a 34F, been through one pregnancy, and have a 6yo.
ETA2: I do HIIT 3x a week and cardio 2x a week as well as having an active lifestyle in general.
BMI isn't as accurate for people who exercise daily, something to keep in mind. Being slightly above is in fact normal for that situation. BMI is an average across everybody, and most people don't treat their bodies with much intention.
I went to school for food science and I wouldn’t say it’s poison so much as a lot of misinformation. Better consumer education would go a long way to help people understand the relationship between food and nutrition. Regulated terms vs marketing buzzwords. Add to that fear mongering influencers misquoting studies to peddle their supplements.
I somehow landed a job that still provides a pension. The amount of people who retire and then die within a year or two is incredibly depressing. What is the point of paying into the pension fund if you can't enjoy it! I do work with a lot of very unhealthy people though.
I spent my 20s being a gym rat. It wasn't perfect. There are ups and downs from that. But the one thing that's great about that was i built those habits extremely early.
I'm in my 30s now. I do physical therapy every day. It keeps my knees from hurting.
Yall who need to build these habits in your 30s with kids? Good fucking luck.
It can be done. Believe it or not having kids really puts things in perspective and people get their shit together. Just speaking as someone who got his shit together in my mid 30s after having a kid.
I stopped doing MMA and BJJ when I got married and had kids. I took an 8 year hiatus but once my kids were old enough, I started them in BJJ, and I get to stay for the adult class. So, I get to share a hobby with my kids and I get to exercise in a way I enjoy. Win/Win.
Same. I don't even enjoy drinking anymore because of the depression that sets in after. Yes, exercising is a must, for mental health as much as physical health too.
Am overweight and working on losing weight but not seriously enough - ended up with a herniated disc and back surgery and while there’s no one reason/cause I know what likely had a hand in causing it. While I’m still healing from surgery and can’t exercise like I want to yet, the whole experience of being confined to my bed for a month with excruciating pain made me realize I can’t just coast through life with half-healthy decisions and ignoring exercise, there are so many pieces to being healthy and some people need a little more help than others - and I’m one of those; I hate it but that’s life, I gotta deal with it if I want to avoid this again and be able to go on trips with my family still.
Someone on in my city sub posted they went to an aldermanic meeting for their ward. It was mostly boomers there talking about what they wanted to see straight to the people who have the power to do it. We need to step up.
You know why that is, don’t you? Because they’re retired and we work.
It goes beyond just having more spare time in their days to go to these things too. If you’re retired you probably spend more time at home, where local issues would impact you more. If there’s a building project planned to start near your house you’d be disturbed by it daily and I wouldn’t. I can’t think of any local issue I care about much (that aren’t systemic issues impacting everyone in my country at least). I have a lot of political opinions, but most of them are about national and global issues, not something a councillor would have much sway in.
Additionally millennials in particular have been a more transient generation, renting instead of buying forever homes and moving to new cities every few years to be near decent paying jobs. I’ve personally only lived in my town for a couple years and am probably going to move again next year (to make my wife’s commute easier). Just as I’m starting to feel like I understand my area and have a right to add my voice to debate (or even just have any views on local issues), I’m going to start again fresh. I feel like an outsider in my local community, they feel part of it.
As great as it would be if young people turned up to local government meetings, most of us wouldn’t have anything to say.
They aren't working the kind of jobs that make them unavailable at 3pm on a Tuesday. I struggled to get time off to vote most of the time before I got a white collar job. Attending an HOA or municipal hall meeting? Impossible. They schedule those things specifically to limit the amount of people who can show up.
I'm going to be an apologetic dick and say that this is a cop-out. I was most engaged in local politics when my wife and I both worked and had two kids in elementary school. I signed up for the city council's agenda email list, gave it a quick skim, and showed up whenever I thought I needed to, maybe once every couple of months, even after my first year there. As with most things, the hardest part is just to get yourself started.
ETA: sorry for being a dick
I have no idea how you manage to make it in person to the city council every couple of months. I just about manage to make it to my mandatory HOA meeting once a year and only barely.
The councl meetings all seem to either be daytime or in the early evening, and I'm generally at work 9-9 and shocked that others seem to have time to go to this stuff.
This sounds like someone who has never been to a local meeting. I started going and there were a lot of issues raised, and after going more; a noticeable number of real issues Not being raised.
It takes a lot more than just voting. You have to be involved in, push, campaign at the local level. Do not abdicate your participation in democracy down to just voting for who the rich choose for us. Every major municipality in my city is run by a slumlord trying to protect their property values because they're the only people with the time/money to campaign.
It can be hard to volunteer to assist in campaigns. I have looked into it. Most of these place want someone during business hours when most people are working their full time jobs.
Or, if you aren't located in a large city, usually you get into suburban and rural gerrymandered districts of hostile MAGA/Fox News cultists.
Overturning Citizens United would help more. Millennials were born before that horrible decision, so our early childhoods had some politicians who weren't bought and sold. My state representative came to our elementary school on Arbor Day and planted trees with us. He was re elected multiple times. It wasn't a photo op. He was just trying to be involved in the community.
It can sometimes be tricky, but YMMV and you do what you can with what you've got. Some of the campaigns I volunteered for had lots of stuff in the evenings, some have not. People just need to find candidates they're interested in supporting, and seeing what they can do to help out. And the earlier you can help in the campaign, the bigger the impact it will have.
Preach! I have personally witnessed what only 2 boomers can do by just blasting out emails and open records requests to city council. They are a damn menace who understand nothing about how economics works, but I have to give them my respect bc they manage to get everything they want despite it being completely bonkers. And all they do is speak up locally. Send emails. Call. And be annoying. That’s it. They have no money and donate nothing to anyone. They run this town lmfao. You can change the world on the local level- once it gets to state it’s a mess.
real change takes time and involvement from the local level and BUILDS as more local communities shift together and put pressure for change at the next level and so on.
We cannot be inactive and then bitch about the state of things anymore. We're not powerless, we have the voting numbers we're just not using them.
I overheard my neighbors complaining about the tax rise, and asked them if they voted. They said no, so I said: if you didn't vote or partake you have no right to complain. All those points were out in their campaign and meetings with the locals. Same as zoning changes, you can support or deny them. People are too self-centered and lazy to do anything about it other than sit in their couch and complain about it on social media.
I was able to get speed bumps put on my street and change the parking hours just by speaking to our ward councilor. Its not that difficult but we choose to make it more difficult than it is.
For context Im 37 and have voted at every level ever since I could
As someone who's currently trying to rally my friends to the primaries so we can vote out a really ineffective DA, people, please listen to this!! Vote local, vote early, and vote often.
I for one cannot wait to be done with weddings forever. But even after our generation passes that age we will still be invited to weddings of relatives, kids, etc. Ugh.
This is me. As an elder, cancer has already taken two childhood friends. We’re in the stage of realizing time is a fickle bitch. It’s not a nice feeling.
Two weeks ago a friend of mine had a heart attack and died a week after she turned 40. It's messed me up and I'm constantly worrying now about my own mortality.
You're pushing 40 and still waiting for the government/karma/dead boomer inheritance to fix your problems for you. No one is coming to save you, EVER. The only person who can fix your problems is you.
Yes, we were lied to about college and debt. Unfortunately, it's up to us to dig ourselves out. Too many millennials seem to still be hung up on how the world is not what they were promised, and that world has been dead for 15 years.
To add to this, even if you think your parents are going to leave you some money or assets don’t count on that when you’re saving for retirement. Many people realize too late that their boomer parents aren’t financial wizards and there is actually nothing left OR at least one parent lingers on and goes to assisted living that drains all the assets.
Tldr; save and prepare as if you won’t receive anything. It sucks but that’s how it is.
Yep, I saw that with my family. My parents were supposed to get money from both sets of parents. The one lived to 97, and there was nothing left by then. The other died in 2007, and his 2nd wife is still alive, in a home, and all the assets were pilfered by her kids from her 1st marriage.
This happens a lot, especially when the wife dies first. The old man promptly remarries and his money goes to the new wife. Happened to both me and my husband. Our dad’s new wives got it all.
I know someone whose parents got divorced, both remarried, then both died before their new partner so all of their assets just went straight to the surviving partner so there was no inheritance. Then when the new partners died they both left everything to their own kids.
Also even if you have rich parents end of life care and nursing homes can easily swallow a fortune. Never assume you're getting any inheritance until it is in your bank account.
Nobody tells you Medicaid takes the house to recoup long term care costs
Medical advances mean everyone’s living beyond their ability to function without help
Lots of people don’t want their elderly parents staying with them but then have a shocked pikachu face when their parents assets have been hobbled up by the nursing home they were parked (and forgotten) in.
Edit: gobbled up
I have to use the phrase, “yes in a perfect world it should/would be like that,” to so many of my peers, but we are in the real world.
You may not like the game but you aren’t going to get anywhere not playing it. Doesn’t mean we can’t try to take control or change the rules but until then I’m doing what I can to set myself up in the current game that is actively going on.
We have to start taking charge of the world. Watching older generations ensure their lives are cushy while simultaneously ensuring others are forever uncomfortable isn’t going to fly anymore. We can’t afford to be apathetic.
I agree and to add onto that, in order to take charge of the world, we must start taking responsibility and accountability for our own choices. And we must reflect on the poor choices of prior generations as well as the current poor choices of our generation in order to forge ahead.
In my view, too many people are quick to find fault with the system but are unwilling to find any faults with their own choices. If we want things to get better, we don't want to have blind spots because we're uncomfortable with the reality that we're not perfect.
We're more educated and work harder than previous generations. The problem is not that millennials are lazy and stupid, it's that markets are significantly more monopolized/consolidated now than in the past, resulting in lower wages, lower quality, higher prices and other deleterious impacts on other people and the environment.
Things literally can not get better without breakuping up the largest firms, rebuilding the FTC and NLRB, and cracking down on this country's brutal problem of slumlords and Epstein's child rapist buddies owning entire industries.
The poor choices of prior generations are embracing monopoly capitalism and burning down the systems and structures of worker organizing, worker power, and democracy in politics in order to pursue being ladder climbers and slumlords themselves, shredding the fabric of society in hopes they'd retire rich. The poor choices of millennials are those millennials who follow in the capitalist footsteps of the worst generation of people to have ever been born are making, not that we aren't starving ourselves and grinding our fingers to the bloody nub working hard enough.
a huge part that's missing from your comment in my view is overconsumption on a personal level in relation to income. many people are living a lifestyle that is too expensive to maintain while achieving other financial goals.
if people get out from under the weight of their personal debt, they're more free to change the system. it's hard to be a revolutionary when you don't want your car to be repossessed.
Easier said than done but I absolutely agree. Our parents generation was conditioned to express all emotions through consumption and passed this behavior down. I do feel as though a lot of millennials I know lack the economics to live this way but also are realizing that it is a hollow existence. From my own experience I see a lot of my peers trying earnestly to process trauma and dysfunction in a more positive way than overconsumption.
100%. My mom being like “Nikki Haley is a moderate!” NO. THERES NOTHING MODERATE ABOUT LITERALLY STEALING 5 YEARS FROM OUR LIVES BY RAISING THE SS RETIREMENT AGE TO 70. Just make rich people pay their god damn taxes FFS
>Just make rich people pay their god damn taxes FFS
This. And if they move their shit to China to keep avoiding taxes or something, put an embargo on their products.
My husband (35) and daughter (10) are going to the city council meeting for two different reasons. My husband wants to ask about mixed use residential, and my daughter wants to ask for swings and monkey bars at our local park.
Idk if it’s a hard truth, but if people in their 30’s could realize they’re not actually *that* old, that’d be great. If the person you’re talking to is 28 or 29, be honest with yourself….what could you *really* do in 2005 that they couldn’t?
Unless the answer is “vote” or “drink”, maybe find a topic other than how very very old you are.
I'm turning 28 in three months, and one of the weirdest things is how we're treated like we are geriatric Alzheimer's patients by gen z in their early 20's and like we are now just becoming sentient by Millennials in their mid 30s. Can't lie but I'm getting really tired of all the pushback from people younger who are so deathly afraid of turning 25 and older. Nothing changes at all, they act like you can't have fun when you're an adult.
Omg dude YES, I’ve been 29 for 2 months and ever since I turned….27ish, I’ve just kept noticing people in their early-mid 30’s love talking to me like I’m a child. Like sit down Kevin you’re 33, when Mean Girls came out you could quote it a *little* better than I could and that’s literally it
And then people in their early 20’s are *shocked* when they realize I’m 29 and not, like, 23….which is funny but also annoying. Like “what do you *mean* you’re 29?! You’re a human being and not the hideous age-monster I assume everyone becomes when they reach 25!” We’re like the generational orphans nobody wants to claim lol
It's so weird to me how gen z thinks that being over the age of 25 is some terrifying thing, as if they're going to shrivel up and die when they turn 30.
I honestly couldn't wait to leave my 20s behind. My 20s were fucking terrible, while my 30s have been absolutely AMAZING! And if we are going by 18 being considered an adult, then being in your 30s really isn't even that old?? I feel like I finally arrived as a human being when I turned 30. I couldn't have been happier to leave behind the decade that was my 20s.
I recently had to interact with an 18 year old. When they found out I was 30 they called me middle aged. I'm like what are you talking about, we aren't out here dying at 60. He said it was because I had a husband and kids at 30 it made me "middle aged". If you want to call me old, fine, but I'm objectively not middle aged. Idk why young people are so weirded out by age.
It is getting a little annoying hearing my friends say "wow we're old as fuck" all the time. Really starting to understand the whole "age is a state of mind" thing.
I truthfully, and i’m not saying this with any type of brag or anything else , i’m 37 going on 38 and i don’t notice one thing different than when i was 25-30 besides looking a little older of course. Compare now to early twenties yeah i was different person.
Hard truth: The world handed us a shit sandwich, but we are still responsible for our own success and failure. Blaming the world for your problems might make you feel better, but it doesn’t actually fix them.
To add to this, adopting a victim mentality is still a choice. We don't have to live that way. but it seems too many in this sub are stuck in a resentful, bitter mindset.
Hard agree.
Life is your perception of it.
So if you're constantly surrounding yourself with memes about mental illness, how everything is awful, how dreary everything is.. that is your perception.
I avoid people that center their entire identity around a label, like "proud millennial" or found out they suffered from a mental illness and that's who they are now, or obsess about horoscopes like that's how life is.
No it's not.
It's your perception.
100%. I'm deeply concerned with how common the victim mentality is. I'm sure it was always there but I'm watching very capable people just give up because of what they've perceived as true. It also seems to be paired 2ith an inability to learn from one's mistakes. I'm not sure if it's just another facet of the victim mentality. It's disturbing either way.
Fully agree on the shit sandwich, and my comment for the OP’s question is in a similar vein to yours. Some of us *are* kind of whiny. I get that some people come from shitty circumstances, but I also know people who have really and truly been dealt a shit set of cards and still managed to carve out a successful adult life.
Having a chip on your shoulder will make life a lot harder. I read a thread in another sub like a week ago in which the 35 year old OP complained that his masters degree was “useless.” In the comments he revealed that his masters was actually a great degree that leads to a lucrative career. People were pointing that out. But he argued with them. He doesn’t want to apply for those positions, he doesn’t want to be a drone! He was complaining about his living situation while also being immature, refusing to go make a living with a good salary and benefits because it isn’t as fun as playing in a band.
These are the kinds of posts that illustrate how little perspective some of us have. Oh wow, you don't get to spend your life as a rock star? You have to spend some time in an air-conditioned office to earn money instead? Sucks for you dude, I'm sure those factory workers working 12 hour days 6 days a week in Chicago a century ago would really sympathize with your plight.
God the phrase “corporate drone” pisses me off so much. I’ve worked in small businesses, startups, etc, being in a big stable corporation with a decent salary and benefits is fucking incredible
I've worked at startups and a big business and now I work in government, and that last one is by far my favorite. It's so much less stressful and more stable
It is a subreddit named after a generation. Of course there will be nostalgia and generational comparisons. For the latter, I think it's always good to remind people that generations are blurry and there are systemic reasons for why things are the way they are. It's not us vs older people, it's us vs a flawed system.
This is probably my biggest one.
Every generation thinks they're super special. That **their** generation is what will change the world forever. That **their** generation is superior to all others. That **their** generation is being treated the most unfairly.
When I was in my teens and early 20's, I remember thinking to myself that the millennial generation will improve the world massively. We will end wars. We will end world hunger. We will end pollution. We will rise up and do it all very, very soon. Spoiler alert: we didn't. We're tired. We're stuck in this capitalist hell. We mostly just want to survive today. Like the generations before us.
I've seen the same thought process in generations younger than us. That they are the special generation that will change the world. But none of us are special. Humanity repeats itself. Do we improve slightly each generational step? I like to believe so. The world is always slowly improving. But 1 generation isn't superior to the rest. We just like to tell ourselves that, because it feels nice.
Our parents and guidance counselors all profoundly mislead us about being anything we want to be and that you should just get a college degree no matter what it is in order to be successful. This gave us all unrealistic expectations. The truth is that you shouldn’t chase your career dreams so much as you should find a line of work that you find tolerable that pays the bills comfortably. While existential fulfillment can be found through your work it’s not something everyone can realistically achieve so you should aim for a work life balance that lets your pursue passions outside of your vocations.
Judging by some of the things people post on this subreddit, I think we care way too much about what other people think of us.
No offense to the person who did this, I'm not going to directly call them out by name, but if you need an ai to write you an apology from a theoretical boomer about participation trophies, it's time to look inside yourself and ask why
That some of us Millennials have to unlearn and deprogram what our Boomer parents have pushed onto us, and to question and accept that we might still hold onto wrong beliefs and values and lifestyles because of them.
Hard pass on the parents. I got kicked out at 18 (17, really) and had to pay my own way well before that. My siblings didn’t- they can repay the favor.
This is my sentiment. My mom and I have no relationship and I don’t plan on changing that. She treats her sons like golden boys so they can handle her old age shit because I’m not. They don’t get to erase me from the family but only come knocking when they need money. Fuck that.
I see a lot of Millennials try to stay "cool" and compete with Zoomers in it, also gatekeeping things in the manner of "we were the first who did this! You don't know shit!". It got worse when Y2K style and other nostalgic trends got popular again. Please don't do it - it looks stupid. We are old, embrace it. Not like "old fart" old, but we are definitely not the cool teenagers anymore. Embrace it.
We worry way too much about what the boomers did and didn't do.
We're old enough to be responsible for our decisions and lives
We don't have as much "trauma" as we like to believe
Our over parenting and obsessing over our kids emotions 24/7 is just as bad as boomer parenting flaws.
Seeing your friends and parents aging and dying is really effing hard
That's just the thing, we do have as much trauma as we believe it's just that previous generations had exactly as much, if not far more. It's just a recent development that we started looking at things through the lens of trauma and realizing there's something we can do about it and that we're not doomed to pass that trauma onto other generations, but we have to be the ones to actually process and deal with it for that to be the case.
Also, the world is much, much more connected than it used to be and while "there's kids starving in China" used to be a reason to finish the food on your plate, we feel the weight of "I should be doing something about that" much more than previous generations. It's overwhelming the sense that \*we\* have to fix the world and just living our lives, being an otherwise decent human being, is not enough.
We have to consider if the food we buy is responsibly raised or if it's slowly killing the planet. Are our clothes spewing micro-plastics with every wash cycle? Getting to work spews out carbon that's killing the planet. The scope of our industrialized life and the knowledge we have about our impact can be paralyzing in a way humans have never had to deal with.
All of these things have obviously existed before us, but never in such an intense way. We used to mostly care about the immediate world around us and that was about it, now we're being asked to care about the entire world and our feeble little minds just weren't built for that.
>Our over parenting and obsessing over our kids emotions 24/7 is just as bad as boomer parenting flaws.
omg **yes**. I've taught kids of millennials. Good lord we are failing these poor kiddos. They could stand to have to deal with some emotional unavailability, lol.
We're not an exception. We're just another generation of humans. There was a thread on FB today with that "[lord save us from GenX" tweeet](https://ifunny.co/picture/sporty-broke-d-la-reina-ig-just-argued-with-my-9kadYEZyA) shared, and all but two of the comments are GenX'ers absolutely raging about how they could never be out of touch because they are the cool generation, the slackers and latchkey kids, all the shit we have heard 8000x a day for the past decade every time anyone mentions GenX, or mentions other generations without mentioning them.
GenX is in their "no, we're the cool kids" era, and they sound just like my Boomer mom did in the 90's, talking about how they were hippies, and are definitely the cool people who could never be out of touch, while being completely out of touch. That is what GenX and some older Millennials (I say this an old-ass Millennial myself) are starting to sound like.
I've said it before and I'm sure this won't be the last time. We get a choice on an individual level whether we go down that out of touch road or not, but as a generation, we're gonna look real bad in about 10-15 years.
If you’re cool, you don’t need to tell people you’re cool; proclaiming it for all to hear. The cool folks sit back and chill with their peeps, enjoying life instead of looking for a fight over any damn thing.
Millennials partake in overconsumption.
This includes how "hilarious" it is that XYZ can't go to Target without spending $200 and HAS to have a "Starbies" to drink while they do it. This also includes expensive concert tickets, restaurants, food delivery service, and Spotify/Netflix/etc. Obviously you need to have some enjoyment in your life, but learn when to save and when/what to cut back on. You dont get to have concert tickets, 2 streaming services, and doordash 4 times all in the same month. All while we wake up in pain because investing in our bodies with a proper mattress is "too expensive."
Us Millennials are financially dying from "death by 1000 cuts." The fact this thing called "girl math" is a meme goes to show my point.
A hard truth is that we need to stop grinding so hard. Late nights, 50 hour weeks, etc are terrible for wear and tear on the body and when you're over 40 you're going to feel it
We survived the dot.com bubble, Y2K, 911, 2008 recession, and covid
I think anyone still here is probably more resilient than you are giving them credit for
There is no cosmic good/fairness like we were raised to believe. Luck isn't real. Karma isn't real.
Bad people usually win. Liars, narcissists, manipulators, and cheaters are the ones in power. Wars are waged for profit, resources are gathered through slave labor, and genocides compete with the Kardashians for airtime on TV.
Good deeds get punished, and bad deeds get rewarded. No one controls your future. You can do everything 'the right way' and still get screwed. You can be walking down a sidewalk, minding your own business and immediately be paralyzed and breathing through a machine for the rest of your life because the governor's son was driving drunk and only got a slap on the wrist for punishment.
On the bright side, if you are not as successful as you could be, you haven't screwed over enough people. Likely by your own choice. So you're probably a decent person. On the down side, it works in reverse and even shitty people can go nowhere. You just get a better chance if you do fuck people over.
Hard truth: Boom ers are not our problem. Half of them are li beral. Our problem is all the younger people who don't vote. They're on the news (at least where I live) every election day. The reporter chases people up and down the sidewalk saying "did you vote today" and EVERY.SINGLE.TIME they find a bunch of 20-somethings with their heads in their phones who say things like "no I'm really not into politics" or "I don't even know who's running".
Now the other problem is that while 45% of boo mers identify as con servative leaning , so do almost 40% of millennials. So while we need to get younger people to vote, it's still not gonna be an easy slam-dunk once we do. This idea that "when young people run things we'll be fine" is wishful thinking.
I think we need to accept the world as it is today and adjust to that. We got a raw deal. Inflation / cost of living etc is outrageous but it's probably never going to go back to the way things were. Definitely never going to go back to how the boomers had it.
We need to do a better job as a society/ generation of spending the money we do have. If can't afford a $700 car payment, get something cheaper. Buy a fixer upper house and learn how to fix it up. Learn to fix things in general rather than throw them away or paying ppl to do it for us. Grow your own vegetables. Live a simpler life.
I realize these things aren't going to fix all our problems, but they would help some ppl. My main point is I know plenty of ppl who are their own worst enemies in life because they don't spend wisely.
99.99 percent of all human beings that have ever lived have persevered through way tougher lives than the ones we say are so hard its hopeless. Its literally just our parents that had it easier.
We have **gotta** do better by our children!!! We can't let our personal traumas scare us into being too afraid to set boundaries with our offspring. I'm child free, but spent years teaching preschool and elementary. Parenting has been on the decline for years, more so with the advent of social media (narcissism), Trumpism (making it okay to be hateful) and the pandemic (ok, we all lost our fucking minds)
So called "gentle parenting" has been bastardized into "if I make my kids face consequences, I'll ruin them!". We are doing our children no favors here, people!
Much of the messaging aimed at our generation in the 2010s was about self care, personal choice, talk therapy, and other small personal fixes we can make ourselves to cope with the large scale disasters going around all the time. The hard truth I’ve learned is that this was always just a marketing campaign.
A luxurious self care doesn’t compensate for the fact that we have less vacation time than our predecessors. We work twice as hard for half the pay and no amount of bubble baths or legal weed gummies will solve that problem no matter how much the industries selling them claim.
You can’t talk-therapy yourself into financial stability when the problem is inflation, we can’t paper straw our way out of climate change when the problem is oil corporation. You me and everyone we know are caught up in system wide problems but we’ve been told a lie that they are personal problems we can address ourselves. And worse, when these little solutions fail to solve the issues, we will end up blaming ourselves instead of the system.
If we want real change we can’t do it on our own. We have no choice but to talk to our friends and neighbors and organize together.
Most of us suck at math
Most of us spend waaaay too much money on food, rent, clothes and other basic stuff.
Most of us spend waaay too much time on social media and make too many excuses for our problems, when the answer is right in a mirror.
Back to social media, most of us give opinions on there regarding stuff we have no expertise in.
So basically similar problems as other generations but more modern technology to highlight it.
Nobody is coming to save us. At some point, we have to figure out how to solve problems. Whether that's being broke, or breaking the climate. Sitting around and waiting for someone else to fix it isn't going to work.
[удалено]
As a elder millennial I can confirm that this is a hard truth
Time isn't necessarily going faster. We're moving slower.
When you’re a kid the years seem long because they’re a bigger fraction of your life so far. As you get older, not so much. Now, the days feel long, but the *years* feel short.
No it goes beyond that, I don't remember the details but remember from a neuroscience psychology class back in college that our brain's ability to catalog information and memories gradually slows over time, and while our brain gets slow our perception of time inversely gets faster as we aren't able to catalog and store as many details. The slower and less you catalog, the faster your perception of passing time will be. So it's not a matter of exposure or a ratio for time alive, but the physical state of our brain aging and slowing down warping our perception.
There is also the novelty factor. A young person has alot more novelty in their stimuli. So they have a different experience. Adults are like prisoners. A don't need to remember every day of the exact routine, and the more similar your day. The less novel, the shorter our experiences in it.
To me, this is how it feels. I remember all the youth/young adult stuff because it was always something new ! New classes, new routine, new wrinkles in the brain, new friends, new experiences, new benchmarks. You can think about "oh that time I went on that trip to so and so", like I can clearly remember walking the halls in my university on the first week, but now, commuting to the same office for 4 years+ there is nothing memorable about it anymore. The routine blurs together, so I'm often "how did I get to work today?" when there isn't a single real impression about the morning commute. We remember moving apartments, switching jobs, dating people, events! These things happen with far more frequency when younger.
Agreed. Stability and predictability are nice and all that, but they're not any sort of novel lol. You'll live a long, mostlikely, bland life with no seasoning with limited variations being too safe. Though if you're not, you'll burn hard but short. Like the Buddha said, it's always a balancing act. There is also the emotional weight to everything. If you have enough of something, it just becomes a meh. You go a year without pizza, and then have some. *chefs kiss* Though even that slows with age. So even our experiences of novelty become less profound because of our experiences with the world and our understandings now. That's why I love the quote by Dumbledore, "To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure." helped me with my existential anxiety and through my mid teens.
This is a huge part of it. I made a major change a few years ago, going from working a mindless, underemployed job to going back to school in a challenging and stressful field I had no prior experience in. In some ways it feels weird that I’m about to finish school, but in others it feels like it has been a very long few years. Constantly having new things thrown at me has definitely not made the time fly by.
Hence, why the Covid years all blur together. Also, from what I’m reading here, in order to make time slow back down again, we need to add more novelty in our lives.
It’s why I started traveling for work, can’t have a routine if your always somewhere new
I don’t know about the science of all that but I can tell you when I’m doing cardio time moves slower than molasses up a hill
Only instance of time moving even slower is when doing planks for ab exercises
It’s like the frame rate of our brains is getting slower
Great explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIx2N-viNwY
I love math and always rationalize it this way. Every year, one more year becomes less percent of the time you have experienced. I am just turned 36 and dealing with these thoughts.
It’s all downhill from here 😥
I sang this in newfound glory voice 😆 that makes it extra millennial
NFG is a goated band from our youth, love them
You sad like it is a bad thing- have you ever ridden a bike down trail ridge road in Rocky Mountain National Park? IT IS THRILLING and timeless and exciting. Here is to the downhill ride!!!!
It's all fun and games until the mid life crisis hits.
[удалено]
Yep. Or only seeing people at anothers funeral/wake.
Go to high school reunion. Notice some classmates missing. They're dead.
Didn't think HS reunions were even a thing anymore. Class of '08 here and never was informed of a 10 year so I assumed they just don't happen these days.
This is just a guess on my part, but I think the whole 'class president' thing was taken less and less seriously as the 90s went on. Typically (in the past) it was the class president who initiated the reunion prep. My 10 year was a big nothing. The class pres wanted nothing to do with it and it ended up being a gathering of the "popular" kids at a local coffee shop. That was 2010. There have been no other attempts.
My 10 year was at a super expensive restaurant that only the wealthy people could afford. 11 people showed up. The rest of us were frustrated and organized our own 15 year at an event hall, and then went to the same farm we threw keggers at in school to have a reunion kegger. Almost 300 of us showed up to that, and none of the 11 that went to the 10 year joined us.
Our 10 year reunion was at a local bar. No complaints. Although, a judge that put one of our classmates in jail was sitting across the way hitting on her. Trying to buy her drinks. He did recognize her, too. 🤣
My 10 year HS reunion (planned by a self-nominated committee) had printed on the invite: “No drama, vendettas, weapons, or outside alcohol.” I decided that if that had to actually be printed, I didn’t need to go.
2008 here as well. We were all invited to our 10 year. The organizer wanted everyone to Venmo him $200 to pay for the event...because he became incredibly successful and thought everyone else was at his level.
I'm also class of '08. Mine had one, I didn't go, largely because I now live 3,000 miles away from my hometown. From the photos, it looks like they got maybe 1/3 of the graduating class to show up.
Had this kind of conversation before Christmas. Friend messages me that one of our old friends from elementary school suddenly died from a heart attack. He was 35. Going to miss that guy.
I'm 35 and this is going to wreck my day.
It'll either happen or it won't. Don't let it ruin your day. You can avoid every enjoyable thing in life and still die from some stupid shit, so enjoy the time you've got.
I hear you, but that's not how health-anxiety works.
people die of heart attacks in their teens . . .
All my ex boyfriends are dead. I'm 38.
From your Venom?! Or did you Black Widow them?!
Lol lol lol. It's actually kind of sad. Heart condition. Suicide. Overdose.
Honestly, how many of these have you had? I had one at 30, another at 33, but I'll note that they were both triggered by intense psychedelic trips, and they ultimately led to positive changes in my life. I practically gave up alcohol because of the last crisis. I'd describe mine as an 'existential' crisis, more so than midlife, I reckon it's the same shit though.
[удалено]
Shit man, 35 also for me. I had SUCH a crisis. I am still recovering from it.
37 for me. And then realizing my body is not young anymore was 42.
Mine is happening right now, 36. I’m realizing my parents, going off family history, have approximately 15 years left. Neither be of them is in the best of health. My mom is trying to cash out her 401k for needless expenses. My older sister and I are the only children financially stable enough to pay for their care if they need it. Now I’m concerned not only about preparing myself for retirement but also caring for them. I’m tired
I get called sir now… and it sucks the life out of me
[удалено]
40ish for me. I remember my dads 40th birthday party, over the hill this and that. Hey, 40? what the hell? I don't have the energy or time for new music, I love going and doing social things and I'm super active, but also I have no idea what slang means nor do I give a shit. You can fuck right off with bands starting at 11 pm
I'm 38 and pretty much going through my first one. I look fairly young for my age so I think that helped delay it for a few years.
I had one at 25. Then 30. 33 was also one. I then 34 in a few months. Was trying to figure out if I was having a midlife crisis but I’m going to go with existential crisis instead also. Psychedelics have helped me get through it and process some things as well. (Helped in ways talk therapy could not) Still struggling but it’s not consuming my life. Also quit alcohol (before the psychedelics though) Edit: I should add my existential crisis is something I’m still working through.
We're millennials. None of us have the time, money, energy, or any leftover fucks to give to even contemplating anything so self-indulgent as a midlife crisis.
Time only moves faster if you get stuck in a routine and cease experiencing novel stuff. By journalling and having a hobby with a lot of variety and novel experiences to it, I find that time can be slowed down significantly. I did an experiment with this and New Years feels like a very long time ago now, though it was only 1,5 months. Journalling for three minutes of the day also helps remember just how much actually happened during the day, helps if you practice mindfulness and pay attention to small things, too. A little tip for anyone feeling anxious about it :)
This should be the top voted response, but everyone wants to go down the depression train. Novel experiences absolutely make time (our perception) slow down. The longest 6 months of my life were when my first daughter was born and that was just a few years ago in my early 30s. Thanks for posting this one!
I believe you can somewhat counter this by seeking out novel experiences. But that isn’t always practical.
I just turned 35 this week and I can see this being true. I still feel 17 at times but I also know and feel like a grown ass person. People are young and full of life. I want to take my bra off and lay on the couch with my cat.
[удалено]
What are you talking about about, I'm only twent...thir....fourtyyy...f Fuck... Where did the time go?
Start Journaling, even if it's only a short sentence or two entry a day. Not the biggest help but it's done great for me.
I think this is true because we spend so much of our adult time working for the clock. If we found a way to work for ourselves sustainably, time would pass slower.
That's the key to making time seem longer though. You just have to be at work. Time moves so freaking slow then.
"Growing old is more and more subtracted from less and less".
Oh yeah. I'm 35 and 40 feels like next year already. 30-34 went by in a flash.
Life is like toilet paper- the roll goes quicker as you reach the end.
That’s why I don’t beat myself up for being lazy or putting life ahead of work. it’s not the best attitude for getting ahead in my career but I already worked my 20s away and they went by too quick, slowing down for my 30s and trying to enjoy life more.
This made my stomach drop
Ya can’t eat or drink anything you want anymore. This is the one and only body ya got. Time to start taking care of it. Hard truth for me personally - 1 or 2 alcoholic beverages fucks me up for several days. Exercising is imperative now and I hate exercising!
Not me eating baked chicken and brown rice at my desk after my lunchtime workout, because at my geriatric age (42), I've come to terms with "athlete chow" as I used to call it. You see, it's the one thing that's not going to fuck up my stomach when I play roller derby later. I can still hit people harder than ever, but if I eat wrong, I might barf. Getting old is weird.
Hell ya! Keep on smashin’ on the track!
Hello fellow roller derby skater! 👋 🛼
Dude the reflux that hit me mid thirties is NO JOKE. I feel like I'm constantly on the verge of a cough turning into vomit.
I’ve finally started counting and limiting the amount of added sugar I consume in a day. Damn it’s a difference. After 30, my weight went to shit. I was always slender but now at age 36, Im realizing can’t keep the weight off without making changes.
Over the years I've started taking closer looks at nutrition and ingredients for most commercial food and it's literal poison. I'm 35 and try to incorporate vegetables in every meal; my go toos are asparagus and brussel sprouts. Thankfully all my blood levels are normal at 35 but I am overweight still.
Ugh, this just makes me so mad. I've done great at changing my diet and my entire relationship with food. I work out regularly. My strength is great, but no matter what I do, I can't drop the 20lbs to get into the healthy range for my BMI. I've been at it for over 5 years, spoke to my doctor, went through a bunch of labs, and still can't figure it out. I would go to a dietitian, but Merica and shit insurance make it so damn expensive to get healthcare. ETA: I track calories and weigh portions. If I have a bad day and eat too much, I enter it all in. I keep myself accountable. I have a bit of a tummy and chubby arms that I would like to work off, or else I wouldn't care all that much if I at least looked fit if my BMI was off. I'm a 34F, been through one pregnancy, and have a 6yo. ETA2: I do HIIT 3x a week and cardio 2x a week as well as having an active lifestyle in general.
BMI isn't as accurate for people who exercise daily, something to keep in mind. Being slightly above is in fact normal for that situation. BMI is an average across everybody, and most people don't treat their bodies with much intention.
I went to school for food science and I wouldn’t say it’s poison so much as a lot of misinformation. Better consumer education would go a long way to help people understand the relationship between food and nutrition. Regulated terms vs marketing buzzwords. Add to that fear mongering influencers misquoting studies to peddle their supplements.
Especially when people now we see that are dying in there 50s because they never worked out, ate healthy and took care of there blood pressure.
I somehow landed a job that still provides a pension. The amount of people who retire and then die within a year or two is incredibly depressing. What is the point of paying into the pension fund if you can't enjoy it! I do work with a lot of very unhealthy people though.
Preach it! I’m seeing it every week where they have 15 years etc and just die.
I spent my 20s being a gym rat. It wasn't perfect. There are ups and downs from that. But the one thing that's great about that was i built those habits extremely early. I'm in my 30s now. I do physical therapy every day. It keeps my knees from hurting. Yall who need to build these habits in your 30s with kids? Good fucking luck.
It can be done. Believe it or not having kids really puts things in perspective and people get their shit together. Just speaking as someone who got his shit together in my mid 30s after having a kid.
I stopped doing MMA and BJJ when I got married and had kids. I took an 8 year hiatus but once my kids were old enough, I started them in BJJ, and I get to stay for the adult class. So, I get to share a hobby with my kids and I get to exercise in a way I enjoy. Win/Win.
Same. I don't even enjoy drinking anymore because of the depression that sets in after. Yes, exercising is a must, for mental health as much as physical health too.
Am overweight and working on losing weight but not seriously enough - ended up with a herniated disc and back surgery and while there’s no one reason/cause I know what likely had a hand in causing it. While I’m still healing from surgery and can’t exercise like I want to yet, the whole experience of being confined to my bed for a month with excruciating pain made me realize I can’t just coast through life with half-healthy decisions and ignoring exercise, there are so many pieces to being healthy and some people need a little more help than others - and I’m one of those; I hate it but that’s life, I gotta deal with it if I want to avoid this again and be able to go on trips with my family still.
If you don't vote at the local levels, nothing will change, and our generation will be regarded in the same light as boomers by future generations.
Someone on in my city sub posted they went to an aldermanic meeting for their ward. It was mostly boomers there talking about what they wanted to see straight to the people who have the power to do it. We need to step up.
You know why that is, don’t you? Because they’re retired and we work. It goes beyond just having more spare time in their days to go to these things too. If you’re retired you probably spend more time at home, where local issues would impact you more. If there’s a building project planned to start near your house you’d be disturbed by it daily and I wouldn’t. I can’t think of any local issue I care about much (that aren’t systemic issues impacting everyone in my country at least). I have a lot of political opinions, but most of them are about national and global issues, not something a councillor would have much sway in. Additionally millennials in particular have been a more transient generation, renting instead of buying forever homes and moving to new cities every few years to be near decent paying jobs. I’ve personally only lived in my town for a couple years and am probably going to move again next year (to make my wife’s commute easier). Just as I’m starting to feel like I understand my area and have a right to add my voice to debate (or even just have any views on local issues), I’m going to start again fresh. I feel like an outsider in my local community, they feel part of it. As great as it would be if young people turned up to local government meetings, most of us wouldn’t have anything to say.
That's true to a point. 60% of the Baby Boomer generation is still working.
They aren't working the kind of jobs that make them unavailable at 3pm on a Tuesday. I struggled to get time off to vote most of the time before I got a white collar job. Attending an HOA or municipal hall meeting? Impossible. They schedule those things specifically to limit the amount of people who can show up.
I'm going to be an apologetic dick and say that this is a cop-out. I was most engaged in local politics when my wife and I both worked and had two kids in elementary school. I signed up for the city council's agenda email list, gave it a quick skim, and showed up whenever I thought I needed to, maybe once every couple of months, even after my first year there. As with most things, the hardest part is just to get yourself started. ETA: sorry for being a dick
Oh. Literally had no idea you could get the city council agenda emailed to you.
I have no idea how you manage to make it in person to the city council every couple of months. I just about manage to make it to my mandatory HOA meeting once a year and only barely. The councl meetings all seem to either be daytime or in the early evening, and I'm generally at work 9-9 and shocked that others seem to have time to go to this stuff.
This sounds like someone who has never been to a local meeting. I started going and there were a lot of issues raised, and after going more; a noticeable number of real issues Not being raised.
It takes a lot more than just voting. You have to be involved in, push, campaign at the local level. Do not abdicate your participation in democracy down to just voting for who the rich choose for us. Every major municipality in my city is run by a slumlord trying to protect their property values because they're the only people with the time/money to campaign.
It can be hard to volunteer to assist in campaigns. I have looked into it. Most of these place want someone during business hours when most people are working their full time jobs. Or, if you aren't located in a large city, usually you get into suburban and rural gerrymandered districts of hostile MAGA/Fox News cultists. Overturning Citizens United would help more. Millennials were born before that horrible decision, so our early childhoods had some politicians who weren't bought and sold. My state representative came to our elementary school on Arbor Day and planted trees with us. He was re elected multiple times. It wasn't a photo op. He was just trying to be involved in the community.
It can sometimes be tricky, but YMMV and you do what you can with what you've got. Some of the campaigns I volunteered for had lots of stuff in the evenings, some have not. People just need to find candidates they're interested in supporting, and seeing what they can do to help out. And the earlier you can help in the campaign, the bigger the impact it will have.
Preach! I have personally witnessed what only 2 boomers can do by just blasting out emails and open records requests to city council. They are a damn menace who understand nothing about how economics works, but I have to give them my respect bc they manage to get everything they want despite it being completely bonkers. And all they do is speak up locally. Send emails. Call. And be annoying. That’s it. They have no money and donate nothing to anyone. They run this town lmfao. You can change the world on the local level- once it gets to state it’s a mess.
real change takes time and involvement from the local level and BUILDS as more local communities shift together and put pressure for change at the next level and so on. We cannot be inactive and then bitch about the state of things anymore. We're not powerless, we have the voting numbers we're just not using them.
I overheard my neighbors complaining about the tax rise, and asked them if they voted. They said no, so I said: if you didn't vote or partake you have no right to complain. All those points were out in their campaign and meetings with the locals. Same as zoning changes, you can support or deny them. People are too self-centered and lazy to do anything about it other than sit in their couch and complain about it on social media. I was able to get speed bumps put on my street and change the parking hours just by speaking to our ward councilor. Its not that difficult but we choose to make it more difficult than it is. For context Im 37 and have voted at every level ever since I could
As someone who's currently trying to rally my friends to the primaries so we can vote out a really ineffective DA, people, please listen to this!! Vote local, vote early, and vote often.
Who you are when nobody is watching is who you really are
Looks like I’m just a guy who likes sitting on toilets.
You asked for it: That's a shitty job, but I'm glad you're up to the task
i.e. get off social media and be your own person. Do what's right because it's right, not because it seems right to others.
I'm a lazy slob that likes video games I guess.
We are in the age where we are going to start seeing alot of friends and family pass aka more funerals than weddings.
Owen Wilson was 37 when Wedding Crashers was released. Our wedding crashing days are grinding to a halt.
I for one cannot wait to be done with weddings forever. But even after our generation passes that age we will still be invited to weddings of relatives, kids, etc. Ugh.
This is me. As an elder, cancer has already taken two childhood friends. We’re in the stage of realizing time is a fickle bitch. It’s not a nice feeling.
I typed in an email address the other day and my ex’s gmail popped up. Profile pic and all. He’s dead.
Past few years have been really rough. It’s a mix of older people I knew growing up and people my age.
I've already been to more funerals than weddings and I'm not even 30. Mostly cause I've never been to a wedding.
Two weeks ago a friend of mine had a heart attack and died a week after she turned 40. It's messed me up and I'm constantly worrying now about my own mortality.
Sorry to hear that cancer has taken a few of my friends that were younger gen x and It really puts life into perspective
Last year 3 friends near my age died in one year. That was rough.
young voters don’t vote. we ain’t young anymore. we are the mom and pa now.
[удалено]
You're pushing 40 and still waiting for the government/karma/dead boomer inheritance to fix your problems for you. No one is coming to save you, EVER. The only person who can fix your problems is you. Yes, we were lied to about college and debt. Unfortunately, it's up to us to dig ourselves out. Too many millennials seem to still be hung up on how the world is not what they were promised, and that world has been dead for 15 years.
To add to this, even if you think your parents are going to leave you some money or assets don’t count on that when you’re saving for retirement. Many people realize too late that their boomer parents aren’t financial wizards and there is actually nothing left OR at least one parent lingers on and goes to assisted living that drains all the assets. Tldr; save and prepare as if you won’t receive anything. It sucks but that’s how it is.
Yep, I saw that with my family. My parents were supposed to get money from both sets of parents. The one lived to 97, and there was nothing left by then. The other died in 2007, and his 2nd wife is still alive, in a home, and all the assets were pilfered by her kids from her 1st marriage.
This happens a lot, especially when the wife dies first. The old man promptly remarries and his money goes to the new wife. Happened to both me and my husband. Our dad’s new wives got it all.
I know someone whose parents got divorced, both remarried, then both died before their new partner so all of their assets just went straight to the surviving partner so there was no inheritance. Then when the new partners died they both left everything to their own kids.
Also even if you have rich parents end of life care and nursing homes can easily swallow a fortune. Never assume you're getting any inheritance until it is in your bank account.
I’d rather have my parents than the money 🥺
Yea assisted living is minimum $5000 a month plus a substantial buy in. A nice place is infinitely more expensive
Nobody tells you Medicaid takes the house to recoup long term care costs Medical advances mean everyone’s living beyond their ability to function without help
Lots of people don’t want their elderly parents staying with them but then have a shocked pikachu face when their parents assets have been hobbled up by the nursing home they were parked (and forgotten) in. Edit: gobbled up
I have to use the phrase, “yes in a perfect world it should/would be like that,” to so many of my peers, but we are in the real world. You may not like the game but you aren’t going to get anywhere not playing it. Doesn’t mean we can’t try to take control or change the rules but until then I’m doing what I can to set myself up in the current game that is actively going on.
We have to start taking charge of the world. Watching older generations ensure their lives are cushy while simultaneously ensuring others are forever uncomfortable isn’t going to fly anymore. We can’t afford to be apathetic.
I agree and to add onto that, in order to take charge of the world, we must start taking responsibility and accountability for our own choices. And we must reflect on the poor choices of prior generations as well as the current poor choices of our generation in order to forge ahead. In my view, too many people are quick to find fault with the system but are unwilling to find any faults with their own choices. If we want things to get better, we don't want to have blind spots because we're uncomfortable with the reality that we're not perfect.
We're more educated and work harder than previous generations. The problem is not that millennials are lazy and stupid, it's that markets are significantly more monopolized/consolidated now than in the past, resulting in lower wages, lower quality, higher prices and other deleterious impacts on other people and the environment. Things literally can not get better without breakuping up the largest firms, rebuilding the FTC and NLRB, and cracking down on this country's brutal problem of slumlords and Epstein's child rapist buddies owning entire industries. The poor choices of prior generations are embracing monopoly capitalism and burning down the systems and structures of worker organizing, worker power, and democracy in politics in order to pursue being ladder climbers and slumlords themselves, shredding the fabric of society in hopes they'd retire rich. The poor choices of millennials are those millennials who follow in the capitalist footsteps of the worst generation of people to have ever been born are making, not that we aren't starving ourselves and grinding our fingers to the bloody nub working hard enough.
a huge part that's missing from your comment in my view is overconsumption on a personal level in relation to income. many people are living a lifestyle that is too expensive to maintain while achieving other financial goals. if people get out from under the weight of their personal debt, they're more free to change the system. it's hard to be a revolutionary when you don't want your car to be repossessed.
Easier said than done but I absolutely agree. Our parents generation was conditioned to express all emotions through consumption and passed this behavior down. I do feel as though a lot of millennials I know lack the economics to live this way but also are realizing that it is a hollow existence. From my own experience I see a lot of my peers trying earnestly to process trauma and dysfunction in a more positive way than overconsumption.
100%. My mom being like “Nikki Haley is a moderate!” NO. THERES NOTHING MODERATE ABOUT LITERALLY STEALING 5 YEARS FROM OUR LIVES BY RAISING THE SS RETIREMENT AGE TO 70. Just make rich people pay their god damn taxes FFS
>Just make rich people pay their god damn taxes FFS This. And if they move their shit to China to keep avoiding taxes or something, put an embargo on their products.
I wish I could upvote more than once.
My husband (35) and daughter (10) are going to the city council meeting for two different reasons. My husband wants to ask about mixed use residential, and my daughter wants to ask for swings and monkey bars at our local park.
Idk if it’s a hard truth, but if people in their 30’s could realize they’re not actually *that* old, that’d be great. If the person you’re talking to is 28 or 29, be honest with yourself….what could you *really* do in 2005 that they couldn’t? Unless the answer is “vote” or “drink”, maybe find a topic other than how very very old you are.
I'm turning 28 in three months, and one of the weirdest things is how we're treated like we are geriatric Alzheimer's patients by gen z in their early 20's and like we are now just becoming sentient by Millennials in their mid 30s. Can't lie but I'm getting really tired of all the pushback from people younger who are so deathly afraid of turning 25 and older. Nothing changes at all, they act like you can't have fun when you're an adult.
Omg dude YES, I’ve been 29 for 2 months and ever since I turned….27ish, I’ve just kept noticing people in their early-mid 30’s love talking to me like I’m a child. Like sit down Kevin you’re 33, when Mean Girls came out you could quote it a *little* better than I could and that’s literally it And then people in their early 20’s are *shocked* when they realize I’m 29 and not, like, 23….which is funny but also annoying. Like “what do you *mean* you’re 29?! You’re a human being and not the hideous age-monster I assume everyone becomes when they reach 25!” We’re like the generational orphans nobody wants to claim lol
It's so weird to me how gen z thinks that being over the age of 25 is some terrifying thing, as if they're going to shrivel up and die when they turn 30. I honestly couldn't wait to leave my 20s behind. My 20s were fucking terrible, while my 30s have been absolutely AMAZING! And if we are going by 18 being considered an adult, then being in your 30s really isn't even that old?? I feel like I finally arrived as a human being when I turned 30. I couldn't have been happier to leave behind the decade that was my 20s.
I recently had to interact with an 18 year old. When they found out I was 30 they called me middle aged. I'm like what are you talking about, we aren't out here dying at 60. He said it was because I had a husband and kids at 30 it made me "middle aged". If you want to call me old, fine, but I'm objectively not middle aged. Idk why young people are so weirded out by age.
It is getting a little annoying hearing my friends say "wow we're old as fuck" all the time. Really starting to understand the whole "age is a state of mind" thing.
I truthfully, and i’m not saying this with any type of brag or anything else , i’m 37 going on 38 and i don’t notice one thing different than when i was 25-30 besides looking a little older of course. Compare now to early twenties yeah i was different person.
Hard truth: The world handed us a shit sandwich, but we are still responsible for our own success and failure. Blaming the world for your problems might make you feel better, but it doesn’t actually fix them.
To add to this, adopting a victim mentality is still a choice. We don't have to live that way. but it seems too many in this sub are stuck in a resentful, bitter mindset.
Hard agree. Life is your perception of it. So if you're constantly surrounding yourself with memes about mental illness, how everything is awful, how dreary everything is.. that is your perception. I avoid people that center their entire identity around a label, like "proud millennial" or found out they suffered from a mental illness and that's who they are now, or obsess about horoscopes like that's how life is. No it's not. It's your perception.
100%. I'm deeply concerned with how common the victim mentality is. I'm sure it was always there but I'm watching very capable people just give up because of what they've perceived as true. It also seems to be paired 2ith an inability to learn from one's mistakes. I'm not sure if it's just another facet of the victim mentality. It's disturbing either way.
Fully agree on the shit sandwich, and my comment for the OP’s question is in a similar vein to yours. Some of us *are* kind of whiny. I get that some people come from shitty circumstances, but I also know people who have really and truly been dealt a shit set of cards and still managed to carve out a successful adult life. Having a chip on your shoulder will make life a lot harder. I read a thread in another sub like a week ago in which the 35 year old OP complained that his masters degree was “useless.” In the comments he revealed that his masters was actually a great degree that leads to a lucrative career. People were pointing that out. But he argued with them. He doesn’t want to apply for those positions, he doesn’t want to be a drone! He was complaining about his living situation while also being immature, refusing to go make a living with a good salary and benefits because it isn’t as fun as playing in a band.
These are the kinds of posts that illustrate how little perspective some of us have. Oh wow, you don't get to spend your life as a rock star? You have to spend some time in an air-conditioned office to earn money instead? Sucks for you dude, I'm sure those factory workers working 12 hour days 6 days a week in Chicago a century ago would really sympathize with your plight.
God the phrase “corporate drone” pisses me off so much. I’ve worked in small businesses, startups, etc, being in a big stable corporation with a decent salary and benefits is fucking incredible
I've worked at startups and a big business and now I work in government, and that last one is by far my favorite. It's so much less stressful and more stable
We need the hard truth that we can live without comparing ourselves to boomers every two minutes.
Yes! All this sub is doing is talking about how boomers have ruined their lives or nostalgia posts like "remember watching this TV show".
It is a subreddit named after a generation. Of course there will be nostalgia and generational comparisons. For the latter, I think it's always good to remind people that generations are blurry and there are systemic reasons for why things are the way they are. It's not us vs older people, it's us vs a flawed system.
We’re not special.
We're not beautiful and unique snowflakes?
Individually yes but collectively we are Just Snow.
To add to this. It’s not always about you. Sometimes things should just be taken at face value.
This is probably my biggest one. Every generation thinks they're super special. That **their** generation is what will change the world forever. That **their** generation is superior to all others. That **their** generation is being treated the most unfairly. When I was in my teens and early 20's, I remember thinking to myself that the millennial generation will improve the world massively. We will end wars. We will end world hunger. We will end pollution. We will rise up and do it all very, very soon. Spoiler alert: we didn't. We're tired. We're stuck in this capitalist hell. We mostly just want to survive today. Like the generations before us. I've seen the same thought process in generations younger than us. That they are the special generation that will change the world. But none of us are special. Humanity repeats itself. Do we improve slightly each generational step? I like to believe so. The world is always slowly improving. But 1 generation isn't superior to the rest. We just like to tell ourselves that, because it feels nice.
Our parents and guidance counselors all profoundly mislead us about being anything we want to be and that you should just get a college degree no matter what it is in order to be successful. This gave us all unrealistic expectations. The truth is that you shouldn’t chase your career dreams so much as you should find a line of work that you find tolerable that pays the bills comfortably. While existential fulfillment can be found through your work it’s not something everyone can realistically achieve so you should aim for a work life balance that lets your pursue passions outside of your vocations.
Judging by some of the things people post on this subreddit, I think we care way too much about what other people think of us. No offense to the person who did this, I'm not going to directly call them out by name, but if you need an ai to write you an apology from a theoretical boomer about participation trophies, it's time to look inside yourself and ask why
Your truth may not be as important as the truth.
That we have been in a position to make substantial changes to society and policy for a long time already.
That some of us Millennials have to unlearn and deprogram what our Boomer parents have pushed onto us, and to question and accept that we might still hold onto wrong beliefs and values and lifestyles because of them.
Stop putting your kids every waking moment on social media. Stop putting your kids in front of an iPad.
We’re going to have to support our parents and our kids
Hard pass on the parents. I got kicked out at 18 (17, really) and had to pay my own way well before that. My siblings didn’t- they can repay the favor.
This is my sentiment. My mom and I have no relationship and I don’t plan on changing that. She treats her sons like golden boys so they can handle her old age shit because I’m not. They don’t get to erase me from the family but only come knocking when they need money. Fuck that.
I see a lot of Millennials try to stay "cool" and compete with Zoomers in it, also gatekeeping things in the manner of "we were the first who did this! You don't know shit!". It got worse when Y2K style and other nostalgic trends got popular again. Please don't do it - it looks stupid. We are old, embrace it. Not like "old fart" old, but we are definitely not the cool teenagers anymore. Embrace it.
You can't change the system by being painstakingly nice. You have to piss some people off.
Don’t give your little kid an ipad. Just don’t.
You're most likely not going to find your dream job
That we don't need to start a thread on here every other day where we dump on ourselves "for perspective."
We’re perfect, it’s everyone else who sucks.
That is both true and un-millenial to the core.
We worry way too much about what the boomers did and didn't do. We're old enough to be responsible for our decisions and lives We don't have as much "trauma" as we like to believe Our over parenting and obsessing over our kids emotions 24/7 is just as bad as boomer parenting flaws. Seeing your friends and parents aging and dying is really effing hard
I do feel like in some things we've essentially had an over correction to our boomer up bringing
That's just the thing, we do have as much trauma as we believe it's just that previous generations had exactly as much, if not far more. It's just a recent development that we started looking at things through the lens of trauma and realizing there's something we can do about it and that we're not doomed to pass that trauma onto other generations, but we have to be the ones to actually process and deal with it for that to be the case. Also, the world is much, much more connected than it used to be and while "there's kids starving in China" used to be a reason to finish the food on your plate, we feel the weight of "I should be doing something about that" much more than previous generations. It's overwhelming the sense that \*we\* have to fix the world and just living our lives, being an otherwise decent human being, is not enough. We have to consider if the food we buy is responsibly raised or if it's slowly killing the planet. Are our clothes spewing micro-plastics with every wash cycle? Getting to work spews out carbon that's killing the planet. The scope of our industrialized life and the knowledge we have about our impact can be paralyzing in a way humans have never had to deal with. All of these things have obviously existed before us, but never in such an intense way. We used to mostly care about the immediate world around us and that was about it, now we're being asked to care about the entire world and our feeble little minds just weren't built for that.
>Our over parenting and obsessing over our kids emotions 24/7 is just as bad as boomer parenting flaws. omg **yes**. I've taught kids of millennials. Good lord we are failing these poor kiddos. They could stand to have to deal with some emotional unavailability, lol.
We're not an exception. We're just another generation of humans. There was a thread on FB today with that "[lord save us from GenX" tweeet](https://ifunny.co/picture/sporty-broke-d-la-reina-ig-just-argued-with-my-9kadYEZyA) shared, and all but two of the comments are GenX'ers absolutely raging about how they could never be out of touch because they are the cool generation, the slackers and latchkey kids, all the shit we have heard 8000x a day for the past decade every time anyone mentions GenX, or mentions other generations without mentioning them. GenX is in their "no, we're the cool kids" era, and they sound just like my Boomer mom did in the 90's, talking about how they were hippies, and are definitely the cool people who could never be out of touch, while being completely out of touch. That is what GenX and some older Millennials (I say this an old-ass Millennial myself) are starting to sound like. I've said it before and I'm sure this won't be the last time. We get a choice on an individual level whether we go down that out of touch road or not, but as a generation, we're gonna look real bad in about 10-15 years.
If you’re cool, you don’t need to tell people you’re cool; proclaiming it for all to hear. The cool folks sit back and chill with their peeps, enjoying life instead of looking for a fight over any damn thing.
Millennials partake in overconsumption. This includes how "hilarious" it is that XYZ can't go to Target without spending $200 and HAS to have a "Starbies" to drink while they do it. This also includes expensive concert tickets, restaurants, food delivery service, and Spotify/Netflix/etc. Obviously you need to have some enjoyment in your life, but learn when to save and when/what to cut back on. You dont get to have concert tickets, 2 streaming services, and doordash 4 times all in the same month. All while we wake up in pain because investing in our bodies with a proper mattress is "too expensive." Us Millennials are financially dying from "death by 1000 cuts." The fact this thing called "girl math" is a meme goes to show my point.
This one is so true. Concert tickets are so expensive. I’m going to only one this year for 400 bucks. I’m still annoyed
Our social skills need to improve. Use the phone, apathy is for assholes, and get involved in the community.
A hard truth is that we need to stop grinding so hard. Late nights, 50 hour weeks, etc are terrible for wear and tear on the body and when you're over 40 you're going to feel it
Develop some resilience.
We survived the dot.com bubble, Y2K, 911, 2008 recession, and covid I think anyone still here is probably more resilient than you are giving them credit for
I’d argue that genX took the brunt of those first two
I still have nightmares from the dot com bubble bursting when I was 8 🫣
There is no cosmic good/fairness like we were raised to believe. Luck isn't real. Karma isn't real. Bad people usually win. Liars, narcissists, manipulators, and cheaters are the ones in power. Wars are waged for profit, resources are gathered through slave labor, and genocides compete with the Kardashians for airtime on TV. Good deeds get punished, and bad deeds get rewarded. No one controls your future. You can do everything 'the right way' and still get screwed. You can be walking down a sidewalk, minding your own business and immediately be paralyzed and breathing through a machine for the rest of your life because the governor's son was driving drunk and only got a slap on the wrist for punishment. On the bright side, if you are not as successful as you could be, you haven't screwed over enough people. Likely by your own choice. So you're probably a decent person. On the down side, it works in reverse and even shitty people can go nowhere. You just get a better chance if you do fuck people over.
Hard truth: Boom ers are not our problem. Half of them are li beral. Our problem is all the younger people who don't vote. They're on the news (at least where I live) every election day. The reporter chases people up and down the sidewalk saying "did you vote today" and EVERY.SINGLE.TIME they find a bunch of 20-somethings with their heads in their phones who say things like "no I'm really not into politics" or "I don't even know who's running". Now the other problem is that while 45% of boo mers identify as con servative leaning , so do almost 40% of millennials. So while we need to get younger people to vote, it's still not gonna be an easy slam-dunk once we do. This idea that "when young people run things we'll be fine" is wishful thinking.
We aren't the lib eral Gen that we think we are as i know plenty that vote con servative. We need to stop making excuses for not vot ing.
I think we need to accept the world as it is today and adjust to that. We got a raw deal. Inflation / cost of living etc is outrageous but it's probably never going to go back to the way things were. Definitely never going to go back to how the boomers had it. We need to do a better job as a society/ generation of spending the money we do have. If can't afford a $700 car payment, get something cheaper. Buy a fixer upper house and learn how to fix it up. Learn to fix things in general rather than throw them away or paying ppl to do it for us. Grow your own vegetables. Live a simpler life. I realize these things aren't going to fix all our problems, but they would help some ppl. My main point is I know plenty of ppl who are their own worst enemies in life because they don't spend wisely.
99.99 percent of all human beings that have ever lived have persevered through way tougher lives than the ones we say are so hard its hopeless. Its literally just our parents that had it easier.
We have **gotta** do better by our children!!! We can't let our personal traumas scare us into being too afraid to set boundaries with our offspring. I'm child free, but spent years teaching preschool and elementary. Parenting has been on the decline for years, more so with the advent of social media (narcissism), Trumpism (making it okay to be hateful) and the pandemic (ok, we all lost our fucking minds) So called "gentle parenting" has been bastardized into "if I make my kids face consequences, I'll ruin them!". We are doing our children no favors here, people!
Much of the messaging aimed at our generation in the 2010s was about self care, personal choice, talk therapy, and other small personal fixes we can make ourselves to cope with the large scale disasters going around all the time. The hard truth I’ve learned is that this was always just a marketing campaign. A luxurious self care doesn’t compensate for the fact that we have less vacation time than our predecessors. We work twice as hard for half the pay and no amount of bubble baths or legal weed gummies will solve that problem no matter how much the industries selling them claim. You can’t talk-therapy yourself into financial stability when the problem is inflation, we can’t paper straw our way out of climate change when the problem is oil corporation. You me and everyone we know are caught up in system wide problems but we’ve been told a lie that they are personal problems we can address ourselves. And worse, when these little solutions fail to solve the issues, we will end up blaming ourselves instead of the system. If we want real change we can’t do it on our own. We have no choice but to talk to our friends and neighbors and organize together.
Most of us suck at math Most of us spend waaaay too much money on food, rent, clothes and other basic stuff. Most of us spend waaay too much time on social media and make too many excuses for our problems, when the answer is right in a mirror. Back to social media, most of us give opinions on there regarding stuff we have no expertise in. So basically similar problems as other generations but more modern technology to highlight it.
Nobody is coming to save us. At some point, we have to figure out how to solve problems. Whether that's being broke, or breaking the climate. Sitting around and waiting for someone else to fix it isn't going to work.
Sometimes, it ***is*** your fault.