Yeah, Bill Cosby was such “a black stud” that he had to drug women to get sex. The whole concept of “virtue signaling” is repulsive. I watched “The Beverly Hillbillies” and laughed which is what it was meant to engender. Forcing anything that disrupts the “natural” (albeit often “glacial”) flow of change often backfires. What did “The Fresh Prince Of Belair” ever accomplish? Lebron James’ shoes are made by Chinese-Muslim slaves. Hypocrisy reigns at all times. “Time” leaves the present in the dust. The Salem Witch Trials seems like a stupid fantasy, but it wasn’t. What the world can’t make happen is perfect time-sequence progress for everyone. Been to Somalia lately? We can’t choose the era we are born to or live in. And it takes time to discover and decide what part we might play.
1980: it's a weird, weird dividing line. Those of us born that year don't really have a... like, whether we belong to GenX or GenY culturally seems to be largely a function of whether or not we had older siblings. I identify more with GenX because I had the siblings. I know people I was in the same grade with at school, who are solidly GenY in all their tastes, opinions, and formative cultural experiences. It's a weird thing.
One of the more interesting peculiarities is that we, the 1980 cohort, seem to be right on the cusp of a lot of things: Nothing that worked for our parents, really worked for us. We were the first group for whom a bachelor's degree was no longer enough to get an OK white-collar job. "Go to college, get a good job" is what we were all told... and then when we got there, it had changed to "Oh, you'll need a master's degree to qualify for anything."
We were the last cohort to get most of the way to adulthood before home internet was a thing. Smartphones didn't come out until we were... 27? That makes a sharp break between us and people who were born after 1985.
Will a Trump admin finally give us the future we were promised? I'm not holding my breath. But I have hope for some improvement.
I do find it weird that depending on some people's designations of the generations that the year 1980 sometimes is forgotten completely. I was the eldest among my siblings. I agree completely that the schooling that my parents pushed didn't work out the way they thought it would. I wish I hadn't gone to college in some ways. But I didn't really know what to do either.
I think I was probably 13-14 before I ever got on the internet. But the timing is fuzzy. I know I was one of the first children at our school to be on there. We had a personal computer before others as well.
Around 2007 (maybe earlier) I had a Motorola Razr flip phone and kept it with prepaid minutes for a loooong time. I was very late in getting a smartphone. I think I may have gotten my first smartphone in 2018 at 38 years old or so.
My life was odd, and since I didn't have children and wasn't big into social media, I didn't get slowly boiled like a frog (brainwashed) along the way. I totally understand that people my age became parents and were exposed to what the children were exposed to as they aged. I missed out on that for better or worse.
We got internet in 1995. It was dialup, it used our phone line so most things were designed to download a packet of data and then sign off to read and reply-- juno email, that sort of thing. No pictures. All text. Internet as we know it now wasn't in any recognizable form until after 2000.
I still haven't gotten a smartphone. Do not want one.
I think our parents tried to do the right thing, and told us to do what had worked for them... but when we got there, that track was broken, and we had not been given *any* viable advice for getting around that. It was a shock. In my junior year, in the middle of a health crisis, I ran out of saved money to pay tuition, and was faced with the choice of dropping out, or borrowing to finish a BA. I dropped out, and I have never regretted it. There were zero jobs on the other side of that, and it was a state school, not the sort people wax romantic about "improving your mind" and "the value of the liberal arts" when they look back on.
And I think people born just 5 years before us, didn't really run into that. We were the first cohort to get there and find everything broken. There are some non-trivial implications to that, but I haven't teased them out just yet.
I think we were also on the leading edge of housing prices outstripping incomes. Those who bought when they were fairly young-- parents cosigned, inherited enough from grandma for a downpayment, etc-- lucked out, and those who missed that boat were/are completely hosed.
When I reached adulthood, the standard, prudent advice about buying a house was: 20% in cash for downpayment, and don't borrow more than 2x your annual income at most: shoot for no more than 1.5x. Now, of course, people are mortgaging their immortal souls, putting down 5%, and buying houses at 3x their annual income or more, counting on the nominal value to keep rising all that time, and selling it again in 5-10 years when they move to another state for another job. For people looking to buy a house, and live in it until they die, the math simply doesn't work. You get into a mortgage you can barely pay, and then when the roof or the HVAC predictably needs replacing, you borrow more. There is no paying it off, ever.
Yeah, Bill Cosby was such “a black stud” that he had to drug women to get sex. The whole concept of “virtue signaling” is repulsive. I watched “The Beverly Hillbillies” and laughed which is what it was meant to engender. Forcing anything that disrupts the “natural” (albeit often “glacial”) flow of change often backfires. What did “The Fresh Prince Of Belair” ever accomplish? Lebron James’ shoes are made by Chinese-Muslim slaves. Hypocrisy reigns at all times. “Time” leaves the present in the dust. The Salem Witch Trials seems like a stupid fantasy, but it wasn’t. What the world can’t make happen is perfect time-sequence progress for everyone. Been to Somalia lately? We can’t choose the era we are born to or live in. And it takes time to discover and decide what part we might play.
1980: it's a weird, weird dividing line. Those of us born that year don't really have a... like, whether we belong to GenX or GenY culturally seems to be largely a function of whether or not we had older siblings. I identify more with GenX because I had the siblings. I know people I was in the same grade with at school, who are solidly GenY in all their tastes, opinions, and formative cultural experiences. It's a weird thing.
One of the more interesting peculiarities is that we, the 1980 cohort, seem to be right on the cusp of a lot of things: Nothing that worked for our parents, really worked for us. We were the first group for whom a bachelor's degree was no longer enough to get an OK white-collar job. "Go to college, get a good job" is what we were all told... and then when we got there, it had changed to "Oh, you'll need a master's degree to qualify for anything."
We were the last cohort to get most of the way to adulthood before home internet was a thing. Smartphones didn't come out until we were... 27? That makes a sharp break between us and people who were born after 1985.
Will a Trump admin finally give us the future we were promised? I'm not holding my breath. But I have hope for some improvement.
I do find it weird that depending on some people's designations of the generations that the year 1980 sometimes is forgotten completely. I was the eldest among my siblings. I agree completely that the schooling that my parents pushed didn't work out the way they thought it would. I wish I hadn't gone to college in some ways. But I didn't really know what to do either.
I think I was probably 13-14 before I ever got on the internet. But the timing is fuzzy. I know I was one of the first children at our school to be on there. We had a personal computer before others as well.
Around 2007 (maybe earlier) I had a Motorola Razr flip phone and kept it with prepaid minutes for a loooong time. I was very late in getting a smartphone. I think I may have gotten my first smartphone in 2018 at 38 years old or so.
My life was odd, and since I didn't have children and wasn't big into social media, I didn't get slowly boiled like a frog (brainwashed) along the way. I totally understand that people my age became parents and were exposed to what the children were exposed to as they aged. I missed out on that for better or worse.
We got internet in 1995. It was dialup, it used our phone line so most things were designed to download a packet of data and then sign off to read and reply-- juno email, that sort of thing. No pictures. All text. Internet as we know it now wasn't in any recognizable form until after 2000.
I still haven't gotten a smartphone. Do not want one.
I think our parents tried to do the right thing, and told us to do what had worked for them... but when we got there, that track was broken, and we had not been given *any* viable advice for getting around that. It was a shock. In my junior year, in the middle of a health crisis, I ran out of saved money to pay tuition, and was faced with the choice of dropping out, or borrowing to finish a BA. I dropped out, and I have never regretted it. There were zero jobs on the other side of that, and it was a state school, not the sort people wax romantic about "improving your mind" and "the value of the liberal arts" when they look back on.
And I think people born just 5 years before us, didn't really run into that. We were the first cohort to get there and find everything broken. There are some non-trivial implications to that, but I haven't teased them out just yet.
I think we were also on the leading edge of housing prices outstripping incomes. Those who bought when they were fairly young-- parents cosigned, inherited enough from grandma for a downpayment, etc-- lucked out, and those who missed that boat were/are completely hosed.
When I reached adulthood, the standard, prudent advice about buying a house was: 20% in cash for downpayment, and don't borrow more than 2x your annual income at most: shoot for no more than 1.5x. Now, of course, people are mortgaging their immortal souls, putting down 5%, and buying houses at 3x their annual income or more, counting on the nominal value to keep rising all that time, and selling it again in 5-10 years when they move to another state for another job. For people looking to buy a house, and live in it until they die, the math simply doesn't work. You get into a mortgage you can barely pay, and then when the roof or the HVAC predictably needs replacing, you borrow more. There is no paying it off, ever.