Millenials = End of the US

[DarkCorp]

Mom and Dad are Both Baby Boomers (1961) and I'm one of those oh-so feared "Milenials." That's funny, you say we're spoiled. Maybe that's so in your country, I'm no middle-class, but you wanna know the truth?

Our fathers had it easy.

They lived in the time where Oil was cheap as a bottle of fuckin' water. Where there was no China to skin off our goddamn back, just the commie losers from Russia with nukes that never were launched. There were less people in their times, so there was less competition against them. Today, oil is fuckin' expensive, the world has increased 3x in population thanks to the Baby Boomers, there is just... too many fucking people. Too many people wanting to work, too much traffic in the streets, too much crime. We're stocked up on crazy here, pal. In your times, you said your mother didn't know where you were. My brother's life was about the same, he is probrably a X-gen, too. But today? Today we have to be watched all the times, because it's SO FUCKING VIOLENT AND DANGEROUS out there that WE. CAN'T. GET. OUT. OF. OUR. FUCKING. HOUSES!! Do you understand how annoying and despairing is that? It's HORRIBLE!!

This is interesting and I am glad you brought it up. I always wondered why inflation has gone up so fast.

 

[Kissker]

I am not widely liked, so I can speak freely here.

Honestly viewing all this spurs up my old thoughts, seeing everything going on, and how Todays Teenagers are complete morons (for the most part) those in their 20's aren't much better, and almost no one knows what the hell to do with life (although not a bad thing, some of the most interesting 50 year olds I know, still have no idea what they want to do in life) Rising oil prices (I am in USA btw) decline in available work....

We need a global event to stir things up, including growth. Now I am not saying "lets nuke the whole damn planet!" but hell people, I go out in the street and see Teens with kids, some of my younger friends have kids, but instead of doing proper "parenting" they tend to say "screw the bugger, I wanna party" Not a very good looking future if you ask me.

In the US, parents used to be able to beat their children as a decipline...but today that is a illegal action, and can result in your children being taken from you and you sent into prison. Children grow up with this in mind, and get the "you can't touch me" attitude. Which is pretty bad for our economy.

Our economy is effected because "you can't touch me, I can do what I want" still applies to teens, and those in their 20's until they finally realize they need to grow up really, whenever that happens, IF that happens. So when it comes to the whole "working nine to five" thing.. they get cocky. "I'll just do something else" or "screw it" all together.

Sadly most jobs (at least around here) are taken by these teenagers, and those in desperate need of work are losing the battle. Being out of work for more then a month is devastating to your reputation, and you will become over looked for those teenagers that "could" do better, however in all honestly they probably won't when they get what they want, a new car, computer, game, whatever- they will lose interest in the job and simply stop caring about the quality.

A war, an event, something to shock today's parents and Tomorrow's kids would be an improvement, yes people would die and that sucks, yes we might do something stupid and nuke the land and well then hell, we won't be playing Fallout- we'll be living it, except it won't be nearly as fun or pretty. But something such as a asteroid or other 'out of man's control' object coming dangerously close to earth, or even better, colliding with the moon causing multiple disasters and problems associated with the tides, gravity and the like, would cause us to stop being so stupid and work together to fix the problem, even if just temporary before greed and the like kicks back in.

Jobs would be stimulated by things needing repaired, rebuilt, remade, re-thought. Kids would get off their high horses and finally realize "damn I gotta do something!" Parents would learn just a tad bit more respect for elders, and pass that on to their children. People would help one another without "what will I get out of this" all the time.

No, it's not a permanent solution, no it's not the "best thing" that could happen to us.. but damn, where we are headed is a much worse off place.

Once the retards are in control of our economy, and thus the 'planet' the whole world's gonna suffer.

 

[DarkCorp]

A big part of it is discipline. All you have to do is look at the TV programs for children. A lot of episodes often feature kids making big, usually really dangerous mistakes. However, since they tell the truth they get off with some warning or being grounded. An example is this past christmas. There was a show where a girl stole Santa Clauses weather/snow machine. She ends up causing hell for the entire country/world because she wants a snow day and no school. In the end she tells the truth and gets a slap on the wrist and I am like WTF??? We give our kids too much leniency and treat them like children. When they fuck up the parents say "oh but they are just children". I see it at Target all the time when kids make a mess on the shelves and use the "negotiation cry" to get what they want when they deserve a swift smack to the butt. Of course they are just being children so its dismissed as such. But I do agree the problem of education also lies with our schools and teachers.

I believe one of the reasons why kids are so confused is because our schools are a bureaucracy. Instead of trying to find out what our kids strength and weaknesses are, they are just shoehorned into a specified "curriculum". Our kids get 8 years of general education. Shouldn't highschool be the stage where they are encouraged to find out what they are good at, what their passions are?

College needs to be cheaper. Not only by fixing inflation but by getting rid of un-necessary distractions. If they are going to college to major in business, they don't need classes like algrebra, or chemistry, engineering, whatever the fuck. Kids need to be given time to focus solely on what they are learning and not be distracted by homework and tests from other classes.

 

[Phil the Nuka-Cola Dude]

*snip*

So the solution to America's problems (Failing economy, massive dept etc.)is to beat our kids and send them off to war? Damn, you're certainly the revolutionary thinker!



Protip: This country is incredibly fucked up, and it ain't because of my generation honey ('88).

-We aren't running the corporations who are stripping the earth of its non-renewable resources. You are.

-We aren't corrupt politicians and defense contractors who are profiting from a war which has cost over 4,500 American lives. You are. (The "Millenials" ARE over there dying in Afghanistan and Iraq so you can be free though.)

-We aren't responsible for ignoring the intelligence which could have stopped the attack on 9/11. You are.

-We didn't totally fuck up when it came time to help the people of New Orleans in 2005. You did.



If you're going to spew verbal diarrhea and stereotype everyone who was born from 83 to 97, at least pepper your argument with some facts so it doesn't reek of bullshit.



And no: "lolz teenagers r lazy" doesn't count.

 

[Moving Target]

Ah yes the millenials. Boy I've got to tell ya, it's definitely not looking good for the U.S. Personally I'm at the cusp of Gen X/millenial, so I got semi-pampered by my family. Especially my mom, who never really figured out how to deal with money and passed that experience on to me. She was semi-rich, I was semi-rich, and my dad... well, he grew up on a farm in West central Texas, had to go into the Army to get his college education thanks to the GI bill, and JUST.... BARELY.... missed the troop buildup in Vietnam.

So, anyway, back to the millenials. Maybe it's just my age starting to catch up to me and I used to be like it (I hope not) but every time I see these fucking kids I just get so aggravated. They seem so clueless and entitled.... Maybe it's always been like that, like maybe I've been that way.

All I know is this: my generation (sorta) wouldn't think to have their parents call their professors/teachers/bosses and bitch them out about how their kids are fucking up. Nope- my parents would've been like "Oh, you got a D? Well, no Nintendo for you. Yep, you're just going to sit right there until you get this right."

Though, the interesting thing is I never NEEDED that sort of disciplining. Not that my parents were against corporal punishment in general, mind- I remember getting spanked at least once, but I deserved it; I was being a little shit- but me and my brother were extremely well-behaved children. We just were.... not much in the way of being taught.

And I have no idea what to do about the problems that are developing. Besides stopping being so freaking paranoid about doing the "right" thing in parenting. That sort of neurotic behavior hasn't helped anyone, and just about all it's done over the past several decades is give kids a sense of excessive importance and vastly expand the role of CPS in folks' daily lives.

Also, when it comes to teaching- I was a student teacher, almost got my credential, but.... yea, it's pretty much all bureaucracy now. Teaching methods and curricula are dictated, from above, not even by administrators (BTW, the "lower tiers" would be fine as curriculum builders since most of them have LOTS of good classroom experience) but by TEXTBOOK COMPANIES.

Who the hell do you think made all the extra push for NCLB? The folks who made Open Court, Harcourt Brace and so on. They, along with the test-making companies, have messed up our educational system to no end.... and then on top of that they have the audacity to expect that each new class will do better than the last until the magical year of 2010, when all children everywhere in the U.S. will be fluent in English. Give me a break.

However, I do hope that, along with greater respect for teachers (unlikely, but one can dream) comes the idea that children don't need to learn exactly the same way, always. I'm all for standardizing timelines among the various grades within the schools, but I hate hate hate how Open Court does it- sending spies (oh sorry "Reading Coaches") to make sure the entire school is keeping pace with every other school in the country that's using Open Court.

Got off on a rant there.... Anyway, yea, worried about how these kids are going to grow up. And what they're going to be like.

Hell, I'm lucky I came out as good as I did- and I'm pretty messed up in certain respects (can barely balance a checkbook, JUST learned how to live within my means, working at getting rid of my massive credit card debt because I was STUPID and bought shit I didn't need/couldn't afford) but I still have the sense that I'm better off than a lot of these young 'uns.

 

[Mord_Sith]

Heh, don't get me started on my family but let me tell you, my parents took a script from the baby boomers and whenever I botched something bad I got a bloody good cuff upside the head.

However yes I am immature, I admit it, I'm a lunatic if I don't keep myself in check, a friendly lunatic, but a lunatic nonetheless, however everyone has to be selfish in a capitalist society so I don't see why that is a problem solely the privy of the Millenials.

HOWEVER, I busted my ass to get through school and even still I'm only at the tip of the iceberg, I'm a slob at home but I try not to take it to work.

What is needed is a damn good slap in the face either from the parents or from the schools, something that tells the kids that they're not playing softball anymore, and it's time to saddle up or sally forth to a minimum wage job.

As I said, I'm not without my quirks, but at the very least I do what I'm supposed to do at work, not get babysat and do the job I'm hired for.

At the age of 20 I owned my own house (and still do) and I am without other significant debt aside from my mortgage for said house.

Early on I learned that bills come first, period, otherwise I botch things up real bad, after 4 years I finally decided to get a low limit credit card after much paranoia about the plastic card of life destruction.

However it's purpose is more or less e-purchases than anything else so it will serve properly then I pay it off immediately afterwards.

I also simply hate being in debt, it gnaws at the back of my mind without respite, but that's ingrained from most of my childhood being without many of the finer things in life, hell I count myself lucky that we had food on the table every meal considering the circumstances.

At any rate, I don't hold myself up as some kind of shining example, but it's a point of not that not -ALL- Millenials are hopeless as far as business and existence in general is concerned.

-EDIT-

And right now I'm enjoying a Grade A Shingle Burger if anyone cares

 

[Golan2072]

I wonder what it must be like to be a Millenial in the Middle East?

I am a Millennial from the Middle East (Israel). I was born around the time Israel invaded Lebanon (1982); I was 18 when Israel finally got out of Lebanon (2000). I was 5 when the first Intifada began; I was 8 (and a half) years old when we had Iraqi missile attacks during the first gulf war (causing very little damage or deaths but mass panic). I was 13 when Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated.

Sure, there were always "peace agreements" but these were more or less useless treaties between corrupt fatcats on both sides, meaning quite little for the masses. In practice there was an almost unceasing chain of violence - terrorism and similarly-devastating (or worse) counter-terrorism - ever since I remember myself. The eventual result was having security guards everywhere - at the entry of every mall, bus station or office building - making searches on you in order to catch terrorists (it rarely worked in practice; and now we get short-range rocket attacks instead of suicide bombings, too). The answer to each attack is a bloody, messy counter-attack with zero results; it usually gets repeated not long after that.

In 2006 we had a month-long war in Lebanon. Its stated aim was to release Israeli POWs held by Hizbulla; in practice nothing real was done for them, and instead our over-confident generals thought they could simply crush Hizbulla, especially with our ultra-tech, highly-expensive air force. It didn't work; the war ended up as a bloody stalemate after the cities in the north of Israel were extensively shelled and Lebanon got heavily bombed. The POWs are still in Hizbulla hands; and Hizbulla is as strong as ever.

Israeli politics got more and more corrupt as time went by. Currently almost any member of the cabinet - starting with the prime minister - is under investigation for severe corruption charges. Previous administrations were similar but a bit less blatant. Many people are disillusioned by politics: it doesn't matter who you vote for, the policy is the same (and doesn't help anyone except the politicians and their arch-monopolist, super-oligarch fatcat friends/financiers).

The standard of living is declining. In my mother's generation, with high-school education (or, better yet, a BA) you could find a professional job with a decent salary. I have a BA in Ecology and Sociology (with good marks too), and all the jobs I could find are extremely low-paying service or security jobs with little or no chance of advancement. Manufacturing has mostly moved to Jordan or other impoverished neo-colonial countries where the pay is even lower.

The education system is declining too. Teacher salaries are horribly low. Class sizes are horribly big. Each minister of education wants to list "achievements" in his resume' and thus implements new "magic solutions" and crackpot education plans, always with disastrous results. Children get violent; the government's response is by repression, up to and including putting actual cops in schools. The violence, of course, continues to grow.

The government continually cuts budgets for education, welfare, and healthcare, and instead wastes its funds either on the ever-growing war budget or on privatizing (read: handing them for free or for very very cheap to the fatcats) public services, including ones which were giving the government a very healthy revenue (such as the seaports). Privatized services decline in quality as no one in the government dares to monitor what the contractors do with them (after all, the contractors are financing the politicians' election campaigns); privatized factories pollute almost with impunity. Taxes remain the same but you get less and less in return for them.

Bosses treat us like children. My last workplace (call-center) had a whole lot of silly, childish activities probably invented by one "organizational adviser" or another. The bosses talk and talk and talk about how they care about us and want us to have fun but, of course, the pay-check says the opposite: 4,500 NIS (equivalent for about 1,200 US$) for a 200-hour-plus month (50 hours and more a week). "Advancement" meant earning a few hundred NIS a month more but doing much harder work.

 

[Moving Target]

I wonder what it must be like to be a Millenial in the Middle East?

I am a Millennial from the Middle East (Israel). I was born around the time Israel invaded Lebanon (1982);

You're not a Millenial; you're an ass-end Gen-Exer like myself. I was born in 1980.

Great post regardless. Very interesting to read other peoples' experiences from all around the world.