We have truly failed our children when they can’t even manage life without burning out. I don’t say I have an answer, but I am genuinely curious as a 48 year old man what it is.
Is it that you never had chores as a child? Are parents withholding responsibility too long making you isolated from that norm when you become an adult?
It’s not the parents failing to teach their children. It’s that this society is SO VASTLY DIFFERENT from what you grew up with or what your parents did and certainly so far removed from what we have experienced for 100,000 years, that our brains are melting trying to make sense of it.
Making your bed, bills and errands around us new? Commitments at work are new? I’m not being factitious I genuinely don’t understand.
Yes the world is different. My dad at 82 had a vastly different world than me at 48. But here’s the rub, you peel back the technology advancements it’s the same world. How are kids today not seeing the same world? Parents may not have failed but someone/something has.
For context: I am 29, 5 years in the workforce after university. Also German.
For me it’s the pointlessness about all of it. I live with the expectancy of this world going to shit since my formative years. Nothing ever feels like it is getting better. If society is talking about my generation it’s either “sorry here is another burden we don’t want to take care of right now” or “this generation is too lazy, too weird, too something”.
I am supposed to pay for 1/2 of someone that was allowed to stop working at 63 while I fully expect to work until I’m 70 or dead because of some war about water supply.
I am also supposed to keep consuming because otherwise the economy will collapse.
I am also supposed to keep my own stockpile of cash because probably the system won’t provide for me when I am old.
I am also supposed to always keep learning because otherwise some AI will steal my job.
All the while every tech company out there is hellbound to make me feel miserable because that is the best way of keeping me engaged to make them some profit either via ads or by selling my data or both.
It’s just so… meh. And then the garbage bin is full again and all I can think about is “yeah be a good little cog in the machine and bring out the trash”
I understand everything you’re saying… I don’t see this as burning out though. This is more existential or nihilism. Welcome to experiencing life as a GenX 🤣
It’s always been pointless. I work in Finance everything is smoke and mirrors. If you want real meaning it’s all those jobs none of us care about. Social workers. Nurses. Construction. Cashier’s. Farmers.
This is why IT people like me end up dipping out before retirement and shifting careers drastically. It’s all bullshit. It always has been.
You kinda got the wrong point of the comment. This wasn’t about the meaning of life or coming to terms with the fact that your life will not matter in the grand scale of things.
Its about having no hope that things will ever get better for you. Most generations over the last few hundred years either saw a great increase in living standards for everyone or had technological breakthroughs during their live-time that promised a better life for them.
Even if the current situation was bad for them the future didn’t look completely black. There was always that small voice in the back that said “Maybe in the future it will be better”.
Nowadays? I dread every technological breakthrough and every election cause it brings us one step closer from endstage capitalism back to feudalism ruled by a few cleptomanic psychopaths. The general populace is purposefully kept as close to their breacking point as possible to stop them from rising up and seemingly every single nation is drifting towards fascism while trying their absolut hardest to implement a full scale surveillance system.
The only reasonable way to cope with that is being completely apathetic to your surroundings, which makes it even harder to find enough joy in life to get trough the daily boring grind for survival.
Nah that’s just a lie. There was no major increase in lifespan, sure, but that’s mostly due to the fact that we are pretty close to the normal biological limit after we stopped early child deaths for the most part.
But in terms of living standards, a lot changed. In the time from 1980 to 2000 the internet emerged, information and entertainment slowly became available on demand for most people. Electronic devices became affordable even for “lower class” families. Smartphones slowly became a normal to own. Slowly increasing globalization gave pretty much everyone the chance to see a bigger part of the world than ever before. At the same time a lot of the most problematic illnesses got eradicated. Polio is gone and there are vaccines for stuff like hepatitis. Insulin slowly became available for everyone (apart from the corporate hellhole that’s the USA). With the increase in global trade you could by fruits that your grandparents barely knew about.
That’s not to say that everything was good. If you were part of a surpressed group back then, your life definetly wasn’t easy, but even then there was slow progress towards acceptance. While climate change was already an ever present topic, most prognoses were still optimistic until the early 2000s. The biggest climate issue was the ozone hole that got mostly fixed by now. Even if you lived in the 3rd world and still suffered a lot more than others, you could still slowly see amenities that europe took as granted come into your country.
How many passwords, accounts, bills, charges, emails, letters, apps did they receive or use every day? How many minutes of their day were hijacked by advertisements expressly designed to make you feel strong emotions?
Every single person is so intensely overstimulated compared to our ancestors. Even on our days off, we rarely spend time just sitting and relaxing because our capitalistic world demands our labor. When we do relax, usually we are overstimulating with media.
What im reading from this is not new but i don’t want to discount your sentiment. What I am assuming is the difference is for me and those older we are the frog in the pot of water with the water being brought to a boil. Because we grew up before The Internet we are effectively better grounded for the overstimulation now? The shock for those younger is far more jarring especially if they have not been adequately prepared by their support systems.
We have truly failed our children when they can’t even manage life without burning out. I don’t say I have an answer, but I am genuinely curious as a 48 year old man what it is.
Is it that you never had chores as a child? Are parents withholding responsibility too long making you isolated from that norm when you become an adult?
It’s not the parents failing to teach their children. It’s that this society is SO VASTLY DIFFERENT from what you grew up with or what your parents did and certainly so far removed from what we have experienced for 100,000 years, that our brains are melting trying to make sense of it.
Making your bed, bills and errands around us new? Commitments at work are new? I’m not being factitious I genuinely don’t understand.
Yes the world is different. My dad at 82 had a vastly different world than me at 48. But here’s the rub, you peel back the technology advancements it’s the same world. How are kids today not seeing the same world? Parents may not have failed but someone/something has.
Doing dishes shouldn’t be burning you out.
Edit - minor generic tweaks
For context: I am 29, 5 years in the workforce after university. Also German.
For me it’s the pointlessness about all of it. I live with the expectancy of this world going to shit since my formative years. Nothing ever feels like it is getting better. If society is talking about my generation it’s either “sorry here is another burden we don’t want to take care of right now” or “this generation is too lazy, too weird, too something”.
I am supposed to pay for 1/2 of someone that was allowed to stop working at 63 while I fully expect to work until I’m 70 or dead because of some war about water supply.
I am also supposed to keep consuming because otherwise the economy will collapse.
I am also supposed to keep my own stockpile of cash because probably the system won’t provide for me when I am old.
I am also supposed to always keep learning because otherwise some AI will steal my job.
All the while every tech company out there is hellbound to make me feel miserable because that is the best way of keeping me engaged to make them some profit either via ads or by selling my data or both.
It’s just so… meh. And then the garbage bin is full again and all I can think about is “yeah be a good little cog in the machine and bring out the trash”
I understand everything you’re saying… I don’t see this as burning out though. This is more existential or nihilism. Welcome to experiencing life as a GenX 🤣
It’s always been pointless. I work in Finance everything is smoke and mirrors. If you want real meaning it’s all those jobs none of us care about. Social workers. Nurses. Construction. Cashier’s. Farmers.
This is why IT people like me end up dipping out before retirement and shifting careers drastically. It’s all bullshit. It always has been.
You kinda got the wrong point of the comment. This wasn’t about the meaning of life or coming to terms with the fact that your life will not matter in the grand scale of things.
Its about having no hope that things will ever get better for you. Most generations over the last few hundred years either saw a great increase in living standards for everyone or had technological breakthroughs during their live-time that promised a better life for them.
Even if the current situation was bad for them the future didn’t look completely black. There was always that small voice in the back that said “Maybe in the future it will be better”.
Nowadays? I dread every technological breakthrough and every election cause it brings us one step closer from endstage capitalism back to feudalism ruled by a few cleptomanic psychopaths. The general populace is purposefully kept as close to their breacking point as possible to stop them from rising up and seemingly every single nation is drifting towards fascism while trying their absolut hardest to implement a full scale surveillance system.
The only reasonable way to cope with that is being completely apathetic to your surroundings, which makes it even harder to find enough joy in life to get trough the daily boring grind for survival.
GenX did not see an increase in living standards… Shit has been rolling downhill since the 80’s.
Nah that’s just a lie. There was no major increase in lifespan, sure, but that’s mostly due to the fact that we are pretty close to the normal biological limit after we stopped early child deaths for the most part.
But in terms of living standards, a lot changed. In the time from 1980 to 2000 the internet emerged, information and entertainment slowly became available on demand for most people. Electronic devices became affordable even for “lower class” families. Smartphones slowly became a normal to own. Slowly increasing globalization gave pretty much everyone the chance to see a bigger part of the world than ever before. At the same time a lot of the most problematic illnesses got eradicated. Polio is gone and there are vaccines for stuff like hepatitis. Insulin slowly became available for everyone (apart from the corporate hellhole that’s the USA). With the increase in global trade you could by fruits that your grandparents barely knew about.
That’s not to say that everything was good. If you were part of a surpressed group back then, your life definetly wasn’t easy, but even then there was slow progress towards acceptance. While climate change was already an ever present topic, most prognoses were still optimistic until the early 2000s. The biggest climate issue was the ozone hole that got mostly fixed by now. Even if you lived in the 3rd world and still suffered a lot more than others, you could still slowly see amenities that europe took as granted come into your country.
I have a job where I don’t have to worry about money! What is everyone else’s problem?!
Lol. I worry about money all the damn time. I have 3 kids. Divorced. 2 boys on the spectrum and one of them will probably never be independent.
Point being before you talk walk a mile in someone’s shoes. I have busted my absolute ass off to get where I am.
How many passwords, accounts, bills, charges, emails, letters, apps did they receive or use every day? How many minutes of their day were hijacked by advertisements expressly designed to make you feel strong emotions?
Every single person is so intensely overstimulated compared to our ancestors. Even on our days off, we rarely spend time just sitting and relaxing because our capitalistic world demands our labor. When we do relax, usually we are overstimulating with media.
What im reading from this is not new but i don’t want to discount your sentiment. What I am assuming is the difference is for me and those older we are the frog in the pot of water with the water being brought to a boil. Because we grew up before The Internet we are effectively better grounded for the overstimulation now? The shock for those younger is far more jarring especially if they have not been adequately prepared by their support systems.