• Naatan@lemdro.id
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    1 year ago

    I really wish my generation was a bit more optimistic. Yeah shit sucks, don’t get me wrong. But have you guys seen all of history? This is par for the course. Yeah the challenges are different but every generation had their challenges. And yeah baby boomers definitely had it better than us, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing but bad stuff to come. You have to take life with the good and the bad and make the most of it.

    • Sylvartas@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The bad is starting to look more and more like an impending global societal collapse with every passing day though

      • bitsplease@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Yeah I don’t know about “par for the course”

        What other generation had the threat of scientifically proven ecological collapse looming over them?

        • ozebb@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          scientifically proven ecological collapse

          This is a pretty specific thing, but the general “we’re all doomed” vibe is definitely not unique to today. Boomers and older had the threat of nuclear annihilation looming over them, and before that… well, disease and famine and death and destruction due to war have historically been the norm.

          Imagine how you’d feel living in the Americas in the 16th or 17th centuries and either watching the destruction wrought by European settlers firsthand or, maybe worse, watching your peers die en masse of the diseases introduced by those settlers. Imagine living in Eurasia in the 13th century and watching the Mongol army sweep through.

          None of this is to say that today’s challenges aren’t real and serious. Just that we’re not the first to face such challenges.

          • OrteilGenou@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I think the doom is real, but we’re all looking at it through 6" x 3" magnifying glasses that condense all the shit into one giant nugget, and then the easy thing is to comment on that nugget because, well it’s right there, and last winter was unseasonably warm and there were some pretty catastrophic wildfires, and the ocean is doing weird shit, and it’s easy to think that that’s all there is, but you can still take a walk in the woods on a sunny day, and say hi to some people, and maybe make a friend.

      • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
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        1 year ago

        I mean, they literally thought WW1 and WW2 would start the apocalypse.

        Nuclear armageddon was a daily fear of the Cold War, and almost happened several times.

        The difference now is that we know all we need to do to ruin Earth for human life is to do nothing.

        • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          This is an interesting perspective, because in previous generations most of the long term fears were settled by simply doing nothing. They held their breath and it worked out.

          The key difference is that the current generations are acutely aware that if we do nothing and just “stay calm and carry on”, we’re totally fucked. Inaction isn’t going to save us this time. We can’t put our heads in the sand and just sing ourselves to sleep then expect a good outcome when we resurface.

          I think that’s a key differentiator. Previous generations were fearful of something happening. Current generations are fearful of nothing happening, because if nothing happens then the world will become uninhabitable by humans.

          Yet, the majority of the decision-makers in our society are silent generation/boomers that drove to success by inaction and they’re largely doing nothing. We see this and understandably know how fucked we are.

          • Krauerking@lemy.lol
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            1 year ago

            Yeah I think that nails it. That fear of nothing changing except the slow crumble getting worse while we watch more people metaphorically drown in the onslaught of horrors.

    • stolid_agnostic@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      What’s interesting when you look at birthrate declines is not that they are declining, it’s that they are declining to NORMAL LEVELS. Everyone is freaking out that the next generation won’t be big enough to support retiring Boomers without understanding that there should never have been so many Boomers in the first place.

      • Marin_Rider@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        Boomers without understanding that there should never have been so many Boomers in the first place.

        its literally in their name too: ‘baby boomers’. too many in too short a time and they have dominated politics for the better part of a century now

    • Squirrel@thelemmy.club
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      1 year ago

      Most generations don’t need to deal with an impending threat to the whole planet. Nuclear apocalypse, sure, but at least there was no pretending that it wasn’t a problem.

      This is ignoring all of the other ways in which we’re fucked.

      • Wugmeister@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        Another thing that is worse is how we havent had anything recently to inspire hope. The Higgs Boson would have been the Millenial/Gen Z equivalent of the moon landing if the public hadn’t been so distrusting of physics because of string theory evangelists.