• UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Trying to piously ignore generational differences entirely is a willful choice to ignore differences in material conditions that happen over time.

    The boomers, on average, did have an easier time buying houses and having a comfortable standard of living.

    This also applied to Xers, though to a lesser extent and with different propaganda than the boomers had received to keep them compliant and in support of the economic system.

    Exceptions exist, of course, but intersectionality is a real thing and ignoring entire facets of it just because generations are a social construct just results in willfully ignoring the patterns and tendencies that are there whether you accept them or not.

    • neo [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Piety has nothing to do with it. I’m not trying to act holier-than-thou. Obviously the person in the OP screenshot is a total fucking loser, but this doesn’t generalize gen x or baby boomers. This is just some individual pretending real adversity in life is a scenario he totally imagined, probably based only in repeated fictions that he eventually came to believe in.

      Also, there is no disagreement about baby boomers living much more privileged and easier lives in general than we do today. But nobody chooses the environment in which they’re born into, the propaganda of the era they are subjected to, or the general information publicly available to them during their lives. Much as you said, we all receive a propaganda made to keep us compliant to the economic system we live under, and that message shifts over time. But that’s the thing that needs to be combated today, not the bygone fact that someone lived a better life in the past.

      • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        But nobody chooses the environment in which they’re born into, the propaganda of the era they are subjected to, or the general information publicly available to them during their lives.

        I agree here, except that I don’t let people off the hook for going with those tendencies rather than against them. At some point people should be allowed to dislike police even if exceptions exist to how police are typically known to act (and those exceptions often have short careers, but I digress), for example.

        not the bygone fact that someone lived a better life in the past

        If those boomers (and junior boomer Xers) stopped shitting on millennials, zoomers, and whatever-gen-alpha-will-be-called, it’d be easier to not fling some of it back. I can’t blame people for resenting the sheer arrogance of materially privileged people LARPing as born-better rugged individuals that were just better than the entitled youths nowadays. grill-broke