AGAIN

Some millennials are over 40. Doesn't change the point but let's be factual here
Fuck I'm old :((((((
- I'm here with you on that. We got to see Biff in back to the future and now we get to see a Biff Larper as president.
  
  All Biff and no hoverboard? Bogus!
  
  Considering Biff was based on Trump in the 80s...
- Oh shut up.
  —GenX
  
  I envy gen x. Last generation to be home owners.
- I'm 43. Look at me go.
  I was trying to think of some shit going down in the 80s.
  All I can think of is Chernobyl melt down in 86.
  
  Challenger explosion, televised straight into so many classrooms
  
  Not the 80’s, but the early-mid 90’s were rife with evidence of the U.S.’s decline.
  Rodney King beatings, the highway of death in Iraq, the rise to prominence of Fox News, the mass destruction of the ‘93 floods, all those communities destroyed by the shift to zero tolerance policies, and the deevoludtion of national political debate into contentious identity politics by 24-hour news channels.
  In the 80’s you had Bhopal and 3-mile island, too. And the savings and loan crisis, I think.
  
  Mutually Assured Destruction was pretty big at the time. The rot really started to set in with Reagan.
- Yeah, you can change high-school to college, and 40 to 45 for me, but the point doesn't really change.
- you boomer
- This isn't about them.

Jokes on you. I watched 9/11 in elementary school.
- I was in my geography lesson, so I don’t identify either.
- 5th grade. I remember pre-9/11 I wasn't really scared of much, cause you know, there wasn't a lot to be scared of.
  Watching it on live TV and everything devolved very quickly.
- I think we're called Zillennials?
  
  Probably "Millennials" hating that you're too young to claim their tag, and "Zoomers" hating that you're too old to claim theirs. Whatever. We are the mid-90s (even 90s) babies, and that's a cool name even if a little longer.
  
  Xennials?
  Edit: oh, no, it's in the other direction.

This is why I don’t believe people who say things can get better.
- lol, yep, things have only became worse over time through my whole life, and I just got laid off from a sick job I scored during the Covid chaos, so i'm job searching on top of all of that
  
  Certainly job search got worst during and after COVID. Especially people recently graduating finding out stems are not very easy to get into
- They certainly can - post-WWII was certainly an improvement for most people - but there's no guarantee that they will.
- Yeah it's not like our ancestors went through two world wars in a period of 20 years along with the first Global economic depression or anything like that, and the realization that Humanity can now wipe itself off the planet.
  No it's definitely us that lives through the most interesting time
  
  It doesn’t have to be the most interesting time. Just an interesting time.
  Still sucks and we’ve got climate collapse to worry about in addition to nukes. And PFAS. And microplastics.
- Is this what the Romans felt at the end? Walls falling, raiders raiding, terrible leaders-- it's not looking good.
- Just have to vote for Dems and there's a decent chance 9/11 wouldn't have happened, so no Afghanistan, Iraq wouldn't have happened, pandemic would've been handled better and the pandemic response plan wouldn't have been axed, and we wouldn't have bombed Iran. Not to mention women would still have health care.
  
  I’ve been voting D for years and it still didn’t help.

Also the middle-eastern millenials getting bombed, occupied, and bombed again during each of these.

Am I numb or am I exhausted? Maybe I'll find out after another nap.

I’m 42 and this is deep.
- Aye gather round elder Millennials, our watch has begun
  
  Back in ye day we hath this magical place called “limewire” it could brick your mothers gateway computer without a moments notice.

Don't forget Columbine. People always leave that out, but as far as historical milestones that shaped how awful American society has become, it was a big one.
- Now we get one every week!
  
  It is insane how common it's become.
  It's hard to even explain to people that there was a time when it used to be a very shocking thing to hear about.
  "Back in my day, parents didn't have to send their kids off to school every morning pretending everything was normal, but internally struggling with anxiety they might never see them again."
- My high school experience started with Columbine freshman year and ended with 9/11 senior year. Life has been so crazy.
- We had some copycats here in Germany and of course Counterstrike or some other game was to blame. Not the very real weapons the people were shot with.
  
  And Marylin Manson.

I'm so fucking over this shit yall. Don't forget the corporate takeover and surveillance dystopia created by quite possibly the biggest dork losers that are alive. What the actual fuck? Need a genocide. Check. Civil rights collapse? Check. Financial meltdown? Check. Pandemic that kills millions? Check. Collapse of the dollar for shitcoin scams? Check pending. Terrorist attacks that convince your country for 20 years of wars? Check. No more war excuses, and need more? No worries, we'll just recycle the same one from 25 years ago because y'all couldn't do shit about it then either. They have nukes so we have to attack.
Now, go be a good citizen and participate in some blind nationalism and virtue signaling with your pledge of allegiance to an inanimate object while simultaneously and intentionally starving brown kids by the thousands.
Can't a giant EMP come and save us? I'm so tired.
- Let‘s convince Iran of the existence of space jews so when they get a nuke, they light up the atmosphere and kill all the powergrids and servers forever. Peace, out!

We didn’t start the fire. It was always burning since the world’s been turning. No we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.

I just joined the Bundeswehr (the german army) a couple of weeks before 9/11. I still remember that I thought "You idiot really have managed to join the military right at the beginning of WWIII..."

I don't really understand the age focus on this one. People older than millenials have also experienced all that plus some extra shit which millenials haven't. We are all in this together (except for the billionaires and their dictator friends), regardless of age.
- Watching your mom die is a bit more shocking at 12 than it is when you are 40
  
  These are millennials having main character syndrome about watching stuff on tv.
  Meanwhile there are actual war zones in which all age groups are getting physically wiped out.
  They actually are losing their moms at any age . Not just watching stuff on tv.
- The circle of life. We're about due for a depression and a war. Humans are so predictable it is mind numbing

Everyone's always quick to declare the beginning of World War 3, to pass every event through that lens. Inadvertently, it provides cover for the fact that Cold War 2 already started.
- The Cold War never ended
- I don't think anyone is seriously "declaring" WW3. It's just an acknowledgement that there's a lot of unrest in many different regions.
  A global conflict in 2025 would be very different to WW2.
  Cyber attacks could decimate a country's ability to make war.
- I fear at this point the two are not even incompatible.
- Cold War 2 is not so much the superpowers vying against each other, but desperately attempting to retrench their power over the global south and their own citizens. The adversarial stance is largely political theatre to manifest the narrative of great powers locked in competition, while in reality Moscow and Washington meet in private to decide the fate of Ukraine and Iran. (I’m also counting China here)
- Did the Cold War ever really end? I feel like the names of the players may have changed, but the board is still there and the pieces are still moving.
  
  There was a bit of a moment after the USSR dissolved where the US was just kinda spinning its wheels without any clear purpose. We still had all the institutions for weapons manufacturing, intelligence gathering, financial strong-arming -- they were still doing their thing, but without an overall narrative to give a unified sense of purpose.
  You can almost imagine 9/11 being somewhat of a relief -- like, oh thank god a clear external enemy, now we don't have to struggle justifying our continued existence. And, of course, now our leaders can't agree on weather we're in existential conflict with Russia or China or both. This go round, we are the crumbling gerontocracy.

You forgot Y2K. That was wild.
- Ah, yes, the one crisis we managed to avert during our lifetime...
  
  It's not the only one. Ozone Hole has been recovering since the 80s thanks to people who actually listened to scientists.
  
  Well, there have been plenty of potential Covids, that were nipped in the bud, because we had more competent leadership that heeded scientists, and systems in place to catch them early. It's just that when Covid hit we...didn't.
- Was it? Other than media overhyping the dangers and saying it’ll end the world, I don’t think it had much of an impact.
  
  The dangers were very much real, we just took them seriously and fixed the problem so it didn't have an impact.
  
  Y2K is the perfect example of a crisis averted. There was a major problem that would've crashed computer systems all over the world, potentially bringing down power grids, financial institutions, hospital networks, etc. But the problem was identified well ahead of time and programmers and engineers spent like a full year working to ensure that the problem was fixed and wouldn'timpact anything, so it never became A Problem like the media said it was.

Probably not better if you were born in 1900. You were born in an European Monarchy. Life is not exactly free, but stable and prosperous.
Some psycho stabs a queen, and all of a sudden all of Europe and a lot of the rest of the world is at war. Most of Europe is razed to the ground and millions of soldiers return with heavy PTSD.
The monarchy is done, you got a completely new system in Europe and a communist revolution in Eastern Europe/Russia.
Times such, but stability returns for a few years until the Great Depression hits and boom, we got Nazis, holocaust, and yet another world war, which is ended by a literal science fiction weapon that can raze whole cities to the ground at the press of a button.
And now your country is occuped by a foreign army, while everything has to be rebuilt.
Seriously, the phase from 1955-2000 was an anomaly. That was pretty much the most peaceful time in world history. Before that, constant wars, pagues, starvation and general horrors were the norm, not the exception.
- And even with that, you are glossing over the Spanish Flu. The "peaceful" time since the '50s included numerous massive wars, not least of which was the Vietnam war.
  The idea that every time period has its own chaos is the whole point of the song We Didn't Start the Fire, written in 1989.
  
  Everyone glosses over the Spanish Flu ;)
  At least the wars since the 50s have not been on European or US soil. Well, except of the wars that were actually on European soil.
  But yeah, it's totally true that constant chaos is constant.

I have a much lesser ww3 vibe than when the Ukraine thing started. It hasn't even crossed my mind but it keeps popping up everywhere. Perhaps I'm missing something crucial here.
- Perhaps I’m missing something crucial here.
  For me, the crucial bit here is political ideology vs. religion. Russia invading Ukraine is purely political in my opinion, whereas the Israel/Iran conflict can't really be separated from religion. Might be spitballing here, but religious fanatics might be more extremist (willing to escalate war to defend their beliefs) than political fanatics. I also think USA's historical defense of Israel is in play here, whereas USA's involvement with Ukraine hasn't really been a thing.
- Yep I've got anxiety and I honestly thought something awful would happen. For about 6 weeks I was taking a rucksack with clothing, food and wind up radio wherever i went.
- It’s probably because Iran doesn’t have any nukes
  
  Or friends. Nobody's going to war over Iran. Suggesting this is WW3 is quite the stretch. America bombs places. It's just what we do. Dropping bombs on poor brown countries is as American as apple pie, and it crosses the aisle.

We watched the second plane hit live on a shitty CRT in my Geography class. Shit was insane. I'm so damn tired...
- I was having computer science class and I remember seeing the news... Felt so unreal to see something like that in America. Went home, watched news for the entire day.
  Then I read a lot about 9/11 the following years. I think it changed the perception about America in a lot of people.

Ah, but we have the benefit of never being able to buy a house, and having the same minimum wage for 16 years.

WW3 ain't coming, and if it was there's nothing you could do about it anyway.
Dead people don't buy oil, financial services, adverts, housing, or plastic tat from China.
Unhappy people buy lots of it, or at least go into debt trying.
The goal of the world is to keep you miserable and spending.
- Amen. As a millennial I've lost count of the times I've heard that WW3 is starting. Every time shit pops off in the Middle East (almost always thanks to the good ol' US of A) the media starts handwringing and people start panicking.
  But even if we do end up in a world war, the world won't stop turning. People with bombs raining down on them still need to go to work and cook dinner and pay their bills.
  War has always been a reality for someone somewhere in the world. But if/when it's our turn, we're so self-centered we think that it's the actual apocalypse.
  All we can do is keep working to make life better for each other. Even though shit is pretty bleak for everyone with late stage capitalism and climate change, it's not nearly the worst thing any group of people have ever experienced.
  So you can give up, or you can embrace radical nihilism and choose to cling to any scrap of joy you can find while working to make things better, even if it's just the tiniest bit.
  In the grand scheme of human history, western civilization as we know it is a tiny blip. It's incredible that we're here to witness this moment. If nothing else, let sheer curiosity and spite drive you to keep going.
  
  The people that make the news for this kind of crap are also the ones who report it to you in that sensational way to get those reactions. Some of those who work forces...
  
  Yeah I feel like if a direct attack on American soil that killed thousands of civilians didn't spark WW3, then nothing will
- You're expecting old farts in charge to be always rational about everything. They need to let their rotting brains to slip up once, and we're all fucked.

Gen-Xer who remembers the cold war and also lived through all that other shit: Welp I guess I'm flinging myself back off the fucking wagon.
- You got to benefit from the 80s and selling off of all our national assets to prop up our economy for 2 decade's
  You lived in the good times and called it "the cold war".
  From a millennial give us our stuff back (to the state who gave it to you).
  
  Man, don't pick a Millennial vs Gen X fight. Most of Gen X got just as fucked as we did and pretending otherwise is some ageist bullshit
  Boomers ruined the economy and sold Gen X and Millennials the American Dream. We both figured out it was a lie too late. Gen Z is the first generation to see the truth from an early age and I won't be hearing any trashtalk about how they're lazy because of it, either
  Sure, more of Gen X benefitted from the boomer economy than Millennials but that doesn't mean they owe us something. We're on the same team.
  
  Dude I'm disabled and can barely afford food, I didn't benefit from shit.

Things are gonna get worse before they get better, so buckle up.
- They also become worse before they become the worst

My daughter was in kindergarten and saw a man fall to his death on 9-11. Its stuck with her. Nothing was done to those assholes who allowed this to happen.
- You mean your government and their Saudi money men?
  
  No. You should be able to figure out who I meant now. Right?
  Edit: Bless your heart, I guess not.
- I was 15 when I watched a guy blow his brains out on a freeway overpass on broadcast TV. That's always stuck with me.
  
  When my daughter was old enough I told her about the first death I saw. I was six years old and at a small dirt race track that operated for a few years. A photographer was crossing the track at the end of the night and I was looking right at him when a orange race car hit him at a fairly high speed. I was only about ten to twenty yards from him. I remember he was twitching and I remember all the blood on the track after they took him away. My mother of course was storing it all up for her vile daily gossip the next day. She dismissed my distress and told me it happens. Most people never see a person die. It affected me deeply and I was denied my distress by my parents. I'm thankful I could explain to my daughter that what she saw should upset her. Seeing something like that at a young age sticks with you.

OJ Simpson murdered his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman.
One of OJs lawyers was Robert Kardashian, Kim Kardashian's father.
US President Bill Clinton impeached over abusing his power by getting a blowjob in the Oval Office from an intern. Then lying about it.
Y2K. Remember that?
- AIDS.
  And in my country, a coup, a toxic syndrome, a housing bubble, terrorism, ...
  
  It's amazing to me the strides in medicine that have helped reduce the deaths associated with HIV in such a short time. I remember that shit was like a 1 to 2 year mortality rate, and people are now able to live much much longer.

Toss in an exploding space shuttle and the fall of the Berlin wall and you get Gen X.
- Born in 83.
  Was there for the shuttle, remember the Berlon wall and the first Iraq war pretty well, was a senior in high school for 9/11.
  Meanwhile, on 9/11 my sister was at her office working her new job she got after graduating college.
  At Enron.
- 2 exploding space shuttles
  
  One exploded. The other disintegrated.
  
  Need Another Space Agency
- Also the Herald of Free Enterprise and Chernobyl.

I love how it only recognizes the "recessions" as those that impact rich people. The metrics are fucked. We've been in a recession since 2008.

Anyone who didn't vote last year can please quit whining.
- Oh shut up already, voting systems all over the place have been messed up for ages (Electoral college? First past the post?), proper blank voting (obviously) denied or defanged, opportunities to create alternatives denied years ago, usually by existing parties which are often so entrenched and converging to the right anyway that simplifying to "you can't complain if you didn't vote" sounds like the moralising of a first year uni student discovering PolSci.
  I vote against shitty candidates and in local elections. I'm under no illusion about its effect and fully respect election boycott and those who refuse to vote.
  If you're not happy about the results of an election, the first to blame are those who voted for the shitty candidate and their policies, not those who said thanks, but none of the above.
  
  Voting for government is not "who do you think should be in charge" it's "these are your options now". Your time to change those options is way way before the election.
  Not voting is voting "ehh, just whoever everyone else thinks."
  Abstaining isn't the big brain move you think it is.
  
  Well thanks then. Have the day you voted for.
  
  If people don’t give enough of a fuck to use their voice then why should I give a shit what they have to say?
  Nothing isn't brave, it’s nothing. If someone decides that they don’t matter then I’m inclined to agree with them.

- Isnt it wild that the nothing ever happens chud has gone from /pol/ to mainstream. Its always so jarring to see people post the exact same stuff open nazi's post.
  Not saying you're a nazi or anything, just rambling about how memes spread through communities.
  
  Look at what happened to the 👌 sign. You can now get into legal trouble in some EU countries for doing this gesture, even though many militaries use it as the "all right" sign with the hand beside the face. It‘s absurd

Ah yes.
Fuck

Elementary school for me, I think 2nd grade, but yeah
- I was in kindergarten, so i get all of this before i'm even 30.

Yeah, pretty much. We burned up the middle class trying to bomb Iraq because of Bin-Laden. Billionaires won't spend their money, poor people don't have money to spend, not sure where republicans think the cash is going to come from for this crusade.

I'm 40
- What's it like?

And holding the camera is generation x, smiling and nodding like an exhausted parent as though millennials have discovered something new.

I can't remember why but I didn't go to school that day. I remember finding out because I was arguing with my brother about what movie to watch, then complaining to my mom, and her freaking out going "You're complaing about this when there's a national crisis going on?!"

Our leadership has been trying to benefit the rich for decades, not you. Please resist.

Jokes on you, meme. I'd dropped out of high school and was working full time at Spencer's by then. I got to see the second plane hit on a bank of TV's at RadioShack on my way back from getting a pack of cigarettes from the news stand by the Sbarro.
- One CircuitCity away from a Bingo

"This is fine"

Math class.

Haha Shartzer

It was AP European history, but, ya, wtf this has been wild
- Biology for me. I remember watching the towers collapsing when the teacher turned the TV off and said we should just go about our day normally.
  Golgi apparatus. (Was that a person jumping I saw before?) Lysosomes.
- Hey US history, and for me it was just a teacher walking into the class, going to the closet, grab ing his coat, and going "A plane just crashed into the WTC," and leaving. Like, dude, how are you going to do that.

Live during jr high but yeah

literally watched
What's the other way?
- Figuratively watched. It’s when you watch figure skaters.
- Actually, I was asleep when they struck because I had no classes that day, so I mainly saw replays of the clips right after the event.