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  • I've gotten tired of this whole "everyone from this generation thinks the same, acts the same, is poor/wealthy", etc bullshit. The coincidence of your birthday doesn't automatically identify you.

    • No. But we are all a combination of our biology plus our experiences. Bring born at the same time as someone means a significant portio of your experiences will be more similar than with someone born decades after you. The fact is that Zoomers went through a disruptive global pandemic either while still in education or leaving to start their careers. That experience will inform who each of those young people become. The way that this effects each individual Zoomer will vary but it will affect them and so it makes them a demographic of "people who's education or early work experiences were disrupted by a pandemic." Those people will on average be a little more similar to one another then people who didn't experience that. Generational identities are formed by all the millions of experiences, big and small, those people have in common with one another but not with other generations by merit of being born at a particular time. Just as Zoomers went through a pandemic at a crucial early point of their lives the Greatest Generation endured the great depression and world war 2 in the first half of their lives. There's absolutely no reasonable way to claim that living through world war 2 wouldn't inform your personality and behaviour on some level. And so, people from the Greatest Generation (who lived through World War 2) will, due to that experience and many others, will have things in common with one another that they do not share in common with Zoomers (who didn't live through World War 2.) Another huge example is that somewhere roughly alligned with the millennial generation we made the transition from people who grew up with constant easy access to the vast expanse of information and communication on the Internet and people who grew up before they'd ever heard of it. Those are hugely different experiences. They change the part of you that is due to your experiences. The other people who share those experiences will tend to have commonalities with you that people who didn't share those experiences don't have.

  • I mean, is it really surprising that a generation full of Karens who have blamed other people their whole life for their problems are now blaming their posterity?

    • And here we are, blaming other people for their problem as well, and mostly just the other regular Joe whose only fault is to be born earlier

  • It is, at least partially, an inevitable consequence of an educational system that, whether by design or by accident, makes social mobility really difficult. Accessing advanced education often requires financial or personal sacrifices that are harder to make for lower income parents and kids. This is also compounded with the fact that in many places there's a perception that if you want a really good job you will need to go through this advanced education.

    I was in that situation myself, I was always told that I couldn't expect to get a really great job in IT unless I went to college, which was unfeasible for me both financially and in terms of my aptitudes as a student. But fortunately for me, I discovered that my country had a vocational education system that prioritized the quick transition from education to employment, and a mere year and a half later I had a decent job, six years later I am an engineer. Turns out it wasn't necessary to go through four years of extremely expensive, pointless hoops, I only needed a chance to prove myself in a professional environment. It only cost my family 800 euros in two payments, now we are doing well financially.

    So yeah, maybe just maybe if there were more systems in place like that, we wouldn't be reading how more and more parents are having to sacrifice everything just to give their kids a chance at some sort of future, you know?

    Idk maybe I'm rambling.

    • You've identified a part, and symptom, of the system. What is behind it is capitalism.
      Our education systems are designed to make us complacent worker drones incapable of critical thinking. Our higher education systems are sold as a necessity for anyone who wants a slightly less crappy life, and ensure anyone who doesn't already come from money who wants to go down that path starts their life in deep debt, making them desperate and easier to exploit.
      These are all features of the system there to ensure its own existence.

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