i am middle aged man, i experienced life since before even computer and smartphone is a thing like today.
back then, i feel that life is much easier, what i mean easier is more simple life, less competition, less stress, fresh environment, and more happiness despite lack of technology.
but right now, everything is just too complicated despite of power of tech, internet, smartphone, and AI helps, i feel that life is much harder right now, what i mean is like competition is everywhere, stressful everyday, crowded city, and i easily depressed these days.
is it just me or everyone else can relate to what happens right now?
Thirty-something Norwegian here. I am born into a rich, relatively functioning social democracy with a good welfare state. Buying my own home was a real struggle, even with a good salary. Many of my peers will never own, my younger friends will struggle to ever own, or never.
Unfortunately the welfare state is eroding, prices for everything is increasing heavily, and the private sector is a growing leech on the state.
the real problem is capitalism
May your welfare state never erode enough to remove your Healthcare and turn it into exclusively private!
Bills went up, pay did not keep up.
This is true, but It’s not just that. There is friction built into everything, designed to squeeze as much as possible out of us.
Yeah companies used to pretend to please customers and now they don’t even pretend.
The staff are minimum wage and don’t care because it’s a big corporation so you can’t get good service.
The price is high because the shareholders must be kept happy so you pay over the OSA Odds.
Corners were cut in several places making the product to please the shareholders too and the workers manufacturing got minimum wage in the factory wherever it was located and have zero interest in making good products as a result.
Basically capitalism ate itself
here i am still unable to buy a house or car
There’s a whole lot of awful going on.
My dad used to rant about how government should be run like a business, no, no dad, it really, really should not. Businesses do not care about people, businesses don’t want anything but money, your money, and they will twist, turn, manipulate, lobby, and flat out steal or harm people to get it.
So the next time you call 311, the non emergency police line, or God forbid 911 remember, your call is very important to us, a representative will be with you shortly. If you’d like to take a brief survey after the call just stay on the line. If you’d like to talk to our chat bot Sally just say, hey Sally!
My dad used to rant about how government should be run like a business,
Anyone who sincerely believes that is too fucking ignorant and or stupid to be taken seriously. They’re a hazard to themselves and their polity.
He’s dead so you can relax
Sorry for the lol
My dad used to rant about how government should be run like a business, no, no dad,
The last thing you hear: Sorry but your citizen contract has been revoked in order to meet our 3rd quarter profit target. You have been terminated!
“It was in the user agreement.”
guess your dad regrets his rant now, everything is just business now.
He didn’t live to see any of this bullshit. He died bitching about her emails.
Simpler times.
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I have had a few corporate jobs. Businesses are NOT efficient.
Imagine thinking businesses are efficient in big 26
People who say what you say have fundamental misunderstandings about how governments work and about how private companies (“businesses”) work.
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OP, it’s also going to sound like a cliche, but touch grass. The cancer-like tech companies want to replace your sense of community so that they have more power over you. F them, join a local group, and find yourself feeling more powerful when you have a real community behind you.
see also: misery loves company
Yep! Something about staring into the void, yada yada yada
Every time your life gets harder, some rich persons life gets easier. Welcome to capitalism.
I’m not even sure if the average rich person’s life is actually getting better by hoarding even more wealth. I tend to believe that being really rich is kind of an illness. Like an addiction where you never feel powerful or rich enough because there’s always someone that’s ahead of you. I feel that capitalism, especially in its current stage, is really bad for everyone.
yes, join your local communist party
im putting groceries on credit. i had a great credit score till this year, i havent even tried making payments on certain things including ER bills. only a matter of time before im bankrupt, and i am also disabled. i have given up on having a future and I’m only 32.
Mid twenties here, same situation. My bank closed my accounts lol
It’s really hard to tell what was just younger kids not being exposed to the world vs. things actually getting worse. I was a kid during '08, and things didn’t really change for me at home cuz my family was always very frugal, especially my dad.
Climate change has empirically gotten worse tho. Inflation, enshitification, food quality, all of it SEEMS worse but it’s hard to quantify it you know?
nah lil bro. The enshittification is real and huge. The quality of goods, particularly what used to be reputable brands, is 100% in the shitter. I have started only buying fabric with natural fibers in them because polyester sucks. Turns out that’s a lot harder than it used to be. I’ve been a regular grocery shopper for the entirety of this century. Things were pretty much the same price for years and years. There was a bump in 08 to punish us for electing a half-black guy and demanding reasonable pay, but then it stabilized until around 2018. Shit has increased in price by multiples while quantity and quality have plummeted.
We’re fucked bro. Get whatever enjoyment out of this life while you can. There are some unprecedented hard times coming. We’re going to pay for the recklessness and irresponsibility of the boomers. Buy hey, they got theirs, didn’t they?
This isn’t the boomers fault, what did they do? There is no reason we can’t get good pay and cheap groceries now, aside from capitalists knowing they don’t need to anymore.
- horded wealth
- refused to retire or mentor
- outsourced manufacturing to Asia for a quick buck
- aggressively supported anti-labor policies.
- deregulated the environment, media, antitrust - all the things that kept water and air clean, houses affordable, and an empowered middle class possible.
- Allowed the uber-corrupt Machiavellian shitbird pals of Nixon to run and influence the country for decades.
- killed pensions
- Supported Israel, turning a blind eye to their blackmail, false-flag attacks, and war crimes.
- fostered evangelical dumbassery, satanic panic, etc.
I mean, Boomer greed and selfishness has given us the burning heap we have now. Good news is it’s too late. They benefitted from the establishment of the middle class and then shot it in the face.
I’m going to start by saying I’m not entirely sure if a lot of these claims you have made are true or not since you don’t have any sources and I don’t really have time to do much research myself. But I believe a lot of these are relatively meaningless regardless of their factuality.
Hoarding wealth is hardly an idea that has any real effect, that is assuming you are referring to wealth and not capital. People who earn their own money through working have the right to spend or not spend it as they see fit. Regardless they aren’t going to simply give you the money so them spending wealth doesn’t cause your conditions to improve anyway.
I actually do not understand why refusing to retire is a bad thing for younger generations. Also why do you think older people choose not to retire? Older people not retiring might be a sign of a deeper issue such as them not having enough savings to properly retire.
If you ask a random boomer “why did you outsource all the manufacturing to asia” they will most likely stare at you with a confused look. They did not decide to do it, the people who own factories decided to.
I do agree that many of the older generation are quite anti-union and antilabour, these pushes particularly happened around the late 80’s and 90’s. But this is true only because the capitalist press made them believe the lie that unions are disrupting the economy and workers are asking for more pay than they can afford.
The United States is a capitalist state is therefore dictated by the capitalist class. The media currently is and always has been controlled by the capitalist class that owns it. The government never regulated the press for the benifit of workers and workers of the boomer generation never had any control over the press. The things that kept houses affordable was the existence of socialist states in Europe and the USSR that had extremely affordable housing as well as more militant workers organising to improve conditions.
Could you actually provide a source to pensions? I’m not a USian and I was under the impression that the US never had pensions, I didn’t know they used to.
The “middle class” is not really a social class in the fact that it represents a material relationship with the means of production. By that I mean the only difference between the “lower class” and the “middle class” is the amount of wealth they own. It’s much better to talk about social classes in terms of weather they are earning money based of the work they do or earning money from other peoples work. That’s why Marxists prefer to talk about 2 main social classes: working class and capitalist class.
I realise now that most of my writing boils down to a similar argument: The boomer generation did not inflict most of the decisions you listed, the capitalist class did. Since when the capitalist class dictates the decisions made by the capitalist state the boomer working class (around 99% of the entire boomer generation) does not make the decisions themselves.
All the boomers in government are the problem.
Fucking yanks have an 80yr old for fucks sake. Can’t be any more out of touch then being older then most of your country.
Australia is no better really anyone in politics gets there sits there gets old and out of touch.
Their needs to be a hard limit on politicians so they don’t run the country based on how it was as they grew up 65 years ago. That’s an entirely different world
No politician, older or younger can make change without permission from the ruling class. In the case of capitalist countries that is the capitalist class. A younger politician won’t change the fact that the capitalist class forces them to do there bidding for them.
What about unions?
If you beleive they can stand up to a corporation then there’s no reason politicians could do the same.
Not to mention authoritarian countries stand up to corporations they don’t support.
There’s no real solution
What unions? Union membership in Australia has been falling since at least the '70s (source). The press is almost always anti union resulting in some of them being legally dismantled when they ask for too many rights. Such as the BLF. The unions that remain today only ever go on strike as a last resort, when conditions are dire.
Regardless unions are able to go on strike because they take away something bosses need: workers. When workers go on strike profits for bosses fall immediately and bosses are forced to do what they need to get workers working again.
Politicians don’t have this leverage. Political parties must do the bidding of capitalists in order to maintain donations to fund their advertising campaign. The capitalist class owns virtually all media and have almost complete control in terms of shaping peoples opinion on the current government. Politicians can’t implement policies that benefits workers at the expense of the rich.
Not to mention authoritarian countries stand up to corporations they don’t support.
I’m going to assume by “authoritarian” you mean socialist countries such as Vietnam, China, Cuba etc. These countries have the ability to stand up to corporations because they are truly democratic. The press of our capitalist country (I’m Australian too) has told us these country’s are authoritarian because they pose a social order that competes with capitalism.
The reality is that these countries are able to stand up to corporations because their government is ruled by the working class, not by the capitalist class. This is also why these countries consistently make decisions that benefit the working class at the expense of the capitalist class. Decisions such as cheap or free healthcare, immense poverty reduction schemes, increasing wages etc.
So, I hear you, but i saw this meme of newspaper clippings going back to like 1900 where business owners were quoted “people don’t want to work anymore”. We think it’s a new idea but its like 100+ years old.
Maybe companies have always looked for ways to cut corners and screw customers, we just focus on our last 20 years. And it’s not that before we got older they were all reputable and its only recently they’ve gone this greedy path. Its just cuz we didn’t know about it as kids, especially cuz the interent wasn’t huge yet.
I’m not trying to say things aren’t getting worse. They definitely are. But what if we’ve had this long, general decline of everything that’s always been happening and we didn’t see it or feel it cuz we were just kids.
The more you look into things, the more you find out that entire sectors of the economy are held by a handful of multinational conglomerates. Say there are 5 widgets on the shelf, all at different prices making different claims. then you find out that 3 of the 5 are all made in the same factory and put in different boxes, with the only difference being the brand name. The other 2 are both made in a different factory. Of the 3 from the same factory, one company has bought out the original two competitors and they now just use the old competitors’ branding. A different company owns the other two brands and then you find out that both of those companies are actually owned by a faceless multinational conglomerate. It is the illusion of choice. There is no actual competition. Koch, Proctor and Gamble, Nestle, Stellantis - all things you should investigate. All companies selling you garbage, shitting up the Earth, and convincing you that you still have some agency and aren’t just a critter to be milked for your labor.
It’s definitely getting worse, you’re not imagining it.
yeah it’s intentional.
oligarchs are hoarding the resources and getting people to distract themselves by pointing at each other while they stockpile their bunkers.
Wealth divide is worse. We are also in a time of change geopolitically. Also in a time where powerful actors benefit from creating controversy including media, social medial, political, and geopolitical. We live in interesting times.
Describe a time of geopolitical non-change please.
Well, before smartphones people didn’t get bombarded with bad news all the time. The changes were there but we hardly noticed them. Now they’re being shoved in our schnozes to instill fear and push us all to the far right.
Largely from 1947 to 2020.
The Cold War. Transfer of Hong Kong to China. The collapse of the USSR. Arab/Israeli wars. Vietnam and the Peace Movement. The oil crisis. 9/11. End of Segregation in the US. Womens’ Rights especially after the Pill Gay/Trans Rights The Korean War The Beatles
It’s pretty much constant.
All fairly minor. Now we are leaving the post WW2 era. No one knows what is next.
The Cold War, the threat of “Mutually Assure Destruction” that hung over all of heads for decades until the USSR dissolved, was “fairly minor”???
That has not ended. Russia and China have large supplies of nuclear weapons. Just like WW2, Russia has initiate a war in Europe with China, NK, and Iran as allies. China will invade TW at some point. NK may do the same to SK. All of these allies are nuclear powers except Iran which will be.
Yeah, i mean we make more stuff than ever before per capita and all that, and yet we still have to fight harder and harder to survive. How so? We’ll these fucking billionaires are also richer than ever before. Crassus’ wealth is estimated at like $2B in today’s dollars. Rockefeller is estimated at like $300-400B. Musk is more than double that. It’s very clear what’s happening, the rich use the capitalist surplus as a weapon to extract more wealth from the poor.
Sounds like things have been good for you in the past. I am happy for you, and wish you a return to the good times.
They say happiness is all about expectations, but I haven’t expected anything good and I am still disappointed.
Life isn’t that bad yet but owning things is starting to become impossible. You used to buy and own things now you are more and more only allowed to rent them. Be it movies, video games or your house.
Marx and Engels predicted that economies would become dominated by rentiers
They broke the social contract. The thing that a polite, cooperative society is built on. So now we see what that means as more everyday folk realize it over time.
