# Generation Envy



## AddictiveMuse

one of the most annoying things I find on here is this 'Generation Envy' 
you got Gen Xers wishing they were Gen Y and the Gen Y wishing they were Gen Xers and then the Generation Z kids envying both Y and X and being looked down on by the Y guys and the Baby Boomers just in the midst of all this
I find this all to be incredibly stupid and unnecessary..

why not create a vent thread based on the Generations?
Do what you want with this idea..also...what is your stance on this Generation envy topic?


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## Psychophant

I don't really see anyone being looked down on. I think it's funny though when someone says they envy an older generation in a pathetic attempt to feel superior to people their age. Pretty silly to let your generation label define you anyway.


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## tangosthenes

Why the fuck would you want to be Gen X. That generation sucks. Generation Y sucks too. Ok, all the generations suck. Why would you wish to be a person?


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## athenian200

I sometimes envy people who got to live through the 1980s, but I think it should be fairly understandable why.

It's not that I feel superior, it's that I think being born 10 years earlier would have given me a much happier life. I feel like I would have had a chance to be a part of the Internet first being built, and to build my resume during a time of economic prosperity where more jobs are available. Not to mention, a lot of my favorite movies and music were popular back then. 

Also, I feel like a lot of things have been formalized and closed off to the point that you can't get away with anything. You can't lie about your experience or education, they check everything electronically. There are cameras everywhere, there are lots of regulations and people like to play it safe when hiring. They expect you to be involved in many things and be able to provide multiple forms of ID, beyond what is government issued.

To be honest, one of the biggest reasons I envy an older generation is because they were living at the peak of American civilization rather than close to the point where the "bill is coming due," if you know what I mean. I'd rather have been one of the people who got to enjoy the good times rather than one of those who has to pay for it and tighten their belt.

I know it's selfish, though.


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## tanstaafl28

@AddictiveMuse

Never heard of such a thing. Tell me more...


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## AddictiveMuse

tanstaafl28 said:


> @AddictiveMuse
> 
> Never heard of such a thing. Tell me more...


Haha I was looking through this thread about this guy who was born in 1990 and hated because he wasn't classified as an 80's baby
And then went on to say how he wished he was gen x, it kinda just pissed me off..


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## tanstaafl28

AddictiveMuse said:


> Haha I was looking through this thread about this guy who was born in 1990 and hated because he wasn't classified as an 80's baby
> And then went on to say how he wished he was gen x, it kinda just pissed me off..


You could also take it as flattery...

My basic reason for not envying the younger generations I was young once. I don't see a point in going through all that again, even if they did get a few hundred channels of cable, DVD's, CD's, cell phones, the Internet...etc.


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## PowerShell

Honestly I could care less. I can relate to most adults no matter what age (I guess starting in the working world very early helps). I enjoy being young still (well 25 in the whole scheme of things is young) but also enjoy having some wisdom under my belt. I like where we are technologically and I look forward to the future.


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## TheSpinningDoctor

AddictiveMuse said:


> Haha I was looking through this thread about this guy who was born in 1990 and hated because he wasn't classified as an 80's baby
> And then went on to say how he wished he was gen x, it kinda just pissed me off..


The guy who hates being born in 1990, his name is Donnie Darko. It's a zillion times better to be born in the very beginning of a decade rather than get aborted in the womb or being born with a serious problem.


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## Antiloop

Yomiel said:


> I don't really see anyone being looked down on. I think it's funny though when someone says they envy an older generation in a pathetic attempt to feel superior to people their age. Pretty silly to let your generation label define you anyway.


I absolutely hate when you're listening to some song from the 90s on Youtube, and you're feeling all nostalgic, but then you read the comments and encounter some kid who complains that all kids nowadays just listen to Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber or whatever. It really ruins the mood for me. The kid wishes to have been born way earlier when "true music was made". Yeah. In twenty years the crap music of today will have been forgotten too. I'm assuming they want to feel special and distance themselves from their peers..


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## AddictiveMuse

Antiloop said:


> I absolutely hate when you're listening to some song from the 90s on Youtube, and you're feeling all nostalgic, but then you read the comments and encounter some kid who complains that all kids nowadays just listen to Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber or whatever. It really ruins the mood for me. The kid wishes to have been born way earlier when "true music was made". Yeah. In twenty years the crap music of today will have been forgotten too. I'm assuming they want to feel special and distance themselves from their peers..


Yes! I hate those, I kind of always want to reply with:'do you want the medal or the chest to pin it on?' They're almost as bad as the usual spam comments..


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## Purrfessor

I actually love the time I was born. I get to have a childhood that wasn't superficial and also internet at like 12! It's amazing!


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## JoanCrawford

delphi367 said:


> I sometimes envy people who got to live through the 1980s, but I think it should be fairly understandable why.


The 80's seemed to suck in many respects. Greedy, corporate, capitalist America at its finest. And their clothing matched it.


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## PowerShell

People tend to remember the good or look back and people talk about the "good ol' days." In the whole scheme of things there was just as many problems then as there is now. Statistically speaking, a lot of problems like crime, teenage pregnancies, and pollution (in the US) are down.


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## lifefullofwords

No, I don't wish I were a member of a different generation.



PowerShell said:


> People tend to remember the good or look back and people talk about the "good ol' days." In the whole scheme of things there was just as many problems then as there is now. Statistically speaking, a lot of problems like crime, teenage pregnancies, and pollution (in the US) are down.


Yeah, but life is worse for a lot of Americans right now than it was in the 90s. Not saying the past was perfect or the present is all bad but on the whole things were better. Lots of things have gotten worse but what stands out is there's a lot more unemployment and general financial insecurity. America was simply more prosperous and stable in the 90s than it is today.


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## PowerShell

lifefullofwords said:


> Yeah, but life is worse for a lot of Americans right now than it was in the 90s. Not saying the past was perfect or the present is all bad but on the whole things were better. Lots of things have gotten worse but what stands out is there's a lot more unemployment and general financial insecurity. America was simply more prosperous and stable in the 90s than it is today.


Could it be a lot of that stability was actually an unsustainable bubble that was starting that then took off until the mid 2000's (with a minor recession in between) and then it all came crashing down? It may have seemed more prosperous then, but long term, we're paying for it. The thing is, technology is making things better.


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## lifefullofwords

PowerShell said:


> Could it be a lot of that stability was actually an unsustainable bubble that was starting that then took off until the mid 2000's (with a minor recession in between) and then it all came crashing down? It may have seemed more prosperous then, but long term, we're paying for it. The thing is, technology is making things better.


I agree but I think people always pay for the good times with bad times. During good times people take risks and they get lazy and then eventually society pays. It doesn't mean things weren't materially better, at least for Americans, in the 90s.

Technology has done a lot to improve the world but it has also done a lot to create the difficult situation the West is in right now. Technological advancements are double-edged swords, they lead to many improvements but they also cause a lot of difficulty. For example, outsourcing wouldn't have been possible without modern technology and it's led to a lot of jobs being lost in America.


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## Tranquility

I envy the 1920's… Jung, Russel, AND Tesla? Amen.


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## PowerShell

lifefullofwords said:


> I agree but I think people always pay for the good times with bad times. During good times people take risks and they get lazy and then eventually society pays. It doesn't mean things weren't materially better, at least for Americans, in the 90s.
> 
> Technology has done a lot to improve the world but it has also done a lot to create the difficult situation the West is in right now. Technological advancements are double-edged swords, they lead to many improvements but they also cause a lot of difficulty. For example, outsourcing wouldn't have been possible without modern technology and it's led to a lot of jobs being lost in America.


I do agree that wages have stagnated and there are some things we are a bit worse off in but technology has immaterialized a lot of things. Think of Netflix. How much would it cost to rent from a video store the average number of movies that a Netflix subscriber watches. I bet it would cost more than $8 a month. How about sites that allow streaming live stuff? You can drop cable. That saves money. Technology is a double-edged sword, no doubt, but overall it seems it's making the cost of things cheaper.


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## Grandmaster Yoda

There were golden ages thousands of years ago. To me the good old days were when I was young kid, it probably had little to do with the setting and more to do with the fact that I was just kid enjoying stuff as it came to me.


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## Thalassa

Amandine said:


> I agree. I think if I had been born in another generation, I might have turned out a completely different person.
> 
> As someone who has been born into a world where internet has been there from the very beginning, it's difficult to imagine a world without it. Technology has had such a big impact on my life. Though it's interesting to imagine what it would have been like to live in certain time period. That's why I love reading stories from all sorts of times and places.
> 
> 
> Plus, I'm currently one of the last teenagers to be born before the late 90's which is pretty cool. It's funny to think that I might possibly be one of the last few on earth to have even been alive in the 20th century. Maybe I'll make it to the 22nd if I'm lucky.


Yeah that's cool, if you were born in like 97-99 someday you could potentially be that, sure....and yes if you were born in a different generation you would definitely be a different person. In fact apparently one of the reasons there was so much crime from the 60s through the early 90s is because of exposure to LEAD POISONING in that generation *meaning Baby Boomers btw*. I mean...holy fucking Christ. No wonder Gen X and Gen Y is considered so "smart" and 36 now even looks younger than it used to. Just physically what people were once exposed to in terms of disease, poor nutrition...and leaded gasoline. That's terrifying.

But I don't want to be younger because I like that I can remember what the world was like before extreme overdevelopment, the population has nearly doubled in my lifetime, and I think part of what is important about being able to remember the 20th century like Gen X and Gen Y do, but also having had benefited from technology, is exactly what may drive us to save the earth. Possibly. Maybe. I don't know. 

If anything I think it would have been nice to be a generation that more "sure" of itself, like any generation before the Boomers, pretty much any generation between Lost/G.I. or Silent...being born from approximately the late 1800s until about 1940....those people lived in a much more structured world of right and wrong, good and evil, social responsibility and a generally slower pace ...but they still had to contend with many hardships we do not. One of the things Baby Boomers did was free us from that kind of rigidity but they also forced the Western world into pretty much complete social upheaval. Having been born in the late 20th century I am not sure how happy I would have been in that world, but if I had been born then, I probably wouldn't have known better, and I think people were less anxious then, less fearful...we have a lot more anxiety in our world. 

I went through phases of saying oh wouldn't it be fun to live through this decade or that, but really I just mean in terms of popular culture and events, the truth is actually being there and being part of that generation isn't one frozen experience in time, the hippies had to leave the 60s and the yuppies had to leave the 80s, just like we have left behind the 00s and eventually will the 2010s.


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## Thalassa

MartinAcoustics12 said:


> What's wrong with envying older generations? We can't change what time period we were born in, heck I wish I was born in the 17th century where all I would have had to do was read, paint and write letters.



...if you had been rich. More likely you would have been a peasant.


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## Thalassa

MartinAcoustics12 said:


> Plus music has been so shitty these last 8 years, like the shittest it's EVER been. ITS NEVER BEEN WORSE. So apart from Alt-J Gen Z are still waiting for something universally considered great. So yeah until that happens I will always envy the early 00's, early 90's, late 70's, mid-late 60's and 50's music.



M.I.A., Bat For Lashes, the Xx, Cat Power, The Knife, Fever Ray, Hurts, Lissie, Florence and the Machine, Lana Del Rey, Sleigh Bells, The Drums, MGMT, The Joy Formidable, Lilly Allen, The Glitch Mob, Sia, Eminem, Groove Armada, Phoenix, Jr Boys, M83, The National, Royksopp, Crystal Castles...I don't know what kind of music you listen to, but all those people have put out good new albums or singles in the past eight years, even if you aren't into Taylor Swift, Niki Minaj, or Tre or something, there are plenty of other musicians out there. 

I listen to music from pretty much the entire 20th and 21st century and I always get annoyed when people say stuff like this, it just seems so pretentious or ignorant.


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## Thalassa

PowerShell said:


> People tend to remember the good or look back and people talk about the "good ol' days." In the whole scheme of things there was just as many problems then as there is now. Statistically speaking, a lot of problems like crime, teenage pregnancies, and pollution (in the US) are down.


Yes, thank you for pointing this out, pollution actually is decreasing thanks to environmental law and technology, and crime has decreased even in major cities since the 90s. 

I actually was having a field day making fun of some retarded people commenting on the Anaconda Niki Minaj video last week because they were bemoaning the immoral state of music and the effect it would have on children, one fool even stating he wanted his daughter to only listen to music from the seventies and eighties, and I said oh yeah make sure she listens to a lot of Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, Madonna and Prince, moron.


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## Thalassa

Antiloop said:


> I absolutely hate when you're listening to some song from the 90s on Youtube, and you're feeling all nostalgic, but then you read the comments and encounter some kid who complains that all kids nowadays just listen to Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber or whatever. It really ruins the mood for me. The kid wishes to have been born way earlier when "true music was made". Yeah. In twenty years the crap music of today will have been forgotten too. I'm assuming they want to feel special and distance themselves from their peers..


Are those even real people? It almost seems like a troll meme "Hi I am only twelve/thirteen/fourteen years old, but I love this music, it's so much better than the music of today." It's always the same basic sentence and they always feel a need to announce that they are in approximately the eighth grade, I'm not sure why. "I want to be friends with adults, please molest me." 

I'm not sure what it's even about.


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## Thalassa

Grandmaster Yoda said:


> There were golden ages thousands of years ago. To me the good old days were when I was young kid, it probably had little to do with the setting and more to do with the fact that I was just kid enjoying stuff as it came to me.


It's entirely about perception. It's why the early 80s seemed so cool to me for so long, and I finally realized within the past few months the reason why I feel "haunted" by certain songs of the late 70s or very early 80s is probably because my mother listened to them in the final months of her pregnancy or when I was an infant/toddler in the pre-memory state, so I have these hazy not really memories of songs and my brain made up stories to explain away why I felt "haunted" by songs I had no clear memory of hearing in my childhood until I "discovered" older music in my teens. 

Also one of the weird phenomenons that I almost never talk about is that the 60s and 70s hold some weird power for me, and did more so when I was younger, because it was right before I was born, so it seems close yet far away, mysterious like a land behind a hazy mist or a veil, that only came alive for me by renting old movies on VHS when I was in middle and high school. 

I think for some of these people born in the early 90s who say they wish they were an 80s baby, the 80s must feel like that to them, the way the late 60s and 70s feel to me...it's not even that they envy another generation necessarily, maybe they just genuinely feel like some kind of awe or mystery about the time period that immediately led up to their birth, when their parents were alive but they weren't. 

But then again I went through this weird phase when I was about 10 or 11 when I was infinitely possessed with the idea of traveling back in time to the 1950s, then not too much later, here came David Lynch with Twin Peaks, marrying the late 80s/early 90s to the 1950s and it really fulfilled some kind of thing for me.

I think some people just want to travel back in time, just out of curiosity. Like "I want to go to Spain, I want to go to Portugal, I want to go to 1937." 

I read recently that more people would rather go to the past than the future than ever before. It definitely means something about our culture. It could be interpreted extremely negative (end of empire, end of world even) or in a totally different way as a neutral or a positive that our culture simply needs to shift to attain some kind of balance, and the only way we can do that is to stop blindly focusing on progress or innovation and focus on things that were important that we may have left behind in the past (simplify, simplify, simplify).


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