Is divorce my final ruin? (Millennial edition)
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Anonymous
+1. My dad went hungry a lot as a kid. Please, OP, get a grip. |
Anonymous
Seriously. My boomer dad had a dirt floor and no electricity on their farm, that my grandparents scratched out of the earth during the Depression. Then he was drafted for Vietnam. I grew up poor too but worked my way through college and made it to the middle class as a Gen-X-er but barely and it was damn hard. But we all STILL had it better than every generation before them in human history. Yes, Millennials and Gen-Z have problems too, not the least of which is their complete lack of knowledge of history, apparently. |
Anonymous
Another GenX here and I agree with everything the PP said. We had our own struggles and complications but I have no doubt our lives were easier than our parents. And my own kids who are teenagers have advantages I could never have dreamed of. Self-pity is pointless and corrosive. Do your best, work hard, change what makes you unhappy instead of spinning some narrative that the world is against you. |
Anonymous
I think this is where an understanding of human history is useful, or even an understanding of the last 200 years or so of American history. Yes, white Americans had a period of unprecedented prosperity in the mid 20th century. There were a raft of government programs that were undertaken to lift up the entire (white) population, from the GI Bill, to highways projects, to the entire project of building out the suburbs and making sure people could afford to buy homes. But not only were those gains unavailable to non-white Americans (look it up), but they were also pretty temporary. By the time we got around to extending all of those social welfare programs to Black and brown Americans, they were suddenly too expensive to continue funding. It's absolutely true that Millennials as a group have a steeper road to climb to middle class prosperity than their parents, but their definition of "middle class" is also a heck of a lot more expensive. Because they themselves grew up in 3500 square foot McMansions in highly segregated suburbs, they think that's what middle class looks like and spurn integrated close-in neighborhoods that actually much more closely resemble what middle class looked like before the massive wealth transfers of the New Deal to white Americans. |
Anonymous
All good points. |
Anonymous
| Gen x’er here. Please stop whining like a typical self- entitled millennial and grow up. Hopefully you are a troll. |
Anonymous
| Three kids?!?!? |
Anonymous
| Does the DW even work? My guess is that with three kids and living in the Midwest she does not. |
Anonymous
Millennials don’t have a “steeper road to climb to middle class prosperity.” Most of them were born INTO it. But they lack the self-awareness to realize it. That’s what people mean when they talk about it being such an entitled generation. Yes, their Boomer parents provided that, but their starting baseline in life is so much better than any other generation in history. |
Anonymous
^ I think this is right. I think the problem is that no one ever wants to trade down their standard of living - so if you grew up in a nice house with great food and a good car, then when you set out on your own and you don't immediately have these same things it feels like something's been taken away from you. My parents lived in a bad apartment, with an old car, and we didn;t have expensive vacations - until they got older and more established, and then we had a much higher standard of living. But it's not realistic that I will have their mid-life standard of living when I am just getting started myself. Then I have the bad apartment and old car (if there's a car at all), etc. There is just this sense that you want it all, and you want it immediately, and not having it makes the universe unfair - not that every generation has to go through the stages of adulthood until they, too, feel the comfort they grew up with (if they were lucky enough to grow up with comfort). Certainly some things have changed. Housing prices, for example. The cost of college. It's nuts. Even since I finished grad school in 2000 - coming out with $160k in loans, that I paid off over 20 years. It's more expensive now. But come on. The world is also infinitely easier in so many ways than it used to be. |
Anonymous
I was with you until that last bit! No, even if you want to live in a small house built in 1940 in one of those close-in neighborhoods and hate the idea of a huge McMansion, housing there is STILL much much more expensive in relation to income than it used to be. 500-700k for the smallest SFH or even rowhouse in the DMV is not affordable! |
Anonymous
I remember having a conversation with my father about how our podunk little rural NJ town was likely on a preliminary or secondary target list for the USSR, because there was a telephone switching station in it that controlled the phones for half the east coast. I think I was 10. No one said Gen X kids had it exclusively rough - people are just pushing back on those who are claiming that their generations *ahemmillennialsahem* have it worse than anyone. |
Anonymous
I am the PP - and yes, for sure, that's exactly what I meant. Sorry if that didn't come through. |
Anonymous
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I think the replies in this thread sound closer to OP’s tone than the posters realize or intend. The vast majority of the posters here castigating OP for her whininess and self-absorption sound equally whiny and self-absorbed (you think YOU have it bad? Well let me tell you about ME! YOUR life is easy!).
Additionally, most of these posters seem as though they are just about boiling over with rage, which to me indicates that they are NOT handling their own lives as wonderfully as they would have OP believe. Lashing out at random strangers on an anonymous mommy message board is not a healthy way to relieve stress, people. |
Anonymous
I don't get anyone boiling over with rage? |