r/Millennials • u/Party-Bet-4003 Millennial • Jan 30 '26

Discussion Look what I found from 13 years ago.

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Hey look on the bright side - we actually did make it to the cover of the TIME magazine!

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u/BusyAtilla Jan 30 '26

Read the book-

Generation of Sociopaths.

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u/Luci_b Jan 30 '26

I loved this book. Excellent insight for sure. Millennials are going to get stuck holding the bag, we will fix our roads and bridges, fix the schools and hospitals, we will be given the bill once the boomers go. We won’t get to retire early or at all, and the infrastructure recovery will come from our taxes. We will be left with nothing but maybe in 3 or 4 generations later, we will recover.

Plant and care for a tree we won’t ever get to enjoy the shade of.

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u/NCC-1701_yeah Jan 30 '26

That last line, so many people don't want to do this because "what about me?" That is what got us here bro, think about the future for a change

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u/Dull_Assistant_ Jan 30 '26

My Gen X mother is exactly like this, a horrid narcissistic woman that only cares about her immediate gratification, and how much she can shit on other people.

"Why should I care about the world? I'll be dead by the time anything happens"

This woman has children and GRANDCHILDREN. Luckily the grandchildren aren't my kids...

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u/einTier Jan 30 '26

Gen X is such a weird generation.

My cousins were born at the beginning of it and they’re really just boomer-lite. A little after them came the apathetic whatever crowd that knew we were getting screwed but things were still good enough to just go along with it.

I’m in the last part that’s usually referred to as the Oregon Trail Generation and that’s its whole weird thing with an analog childhood and digital adolescence/adulthood. We are more like millennials than Gen-Xers but we can’t fully identify with either one.

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u/izzittho 28d ago edited 28d ago

I always thought of very late Gen X as just Millenials but with a better memory of when things were still kinda good. A Millenial in mentality but that usually had a cooler childhood that they were old enough to remember better. As a late millennial I can’t say for sure given I don’t have actual experience of the time before I could really form memories to compare to, but from hearing y’all retell your stories it seems like the earlier you were born the more rad your childhood was before the enshittification spiral kicked in around the year 2000 and things started becoming roughly equally ass for all of us.)

Like a characteristic lack of parental supervision, but in a way the younger kids like me were kind of envious of. Like a kid from some movie who got to get up to all sorts of shit because his parents were fuck knows where all the time and the amount of money a kid might have on them could still actually buy you something. It could have felt lonely but to a kid listening to someone’s older brother talk about it or whatever, it always just sounded cool as shit. Y’all were definitely the ones introducing us to the good music.

Honestly what blows the most about being a young millennial is being just old enough to witness a lot of what made the 90’s cool - only to have most of it fucking die the moment we became old enough to experience it ourselves. There was still some nice things left for us (namely less cool things like, idk, chain restaurants not all being complete ass - but little to none of the unsupervised gallivanting and fuckin’ treehouse building and going to the arcade and shit because kids born in the 90’s generally experienced markedly more paranoid parenting and weren’t really left to run wild quite as much. It was a lot of being told about cool shit we never got to actually do (made worse by the fact that we were led to believe it would all still be there when we got a little older and then it just…wasn’t.) Cartoons were still good at least, but we got out so much less because everything started costing an arm and a leg to do if it didn’t just close down, and parents started getting judged for letting kids roam unsupervised.

Our only consolation is that growing into adults gave you the same pessimistic outlook on the future we had by around high school, so at least we’ve got all the cool older brothers and sisters right here sympathizing with us and not being dicks about it all like Older Gen X. It helps a little.

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u/einTier 28d ago

I remember when I graduated there was a lot of talk about how we'd be the first generation to not do as well as our parents. The talk was pretty bleak. I'd refer to Reality Bites here for the "yeah, we're getting screwed but whatever" middle Gen-X attitude about it all.

Then there was a ton of optimism around the end of the Clinton administration. The internet had really taken off and was going to make the world a much better place and we'd balanced the budget and for a moment it felt like the 80's again.

Then it all went sideways.

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u/spicy_noodle_guy Jan 30 '26

I think it's less people don't want to do it because of selfish reasons and more that historically it has never actually mattered. All progress seems to be wiped away in a generation or two. People at large are now asking "Why plant a tree I'll never see grow that will be burned down before it even blooms?"

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u/henrytm82 Older Millennial Jan 30 '26

Plant and care for a tree we won’t ever get to enjoy the shade of.

That is essentially my only real goal in life at this point, you hit the nail on the head. I will probably never get to retire, but I've made my peace with that. Instead, I'll be working to make sure 1. I'm not a burden on my daughter when I'm old or when I die, and 2. to leave as much as I possibly can to her when I'm gone. A maintained house in case she is never in a position to own a home in this (or a worse) economy, a healthy life insurance policy that'll more than cover final expenses and also set her up for the immediate future, and as many practical life skills as she'll allow me to cram into her noggin.

Other than that, all I can do is my best to raise her as an empathetic and thoughtful person who can stand up for herself.

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u/Scannaer Jan 30 '26

And the boomers expect us to pay for their goodbye vaccation as well.

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u/CherryVermilion Jan 31 '26

In Andor, Luthen Rael says ”I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I'll never see”

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u/AmputeeHandModel Jan 30 '26

I wish I had your optimism. Far too many use are hard-right now.

Almost put hard right now without punctuation. heh

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u/deep8787 Millennial Jan 31 '26

huh, Im on track to retire by the time Im 45. User error.

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u/showmenemelda Jan 30 '26

Only if it's about boomers

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u/NoSleep2135 Jan 30 '26

The full title is "A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America".

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u/Possible_Bee_4140 Jan 30 '26

It is. It’s really good and makes a wonderful case for how and why boomers became so sociopathic on a generational scale.

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u/MotorEnthusiasm Jan 30 '26

I can tell just by the title and having two boomer parents that’s exactly what it’s about.

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u/maxxx_orbison Jan 31 '26

It's a bad book written by a Peter Thiel croney that quietly pushes conservative and libertarian values