Old people had it so easy when they were young

You're absolutely right OP. Thankyou. Most older people really have no idea, My grandfather wanted to leave school at 16. His father told him he could leave if he got a job. He told him not to come home without a job. My grandfather was back before lunchtime with a job. He left school and stayed with that company till he was 67! Unheard of now. No such thing as job security.

I'm Georgia the down syndrome girl, I get a job wherever I want!

Old people had it easy?? That’s ridiculous. Is your Niece educated? Is there a job placement agency in your area? Maybe her resume needs to be reorganized. Job placement offices also conduct training classes on resumes, interviewing, etc. I would stop blaming everyone else or society and focus on giving her constructive feedback.

It's harder today for white people. It has always been hard for black people.

"Old" people did not have it easy. I came of working age in the early 1980s. All companies wanted to do was hire women and minorities. If you were white male you were shit out of luck unless you had connections or went to an ivy league school. They basically let women in who had zero experience and promoted them much more quickly than their male counterparts. That's why Human Resources is a shit hole today.

Old, white, wealthy, heterosexual people, perhaps.

When I was young there were more jobs but many have been lost due to technology.

We didn't need human resources before women entered the workplace.

OP does the young person want a full- time career position or a part-time job? Many jobs are going begging. It sounds like the person needs to widen their search. Or is looking for a position they aren’t qualified for. Everybody starts somewhere. Leave the ego at the door.

Is your niece relying on online sites to get a job?? She needs to tell everyone she knows ("networking") that she's looking for a job. She should also go into places where she's interested in working (retail, etc.) and ask if there are any openings. She should apply for temp jobs.

She can't be picky, she should take whatever opens up, even if it's fast food, etc. Having a job in hand will help her move on to a new and better one in six-twelve months. It will also help her to learn how to work (which many young people don't know how to do).

Somehow I doubt that she's done all that much.

In MY day.....

R8 lmao

My parents' first home cost twice as much as my fathers' yearly wage, my mother never worked and my father bought a new car every 2 years. We never went without. My father was not on a huge salary, just average middle class. Everyone I knew lived like this. So don't tell me the young have it better.

The job market is great for minimum wage jobs. WTF are you talking about OP? If your niece can’t get a minimum wage job, then she’s is in an atypical locality or she’s doing something wrong. Starbucks isn’t hiring? McDonalds isn’t hiring? Has she looked at federal and state job websites? Gone to temp agencies? Is she babysitting? Around here babysitters get up to $20/hour and a pizza. Is she working her LinkedIn profile? Is she taking community college courses to enhance her skills? Community colleges have some great programs. They can provide introductory training for plumbers, mechanics, EMTs. Many community colleges even have full paramedic and / or nursing programs. Does she have a HS diploma? If not, is she working on a GED? If she doesn’t have asthma, eczema, ADD or obesity she can enlist. The military will train her and with an honorable discharge she will enjoy preferential hiring and have some free medical care (yeah, not always the best, but better than nothing).

I graduated college (where I worked in the cafeteria wearing a uniform that included a visor) in the early 90’s and made something like $18k/year in my first job. I was dating a lawyer making $30 or $40k and he had loans (not as bad as the loans kids have today). The job market sucked. So I had a roommate in a one bedroom. Then I moved back in with my parents to afford business school at night. It was fine! Now I’m in my 50’s and I make the same as I did 2 years out of business school. Not great, but I’m not crying about it. I don’t think kids today have it that much worse. My dad had to drop out of college to fight in a war when he was 18. He had it worse than your niece.

Are you sure your niece is really applying for jobs? Are you giving her money?

I do think it’s tough these days for a lot of college grads who have already invested (and paid for) a degree that isn’t paying off. But anyone healthy without student loans and under the age of 25 has a lot of options.

OP listen to r14.

The major expenses - school and home - have increased disproportionately. And the elimination of pensions means we have to devote a chunk of our pay to retirement that people didn’t have to do before. And lay for out elderly parents who are living forever,.

30-40 years ago, people in my job were comfortably upper middle class with no money worries. Thats what I worked really hard for, got an education, worked 70 hour weeks for decades, Now I’m just getting by in a major city while trying to save as much as possible for retirement - which will never be as comfortable or as secure as it was for the prior generation. It really is worse - at least compared to 50 years ago. Though I guess 100+ years ago was tougher.

I'd rather be unemployed than slave for a minimum wage job.

"We didn't need human resources before women entered the workplace"

Haha, you're dumb.

Pretend you have downs, you can have any job you want!

r18 In my experience it's women who cause all the problems in a workplace

World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, ... just saying.

How about we call a truce and say no one has it easy.

Unless you have a creative job that you enjoy all work is slavery. It is the nature of the thing. You live to work. I mean I don't know why people have children except to create cogs in the machinery of society. Most people have always had it hard so your niece can join the boo hoo brigade.

Right, OP, no one ever has had it as tough as the whiny, entitled kids we're raising, now.

Women have always been in the workplace. How did anything ever get done if half the population has been sitting on her collective ass for the entirety of human history?

Oh, you meant professional, corporate America represented in the mainstream media...

Telling anybody they had or have it easy always go over so well.

R17 = OP’s niece

R20 take your misogyny to whatever shit reddit sub will care to entertain it.

It's amazing there's people that really believe stay at home wives were some normal default for a majority of women. What, by some 50s/60s sitcom standard? Or is it that maybe those women are invisible to you? For a very brief moment in history, a subset of middle class women were able to stay home, and obviously that didn't last long.

A working class man could be the sole breadwinner and afford his own house and feed his family. No longer.

r28 thankyou Germaine Greer

Who the fuck wants to go back to a time when men were the breadwinners at some soul sucking job and the woman stayed behind eating bonbons and preparing a shitty dinner?

Oh right, the morons who voted for Trump and want to Make America Great Again. LOL idiots keep dreaming

I truly feel sorry for people in their 20s who don't come from well-off families. Insane student load debt plus the insane cost of housing is preventing them from living like real adults. They're either still living with their parents or living like their still college students, packed into shitty apartments with three roommates. It sucks for them.

Living like THEY'RE still college students.....

[quote]Job placement offices also conduct training classes on resumes, interviewing, etc

Most “job placement” agencies are frauds today. They post fake listings to get people to apply, and will flat-out say the job was fake. They just want your references to try to sell them their services. The few jobs they do have are piddly jobs that pay minimum wage with no benefits where a person may as well have just applied directly to the company on their own. These jobs also rarely turn into full time employment.

Agreed, OP. It's a horrible situation for the young.

And as I've stated many times, I was truly doing God's work.

You can't have a discussion like this on DL. Too many posters are older and completely out of touch with the modern working world. They also don't know anyone from the younger generation.

r28, I was born in 1966 and my mother always worked. As a teacher. Other working women I knew were nurses. Hardly any other moms I knew worked until later in the 70s, often after a divorce.

So easy, with repetitive recessions, real estate bandits and 'downsizing'

Good luck, kiddos, you'll need it. We tried.

[quote] It's amazing there's people that really believe stay at home wives were some normal default for a majority of women.

I know lots of stay at home mothers and these people are not exactly rich. The husband busts his ass while the wife just pops out as many kids as she likes. These women, if they work, do freelance or part-time jobs.

She can always get a job waiting tables, OP. That’s what I had to do when I graduated in 1991 with $14,000 in student loans and my immigrant family had no connections to help me find a job and no extra money to support me.

The loan payments kicked in six months after graduation and at the time there was no reduction based on income and also no options for delaying or refinancing them. It was $200 a month for my loans and I was making two bucks an hour waiting tables.

The economy sucked for Gen X graduates as well. The last time college was affordable and entry-level professional jobs are plentiful was the 1960s. Baby boomers had a much better set of opportunities than either Gen X, Millennials, or Gen Z will have.

R30 You're very welcome

The entry level job market is very strong. It's the olds out of work who are having a hard time finding work. If you're over 40 you're basically fucked.

Well, I'm a Gen-Xer, spent the last 20 years in adveritsing, was just laid off a few months ago and now I can't find any sort of job in my field. In this world, all they WANT is a Millennial. And If you are over 40, your days are numbered.

Though I'm somewhat to blame, too - I didnt want to go into management and the wirting has been on the wall for a little bit. But I remember friends of my parents who worked in advertising until they retired.

This slavish culutre of non-stop innovaton and profit growth is destroying our country.

And people aren’t going to like this comment but it’s the truth - all the Asians (including Indians) keep coming to America and taking the good jobs.

Former restaurant manager here. I had a hard time retaining young people (those under 22yo or so) for more than 2 months. Many resented that I was firm about clock-in times (when you are supposed to start work at 11am, I expected you to be here at 11am). They also did not like my rule that smartphones remain in the breakroom --- no looking at your phone when there were any customers in the restaurant. Being 30 minutes late with no call (or missing work entirely) got folks one strike; three strikes in six months was grounds for dismissal. I was told more than once by a millennial that my expectations about the restaurant work schedule was getting in the way of their social life.

I was also a hard ass on the kitchen staff who expected cigarette/vaping breaks every two hours. I did not allow smoking weed when working and would only let one person take a smoke break at a time (and only when there were no tickets in the window). Shooting up in the bathroom meant automatic dismissal.

The job paid fairly well -- FOH started at $10/hr (plus tips); BOH started at $12.50/hr. But many of my staff under mid-twenties lacked what I considered a good work ethic.

R39 I know it's tempting to use anecdotal evidence, but the key word was majority of women, as in women as a class, and taking into account how modern that phenomenon was.

Most lower class women have had to work. In the US, the stay at home wife concept, as we know it, was not as popular as media portrays it, nor was it available to their entire populace. There's a recent resurgence of stay at home mothers, and even fathers, but due to the high cost of living. Daycare costs end up eating into a second income.

This ties into what the OP mentions about wages. They have been stagnant for decades. If minimum wage kept up with the cost of living, it would have to be $25 an hour to match the buying power of minimum wage in the 70's.

Young or old, this shouldn't be ignored, or derailed by a couple salty men pretending a majority of women just grift, and somehow were able to destroy work environments, all at the same time.

OP, I don't know where you live but around here everyone is virtually begging for people to work for them, at least at the minimum wage jobs and they are paying above minimum wage. Either she interviews bad, something bad shows up when they do a search on her or she really isn't looking for a job, just telling you she is. One thing I found helped when I was young and looking for a job, don't just fill out a application and hope they call you, you go back and ask about the job, beg for an interview, show an interest.

If you were hiring would you hire the person who keeps coming back to check on their application, or the person who fills one out and waits for you to call them. If there are signs all around where you live saying "Help Wanted" and your niece can't find work then something is fishy.

It’s all about who you know or who you blow.

There is no requirement to pay a lot for school and there is no excuse for anyone racking up student loans NOW. Even idiots should know it’s a scam. College is the US is ridiculously overpriced. Find a way to do it cheap, even if it means moving to a different state and taking a year or two to establish residency.

I am sympathetic to people who accumulated a ton of student loan prior to 2010 or 2015, especially if they came from unsupportive families or families without a lot of experience with higher education. There was a window of a couple decades after college became ridiculously overpriced and people were still being told it was worth it. Yeah, they kinda shoulda known. But many people fell for it. And they got fucked.

Housing, eh. That tide is turning. People want smaller, more manageable homes. And previous generations didn’t have young adults buying homes and maintaining their own households. Or even most young married couples. Yeah, there were few decades where that happened. The guys that didn’t get killed came home from war to good paying jobs and Levittown and the like. My parents were in some kind of middle class housing project in Brooklyn and didn’t buy a house in the burbs until they were in their 40’s.

R36 And the young people don't know what it was like when we were young so they shouldn't be such self righteous smart asses saying we had it so much easier.

My neighbor is 67 and refuses to retire. He doesn't need the money, he just doesn't want to retire. If he retired the company could hire three people, he likes to brag about that. He thinks it's funny. I think he's an asshole.

My father had it so easy in the Airborne, parachuting into France and fighting his way across France and Germany. OP is a mother fucker.

I do think there's an age gap leading to misunderstandings about the current climate. I'm an "elder millennial", born in the early 80s. Just as I was preparing to graduate HS, 9/11 happened. Many of my peers went to go fight in both Afganistan and Iraq. Many of those same peers ended up dead, during their service, and after.

Meanwhile, for those that weren't interested in serving, life went on, and that meant going to college. This was changed every other second while in HS. So great, most of us did the college thing.

2008 rolls around right as we're finishing our college education. We all know what happened with that and the repercussions that followed, and still have had a lingering impact felt today.

Obama straightened it out as much as he could, but not until he was into his second term. In 2012, there were still significant amounts of people using unemployment insurance, until the extensions were discontinued that winter. Those of us that survived, were now going into our thirties, and just getting some footing with decent employment, while carrying significant college debts.

Now we're inching closer to 40, and reading daily articles about how we're not buying homes, cars, or whatever else we're supposed to be buying. I just purchased a home, and it's a miracle it even happened. Unlike the past, lenders decided they don't want to take risks, leaving millennials to try and figure out how to get a mortgage, with astronomical housing costs, smaller wages, the burden of debt, etc.

Of course Trump is fucking everything up now on top of it. Us older Millennials have little to look forward to, except maybe more war, maybe buying a home, which will plummet in worth anyway, when all the older generations die and leave too many homes behind.

R53 Welcome to life.

All I know is this: 35 years ago we had no crushing student debt and you could pick up and move to just about anywhere and find an apartment and a job.

In 1976 I moved to NYC. A couple of months later I was renting a place on 57th street between off of 8th (with 1 roommate) waiting tables and going to school with no help from anyone.

It cannot be done today.

Damn autocorrect. It's supposed to read that college was chanted, not changed, every other second.

Poor OP, sI feel so bad for you....NOT..it isn't any harder today then it was sin the 40's, 50's, 60's. Get off your ass and make your job, looking for a job.

R54 No shit, life's not fair. I didn't start the thread, but explained the circumstances. If you're not interested, good on you. I just don't want to see another article about Millennials not doing this or that, while everyone ignores the why.

Most of my peers are well aware of attitudes like yours, and don't expect any change coming from those that came before us.

r49 is completely right. I am no longer impressed with a college degree. My latest entry-level is perfect on paper - high GPA, master's degree, related internships, good schools. Bright and personable. I hired her on the spot. Turns out she can barely write. They'll give a degree to anyone who can pay for it, and god forbid a student gets a poor grade these days. I'd rather have an entry-level candidate with a good work ethic and intellectual curiosity. I can teach them my industry.

[quote] Most older people really have no idea

Oh we do. And yes, we know it's much harder for those just starting out in adult life these days. It's one of the many things that makes me happy to be as close to the end of my time here on earth as I am. I don't even want to think about how bad things will be for kids who are in their 20s today when they reach my age (66), unless some pretty fantastic things change for the better, and soon.

Agree R60. One of the few benefits of growing old - don’t have to be young now. Gen X here and feel like I barely squeaked by. No pension, stuck in corporate slavery and trying to save feverishly for retirement - but still better than starting out today.

It's good to know some employers like you r59 realize a college degree isn't everything. A majority of jobs shouldn't need college educated employees, when they'll need to be trained on the job in most cases. Making a college degree a standard, similar to how a HS diploma once was, played a part in contributing to these ridiculous college costs.

I worked in a specialized part of healthcare and a college degree would not have helped with what was necessary to know. Hands on experience was the only way to learn.

State certification programs or trade programs would even be a better option, versus going for some vaguely related degree.

R58 But I am interested which is why I read it or I would have been off this thread.

Even when I was young older people were telling me things like I don't envy you being young and I'm glad I'm not young anymore. I swear.

All I'm saying is that yeah life is hard and young people couldn't do what I did which was like what R55 did but then young people have different opportunities in a different world and can do things I could never imagine.

Well, unfortunately (and I'm going to get flack for this from the youngers), young people today have vastly different attitudes about work as well as life than we had when I was their age. Working hard, being on time, starting lower on the totem pole and working up, these are things too many young people of today don't seem to be willing to do. They're more interested in how many holidays they get when they interview for jobs than what they can do to help build the company and keep their jobs safe. But thankfully not all young people are that way. But the number of those who are seems to grow year by year.

R51 See this is another problem - people working even though they don’t need too and keeping someone out of a job who actually needs it to live. These assholes should go volunteer somewhere if they want to “stay busy”.

I work for the government and it is ground zero for people who are still working but dont really need the money. My boss is a great example, has a pension, 401k from a previous job, investments, property. He could retire now, but chooses to stay another five years. He is a complete chore to work with as well, as he has the"coast to retirement" mentality. He has to be reminded to do everything. There are so many hungry young people out there, but as long as Americans keep working past their prime, things wont improve.

OP - you are sadly right.

I finished graduate school in 1978 in a field I was no longer interested in. I got a job in a totally unrelated field due to a connection from a former professor and friend.

Never made a shit-ton of money, but have been employed ever since, allowing me a life that I sincerely hope you can achieve.

R67 You has a graduate degree and still didn’t make much money even though graduate degrees were rare back then?😯

Wow. I was thinking of going back to school to get a masters, but I’m starting to think twice because I know several other people who received one within the last few years and it still did nothing to get them a great job or amazing money.

*you have

[quote]There is no requirement to pay a lot for school and there is no excuse for anyone racking up student loans NOW. Even idiots should know it’s a scam. College is the US is ridiculously overpriced. Find a way to do it cheap, even if it means moving to a different state and taking a year or two to establish residency.

Even state schools cost a lot of money now. The reality is you can't even get an admin job these days without a bachelor's. I agree that lots of people aren't college material but they really have no choice but to go to college if they want to earn a living. And the last time I checked moving to a different state costs money.

So many DLers are so old and out of touch about shit like this.

Wages today are nothing when you look at inflation.

My parents bought their first house in the late 70s for $32,000. That same house went on the market a couple of years ago for $320,000. And that house is a so-called "starter home."

[Quote] The job paid fairly well -- FOH started at $10/hr (plus tips); BOH started at $12.50/hr.

Where are you located? In most major cities, $10 hr (even with tips) won't allow you to afford a closet plus your bare minimum living expenses. If you and your business want employees who actually take the job seriously and aren't going to slag off, then you need to pay people better. This is a problem with many employers in this day and age. They aren't willing to pony up the money needed for quality workers and then have the nerve to complain when all they get is the bottom of the barrel. Employers need to step up and increase their salaries and benefits on their own volition. If you don't, then you don't get the right to complain in places like the New York Fucking Post about legislators increasing minimum wage laws so that no working person has to work for starvation wages. Things won't get better until employers take responsibility for their workers well being and financial success.

Old people gave us Reagan .

Old people also gave us Trump. If you gave us Trump, just STFU and sit down because we can't listen.

[quote]My parents bought their first house in the late 70s for $32,000. That same house went on the market a couple of years ago for $320,000. And that house is a so-called "starter home."

And yet so many old people wonder why so many people in the 30’s aren’t homeowners yet. Between student debt and shitty wages, it’s near impossible unless you are partnered or married.

Millennials and Gen Z are good at exactly two things — complaining, and blaming their lazy entitlement on anyone but themselves.

When they say WE CANT FIND JOBS! what they mean is JOBS ARE NOT RAINING DOWN ON ME FROM THE SKY.

Millennials think the way the world works is, it’s there to provide everything you want without any cost or effort. If they have to expend either, they see it as a defeat and then blame boomers.

r77 you have no idea what you're talking about.

Millennials want it all. They want it on their own terms. And they want it now!

Well who can argue with a well-made rebuttal like r78?

There weren't comparable level of student loans 30-40 years ago because not all students were told to go to college. Mostly only academically-capable students went to college, or if you're a dunce like Trump you went because daddy bought you a place. Nonetheless, it was this feel-good, overpraising of children as special and everyone can/ should go to college sort of idiocy that helped to create the student loan mess today.

I was born in 1980 so I'm considered to be part of the youngest Gen-X, and even I see discernible sense of entitlement in Millennials especially the younger ones. I practice as DNP as well as teach undergrad/ graduate degree Nursing at university level part-time, some of my students are fucking insane in terms of how entitled and closed-off to ideas they are, it's quite scary really. It's not unusual for students to take things that patients say to them personally, and those things weren't even that egregious. It's like learn how to deal with it because you're working with the general public and this isn't like retail where you can refuse to serve obnoxious customers. This emotional fragility that needs constant monitoring and positive reinforcement is really annoying. Also they tend to see or dissect issues in terms of black or white without much shading for nuance or complexities. I think if you put these traits together, you get a generation of people who are quick to be discouraged, quick to blame others, and quick to act on groupthink. I wouldn't call them snowflakes as snowflakes are unique; rather they seem to act/ think in similar ways. They want to be viewed as the most victimized generation yet the most enlightened but they're far from the latter. Of course I'm making generalizations here, but I do notice older students in my class (I have older, second-careers students who are 30-50s) are my most nuanced thinkers.

I know several students in my classes who openly brag of using their student loan money to buy clothes or go on vacations, one student even bought a car with it. Have to hand it to them for taking advantage of free money (for now at least).

A big difference I see is that the young’uns don’t have the same hustle and drive. They want the nice apartment with all the amenities, and bitch and moan that they can’t afford it. When I graduated from college in 1988, I moved to NYC. I was lucky to find a job in my chosen industry. It paid $19,000, which today is the equivalent of $42,000 — the low end starting salary in NYC. I shared a studio apartment, 5th floor walk up in Hell’s Kitchen before it was cool (or safe). At times as many as four people were living there. The rent was $650, which is about $1400 today.

I took a part-time retail job 2 nights a week and weekends to make extra money. That increased to 5 nights a week plus weekends from the day after Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve. Minimum wage. I also did occasional coat check gigs for tips evenings. More than once I had to go back to the office after the retail job to finish up something due in the morning. I fucking hustled. Eventually I got a promotion and raise, enough for me to sublet a studio on my own. I still kept the retail and coat check jobs for another year. I took my two week paid vacation during the holidays and worked as many retail hours as I could. This went on for over two years. I kept plugging away at work, putting in extra hours when needed, and kept advancing my career and salary. I moved every year (or more) and after more than 20 years was able to purchase a home.

These days I only see immigrants living this way and working this hard. It builds character.

Well who can argue with a half-assed opinion from r77?

That apartment in Hell's Kitchen would be quite a bit more than $1400 today.

[quote]Nonetheless, it was this feel-good, overpraising of children as special and everyone can/ should go to college sort of idiocy that helped to create the student loan mess today.

It's because you can't even get an admin job without a college degree today. College is a necessity in ways that it was not in whatever decade you were in college.

[quote]I shared a studio apartment, 5th floor walk up in Hell’s Kitchen before it was cool (or safe). At times as many as four people were living there.

Landlords won't permit that many people these days. You guys are coming from a different time and don't realize how much the world has changed.

So you are both right and wrong OP

You are right for the vast majority of my generation, and everything you and many other have said about everything from the lack of middle class jobs to insane student loans to insane housing prices is true.

But for those of us in the top 10%-15%, life is pretty fucking sweet.

We are groomed for success from birth.

The right preschool. The right internships and volunteer opportunities in high school. Tutors and SAT coaches and private college advisors to make sure we get into the right schools.

Then we have internships and usually two professionally educated parents who can pull strings for us, hook us up with the right companies, pay our rents and living costs over the summers.

Then after college we roll right into the right high-paying job and our Boomer parents, who have seen the value on their real estate increase tenfold, can pay our rent and then help us buy a house or an apartment because it's an investment for everyone.

And now we're in our 30s and reproducing and starting the whole cycle all over again.

But all this is evidence of the widening class gulf in America, a gulf that hasn't been seen since the 1880s, a gulf that is exacerbated by Trump and GOP policies that coddle the wealthy and penalize the working classes.

And to paraphrase a common DL-ism, this is why they (the Deps) hate us, because they don't see any hope and when people don't see hope they frequently turn to charlatans who promise it to them

R84 the point is I wouldn’t be anywhere near Hell’s Kitchen today on my income back then, more likely the Bronx or Inwood.

R85, that many people was completely illegal then. We had to be as invisible as possible. You did what you needed to get by.

I'm 61 and both my parents worked from the time I was born. My mother worked in shitty, non-union factory jobs and my father was a door-to-door salesman. I was a latch-key kid before the phrase was even coined.

My parents never talked about us kids going to college, even though I was a very good student. I graduated and didn't know what to do next, so I went into the Army. But I was raped not too long after I got out of basic training (and of course, no one cared about that in 1977), so I got out as soon as I could, and I too ended up working in a factory.

To make a long story short, I did end up going to college as an older adult (on my own dime--I only paid off my student loans at 50), and then to grad school. But because the signs of a working-class upbringing don't exactly wash off, I have never been very successful. In addition, I have been out since I was a freshman in high school, in 1972. Yeah, kids -- that was real easy.

Now, tell me again how good I have it.

R89 I'm 62 and so I grew up during the same time period. It was very hard. And being raised lower middle class by deeply unhappy people was something I wish I had never had to endure.

And yes those signs don't wash off no matter how hard you work. I came out though later. But there really was no point in coming out sooner because there was no personal life and why make things even more difficult? Honestly my parents would have wished I had been a straight murderer. Seriously.

No, life is hard for many people no matter when they are born. It is as always the luck of the draw.

Having parents who can pay your rent and living expenses when you are starting out is the most incredible advantage. That's usually how it's done in NYC, and it's been like that for years and years now.

OP is posting from five years ago. Today, jobs are easy to get. What is not easy to get at any age is a job that pays enough to make you independent. That gravy train ended in the 70s except a brief flourishing in the late 90s that was oversold. Feudalism and genocide of most people is what the upper class wants, and what it will get unless they are eliminated.

R87, A few stories of how the bottom run recent legal immigrants do it. Kids start working at age 9 at least 20 hours a week before and after school, and many hours on the weekends. Find jobs through church cleaning homes for the elderly, child care, delivering newspapers or flyers as a family (some then start at age 5.)

By 16 they've added on a fast-food job. Weekend evenings are spent learning car repair as an apprentice, so they can fix their own cheap wreck. Their single mothers are also working full-time plus additional gigs.

Plenty of places one can sneak in multiple people especially if they're very quiet and all members of the same family. Viet Namese boat people weren't the 1st nor the last to have up to 2 dozen people sleeping in shifts in a 2 bedroom apartment or old home.

I do think people have a hard time finding jobs without a hand up. But I also see help wanted signs for shitty jobs. Any job is better than no job.

[quote] Old people gave us Reagan

[quote] Old people also gave us Trump.

Correction. Old STRAIGHT people gave us Reagan and Trump. Don't be so willfully ignorant. If you want to do that rant don't do it on a majority gay chat board because your targets are going to be few and far between.

I agree wholeheartedly that younger (or today's youth) have it much, much harder than even later generation Boomers. I'm 55 (1963)and we were the last generation that had a solid path to the middle class if we had a college degree. That has gone all to shit for today's young people.

[quote]The job market is great for minimum wage jobs.

No idea where OP lives of course but the job market around here for low wage fast food type jobs is abysmal. They're offering $9/hr or more but can't keep anyone due to injuries and managers are scheduling people for maybe 10 hrs a week.

The local paper had a story about how an Arby's was shut down by the state because four people were injured in a week, and the state official said three other restaurants in town were on the verge of shutdown, too.

[quote] I know several students in my classes who openly brag of using their student loan money to buy clothes or go on vacations, one student even bought a car with it.

They were doing that when I was in college in 1990, back when you were 10.

Just because this is the first time you've been exposed to the idea doesn't mean it's a new phenomenon.

A lot of this thread is why I went from hanging out on on DL daily to maybe once a week. Old, out of touch, and bitter.

To an extent, yes R99. But there's also a lot of young, unrealistic, and dumb around here much of the time.

Mass immigration in the West (US, Australia, New Zealand, UK) has kept wages down.

Until this generation has to go to war, they have no room to complain.

"You're right R102. Bunch of pussies."

"Y'all tell 'em R102 and R103!!!"

"Daddy told me the National Guard was an honorable way to serve."

Completely agree with a poster upthread who said government jobs are ground zero for those not wanting to retire. There are some 70 year olds with pensions from previous jobs who just hang on and refuse to go. I can understand if the individual is in a lower-rung job and needs the cash, but most of these people are upper management.

"Afghanistan was like being at a Club Med, only in Central Asia," R102 R103 R104 R105

"I once ran from sniper fire in Bosnia"

Immigration has kept wages down for low skilled jobs and technical / quantitative jobs. I think it would be tough to demonstrate that immigration has depressed wages for non-technical corporate jobs that usually require a college degree. But there are areas within some huge companies that are almost 100% staffed with non-native English speakers. And they make less than you would think. But the rare non-immigrant in those departments still makes a living wage.

"I start career 'erecting structures' in Bosnia," if my drift you are catching R108.

Does your niece expect to make 60k per year for part time work? Does she complain of work interrupting her busy social life and how irate potential employers become when it really isn't convenient for her to show up every day of the week she is scheduled to work?

What type work is she looking for What are her qualifications?

We are two generations removed from a draft. A couple of years ago I was at an event celebrating the athletic achievements of some graduating HS seniors. So some of these kids were 18. They were talking about how hard they worked and how tough they had to be and how it made them special. Frankly, these kids were not particularly good athletes and at least a few of them should have been if anyone was working all that hard. I was feeling judgmental because I had been a better, fitter athlete and nobody ever patted us on the head. Then I realized than when my dad was 18 he was on the ground in France. In a unit that lost a lot of men and ended their tour of Europe by liberating a concentration camp.

Most of us who are alive now and were born in the US have it so much better than any previous generation that any comparison between those of us who are 50s-60s to those of us who are 20s-30s really kind of silly. We have it very, very good.

R81: "They want to be viewed as the most victimized generation yet the most enlightened but they're far from the latter. Of course I'm making generalizations here, but I do notice older students in my class (I have older, second-careers students who are 30-50s) are my most nuanced thinkers."

🙄 PEOPLE IN THEIR THIRTIES ARE MILLENNIALS. WE ARE ALMOST 40 FUCKING YEARS OLD!

This is why I hate this topic. "What an entitled generation, nothing like the nice 30 something yr olds!" While not realizing they are discussing people from the same generation.

It really comes down to buying power. If minimum wage was the same as the 70s, it would be $25 an hr. That's just min wage, not the living wage. A brand new car would cost a 6 month salary, now it's at least a solid years worth. 40% of Americans don't have any extra money aside... at all.

Wealth disparity has grown since the 70s, but since the recession, the top 20% have grown ridiculously richer, while 80% have grown poorer. THERE'S A PROBLEM.

Instead of generalizing by age/ generations, it should be by class. Older people had their wages go farther and college wasn't as necessary, but wealth disparity is an issue hurting all age groups, especially if they aren't in the top 20%.

R52 Your father is of the Greatest Generation. They returned to the US and created a booming economy.

Boomers did not fight in WWII. They were born after WWII.

R114 are you using your nieces numbers? Actually minimum wage was $2.10 in 1975 and according to bureau of labor statistics inflation adjustment from 1975 to 2019 is 476%. That would put minimum wage at $ 9.99.

He means buying power.

I think DL may have a blind spot because most DLers seem to be middle to upper middle class. Lots of talk of corporate jobs and mom’s staying home back in the day. As a working class person the women in my family always worked. My great grand mother worked back in Ireland, worked here and every generation since has worked. The first SAHM I ever met was a college friend’s mom. I suspect middle and upper class parents today are supporting their kids in some way even if it’s helping them buy their first home. It’s always been hard to be working class but there was a time when it was simple to get out of there and become middle class. Not easy, but simple. You went to college and you were guaranteed a job. You could move to any city and find an apartment. You could live in any city while waiting tables. An entry level white collar job meant you got a mortgage. That’s all gone and it is very, very hard to find a way out of the working classes today for all kids including white kids. If you have parents who can find internships, pay rent in the city and help with a deposit on a house it’s like being born into royalty.

The sexism in the thread is tiresome but that’s the new DL I guess. Although even the points made to portray women as lazy fat witches failed because if a women is doing freelance work or part time work she is not a SAHM. Many of my straight male friends have turned to freelancing or sought out work from home jobs because commuting was either ruining them financially or mentally. I don’t think anyone will be calling them stay at home dads or lazy. I also think younger generations are right to ask for paid leave, maternity leave, sick leave etc.. No of course I’m not talking about taking off for 6 weeks or choosing their own schedules but I think it’s perfectly acceptable to want 20 paid days off from a full time job just like every other first world country.

Also it’s not just the US. My relatives in Ireland are having the same struggles and the only way to live in Dublin is also to have parental support. It’s that or emigration or a life or uncertainty. My niece got a masters degree and she was offered a government job that paid €19,000 to start and capped at €35,000 after 17 years. She moved to Australia. My nephew is earning less as a police officer than his dad earned as a police officer 27 years ago! He earns less than €30,000. A starter home in Dublin is around 350,000. He is gay. Unless he finds a husband he is going to find it next to impossible to buy property. He’s thinking of purchasing with a female friend if both are still single at 40.

Who is attacking young people? Examples please.

And what does something you allege - w/o offering any examples - as a generality affecting your niece who's looking for specific jobs in specific places?

The OP is ignorant of history. Here are some of the “easy” things we dealt with in the 20th century:

Crushing mass poverty

Anarchism

Influenza

The labor movement

Foul food and drugs

The Great War

Encephalitis Lethargica

Terminal syphilis

Starvation during periods of frequent economic depression

Lack of antibodies

Polio

The Great Depression

Fascism & WWII, oh yeah, that

The Cold War and nuclear annihilation

The oil embargos and gas lines

Hyper inflation of 18% per year

Korea & Vietnam wars

Watergate

Unbreathable air, flammable rivers, lead paint, DDT, 3 Mile Island

The two great recessions in the early 1980s and another in 1989

Collapse of the US steel and oil industries

Racial strife

Political assassinations

Collapse of the labor movement

But other than that, it was a breeze.

Young people don't want to work. They refuse to wear a tie, they are tattooed all over the place, and what isn't tattooed is pierced or colored some color even Mrs Slocombe wouldn't wear.

They refuse a fixed schedule, want 40 hours pay for 10 hours of work and heaven forbid you tell them how to do anything. They must set their own rules and styles.

There is always work for those who want to WORK.

[quote]There is always work for those who want to WORK.

I'll tell that to the people who can't find anything, despite a stellar resume and references.

Stay at home moms worked very hard. You might think of it as a luxury but it was a necessity. Try taking care of the needs of entire family including yourself and there is a lot of unending drudgery involved. But a number of moms resented it and were unhappy. Just as the men were who were trapped in pointless jobs having to financially support all these people were and came home grouchy and yelling and upsetting their wives who at the end of their day certainly didn't need to get into a fight with their husbands. But did anyway.

You were ostracized and considered selfish if you stayed single and didn't get trapped into this. What's wrong with this person? Mentally unbalanced? A degenerate? It much to my chagrin still happens but not nearly as much.

[quote]They refuse to wear a tie

What decade are you posting from? Not many business require ties these days.

One of many dilemmas facing younger generations is that almost any random "fake" college can qualify for federal financial aid and student loans. Back in the day, these Trump Universities would never qualify for this program. There were vocational/trade schools that would provide apprenticeships and then there were smaller community colleges that were very affordable and then there were public and private universities. I qualified for the Sallie Mae loans that charged 0% interest.

Then these federally-subsidized student loans were handed over to for-profit lending institutions that tried to apply compound interest rates. That's what screwed almost all younger generations. This conversion was done by Republican George HW Bush (I believe it was the mid-80s). These for-profit loans were always a rip-off and exploitative in nature. Now, the f-ing Supreme Court has ruled that these student debts are no longer forgivable under bankruptcy protection. This happened when Republican George Walker Bush was the US President. Do you see a connection here? These fucking repubs want a permanent slavery class - indentured servants, really. I honestly feel sorry for those Gen X and later.

r117 your stories about Dublin are exactly the same as what's going on here in the US. I don't know how younger people can do it today, everything is so damn expensive and salaries haven't kept up. In my area, home ownership is out of the question for a lot of people who in previous generations would be on their second home by now.

Seriously R123

Even my friends who work at big NYC law firms rarely wear a suit and tie unless they're going to court or meeting with the sort of client who likes their lawyers in suits and ties.

Oh buying power isn't inflation or cost of living adjustment?

What some of you are missing is the huge gap that is forming between the haves and have-nots of my generation, something Boomers in particular did not have to deal with as there were still plenty of middle class jobs

What's funny is that I am sure that there was some EG like R120 back in the 60s complaining about "all those hippies with their long hair and blue jeans who want to smoke marijuana and not work" and another one in the 90s complaining about "Gen X slackers who think they can just go to coffee shops and listen to grunge bands and not work."

Plus ça change....

I want to hear the nieces circumstances

The first war on youth was during Reagan, when the incomes of older people rose above inflation 24% and the incomes of people 18-25 dropped by more than 20%.

R125 Despite being socially liberal the response of the Irish government has been terrible. At first they said just get your parents to help. Leo Varadkar admits his parents got him on the property ladder. When that made people very angry at how out of touch they were they came back when the idea of building modern tenements. They want young people to live in tiny 150sqft rooms with shared kitchens and bathrooms. Last time I checked they were still going ahead with those plans and pushing that as a solution. The US tech firms invading Dublin have made Dublin look good on paper but the local population have not benefited much. It’s very like San Francisco except the locals are much more vocal and haven’t been swept up by the populism sweeping much of Europe so I have a little hope they can do something but I don’t think millenials will recover now.

I had it so good when I worked 50 hours a week while going to college full time in the 80's eating off a $10/week grocery budget and driving a modest paid for car. Just pure luck I graduated with money in the bank and no student debt. Kids today drinking their $20 craft cocktails while they debate the menu at the latest chef driven restaurant with hardly any parking for the 60k car daddy gave them while they run up six figure student loan tabs are absolute victims.

Well they are in the sense they aren't getting anything for their money.

[quote] Kids today drinking their $20 craft cocktails while they debate the menu at the latest chef driven restaurant with hardly any parking for the 60k car daddy gave them since he and mommy and daddy paid their six figure tuition tabs

FIFY R132

Dublin does strike me as very like SF in the intense property prices - and refusal to build up. No homeless though. And the huge millennial population there is amazing. Not sure how any of them do it. And tbh, if I’m spending that kind of money, I would probably move to London. The gay scene in Dublin is sorely lacking.

There’s a massive homeless crisis in Dublin with hundreds of families living in shelters and hotels because there’s no government housing available. Also a few hundred on the streets every night. By nephew in the police has been stabbed with a needle trying to deal with homeless. The millennials emigrated in massive numbers during the 2008 crash and my nephew (29) was one of the few who stayed. He’s not from Dublin, he is from Laois in the country but last year they thought about having a 1” year reunion and they couldn’t get enough of them together to make it worth it. The vast majority of his graduating class is living overseas. Dublin kids didn’t emigrate in quite as large numbers because they had the option of living at home and taking internships/unpaid work/low paying work. In the country there is no employment for young people. As a gay man I would go to London too but I’m told the U.K. has more opportunities but with bad pay and high cost of living so oy! There’s no easy answer.

[quote]In my experience it's women who cause all the problems in a workplace

Overconfident straight men cause most of the problems.

FFS r132 how much did college cost in the fucking 1980s?

As has been said before - old, out of touch and completely clueless about modern life.

I don't think even with the adjustments for inflation the minimum wage in the 70s had much buying power. It was for adolescents living with their parents. It was practically allowance money.

If only millennials could monetize whining, entitlement, and ignorance.

I don’t have a problem with millennials. I mostly don’t think about them at all, but when I read complaints like in the OP, it bothers me. You get nowhere by minimizing other’s challenges, sacrifices, and accomplishments, except to incur resentment.

I’m a late boomer. My two closest siblings and I graduated during the early 1980 recessions. They hit my state as hard as the Great Recession later hit much of the country decades later. It was impossible to find any job, never mind a good one.

Then I graduated grad school in 1989, during the next recession. I recall hearing on the car radio, while job searching, that New England was in a “high tech and housing recession”. It was hard finding work, again.

That was the recession that killed the Rt 128 computer companies around Boston, including, IIRC, Wang, Prime Computer, Aegis, and many others. Eventually Boston lost DEC, Lotus, as companies died or moved to California.

Let’s add the savings and loan crisis of 1986-1995 to R119. My hometown bank of hundreds of years old bought a rival, failing bank, then was dragged down and closed due to the accusations’ bad debts.

The newest bank in that town also failed.

There was another hometown bank that was not computerized. They still used index cards, in the 1990s! They failed, too.

[quote] The savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s (commonly dubbed the S&L crisis) was the failure of 1,043 out of the 3,234 savings and loan associations in the United States from 1986 to 1995...

I had a very difficult time getting a job in the 1970s. It was far easier for boys/men because they could get menial jobs in places like auto parts store, stereo shops/music stores (never hired females), hardware stores. Retail jobs back then were for adults - even cashiers. You never saw a teen cashier. I was amazed when I saw Fast Times at Ridgemont High because even when that movie came out most malls in my area only hired adults. Even for the crap food court jobs.

I was broke. I enrolled in community college and took classes to eventually get into a nursing program because I knew I could get a job when I graduated. Until then I babysat, worked gig type jobs. One of those jobs was — get this — changing the price on items in drugstores. I’d go to a Genovese drug store, they’d hand me a sticker printer and I was told to pull off all the old price tags and replace them with new, higher price tags. I’d get called maybe once every two weeks to go to another store somewhere and do the same thing. I considered myself lucky to get the job. My sister worked in a drugstore and asked if they had any kind of temp work I could do, so I did that. I got about $8 a day.

Remember, there were very few chains back then - few fast food places, no 711, no Target, no Walmart or Home Depot, no Olive Gatden or Applebee’s. My town didn’t even have a McDonald’s until 1982, nearly 10 years after I graduated high school.

It wasn’t all roses back then. We had a severe recession & 90% of retail chains didn’t exist.

Is OP the same guy who complained that Boomers weren’t retiring quickly enough to free-up jobs for younger people like him? It’s hard to even characterize such a ridiculous statement, there is so much wrong with it.

Besides, Millennials were raised by boomers. So, they benefited from the Boomers wealth. It’s as if they don’t even realize how well they’ve had it, based on the OP.

The Boomers who could afford to retire tomorrow yet hang around in the workforce - completely out of touch with technology, I might add - aren't doing anyone any favors. It's not about the Boomers who still have to work to make a living, that's an entirely different story.

R145, you shouldn't judge what it means for someone else to “afford to retire”.

The are doing themselves and their families a favor, by continuing to work.

People need to feel wanted and to contribute. I think people should continue to work as long as they can.

[quote] According to Sigmund Freud and many other well known philosophers and social scientists, one's ability to love and work is deeply connected to one's degree of happiness and satisfaction with life. As Freud said, "Love and work..work and love..what else is there really?"

I imagine you were raised by Boomers and benefited from their success. Were you complaining when you were raised by these Boomers?

The solution about Boomers remaining in the work force and occupying jobs that R145 seems to think he is owed, the solution is for R145 to out-compete these Boomers. That’s how it works. If you can’t do so, then you don’t deserve the job.

Good lord it's about older who have enough $$ to be set for life and should hand over the reigns to younger people so they can get a leg up. And many of them are clueless about modern tech and rather old fashioned in their views, esp. regarding gays and, if they're men, women's roles. This is a constant issue in the modern workplace. If they want to still feel needed there's plenty of volunteer work.

[quote]The solution about Boomers remaining in the work force and occupying jobs that [R145] seems to think he is owed, the solution is for [R145] to out-compete these Boomers. That’s how it works. If you can’t do so, then you don’t deserve the job.

God, how old are you? Many older workers are completely out of touch and keep hanging on. "Out-competing" isn't possible when they hold all the cards and refuse to let go. And nobody thinks they're "owed" a job, it's about dinosaurs not knowing when they should leave the stage, even though they have more than enough money to do so.

There are terrible times for some at all times in history. My mother had a neighbor in Montana who shot himself and his wife in the depths of the Depression because he couldn't find enough work to keep them both fed. That sad story was repeated hundreds of thousands of times in the 30s. In the 40s 500,000 American soldiers of young working age died in WWII. In the 50s, there was plenty of work, but black people were kept out of most fields and forced to work for very little money. 60,000 young working age males were killed in the 60s and early 70s in Vietnam. In the 70s and beyond there were multiple recessions in which people lost their jobs and couldn't find equivalent work, or had to start over at the bottom. I graduated from college at the very end of the 70s. It was the time of stagflation, oil lines, recession. I have always been able to find work, but often not paying well. Sometimes circumstances will screw you over. In the late 80s I was teaching in a state university in Florida and was granted tenure. But under the Republican governor of the time, all university wages were frozen, so I got a token increase for tenure, and no other pay increase that year. Big deal, EXCEPT that future pay increases are always calculated based on what you earn, not what you could have potentially earned. So there was a 4 year period in which every professor who earned tenure in Florida state was screwed for the rest of his/her career, essentially lagging behind the people who earned tenure before or after that period.

But I will say that in most times, especially when families were larger, people felt that if worse came to worst they could move in with relatives until they landed on their feet. And most people did not begin their working careers with the amount of crushing debt that many young people now have because of college loans. Young people in large cities, where most of the interesting jobs are must pay high rents in addition to paying back college loans, so they can never accumulate enough money to put a down payment on a house. What's going to happen to the real estate market when there are no more buyers from the US? I suppose the vacant houses will be bought up by foreigners, but that doesn't seem a very stable situation to me.

Nobody currently working, no matter their age, owes anything to young people just starting out in the job market. Many companies still value experience and ability. And few companies are going to replace a worker who has been doing a job for 25 years, a job that requires a high level of expertise, with some 23 year old who could never fill his shoes. Older experienced workers are not in entry level jobs and that's were these youngsters need to start. But too many of them think they should start far higher up. Fat chance.

[quote]And few companies are going to replace a worker who has been doing a job for 25 years, a job that requires a high level of expertise, with some 23 year old who could never fill his shoes.

Nobody's handing jobs like that to 23 year-olds, and you know it you shit-stirring troll.

[quote] What's going to happen to the real estate market when there are no more buyers from the US? I suppose the vacant houses will be bought up by foreigners, but that doesn't seem a very stable situation to me.

That's already happening. Lot of foreign $$$ parked in US housing as an investment. Nobody actually lives in these places, or they only use them a few weeks out of the year. And of course that drives up prices for everybody else. Walk past the high rises in Manhattan and they're mostly dark at night, but they have close to 100% "occupancy."

R148, maybe you should take it personally? My nephews have both found good jobs. Their both actually on their second employers as they traded-up. I can say I would never hire anyone with your attitude. It’s “you”, not Boomers.

What does it even mean, to you, to have “enough money” in your judgement?

If you can’t out compete a Boomer, that’s your problem, not theirs.

And you do, actually, quite clearly, think you’re owed a job. You just don’t like to admit it.

I see Boomers being discriminated against in employment all the time, due to their age. It’s illegal, and immoral.

[quote] Nobody's handing jobs like that to 23 year-olds, and you know it you shit-stirring troll.

Are you simple? That's exactly what I said!

r153 you're twisting words around and making opinions not based on anything anyone's said. Nobody is "owed" a job. It's just that there's been a bottleneck for a long time with older workers who are already wealthy or at least comfortable not giving up - and they have outdated ways of thinking and have not kept up with trends or technology - that have prevented others from moving up. That's all it is. It really sounds like you're taking this personally.

I've been lucky not to be affected this way in my career, but I've seen a lot of talent who haven't been as fortunate.

[quote] Nobody is "owed" a job.

Could have fooled me. I do believe that some on this thread are saying the older workers who could easily retire but won't OWE it to the younger workers to leave so the younger workers can move up. So yes, obviously some here are saying younger workers are OWED those jobs higher up the chain.

I met a real estate agent in a bar in LA a few weeks ago. I was on vacation and we got talking about the city. He said he’s now selling the majority of his properties to foreigners.

Getting promoted and moving up is a numbers game. There will never be enough senior positions for all those qualified. That’s life. Some jobs attract a lot of retired police/military who are hired from outside in an open competition with the in house staff. That sucks big time for those who lose out on the promotion because those guys have their pension and don’t really need the money to survive but then in other jobs it’s someone’s 35 year old nephew getting promoted over people there 30 years. In other jobs it’s so political you won’t mobe up unless your in a certain clique. Life is hard, we all get screwed.

Employers are about the bottom like they’ll screw of anyone of any generation for a buck. In my hometown many companies used the recession to get rid of older employees and replace them with younger recruits at a fraction of the pay. So both generations got fucked over. You see it in airlines a lot for example. You still have a small few older, well paid staff with lots of benefits and then the newer recruits on half the pay with none of the benefits and it causes chaos within the ranks.

Last point, we won’t be able to have a rational discussion about this because it’s far too emotional for everyone as we all feel hard done by it some way and don’t want to hear that the “others” are the victims and “our group” had it easy. At the end of the day once we’re fighting amongst ourselves it only serves our corporate overlords who are thrilled because it we ever came together they would have problems.

R156, you have, actually, said that you think you’re owed a job, regardless of your exact wording, that’s what you’re saying.

There have always been such bottlenecks that you mention. It’s your job to figure out how to succeed despite the obstacles of your generation.

If these old people are as outdated as you claim, it’s the employer’s job to lay them off. Maybe your employer simply values them more than they value you?

How much is “enough money”, anyway?

I can’t imagine anyone walking into HR and demanding that a bunch of “old” people be fired so that he could move up?

Aside for the amount of money to be considered to be “enough”, what age are we talking about? 40? 50? 60? 70? What?

The needling asshole on this thread is The Cupcake Troll aka the Dear Heart Troll aka the troll formerly known as Paul and he's going to keep on responding. He's a troll. That's what trolls do. There is no argument that you could provide that would satisfy a troll. They live to just have you respond and keep responding.

He cannot bear contrary thought. It's a white privilege thing. Once he renders his final verdict, no contradiction will be tolerated. (Very Trumplike in that way.)The dear heart troll perceives any slight divergence from his orthodoxy as an attack. Not one word can be out of place. This is a white man thing. If you are not in full accord, you are an enemy. (Eg, Trump or Bannon.)

Plus he's a douchebag snob. Thankfully people have caught on to Paul and recognize it for the troll it is.Now I fully expect Paul to respond to this post with more of his witty bon mots.

[quote] It’s your job to figure out how to succeed despite the obstacles of your generation.

To an extent Americans have been sold a lie about “success”. Everything is about succeeding, winning, getting to the top. Yes, it’s nice that now girls and people of color can also aim for the presidency and Supreme Court and to be the next Jeff Bezos but we also have to acknowledge that the chances are very slim. To use an old expression, there will always have to be more Indians than chiefs. The majority of people who get an education and work hard will not become senior management or partner or the next tech billionaire. And there’s nothing wrong with that. They have not failed at life or failed to reach their potential. They are are not lazy or unmotivated. We have to stop excusing the poor wages at the bottom of the pyramid by saying “senior management earn great salaries, aim for that and don’t be lazy” It’s just not possible for every hard worker to rise up and snatch one of the good paying jobs. It’s not even possible without nepotism and favouritism in a perfect world.

I really do think the next generation will move away from the “success,success,succeed” culture we live in. I think they will stop focusing on the material trappings of “success”. They will find value in things other than job title and house size and income. Less consumption will also help the environment so they are killing two birds with one stone and I think they will be much better off for it too. I honestly think the mental heath crisis in this country will improve when we reevaluate our values system and what we consider to be a “successful life”.

I think there are places where there are plenty of (shitty) jobs for unskilled workers and other places where someone is up shit's creek.

It is surprising to see how out of touch DL is. I am a college professor and I can see how much harder it is now than it was twenty or thirty years ago when I was in the "real world."

Low wage jobs treat them like shit. (I especially like how they will schedule them for a two hour shift and a three hour shift with three hour break between them--rather than hiring them for the day. They save money, while essentially taking up a whole working day.)

The higher paying jobs do not actually pay higher wages. And they also treat them like shit. The cost of living has gone beyond wages. The rest of us feel it as wage stagnation, but they feel it as not even getting a foothold.

The world has changed.

If you watch TikTok, you can see that all the young people are upper middle class and have a life of leisure with plenty of time to record video of themselves.

Jesus Christ, PO. Try dialing the phone with a goddam pencil!

r165 if the oldsters here knew what TikTok is, that's how they would form their opinions about all young people, believe me.

[quote] OP: Old people had it so easy when they were young

Different times, different challenges, never easy.

I think younger people have a skewed perception of what they are “worth” in the job market. Get used to the fact that the designer clothes and purses, expensive travel and luxury lifestyle seen on Instagram isn’t reality. Most will have to work a few years before they can afford those things.

It's about getting a foothold and living an independent life r169. As r164 stated. It's about just wanting to make a living, it's not about being rich and fabulous. And young people know that most of the influencers you see on Instagram are either a) presenting a fantasy or b) actual whores. Nobody takes it literally.

I’m a Boomer.

I started my life in an old, cold, rundown tenement slum. My father left, he never even married Mom.

I started school, in a worn, torn, dress that somebody threw out. I knew the way it was to always live in doubt, To be without the simple things, So afraid my friends could see the guilt in me.

But I raised my own kids in the lap of luxury. Now, they’re complaining because they want my job, too. I’ve raised a bunch of monsters.

"The job paid fairly well -- FOH started at $10/hr (plus tips); BOH started at $12.50/hr."

The crux of the problem. In what universe is being paid 12.50 a "fairly" good wage?

Do you know how much an apartment costs? A loaf of bread?

Young people also know that 98% of people will never own all that designer junk and stay at the Four Seasons because most young people have never known anyone who owns designer items or stays at the FS. It really is just about living alone in a nice apartment in your late 20s/early 30s, being able to buy a home, keeping your housing costs under 30% of your income, being able to start a family. Most people period will not be owning purses and jewellery and taking luxury trips after a few years of working.

The materialistic young people who want designer goodies and have a 60K car daddy bought them are not the young people anyone on this thread is talking about. I suspect some of you are completely out of touch with regular middle and working class Americans of all ages.

Oh bullshit. Boomers gutted pensions, rigging the tax code in favor of themselves and giving a big fat fuck you to everybody else after.

[quote] R170: It's about getting a foothold and living an independent life .

It’s not “an independent life” if you depend on some Boomer to give you their job.

You should be thanking the Boomers for raising you in relative wealth. And for saving so that they won’t become a burden to the millennials in their own dotage.

[quote]It’s not “an independent life” if you depend on some Boomer to give you their job.

THAT IS NOT WHAT ANYONE HAS SAID YOU SHIT STIRRING TROLL. Anyway, r161 just checked your ass.

[quote]Oh bullshit. Boomers gutted pensions, rigging the tax code in favor of themselves and giving a big fat fuck you to everybody else after.

And don't forget real estate.

[quote] and it’s harder to get a sense of independency.

Probably investing in a good dictionary would help.

Things are rough all over. There are still all the classes in the USA but the middle class has shrunk to many lower middle and a lot of working class. Their are large hard-working working class families that help everyone get the leg up inside the family. The old upper middle class has become very rich. And the rich have become mega rich.

There is a meritocracy but it's limited to a small percentage of achievers who are clever and work hard. There are all the professions that might pay well.

There is no doubt that it's harder to live a stable - basic - "job transport food shelter health care" - working class life.

All the shittiest jobs need to be reunionized and capitalism will have to adjust OR - there will be mass permanent unemployment if every single possible job that can be offshored, is.

People are not going to build lives working 20 years in an non-unionised WalMart or Amazon grunt job.

their - there

[quote] R148: Good lord it's about older who have enough $$ to be set for life and should hand over the reigns to younger people so they can get a leg up.

[quote] R170: It's about getting a foothold and living an independent life [R169].

[quote] R175: It’s not “an independent life” if you depend on some Boomer to give you their job.

[quote] R176: THAT IS NOT WHAT ANYONE HAS SAID YOU SHIT STIRRING TROLL. Anyway, [R161] just checked your ass.

R176: IT IS EXACTLY WHAT WAS WRITTEN! You want older workers to give you their job, so you can be “independent”, which seems awfully “dependent” to me. And I’m not the cupcake troll or whoever’s ass that R161 was allegedly checking.

I'm done r181. This is a good thread, stop fucking it up with your insanity. You're a troll, as r161 called it. It's not all Boomers, it's the old asses with tons of money who won't get out of the way even though they're pretty much irrelevant. That's all that was said. Sorry you took it personally, but there it is.

r179 it doesn't seem like this is a sustainable model. Unrestricted capitalism, or however you want to phrase it. I think everybody is nervous about where this is going to eventually lead to, and whether or not it's going to happen in our lifetimes.

It's not all Boomers, but it's certainly Boomer politicians, especially Boomer Republicans and their disastrous tenure in power.

Why are you squabbling? Is it because there won’t be many jobs because AI and automation will have millions of jobs redundant? You won’t even be able to drive mini cabs because taxis will be autonomous.

Who’s bringing you AI? It sure as hell isn’t boomers because like you said, they know squat about tech.

Who brought you competition from the Chinese and the rest of the world? Should the boomers have dropped nuclear weapons on them back in the 50’s?

The level of entitlement here is astounding. You get what you earn. No generation has been handed anything. They made what they got.

Whining gets you nowhere - hard work and hustling does. No we’ll-paying GM factory jobs any more? Get over it and create some new ones.

[quote] R182: It's not all Boomers, it's the old asses with tons of money who won't get out of the way even though they're pretty much irrelevant.

How much is a ton of money? At what age are “old asses” supposed to resign? Employers would lay these people off if they really were “in the way” and “irrelevant“. These people are valued, apparently.

This thing called, "life" is a joke. I just turned 50 so I was born into the generation where our parents kicked us out when we turned 18 and we had to do what we could to survive. I rented a single room from a crazy woman who rented to other college students. I was going to Junior College while working full time arresting shoplifters for $12 and hour. My first car was a piece of crap Hyundai. I went to junior colleges for 5 years. I finally realized I was going nowhere working retail and I had to go to a University. I applied to UCLA and got in as a junior. I had zero help from my parents, so I took out student loans. Finished college in 2 years despite being told it would take me 3 and I worked part time the entire time I was in school. I worked my ass off. When I graduated, I owed $25000 in loans, stupidly took a consolidation loan at 9% interested. It took me 18 years of $400 per months payments to finally pay that shit off. I have lived in crappy studio apartments my entire life because I couldn't afford anything nice and I drove cheap cars up until a few years ago when I finally got a nicer, larger car than my tiny Geo Metro. I will never be able to afford a house, nor am I sure I want to. I work in the field I went to college for and make decent money, but the truth of this world is this...most of us will always be slaves. Debt is slavery.

There is no such thing as "good debt" despite what the experts say. Debt keeps you working, keeps you worrying. Most of us will never be much better off than our parents were (unless they are rich). Most of us simply go through the motions to stay alive. I had ALL my debt paid off, but in the last two years I have owed and paid over $9000 for medical. Medical bills will always come, car bills will always come. Vet bills, rent, etc. Life is a joke filled with very small moments of happiness but mostly misery. I have zero hope for the future anymore as I will never be able to retire.

But when I was at the dentist the other day, I overheard them talking to a patient. They asked him if he'd been chewing his retainer and they had to keep going out to talk to his mom in the lobby. I was thinking that he was probably nine or ten, but when I went to the lobby, there was mom who said, "He's 22 years old. He can decide for himself. I'm just the money."

And THAT right there is one of the biggest problems of the young today. Parents don't teach them that being a grown up means struggle and making your own choices. They coddle them into thinking that life will always be easy and so they expect easy. I'm not saying what my parents did was right because my life has been a shit storm of struggle, but every single accomplishment, bill or degree I have I did on my own and I prefer knowing that. Someday, I hope to live in a place where I can have some actual space and even some furniture, but my life has been all about my own choices...not all of them smart or good but most of them where done for survival.

R186 You really think that there aren't young people who are struggling and making choices? It seems like a lot of DLers only know upper middle class youth in their orbit.

187, I didn't say that. I think the problem is, no one tells them that that is life. I'm sure they struggle just as I did. But do we really need to hear about how hard it is for them? There was no one reporting on my generation back in the day because it was just "life."

-186

[quote] "Old" people did not have it easy. I came of working age in the early 1980s. All companies wanted to do was hire women and minorities. If you were white male you were shit out of luck unless you had connections or went to an ivy league school.

Are you f*cking kidding??? The Reagan 80s??!!!! l

More alt-right mythology...

R189, there were two very deep recessions in the early 1980s, back to back. Yes, the Reagan years. The fed had jacked-up interest rates to try to kill the high inflation of the 1970s. It did kill inflation, but caused or exasperated the two recessions. Reagan’s military build-up helped bring the economy back.

I had a friend who was offered an engineering job in Houston in 1983. They laid him off on his first day. Meanwhile, it was very hard to find a job in New England, and housing prices in Boston collapsed. Then there was another severe New England recession in about 1989.

This isn’t mythology, it’s history, and you can google it.

I don’t take issue with the difficulty people have today, but blaming Boomers, or minimizing the challenges that Boomer faced, isn’t good history.

Isn't the world supposed to end due to climate change at an accelerating rate that no one was expecting?

They're expected to pay 3x times the rent in a 10x more competitive job market.

[quote]The needling asshole on this thread is The Cupcake Troll aka the Dear Heart Troll aka the troll formerly known as Paul and he's going to keep on responding.

Sorry to disappoint you but this is my first post on this thread. I've lost track of the number of times you've accused other people of being me. I suggest you get a life and move on.

Preach R4.

It's odd how old people have had it bad and the best. I wish people would make up their mind.

R195 It's more about what they did rather than what they had...

Nobody gets to pick when they're born. It's all in how they deal with it.

[quote]Kids today drinking their $20 craft cocktails while they debate the menu at the latest chef driven restaurant

I will say that I agree with this. I understand the cost of college is very expensive these days, but I find it ironic that 20-somethings have money for those expensive ass craft beers, fancy dinners, and frequent vacations with friends, yet can’t figure out why they can’t get theirs loans paid off.

Not to mention full sleeve tattoos.

There are pros and cons to both I think. As an older millenial, I sometimes envy older generations for having the luxury of being oblivious to the looming climate crisis. By the time sh*t truly hits the fan, they'll all be dead and gone. But as a queer woman of color, I would not have wanted to be young two or three generations ago. NOT AT ALL.

These are UK prices, but the same is most likely true in the US...

My parents bought their first house in 1968 for £2500. The mortgage was based on my dad's yearly wage, which was £1250 per year (equivalent to £21,000 now) and close to the average for the area. It was a standard first time buyer house.

The local average wage is now £23,000 per annum while the same house sold last year for £300,000 - 13x the average local wage. And this is for a two bed terrace, in an area that's quite a lot rougher than it was 50 years ago.

I'm glad I inherited money.

r200, no one NEEDS to buy a house. It's a luxury most of us can't afford. I couldn't afford it when it was more "affordable." I sure can't afford one now. So I rent.

ALWAYS live below your means. I have friends who didn't and they ended up losing their homes, their cars, etc. Yes, it would be nice if we could all afford a house, but that isn't the reality iof Capitalism. If I lost my job that pays me 83 grand per year, I would have zero problems going to work at Target or driving for Uber because I have always lived below my means. Would it suck? Yes, probably. But I have sacrificed before and survived.

Some random notes:

College costs have risen well above the cost of inflation. And in many cities, so have the costs of housing. See the link for some of the numbers.

Couple this with generally flat incomes for the past few decades and it is pretty clear that the millennial generation is the first generation in quite a while that is expected to do worse than their parents and it doesn't look like it will be any better for the generations after that. The Financial Times had a series of five charts two years ago that showed this. Those charts showed that unemployment was higher, labor participation rate was lower, student loan debt was higher, home ownership was lower, and significantly fewer millennials were out-earning their parents at the same age when compared to prior generations at that point in their careers.

Some of us are ready to retire and leave things to the next generation but are unable to do so until we learn whether the ACA will survive or not. I'm five years away from Medicare eligibility and there isn't an insurer in my state who wants to insure me, as I'm high risk. If the ACA survives, i.e., if Democrats retain the House and/or take over the Presidency and if the current ACA challenge is rejected by the Supreme Court, I can retire. Otherwise, I cannot afford to take the chance that Republicans will manage to kill off the ACA and I will continue working until I'm eligible for Medicare.

"...harder to get a sense of independency." - OP

I wonder why you and your dopey niece can't find meaningful work? To start, you write for shit. Times have always been tough. Smart, talented and EDUCATED people who bust their asses will always get ahead. Clearly, that isn't you.

r202 apartments are also expensive, it's not just house prices. And spare us the "I lived with four roommates in a one-bedroom apartment" shit. These days, the landlord would call the sheriff's office.

And not to mention that living in a four person houseshare at 34 is hardly something to strive for.

Focusing on one typo instead of actually replying to what was stated means you have nothing to say.

R207 It was indicative of who this halfwit is and what he presents to potential employers. Make sense now? Let me guess, you're in retail as well.

I avoid getting caught up in the intergenerational arguments here on DL. It's not a question of easy vs hard. Things were just very different. I work with younger people who actually struggle to get their work done because they can't stay off social media long enough to actually work. I don't say that as a put-down, but an admission that 'social media' (and the Internet) didn't even exist when I was starting out. It's silly for me to complain about people with their faces always in their phones when that just wasn't an option, years ago. And now, it's often some of the older people who are the worst offenders. I had a hard time starting out in the world (1978) and I see young people having a hard time getting started out even now. Just different types of barriers.

If the average salary is £23,000 and a starter home is £300,000 then I can imagine rent will be very high and there will be very little left of that £23,000. The £23K will probably put the earner over the threshold for qualifying for any type of government housing or social welfare too. Gordon Ramsay’s son did a tv program where he went back to the council house his dad was raised in. It was quite interesting if a little shallow but it seems that the social programs that helped Gordon get out of his council flat have been eradicated over the years. It’s also much more difficult to get a council house now, 50 years ago men with blue collar jobs were able to get a council house for the family that they could buy out cheaply. All gone. The modern equivalent of that man is on his own and renting privately.

It's a casual gossipy gay forum with no spellcheck, and the formatting also sucks. His business correspondence is probably much better.

Well, there is spellcheck, but it also sucks.

R210 it seems in the UK the only people who can get a council house are Muslim women with 9 children and no sign of a husband. And when they get tired of their 5 bedroom council house they start demanding bigger and bigger accommodations, and they usually get it.

I live in a working class area and I don’t know any young people who drink $20 cocktails or go on expensive vacations or any vacations. Ok not saying those people don’t exist but I’m going to guess those are upper middle class kids in the cities and maybe a few poor kids racking up credit card debt that they’ll regret to keep up with the Joneses but really you can go a lifetime (I have) without seeing young people living ‘Instagram’ lives.

r213 the UK system could be a whole separate thread.

Rents are high in some areas. Then there are rents more affordable but they are far from where people want to live. I commuted every day 60 miles to college because I couldn't afford to live near my school. Young people seem like they don't want to do this anymore. I live in Los Angeles. I could move an hour away from my job and I could afford to buy a house. But I did the commuting thing already so I stay put waiting for the housing market to crash in CA.

OK, people, get a grip. "Old" vs. "young" is a false dichotomy, like the infamous "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists." Quite simply, it's a class (SES) issue. These often masquerade as other things, but it always boils down to money.

If you grew up poor, you had it tough, no matter what age you are now. If you're old and you're poor (like me), it sucks to be old, too. It is difficult to pull one's self out of poverty, but it has always been so. This is not a new phenomenon.

Some people manage to come from nothing and be successful. But they have to either be brilliant, work like dogs, "know somebody," get damn lucky, or a combination thereof. But the rich, you know the old saying: He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. A lot of these young people think they hit a triple, but they're still at home plate, so to speak. They weren't born on third base and haven't figured out they're going to need more than a few base hits to get there.

Pretend you're a social scientist. "Controlling" for age, the correlation with your wealth/social status as an adult would be the socioeconomic status in which you started. That in and of itself will probably predict where you'll end up in life whether it's 1960 or 2020.

r217 I get where you're coming from, but what's being discussed is how the middle class is not what it used to be, and young people are drowning in debt and can't afford the basics the way previous generations could. And working-class kids? Forget it. Again, I'm not saying you're wrong, but what you wrote isn't exactly what's being discussed.

[quote] Young people seem like they don't want to do this anymore

Um, yes they do and they have no choice. I’m blue collar and none of the young people I work with live in the city. The only youngsters I know who live in the city have wealthy parents who are helping them out. I commute 70 minutes each way and my building is full of young people and young families. In LA, every under 30 friend I have there is in the north valley making hellish commutes and some don’t even own a car they are using Uber Pool or the Metro/bus combo to get to work/school. Biking is popular with them too especially the guys, the buses have racks for bikes and they get the bus to the end of the line and then bike to work. My ex had a niece in WeHo because her mother bought an investment property and let her live there. I have one Gen Z cousin working in NYC, she lives in New Jersey and takes two buses to get to work. This notion that young people are all living lives of luxury while also being afraid of hard work keeps cropping up here. I’m baffled because it’s so unlike anything I’ve experienced. I have to conclude it’s just conjecture or that some of you are only seeing young people within your own bubble (nice central neighorhoods, nice buildings, middle to upper middle class areas) and assuming that these kids are paying for his themselves because they’re too lazy to commute and save money? When it’s far more likely that they are just middle-upper middle class kids being subsibized by parents or who had connections and got a leg up in finding decent paying work. Those kids are not the majority. Heck, I can walk into the Ritz tomorrow and find millennials and Gen Zs sitting around the lobby fiddling with their Cartier love bracelets. Doesn’t make them representative of their generation.

[quote] Young people seem like they don't want to do this anymore

Um, yes they do and they have no choice. I’m blue collar and none of the young people I work with live in the city. The only youngsters I know who live in the city have wealthy parents who are helping them out. I commute 70 minutes each way and my building is full of young people and young families. In LA, every under 30 friend I have there is in the north valley making hellish commutes and some don’t even own a car they are using Uber Pool or the Metro/bus combo to get to work/school. Biking is popular with them too especially the guys, the buses have racks for bikes and they get the bus to the end of the line and then bike to work. My ex had a niece in WeHo because her mother bought an investment property and let her live there. I have one Gen Z cousin working in NYC, she lives in New Jersey and takes two buses to get to work. This notion that young people are all living lives of luxury while also being afraid of hard work keeps cropping up here. I’m baffled because it’s so unlike anything I’ve experienced. I have to conclude it’s just conjecture or that some of you are only seeing young people within your own bubble (nice central neighorhoods, nice buildings, middle to upper middle class areas) and assuming that these kids are paying for his themselves because they’re too lazy to commute and save money? When it’s far more likely that they are just middle-upper middle class kids being subsibized by parents or who had connections and got a leg up in finding decent paying work. Those kids are not the majority. Heck, I can walk into the Ritz tomorrow and find millennials and Gen Zs sitting around the lobby fiddling with their Cartier love bracelets. Doesn’t make them representative of their generation.

We have 2 younger people in our job. Both are addicted to their phones. They get away with it because because the boss is always outside on her phone, smoking. The two of us with the work ethic and no phones are boomers. We aren't covered in tattoos and piercings either.

OP if your niece is serious about a job, tell her to put her phone away, cover her tribal body art, take what she can get for her first job, and work hard. Then figure out what she wants do and work towards it.

[quote] This isn’t mythology, it’s history, and you can google it.

Your soliloquy is not well-taken, r190. I don't need to Google it, I was there. The Reagan 80s were not hard for "white males." The Reagan 80s enabled unprecedented class mobility for white males. The notion that the 80s were economically better for women and minorities than for white males is presposterous. Women and minorities prospered because they were starting from zero, but only the white dudes experienced life-altering prosperity.

How did men support their families back in the 50-80s with a single paycheck? Wives rarely worked, and yet they had comfortable middle-class lifestyles with nice homes, cars, vacations and kids were sent to college with no student debt. The kids had new clothes, shoes, bikes, toys.

That could never happen today without both the husband and wife working with good-paying jobs.

I think one of the reasons is that families didn't live beyond their means. Credit cards weren't a big thing back then, so people paid with cash. There no McMansions and must-have luxury SUVs. Kids didn't have expensive activities, cell phones, parties, clothes, etc. We had what we needed, but it wasn't expensive. Families also didn't eat out multiple times a week.

The cost of living was a lot cheaper back then R223. That's how families were able to live a middle-class lifestyle on one paycheck.

R224, The cost of living is relative. They probably thought everything was too expensive back then, too.

People today feel entitled to have the best of everything, even though most can't afford it. Millenials are not saving money. They spend every penny they make.

But the average family is not driving around in brand new SUVs and Teslas. They are not living in McMansions. They are not eating out several times per week but could lay off the fast food and Starbucks runs.

Once again in a world where everyone claims to be middle class the actual middle class are invisible and the working class don’t exist.

[quote] Nobody's handing jobs like that to 23 year-olds, and you know it you shit-stirring troll.

I'm not said troll, but companies ARE giving jobs that in years past went to more experienced candidates to younger ones, and often female candidates.

Why? Because (a) most companies have an unwritten discriminatory rule that they don't want to hire any one older than 35 these days, and (b) younger workers and especially women will accept anywhere from 30-60 percent of what an experienced male candidate would in the same role.

R223 This is an example of how they did it. In my family of seven, my Mother did not go back to work until the youngest was 12. She made our clothes and cooked (including bread) everything form scratch. To pay for the one driving vacation a year, she worked part time out of the house as a seamstress. We had one and one car. Eating out was rare.. Four gifts each at Christmas. Paid cash for everything . If you wanted a car, etc., you got a job and paid for it. Much lower expectations.

[quote] R222: Your soliloquy is not well-taken, [R190]. I don't need to Google it, I was there. The Reagan 80s were not hard for "white males."

The two recessions in the early 1980s were “harder” on some parts of the country than was the Great Recession, decades later. This was “hard” on everybody. You really should google it because you seem to have slept walked through it.

[italic] “The economy suffered a double whammy of two recessions in this period. There was one during the first six months of 1980. The second lasted 16 months, from July 1981 to November 1982.

The Fed caused this recession by raising interest rates to combat inflation. That reduced business spending. The Iranian oil embargo aggravated economic conditions by reducing U.S. oil supplies, which drove up prices.

GDP was negative for six of the 12 quarters. The worst was Q2 1980 at -8.0%. Until the 2008–2009 recession, that was the worst quarterly decline since the Great Depression. Unemployment rose to 10.8% in November and December 1982, the highest level in any modern recession. It was above 10% for 10 months. President Reagan lowered the tax rate and boosted the defense budget, helping to end the recession.” [/italic]

My folks bought a house in 1976 for 50 grand. My father worked, my mother stayed home. We ate almost every meal at home. Going out to dinner meant Bob's Big Boy or something cheap. There were four kids. Birthdays were maybe one new gift, the rest were purchased from garage sales. We didn't mind. We had two cars, both bought used and my dad knew how to fix them if something went wrong. Mom sewed so we got a lot of clothes made for us. There were no electronic devices for play back then. If we wanted to play, we had star wars action figures $1 per piece from Sears or Gemco. We rode bikes all over the neighborhood and had amazing adventures. Mom cooked but nothing great...tuna fish casseroles, crock pot meals, hamburger helper, etc. I actually felt like we were "rich" since we lived in a two story house. Mom would make a little extra $ selling Tupperware or crystal. My sister and I shared a room and a bed for a while, my two brothers shared a room. We had one tv and could only watch it on Saturday mornings (bugs bunny cartoons!) or after school (Brady Bunch). Family vacations were not really a thing, but we did go camping up to the Redwoods every summer. Long drive, but I have great memories of camping. We weren't well off, but we didn't want for much. Even when it became a thing, we never were allowed a TV in our rooms or a phone. Pretty sure it was because we couldn't afford it, but my parents were also old school and limited our phone conversations with friends at they cost money. We were only allowed 10 mins on the phone. We never had video game systems like Atari or any of those when they became popular, but we didn't really mind. I think people today think they have to have it all and aren't used to making sacrifices. Up until I was 10 or 11, life seemed simple and good. It was a big thing if we got to go to a Dodger game or Disneyland. My parents would save the Disney tickets so they wouldn't have to buy more the next time we went. This was when you got a book of tickets that were good for certain rides. I think it's interesting that parents today won't let their kids out of their sight. We were always told to get out and play and don't come back until lunch time or dinner. And yes, kids were being kidnapped back then but it wasn't really something we worried about. We were told to not talk to strangers and we didn't.

Update: No job has hired her still. She's been applying for different jobs at multiple different malls. All retail. Meanwhile, her brother just got an amazing computer job by fucking a girl whose dad runs the company. Ah, the privilege of being a white straight male.

Update: No job has hired her still. She's been applying for different jobs at multiple different malls. All retail. Meanwhile, her brother just got an amazing computer job by fucking a girl whose dad runs the company. Ah, the privilege of being a white straight male.

OP, r231/r232, something is going horribly wrong with your niece's applications. Does she put down that she has limited availability? Is she presentable or does she show up looking like a slob or a freak covered with piercings and a face tattoo?

A lot of people in older generations here are completely clueless. Oh your mom sewed your clothes? Today it costs more to buy the fabrics, than it costs to buy clothing from regular stores. It also comes across as you guys wanting women to be house slaves, to make food from scratch, make clothes, etc. How about no.

The arguments about what people have now a days, is pointless too. For one, regular people aren't living the way you describe. Maybe your own privilege is living somewhere, in an upper class bubble. No regular families eat out every night. It's ridiculous to point at technology too. It would be like me saying, you grew up with a fridge? A tv? No wonder your family struggled financially! Why didn't you all live in a cheap studio apartment?

The cost of living does matter. I can't believe someone here said it's a matter of perspective. Are you kidding me. The buying power of minimum wage in the 1970s would be the same as making $25 an hour today. That's not a personal perspective.