2d ago

Sweet Spot

132 comments

Also flying to Vietnam for a government paid vacation when they were 18 years old.
- Shhhh, the primary social media population wants to believe life was a breeze until they came along.
  
  There was no oil crisis, no cold war, no economic crash in the 80s, no housing shortage in the 80s, no rampant crime!
  The 70/80s where glorious!
  /Sssss
  
  I definitely enjoyed myself, more in the 80s than the 70s (which seemed largely like the record industry still trying to milk money out of the 60s).
  
  Well if you enjoyed the 80s soooo much then a) you where too young to grasp the problems facing your parents or b) you where too well off.
  Just look at the cinema and listen to the music of my fine period.
  Everything, every theme was: please dont kill us and can i have a room to call my own.
  The politics where insane, mortgage rates of 10-15% where the norm, enormous economic shifts.
  The 90s where fun but the eighties where, in my experience, very, very dark.
  Ever listened to, I dunno, two tribes, war, dancing with tears in my eyes, Russians, etc.? Those first albums of u2? Really grasped what Terminator was about? Wall Street? Or the much lighter but still terribly fucked Trading Places?
  It was all really dark stuff, my brother. Fun, but very dark.
  
  I was a regular guy in my 20s/30s working as a computer programmer, living in a house with roommates and doing a lot of theatre. Amazingly there were more than your two possibilities, and I would hazard a guess that there are even more. LPT: simplistic binary thinking makes people boring.
  
  We didn't start the fire
  
  Life has always been a struggle, but it truly feels hopeless being 20 something given the current state of the world. There's some days where I spend 80% of the day consumed by suicidal thoughts.
  
  It was kind of a breeze in comparison to now, no? My dad bought his first house for $37,000 when the average salary was $15,000. I just bought a house and couldn't find one within an hour for under $420,000... The average salary around here is apparently $55,000
  
  Valid point that life was cheaper than it is now (and also a lot more expensive than when my parents were my age). But that whole time is weirdly misrepresented like it was a walk in the part, ignoring the massive social upheaval over race issues, women's rights, the Vietnam War, pollution, Nixon and many other things. There was also the Cold War keeping us in constant fear of World War 3. My school had air raid practice FFS. Life wasn't a party, it was just less expensive.
  
  But is it also the average household salary? Most boomers were single income. Then in the late eighties early nineties people realized that you could get higher mortgages in a double income, and as a result houses got a lot more expensive. Also, interest rates have declined a lot since the eighties, which also allowed people to borrow more.
  
  That just adds to my point? It doesn't matter why it happened, housing is significantly more expensive compared to income. But since you brought it up, let's do the math.
  $15,000 average salary, single income, $37,000 house. That's about 30 months salary.
  $55,000 average salary, dual income ($110,000), $420,000 house. That's 45 months salary. With both people working.
  So....yeah, seems like "the basics" are a lot harder to achieve nowadays than they were in the 80s.
  
  I really wouldn't know if that last statement is true. We were only discussing housing, so not all of the basics. Also, like I said earlier, interest rates on mortgages were higher in the past. I would also consider this when comparing, because the interest can be more than total debt.
  
  Interest rates peaked in '81 at 18% and yes that brings it closer to today's % of income...but it plummeted within a few years.
  And housing/mortgage stuff isn't the only part in this equation - the bottom 90% of the country has been getting significantly less for their labor since Reagan. Money is hoarded and wages have not kept up with inflation
  
  It's also forgetting the Korean war, and several smaller wars in between (Panama, Honduras).
  Vietnam was bad, but don't forget so easily that we only just got out of the longest running war the US was ever been in, and it wasn't Boomers or Gen X fighting in it. It spanned two generations. Now, because there US just can't not be involved in a conflict, we're casting about trying to find a good enemy; I think the next one will be with a developed country. We've realized that we don't do so well with insurgencies, so maybe Russia or China. Or, maybe India and Pakistan will finish everything for us! They both have nukes, and China isn't just going to sit there while they trade nukes across the border.
  Anyway, it's a little depressing that y'all have already written off the 800,000 veterans who fought in Afghanistan as being unworthy of notice.
  
  If you want to nitpick in that area, US soldiers in the Middle East over the past 30 years have all been enlistees, average age around 30. The average age of US soldiers in Vietnam was 19, most of whom were drafted. No American high school students since 1973 have had to watch lottery balls on TV decide whether they get sent to war.
  
  The Korean War “ended” in 1953 the oldest boomer would have been 7 year olds, about half of them were the right age for Vietnam but even with that only about 2.7m served in some capacity for the Vietnam war with a lot in non combat roles there were 76m baby boom era so less than 4%
  
  Fair comment about the Korean war; I incorrectly mentally lump it together with the Vietnam war as part of the general "war on communism," and it wasn't the boomers.
- A lot of boomers missed Vietnam as even in 1975 some boomers were only 11 years old
  
  Those from the actual baby boom right after WW2 weren't
  
  Less than 4% of boomers served in Vietnam.
  
  This kind of seems like a meaningless statistic without some more context (such as what % of US citizens were boomers, and what % of US citizens served in Vietnam). On its own, it doesn't really say anything.
  I think a more useful statistic would be the percent of people who served in Vietnam that were boomers.
  
  It matters because if you are going to say that a defining factor of that generation is that they went to Vietnam when less than 1/25 people did it’s misleading. It’s like saying that a defining factor of millennials was being in nyc when the twin towers went down
  
  Those would be gen X.
  
  Baby boomers are 1946-1964 Gen X is 1965-1980 Gen Y is 1981-1996 Gen Z is 1997-2012 Gen alpha is 2013- present
  
  It's all made up horse shit to draw lines between us. People don't neatly fit into a line or graph and it's really lame people keep repeating this crap.
  
  It’s not some complicated plot to drive conflict… it’s literally just a metric that has turned out to be somewhat useful as we can talk about what major life events different generations experienced at what approximate age.
  For example most Gen Y was a teen when 9/11 happened and most Gen X was a teen when the challenger explosion happened and most boomers were a teen when we landed on the moon

132 comments