Talkin' bout my generation

[SHOOTER12 8800]

50 minutes ago, F250 said:

This is a different topic but how the hell did this happen?

 

Just the going rate back in the early/mid 60's in and around Welfare Texas

[SubliminalHorn 6786]

Supposedly I’m a Millenial (1982), but I don’t feel like I have a whole lot in common with a lot of the younger ones. I consider myself a Xilennial. I’m right there where I can see and remember Gen X angst and can see Millennial “softness” and can learn from both.  

[Armybrat 40826]

I quit listening to pop music when Elvis was drafted.

[DaysOff 7947]

I bought cigarettes at a UTotem when I was 10 for my mom in '76. The clerk gave me a look and I quickly stammered, "they're for my mom". Ok kid, here you go.

[Dewey 3286]

Only happened once, but my father wrote a note, the clerk looked at me strange, but dad got his cigarettes.

[F250 28766]

I remember buying cigarettes for my dad with a note at the store. The clerk didn't even blink at the idea of a little kid buying cigarettes.

 

[Mole 4330]

Early 80s here, so on the cusp of X and Millenial. I don't get the stereotypes about Millenials though, they've only spent the last two decades fighting continuous wars with an all-volunteer military. https://www.duffelblog.com/2016/04/millennials-lazy-freeloaders/

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — Amidst a dizzying array of highly divisive issues in the 2016 presidential election, Americans have found an issue on which there is overwhelming agreement: those born in the Millennial generation remain “lazy pieces of shit looking for handouts,” despite a combined total of 28 years of continuous war in Iraq and Afghanistan being fought on the ground almost exclusively by volunteer Millennials.

The consensus that all Millennials are “weak, useless kids with art degrees” has has emerged in the wake of a Gallup poll showing that well over half of Millennials approve of “some form of socialism.”

“These Millennials are out of control,” said local father Brian Hardy. “I don’t care that the overwhelming majority of the 2.5 million American veterans of these wars were born after 1980. First they voted for Obummer, twice, and now these geriatric Communists. The man and the lesbian.”

“I mean, no way I was gonna volunteer for Vietnam when I was their age, but that was totally different,” Hardy said, “at least we eventually left that shithole.”

Many Americans of the“Gen X” and “Baby Boomer” generations fondly recall their early 20’s, attending college without crippling debt or easily finding a job in the most robust economy in human history, made possible by the blood and sacrifice of their parents and grandparents of the “Greatest Generation.”

But despite lingering effects of the 2008 Great Recession, spiraling tuition costs, and a hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs overseas making comparisons with previous generations difficult, Rick Thomas, a middle aged American, remains unconvinced, arguing the younger generation are simply “lazy-ass dipshits addicted to iPhones and Bieber.”

Since the start of the Global War on Terror, 100 percent of the soldiers, sailors, Marines, airmen, and Coast Guardsmen have served on a completely voluntary basis, reportedly including hundreds of thousands of Millennials. That would make Millennials the first generation in American history to volunteer en masse for what is so far a never-ending war.

“Yeah? Well they still fucking text a lot,” Thomas said.

 

[irishtexan 11515]

1 hour ago, Patricio Swayze said:

Bicentennial Gen X checking in.

You jackoffs who claim good music doesn’t exist after the year you first got your dick wet just don’t know how to find it. Every year since rock n roll became a genre there has been great bands and albums.

Ride your bike until dinner time
CHiPs reruns
Fruit roll ups
First generation gaming consoles (for my brothers and I it was intellivision)
Dialing into BBS’s
First cell phone I owned was in 2000
Remembering where you were when the challenger exploded and Kurt cobain’s body was found (whether you liked nirvana or not)
Parties in fields or dead end streets
Driving around endlessly looking for parties or anything to do


Latch key kid por vida bitches.

 

[Jiggy-Z 3432]

1967.  I always thought that was too early for gen X and way too late for boomer.

Memories:

I remember going to camp on the beach and driving from Austin in 1972.  Dad rigged up some kind of shanty on the back of his truck with 2 X 4s and a heavy duty tarp.  The end would flap in the highway wind.  I know because my brother and I rode in the back of the truck all the way to Port A.

1976 I remember being dropped off at the Village 4 for a matinee and then sneaking off to go see other movies until mom picked us up. 

1979 I remember sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night and ridding bikes all over the neighborhood.

1970's I remember catching dozens of horny toads and then letting them go.  Before the fire ants showed up.

I remember trick or treating without an adult, probably from about age 6.

I remember following flood waters in the rains, through fences, across creeks, all the way to a rancher's pond that had overflowed and was sending catfish into the creek behind our house.

I remember fishing by myself on a pier in Rockport before I even learned to tie my shoes.

I remember fishing with my dad in Bayside on a cold winter's day and him giving me a shot of Jim Beam to help warm up this freezing 8 year old. i also remember going back over to his cooler and getting a few more, because I was cold. 

I remember my parents confiscating my plastic pool so they could set it under a deer that they were skinning in our garage.

Thoughts:

When I was growing up, I noticed that things were different in real life than they were in school literature or film strips.  It always seemed that I was looking at some bygone era.  Same with educational buildings and thought process.  Everything was already made for the generation that preceded us, but times had changed. 

[workswithseed 2097]

3 hours ago, GopherRock said:

There is a clear difference between millennials and Gen Z. Millennials have a coherent memory of where they were on 9/11. Gen-Z was either not born or too young to remember any of it. 

Yep, I was in our 3rd grade classroom watching the aftermath

[Sbbruin 21832]

1 hour ago, DaysOff said:

I bought cigarettes at a UTotem when I was 10 for my mom in '76. The clerk gave me a look and I quickly stammered, "they're for my mom". Ok kid, here you go.

[Sbbruin 21832]

Me and 2 friends were dropped of at the Van Halen concert at Forum in 1981 when we were 14.  Picked us up when it was over.    

[MNLonghornFUKM 8817]

Fucker..stole my thunder.


"Youre old enough right?"

"Yea..just graduated "

[JimmyJames 12271]

39 minutes ago, Sbbruin said:

Me and 2 friends were dropped of at the Van Halen concert at Forum in 1981 when we were 14.  Picked us up when it was over.    

How many blunts were you offered? And did you partake? 

[JimmyJames 12271]

1 hour ago, Jiggy-Z said:

1967.  I always thought that was too early for gen X and way too late for boomer.

Memories:

I remember going to camp on the beach and driving from Austin in 1972.  Dad rigged up some kind of shanty on the back of his truck with 2 X 4s and a heavy duty tarp.  The end would flap in the highway wind.  I know because my brother and I rode in the back of the truck all the way to Port A.

1976 I remember being dropped off at the Village 4 for a matinee and then sneaking off to go see other movies until mom picked us up. 

1979 I remember sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night and ridding bikes all over the neighborhood.

1970's I remember catching dozens of horny toads and then letting them go.  Before the fire ants showed up.

I remember trick or treating without an adult, probably from about age 6.

I remember following flood waters in the rains, through fences, across creeks, all the way to a rancher's pond that had overflowed and was sending catfish into the creek behind our house.

I remember fishing by myself on a pier in Rockport before I even learned to tie my shoes.

I remember fishing with my dad in Bayside on a cold winter's day and him giving me a shot of Jim Beam to help warm up this freezing 8 year old. i also remember going back over to his cooler and getting a few more, because I was cold. 

I remember my parents confiscating my plastic pool so they could set it under a deer that they were skinning in our garage.

Thoughts:

When I was growing up, I noticed that things were different in real life than they were in school literature or film strips.  It always seemed that I was looking at some bygone era.  Same with educational buildings and thought process.  Everything was already made for the generation that preceded us, but times had changed. 

Very good post. You are early Generation X. Things were changing a great deal but hadn’t quite yet. 

[AUinHsv 579]

2 hours ago, DaysOff said:

I bought cigarettes at a UTotem when I was 10 for my mom in '76. The clerk gave me a look and I quickly stammered, "they're for my mom". Ok kid, here you go.

I remember Utotem's but thought they were an Alabama item.. Dad used to send me into the SuperX drugstore to get his pipe tobacco - again no questions asked.

[RPM 26318]

On 10/17/2018 at 7:13 PM, Dropout said:

Macs in school was a pretty cool experience.

My first computer class we learned how to program these

[SHOOTER12 8800]

2 hours ago, RPM said:

My first computer class we learned how to program these

Holy crap, I had forgotten all about those.

[Aqua Buddha 14582]

1974:. Wouldn't trade my Gen X cynicism for anything.  Boomers believe everything they see on the Internet.

[Bat Guano 359]

1 hour ago, Aqua Buddha said:

1974:. Wouldn't trade my Gen X cynicism for anything.  Boomers believe everything they see on the Internet.

[Sbbruin 21832]

1 hour ago, Aqua Buddha said:

1974:. Wouldn't trade my Gen X cynicism for anything. 

Whatever.

[JimmyJames 12271]

On 10/18/2018 at 1:17 PM, SuingToGetAMessageBoard? said:

Peak Gen X:

Look, we're gonna spend half the night driving around the Hills looking for this one party and you're going to say it sucks and we're all gonna leave and then we're gonna go look for this other party. But all the parties and all the bars, they all suck. I spend half the night talking to some girl who's looking around the room to see if there's somebody else who's more important she should be talking to. And it's like I'm supposed to be all happy 'cause she's wearing a backpack, you know? And half of them are just nasty skanks who wouldn't be nothing except they're surrounded by a bunch of drunken horny assholes. And I'm gonna tell you something T. Are you listening?

Yeah, I'm listening.

I'm not gonna be one of those assholes. Alright? It just makes me sick. It's like, some nasty skank who isn't half the woman my girlfriend is, is gonna front me? It makes me want to fuckin' puke!

Sigh. You got it bad, baby. You need Vegas. 

[Al_4_ISU 12454]

On 10/16/2018 at 6:47 PM, Sbbruin said:

There was a rather enjoyable thread on the site that shall not be named dissing on millennials, and rightfully so.  They are awful.  But that is from the perspective of a bonafide Gen X-er (born 1967).  I identify with a group  that was raised free-range, was allowed to fail without a soft landing, experimented with more drugs than I should have, watched in amazement as technology truly blossomed from humble beginnings, and witnessed numerous economic cycles, some boom and some bust.  

What generation are you?  And how do you perceive your own generation and those older and younger than you?  My kids are teen/pre-teen, and they treat me like I'm from the Stone Age.  And I guess that's fair.  In retrospect, I felt the same about my parents.

So what you described sounds an awful lot like my experience, but I was born in 1985, and therefore considered a millenial.

I've never used a dating app.  I distinctly remember the world before the internet.  I distinctly remember the world before cell phones.  I was raised "free range" as were the majority of my peers (although I did know kids with helicopter parents).  I experimented with all but the hardest (meth/opiates) drugs.  I've seen things that I thought were mere fantasy become reality through technology.  The movies I loved as a kid were Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and The Goonies.  I obsessed over Nirvana, Beck, and Sublime in grade school.  I never played with Power Rangers, Pokemon, or virtual pets.  We had He-Man and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys.

I don't really relate to millenial tropes at all, and my experience isn't unique among my peers.  I do have a theory regarding my situation: where I grew up.  Because I grew up in an extremely rural area (on a farm situated between a town of 140 people and a town of 20 people) in the pre-internet era, I was relatively cut off from the trends of the time.  My older cousins, who were definitely Gen Xers (born in '75 and '77) often babysat my brother and I, and basically were the sources of all our childhood entertainment tastes.  They just passed on the stuff they were into and we absorbed it.  That relative isolation and a general tendency to be "behind the times" shaped my formative years in a way that's fairly different from most millenials, and thus I relate more to the Gen Xers in a lot of ways.

[Al_4_ISU 12454]

On 10/16/2018 at 11:37 PM, Celery Man said:

I could talk shit about boomers, or half commiserate/half laugh at the Gen X being the Jan Brady generation.  But I think more specifically the "Oregon Trail" band of the millennial generation (basically millennials born in the 80s) was an interesting one to grow up in.  Elementary school computer labs with monotone screens and MECC games.  Growing up on early 90s MTV - Nirvana, that Blind Melon video (and then 1979), staying up late to watch Beavis and Butt-head and Aeon Flux.  Growing up alongside the internet - from dialing in to AOL (shit, in my case Prodigy to start) to Napster and Counterstrike, MySpace and then Facebook hitting right when I was a college freshman, and then the surge to dominance of social media that may have fucked with slightly younger millennials more than people right around my age.  The quickness with which all that happened - loading my Donald Duck video game on a 5.25" floppy (and applying newfound reading/writing skills to boot up games in Dos), Windows 3.1 - 95 - 2000 - XP and the rise of OS X.  Dot com boom and bust. I fucking still had a zip drive when I was a freshman at UT.  The evolution of design on the internet.  Virtualization, and the change that that has brought.

I didn't intend to just write a whole thing about computers and the internet, but I think the specific time frame of my existence has been a really interesting one to... advance in parallel with the latest great technological revolution.

Our wheelhouse.  It is the same.

[Al_4_ISU 12454]

On 10/17/2018 at 11:48 AM, F250 said:

I had an employee that falls into the old Millennial category by his age but was culturally a Gen-X. He could relate to 1980s shows, clothes, toys, UHF, rotary phones, Atari 2600, and a lot of other things that he should have been too young to really remember.

One day I asked him how is it he remembers or knows so much about things that ended before his time. He said that he grew up poor on the South Side of San Antonio and everything was outdated. He didn't get AC in school until the mid 90's, no computer labs in school, microfiche through HS, had old toys, no cable tv just an antenna, VHS tapes of old cartoons bought at the flea market, cassettes no CDs, etc.

It was interesting to see how income level has an impact on how one experiences their generational time period. I'm guessing these Generational stigmas mainly apply to middle class Americans. Not people that were still using laser disc videos in school while everyone else was migrated to DVDs.

 

 

I really should have read the whole thread before posting.

[Al_4_ISU 12454]

On 10/18/2018 at 3:23 PM, F250 said:

I remember buying cigarettes for my dad with a note at the store. The clerk didn't even blink at the idea of a little kid buying cigarettes.

 

Did the same with beer.  My dad would run into town on Saturdays with my brother and I, and he'd go pick up farm parts and drop us off at the grocery store.  We'd have to get pop and beer for the guys who worked on our farm to keep in the shop fridge.

The clerk would put it on the farm's tab (which got mailed out once a month), put the beer in a black garbage bag, and off we went.

Yes, that's right.  When I was 10 years old I could buy a case of beer and not exchange a single damn penny.  Once I got to be about 12, the store owner quit letting us do this and I really can't blame her.

Edited October 19, 2018 by Al_4_ISU

[SuingToGetAMessageBoard? 3861]

14 minutes ago, Al_4_ISU said:

Because I grew up in an extremely rural area (on a farm situated between a town of 140 people and a town of 20 people)

So were you in the suburbs of those two towns?

[CycleTex87 2967]

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.  Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.  I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.  All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.  Time to die.

[Al_4_ISU 12454]

19 minutes ago, SuingToGetAMessageBoard? said:

So were you in the suburbs of those two towns?

I assume you're being facetious, but I'll roll with it because I've met people who didn't get the concept of just living out in the country from a civic standpoint.

It was unincorporated countryside.  Just rural Mitchell County, Iowa.  In Iowa, you have 3 levels of government - state, county, city.  If you aren't inside city limits (we were not - only the larger of the two towns was incorporated), you're just part of the county.  All counties are divided into townships, but they aren't actual government entities, they're just lines on a map to make legal descriptions easier.

Edited October 19, 2018 by Al_4_ISU

[SuingToGetAMessageBoard? 3861]

I was kidding.  I'm from a farming town of 600 myself.

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

56 minutes ago, CycleTex87 said:

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.  Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.  I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.  All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.  Time to die.

Yeah sure, but have you ever really had a great pickle ??

[El Diablo 4232]

First real job after high school was in a sales office, ashtray on desk, bunch of smokers, place was like a bar.

[RDCanecutter 26405]

I am chronologically a Boomer. Grew up more like a Gen Xer, but where I lived it felt more like 1880s Jamaica than the US some days, so maybe my influences were different.

When all those articles started coming out of "Millenniels don't want to _____, they'd rather ______," I was like "Well hell, I always felt the same way about that too."

My first jobs were working either for old dudes who had silver Elvis haircuts and probably once belonged to the Klan, or else older "True Boomers" who would end every sentence with "maaaan."

[SimonBolivar 10957]

On 10/18/2018 at 2:01 PM, Sbbruin said:

I would regularly leave my house on a Saturday morning on my bike with the instructions to "be home for dinner."  No question of where I was going.  And this was basically from age 9 or 10 on.  Before that the question of "where I was going? "   We had a small beach house and I would head to the beach in the morning, come back for lunch, and head back out until dinner without a moment of adult supervision.  And I survived.

That describes my life in the mid-90s. I don't think things have changed THAT much. The only time I can remember my parents keeping tabs on me was when it was flooding and the neighborhood creek was roaring. They drove around and found me playing with some kids on the street and told us to stay away. Naturally we didn't listen and headed straight for the creek as soon as they left to look at it, but that's the only time I can remember them helicoptering. 

[SuckitKevin 920]

On 10/18/2018 at 2:35 PM, DaysOff said:

I bought cigarettes at a UTotem when I was 10 for my mom in '76. The clerk gave me a look and I quickly stammered, "they're for my mom". Ok kid, here you go.

I used to run into the back of a bar and buy my Dad some Kools from a vending machine.

[wild_turkey 3159]

Born in 1983 so I suppose I’m in that tiny overlap between Gen X and Millenials.

Boomers and Gen X love to bitch about Millennials, but those generations raised Millennials. Maybe if they had better parenting skills and didn’t create stupid ideas like participation trophies, then we wouldn’t have a generation of entitled brats.

We’re all partly responsible for those who come after us. Generations don’t exist in a vacuum.

[JimmyJames 12271]

There’s no reason to bitch about the Millenials. The Millenials are fine. All in all overall good people.

Being and feeling entitled can be a good thing if you ultimately use it for good. Greed isn’t always good boomers. And cynical skepticism isn’t always productive my fellow x’ers. 

[Patricio Swayze 17058]

I was shocked that such a book has been written, but even more shocked that a major Oil & Gas company bought the book to hand out to their millennial new hires.