Graduating right after the Great Recession started. Woooh
I feel especially bad for the immigrant gen-z.
Imagine you just fled a political dictatorship with your family, and now you watch a new political dictatorship form but with AI and racism.
At like fucking 15.
No need to imagine. I am that guy.
I’m Gen Z, was born in China after the CCP failed to terminate me under the One Child Policy, which resulted in my birth. Parent had to pay a massive fine for my existence. Even politics aside, economy was shit at the time, hard for my parents to find stable jobs. My mom told me that work was just brutal, I remember my maternal grandmother had to take care of us often times because both parents were either at work or looking for work from morning to late at night.
Government is so corrupt, they didn’t even enforce food safety regulations (not even sure if such regulations even existed). I remember my mom constantly warning us about food safety. Also you need to boil the water cuz its toxic. Steets were dirty, well at least the neighborhood I used to live in. Other areas might have it better.
Hukou system meant that since my parents were from rural areas, they didn’t have all the rights of someone living in the city. Even though me and my older brother were born in the city. So the city didn’t even allow us into their public schools.
And if we had stayed in the country, it’d be a struggle to get outside information. Like not just for political information and stuff (which honestly, probably doesn’t even matter when you’re struggling and you can’t change the system), but most importantly the entertainment would be limited, anything considered anti-government would be much harder to find, if not impossible, in mainland China. Unless you get lucky and somehow, as a local, manage to find a VPN if you never stepped foot outside the country. (Not sure if I’d even find out what a VPN is if I remained in the country)
Like imagine you’re under a “rat race” for money then you go home and can’t find anything interesting to watch, because its “too political” and blocked.
So yay, jumping from one boiling pot to another. Life is amazing! The universe do love its trolling.
(Tbf life did get better in the US, for us, at least from around 2014 to now. But I’m now more of fearing for the future, such as a Chinese Exclusion Act v2: Electric Boogaloo)
Thanks for your comment. I feel like I learned a lot from it. I didn’t know about the Hukou system, for example.
For what it’s worth, I’m glad you exist.
You have been banned from Lemmy.ml
More like “You’ve been banned from PRC, you fucking 汉奸 (Han Traitor¹)”
(¹Nationalists like to label anyone criticizing the government as race traitors, it’s kinda like the Magats label anyone anti-trump to be “Anti-American”)
My Mandarin is fairly mediocre, but it’s fairly interesting that the 汉字 for “traitor” or “evil” has the “woman” component in it.
Funny enough, the origin of that character is 姦 - which goes all the way back to the earliest forms of Chinese writing (the bronze inscriptions) and was a pictogram of 3 women together (see here), which represented “evil, treacherous, scheming, traitor, adulterer” and similar. 奸 was a later variant form with same meaning (the 干 was added as a phonetic component, and 3 女 were reduced to just 1), which was later adopted as the simplified form of traditional 姦.
the immigrant gen-z
the immigrant gen-z that fled to the usa
Countries should make Americans eligible for refugee visas
I have a family member to whom this happened three separate times during their youth. They are fairly unsurprised by what is going on in the US as it’s all very familiar for them.
Xennial putting up with Reagan onward:
99 dotcom bust, 911, 2008 great recession, covid, idiot tarriffs and this ai bullshit, all while in the worforce.
Yeah, the older millenials be eatin lean cause they always been eating lean.
Don’t forget being blamed industries failing because recognizing our lack of income is impossible for boomers.
Oh and being blamed for receiving participation trophies our parents generation forced on us.
My favorite was the desperate headline, “millennials kill napkins” because we can’t afford so many different paper products (if they knew we were using TP for kleenex, they’d have run with that too).
What really sucks is living near Millennials who were handed jobs and houses by their parents, and live life effortlessly, which makes it seem like the “dream” is still alive and I’m just failing at it.
Have a friend whose Boomer dad said that he’d best hope he, the father, dies early otherwise he’s going to blow all of the inheritance. The dad is also a MAGAt so it tracks.
I don’t hate to say it, Boomers are the most out of touch, entitled, enriched generation the USA has ever seen and they’re going to be the downfall of this country.
Going to be?
They have plenty of time to fuck things up further.
Its the 1% vs the working class, not generation vs generation.
And a lot of boomers who have substantial retirements think they’re the 1% and others protect them because they’ve been misled via propaganda to believe they’re the job creators and back them fully.
I got arrested for possessing a dust-amount of cannabis when I was 13
then I had to work through the pandemic as a cannabis dispensary manager because we were “essential medical personnel”
with no medical benefits. Earning less money than I would’ve if I had been able to go on unemployment.
It’s a shit country. The social contract does not exist anymore. Thinly-veiled threats of violence are the only thing still keeping the population in line, including the threat of homelessness which is also a form of violence.
Once, when I was on acid, I asked myself - how would I define America? The answer I settled on is, “America is everyone who is stuck here” (or forced by economic or otherwise imperially-orchestrated hardship to come here, even if they would prefer to remain in their home country otherwise). Everyone who lives in America and cannot comfortably escape lives in a prison. You may get the equivalent of a Nordic prison if you’re privileged, but look how many wealthy celebrities live miserable lives - it’s still a prison.
And so I live by advice I heard from a prisoner. I wish I could remember the source, but I can’t. The advice, as to how to survive in prison, was: “Take everything they give you. Give nothing in return.” It’s important to note that this applies to the government, to corporations, to capitalism, NOT to your fellow prisoners (Americans). The only way we get through this is each other.
You forgot the two bullshit wars they shipped us off to fight
This must be a mistype, here I fixed the meme
Weed is illegal where I am. I am a illegal American. Ready for my deportation.
I with visit you in SECOT, my narco-terrorist friend 🙏
Didn’t the US federal government close the loophole that allowed Delta 8 THC to be sold?
Lol, yeah. There’s almost always something. I (and I think most millenials) had the housing crisis/economic crash as we entered the age of employment.
Wow, I feel incredibly seen by this meme. Hot damn, the system works
I really worry about the younger generations, they’re growing up in a toxic landscape of end stage capitalism. I’m worried they’ll think this is normal like a kid in an abusive household. This isn’t normal, this is beyond reproach in how abnormal it is. Please, fight with us.
One of the things that bolsters my resolve is seeing how much more politically engaged the youth of today are (though given that I’m one of the youngest Millennials and I’m 29, I’m not sure that Gen Z count as “the youth” any more). Some of it is a bit concerning, in that some of them are becoming politically engaged with right wing reactionary though, but the vast majority of what I’ve seen has been much more positive.
I was talking to a teen the other month who tried using they/them pronouns for a little while, to see how it felt, because there were a few non binary people in his year, which made him feel curious. That blew my mind and made me feel hopeful.
I’m disabled, so I’m not really able to attend protests easily, but there have been a few times where I have given people lifts to protests. I like being people’s protest mom. It makes me feel nice to be able to act as a steward for the younger generation. In my experience, they’re unable to comprehend that what we’re living under isn’t normal, because for them, it is. However, this seems to just strengthen their enthusiasm for radical change. All they know is that what they’re currently experiencing is intolerable for them, and so they have no choice but to resist. It’s sad, but admirable to see. In resisting, they also find that building solidarity and community also helps bolster their individual resilience, as well as their movement’s
Always nice to hear some positivity in a world drowned by negative, thank you. I just hope alpha come of age into this mess, go “this isn’t right” as well and start learning.
Did you think the world was good before 1970? Are you a person of color in the US? This is capitalism. This is normal capitalism. It’s just white people feel it now too. The enslaved white employees are finally now feeling what capitalism does because they no longer benefit from it as the rich white were tolerant of until recently.
Before Reagan there was more unionization, more push for workers rights and increase of wages. But I do agree with you, if you’re a POC, this is a Tuesday for you.
Life was materially much harder but in the early 20th century there were real labour movements and tight communities and that counts for a lot. We have to find a way to recreate connections and a shared sense of struggle (but without pining for some glorified imaginary past like the fascists), but it might just take conditions getting a lot worse still to drive people to that.
It also looks like they’ll be the right age for WW3 deployment
DUDE DONT JINKS IT 😭
JINKSJINXLol I’ve only heard it said by classmates in school, it’s not like they spell it out.
You can fly robots and shit like in the video games. It’s not like it used to be…
If war was supposed to be a video game, you could play chess and get it over with. But that’s not how wars are fought. People have to die in a war.
War is so mid. Entirely without rizz.
Ah! a fellow millenial
Boomers had it good.
Gen X had it mediocre.
Millenials and Gen Z have been shafted.
Given the state of education, economy, and politics, Alpha is straight up doomed.
Stop crying and start guillotining!
As a millennial I’m going to lose my shit if they try to draft my only child after the shitshow I’ve survived
Get in or you’re antisemitic
LOL
I would absolutely no shame in claiming Bone Spurs, or shooting myself in the foot to get out of a war for Greenland…
This is my first time reading the phrase, “age of enjoyment.” I guess I wasn’t ever meant to know that I missed out entirely?
Just in time for the age of deployment.
yall supposed to be mad about it
I graduated college last year and I’m still in unemployment hell. I have a CS degree so now I’m too overqualified for retail and too underqualified for tech jobs, despite the fact that I have made numerous projects and have tried my best to upskill, I’m still not good enough apparently. It is super frustrating and demotivating to wake up to rejection emails month after month after month.
Time to organize
Lol, what in the fuck is the “age of enjoyment” ?
when you were a kid and had no responsibilities and fuckall to worry about
We should stop giving kids lies. Stop deluding them that life is okay.
I mean, the math isn’t hard here, given the obvious pandemic time marker: College aged. If you were born in 2000, you couldn’t, in the middle of a pandemic, go out to the bar with friends for a drink on your 21st birthday for instance. And just generally, people’s early 20s often slowly ramp up, a fun warm up to proper adulthood; a time where expenses are at the lowest they’ll be for the rest of your entire life and the world hasn’t beaten you down mercilessly yet; so yeah, I imagine some of that what OP meant.
