Is a age that is both full of, and devoid of opportunities. I feel like being a adult is just lying about how much you have your shit together to people who also lie about having their shit together. After we got out of college, we are just going to sit in front of a computer like the generations before us for the rest of our life, with the only difference of be paided less then them. I don’t want to be like this. I want my life to be more then this. I want to go out explore and change the world. When we gen z first comes to high school the world seems full of opportunities, we imagine us achieving great things, but not one of us could have imagined the entire generation having a mid-life crisis at the age of 18.
To all the Gen Z, and in the future, Gen Alpha. Welcome to the 2020s, welcome to late stage captalism.
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You are just young enough to be clueless of the world. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but always be ready to be humbled by someone with more experience.
Also there is not such thing as “late stage capitalism.” That’s what people say when they want to feel sorry for themselves. The reality is that world is doing fine and is far better compared to 100 years ago.
My kid’s a millennial and graduated college in 2018… Here’s the dirty little secret… Your life depends on what you put into it. Nobody just just going to hand you anything, you have to put in the work.
I tried to make it easy for him, I paid his way through college so he got a CS degree with no debt, but he worked for that degree, and the connections he made led to his first job at Intel, his second job at Oracle, and now, at the age of 28, he’s out there doing the super spooky AI stuff, and presenting papers at conferences.
Not to belittle you kid’s efforts, it’s a great feat they’ve achieved, but it sounds like survivorship bias. You can do everything right and still fail. Being in the right place at the right time and having the right connections matter.
As a millennial who wasn’t interested in computers these types of stories will haunt me my entire life
I’m a millennial who was interested, I do IT for dirt money. You may put a lot in, but you also have to be surrounded by the right people to succeed.
That last statement is absolutely true. My first 5-6 years in IT I kind of languished, because there were very few people around me that made an effort or pushed me to get better or just explained stuff to me. Then I got a call from a recruiter for a system engineer position. While I didn’t get that job, it did lead me to quit my job to go find something better. I then did find an IT system engineer job where I had a great mentor, support and incentives to get IT certificates. I wasn’t there for long due to personal circumstances, but that really launched my career and I’ve been getting better and higher paid jobs since.
I’m in my 4th year of your six years. My.manager says certs aren’t worth it. Won’t pay for them
Your manager can go suck a dick. They are absolutely worth it and worth the out of pocket expense for the exam. The long term benefits (it looks very good on a cv) are absolutely beneficial to your career, not to mention you will learn relevant stuff in the process.
Yeah mixture of both, wouldn’t you agree?
Sometimes you can get far by just being lucky.
Sometimes you can get far by just working hard.
You’re most likely to get far by working hard and being lucky.
You can still not get anywhere even when you work hard.
Strong economies create more opportunities which means your luck factor doesn’t have to be as high.
I feel like being a adult is just lying about how much you have your shit together to people who also lie about having their shit together.
I mean…yeah actually. Nailed it.
Except I TOTALY have MY shit together. I don’t frequently cry about about how cruel the world is, and how I’m going to die alone, likely by my own hand.
That TOTALLY isn’t a nightly occurance since I stopped drinking, because I gave myself cancer with alcoholism, but also can’t smoke weed because of workplace testing…
Nope. Just being a responsible adult, and paying bills for MEEEE!!!
I think the best kept secret to learn is to stop giving a shit what anyone else thinks and just be you and live how you wanna live. That’s when being an adult is freeing. Stop caring about how others perceive you. Just tune the bullshit out and live your best life.
In some cases, this requires cutting toxic people out of your life, even if they were family.
The worry is good for motivation.
I would recommend against expecting to change the world. This isn’t because you can’t or shouldn’t try to. You should definitely try anyway. But very few people individually end up changing the world in a significant way. Progress is built on the backs of countless people each pushing a little to together push a lot.
Aim to find one specific area that you can become very skilled in and use that to improve things in a small way. If you’re lucky, you might end up having a big impact, but you’ll hopefully feel less depressed if you don’t.
For now, focus on trying out as much of the world as you are able. Learn to be present and appreciate what you can do now. I spent a lot of my youth so obsessed with the future that I missed out on a lot of experiences. Things suck; however, there’s a lot of cool stuff out there anyway.
Get involved locally. Change the world in your vicinity.
That’s a much more succinct way of putting it!
Every generation comes of age with the opportunity to make the world (THEIR world) how they want it to be. But no generation really does. Don’t like Late Stage Capitalism, then when you hit 21, vote the old men out who hold your world beholden to it. Every generation has that ability, and yet every generation seems to have less voter engagement than the last. That’s on them…not the system.
with the only difference of be paided less then them.
Try rice fields.
I don’t want to be like this. I want my life to be more then this. I want to go out explore and change the world.
Everyone does, just don’t overthink it and do what you want now, then maybe you’ll have something to remember when you turn 81.
Welcome to the 2020s, welcome to late stage captalism.
First world problems. Try year 1630 AD.
but not one of us could have imagined the entire generation having a mid-life crisis at the age of 18.
It’s not a mid-life crisis, it’s the typical teenage trap of thinking you’ve reached that and are now wise sensei in a wrong body. Actually feels like something a 15yo me could have written, not 18yo.
It’s more dangerous than you think. When you really have a mid-life crisis, it’ll just be. You won’t think about it this way.
Don’t allow those thoughts to prevent you from getting out, touching grass, learning all you can about all the wonders in the world you can find.
Also don’t wait those 3 months to consider yourself an adult.
And, quoting Al Pachino’s character, when in doubt - fuck.
Just cause people have had it worse doesn’t mean they’re not allowed to criticise it
Show me how a comment on the Web can disallow them anything.
By the way, neither can any of yours
I worded that badly, what I meant was just because humans in the past have had it worse, doesn’t mean OP can’t criticise current problems
OP doesn’t criticize current problems. OP criticizes American median level of life being a bit worse than their parents’ generation, while it’s still obscenely good for most of the planet (for which levels of life have also taken a hit). While the current problems (of the “mass murder, robbery, theft, erasure of heritage, historical revisionism and tyranny” kinds) OP doesn’t even hear about apparently.
In that case you should never complain about anything ever again on the internet because other people on the otherside of the world have it worse than you
No, what I said is not what you are trying to make it seem, it’s that the OP complains about wrong things of what he can complain about.
And no, you are not smart to attempt this kind of cheating, you are robbing yourself and winning nothing.
I’m almost exactly 10 years older than you, and had similar thoughts heading into college. This is what I learned about those thoughts.
After we got out of college, we are just going to sit in front of a computer like the generations before us for the rest of our life
I wanted to avoid an office job, thinking that they’re all bullshit and soul sucking. What I’ve learned is that mental and emotional labor is just as variable as physical labor. The soul sucking still happens as it would in any physical job, but I learned that you need to find something that sucks less than the others and then fight against it. My method of fighting back was to organize a union, but there are other ways as well.
You, as an individual, will need to learn coping mechanisms to stave off the doomerism. I learned a lot of these independently, but this image is a perfect representation of my affirmations and how I remember that I’m more than my job.
These affirmations do not all clash with capitalism. I also don’t agree with all of them, not all jobs are real and valid. We had a guy at work, nephew of the boss, who was facility manager… from abroad. Also got payed way too much and was bought out when the company was taken over. It was not a real job, it was nepotism and he was handsomely rewarded all along the way for doing absolutely nothing while we all had to pick up the slag. Life isn’t fair or equal and cheaters get rewarded. These affirmations work for them too, because cheaters can also just happily define their own worth and their own succesfullness and it’ll be good for their soul. So these rules are not the holy grail, there is no such thing. Just common sense and good conscience.
My only advice is dont wait. Do what you have a passion for now and just do it. Dont wait at all. Fuck what everyone says, especially your own doubts. Take the plunge.
Oh hi, fellow GenZ. I try not to think too much about the future, because I can’t realistically see much good or interesting there. We are probably paid more than we realize. It feels like the world has become too big and rotten. Or maybe it was always this way. idk
Every young person goes through this. They want to change the shitty world and have energy for it when they are young, but no power, money or influence whatsoever.
Later in life, you have power, money and influence but no energy.
Lols.
Also every generation think they are special and better than previous generations. But you need to have been around for a few generations to see that.
Actually gen z is the first generation I’ve seen that blames boomers for everything, and have a us vs them mentality, probably created by social media.
I think the move is to hire some smart younger people and listen to their ideas
I would say millennials blame boomers for the economy and the reasons why we struggled so much to get a house (if they even have one by now)
So if gen z was in the place of boomers, they would have done differently?
I don’t think so. Each person has similar needs. Safety and power comes from money, and money comes from careers or inheritance.
It doesn’t matter which year you are born. You all join the circus going on here on earth. And you can only influence your little bit of a single corporation.
If you are a politician, you influence laws, but those laws are often easily bypassed and exploited for profit.
So I wouldn’t blame generations of people for anything they did. Just like I don’t blame Gen Z for being how they are. They are a product of their environment, same as everyone before them.
Okay… I don’t now why that’s massively relevant to what I was saying. I wasn’t arguing anything in particular other than saying that I’ve not seen that stereotype being zoomer v boomer and mostly seen it millennial v boomer
I didn’t mean to argue about anything. Just a comment with my thoughts.
I also think they have way to high of expectations. They world isn’t going to baby you as it turns out. The younger generations want to be paid these big salaries to sit and do nothing. They don’t want to work hard and if we are being honest a lot of them had everything handed to them.
FWIW, you actually do generally learn to get your shit together over time, at least somewhat more than the past
Or is it just a “fake it till you make it” kind of thing? I definitely haven’t got shit together, but I’ve learned to juggle and balance all my problems to perfection so that outsiders could easily mistake it for “having shit together”. You should just focus on who you are and be the best you you can be. “Having shit together” is mostly a relative metric which is good for measuring the masses, but not fair to measure you personally.
There is a fundamental shift if priorities once people leave education. Unlike knowledge, pretty much everything else costs a specific amount of money. You realize how many things can be directly solved with money and when you have none, of course the world will feel devoid of opportunities. Best to cultivate relationships that are not based on money, because that’s one thing you don’t have to pay for.
Spot on with “lieing about having your shit together”, I’m in my 40s and in academia and almost everyone is “just pretending” to be a high functioning adult.
But you don’t need to spend your life in front of a computer. You can do all sorts of shit. But people like economic security and that makes “college > soul destroying job” seem appealing. But life can be all sorts of things, as long as you realise you’re in control of the choices not the results.
There’s a well established trope that at every age, people think there life is about to settle down and stop being as open and free. I was defintely the kind of person who felt that turning 21 was becoming ancient and tbat life was basically over. But each decade has been completely different and often wild, I’ve done lots of different things, lived in different places and even now I’m married and have a house and all the more “settled” things, I’m confident the last few decades will also be varied and interesting.
Academics is where you go when you fail in the industry.
Tbf, I’m not sure many people succeed on industrial level Anglo-Saxon literature analysis.
