I think that feeling is only going to get worse as time goes on - Does anyone have any demographic info on the size of the aging boomer generation vs. the size of the voting age generations below it? Apparently my generation, the Millennial generation, is HUGE, but not sure how it compares to the baby boomers who are going to only get older, more selfish, and more crotchety with time.
Just add ten years onto the age, and there you have it. Poking around wikipedia, it seems there were 77-78 million baby boomers, and 60 million Gen Yers/millenials. But it's really hard to quantify the latter demographic because there's hardly any firm dates for when that group was born. It's nearly a 20 year span between the late 70's and early 90's. All in all, the groups are close in size, but I'm not sure what that "means" exactly. It's hardly as though 60 million people are going to come together on the basis of having been born within the same span of time and give a bunch of crotchety old fucks an ass-kicking for fucking everything up for the rest of us. As for the concept of being actively screwed by the preceeding generation; I'm fairly insulated from this whole "economic meltdown" thing. Or at least, about as insulated as you can get without going off the grid and planting your own crops, so take my ambivalence for what it's worth. That said, I can't held but notice the disparity between the number of people running around complaining about everyone's entitlement attitude, not living within their means, financial irresponsibility, and so forth, and the number of people who are doing what's being complained about. I mean, you either belong in one of two camps, which means that either the people actively fucking shit up are a tiny group, or there's a fair amount of cognitive dissonance floating in the ether. It's easy to be angry at the people who fucked everything up for us as we head into our careers, but really - how much of that anger is opportunistic and only done in hindsight? If the banks hadn't fallen apart, most of the millenials would have been none the wiser and probably would have done the same thing in the same circumstances. Long story short, if I could, I'd invest my money on the probability that the lessons of the financial meltdown aren't properly learned in the long run.
I am also too young to truly have seen this decade for what it was (I just turned 21 this year), however I changed as a person so much this decade due to the death of my father. Until 2007 my family never had a financial worry due to my father working his ass off to provide a good life for my family, and now that he is gone my mother, sister, and I have all had to really step up to the plate and learn how to live on our own, which was hard, but we're all figuring it out. I'll admit that before this event I did have the entitlement issues that people in that situation have, but I've learned so much in the last two years about living on my own, and it really changed me. I am looking forward to the next decade because this is when I am going to truly become my own person and (hopefully) be able to start a family of my own. Edit: I think that Time is being a little overdramatic calling it the "decade from hell", but considering what happened around the world in the last ten years I agree that it wasn't a very good one.
Is anyone excited the 2000s are over merely because since the 11th of november 2001 we have no longer had binary dates? I can't wait for 10/10/10 myself, but then 01/11/10 is sooner, and a palindrome... I might actually cry on 11/11/11 because, number one it will be probably the one time in my life where a single digit will occupy every space of a date, and number two because it will be the last binary date until the first of January 2100. I may have to put off dying for a while just to spite the calendar and its uppity withholding of meaningless binomial Also by the time 01/01/00 rolls around I'll be 111 years old. Oh shi...
Talk to the Germans who came into adulthood after WWI or WWII. There's a reason it was called the "Lost Generation". FOCUS: Personally, this decade took me from being a freshman in college, through grad school, to being an adult with a full-time job and a girl I'm going to marry. In this decade, I probably learned a lot more than I will for the rest of my life, and I probably had a better time than I will ever have for the rest of my life. So, no, I'm not going to diss the decade where I grew up and became able to (metaphorically) stand on my own two feet. A little adversity builds character, fellas. To sum up: The 2000s were just fine for me.
The 2000's were good to me. I bought my first house in 2001, had my daughter in 2005, my son in 2009. I started the decade in an entry level position making $22,000/yr and I'll end it as agency manager making a lot more. No deaths in the family, only one cancer scare with my father in law who is now fine. All in all not many complaints