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Comment by adamwong246 | Hacker News Reader

Don't the other generations feel the specter of dread hovering over us? Like you are running on a treadmill as fast as you can and knowing that if you trip or stumble, even a little, it's over and what progress you've made will be undone and you'll end up wandering the streets, muttering to yourself?

Or maybe it's just me?

Among the many things that make me feel ill is that byline. We're painfully aware that we exist to serve "The Economy"- perhaps _that_ is what is making us ill, that we must forever justify our existence in terms of the movements of bits of green paper?

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From a prior generation, I think we served you a shit sandwich. I prefer to be optimistic, and believe you guys can work it out, overcome it, and move on. I also tend to be mildly pessimistic and I think tumbrils await my cohort, for the wrongs done to future history: we really did crap in the swimming pool and expect you to learn to swim in it, and then clean it up.

We were not kind. We might get what we deserve.

We don't need to engage in inter-generational griefing. Yeah, my parents had a much nicer economy but it's not like they are in a great place now and they did not build the systems we find ourselves trapped within today. The shortness of vision can't really be blamed on any one generation. It's a collective human failure.

I think it's just a few individuals of each generations that are responsible for most of the world's ills while the others were either just trying to survive or thinking "there's not much I can do about it, let's just try to have a decent life".

Millenials are just at that age where their generation can start having an influence on the world. So they can still blame most of the world's ills on boomers. In 40 years, young people will blame millenials the same way boomers are blamed today.

Because millenials will be the latest active representatives of a generation where a few abused their positions of power and made the world a worse place than it was.

Don't worry, they already are. For some reason a little puke was claiming I was responsible for a policy that was created by a president when I was 5 years old. I think he was just looking for an excuse to say OK boomer and didn't care I was born in the mid 80s.

We don't need to engage in inter-generational griefing

Why not? A huge amount of post WW1 was about precisely that: generals trained for war on horseback, leading men into mechanised warfare. The 'never again' peace movement was a reaction. (wrong headed maybe, but this is how I believe it happened: it was inter-generational griefing.)

The EU exists because a generation of new voters emerged from the ashes of WW2 and said 'we're not going back there' -The election of the Atlee Labour government was the generation who fought WW2 saying "no" to churchill, from the generation who fought WW1 and the Boer war.

Inter-generational griefing is routine, normal and I would suggest neccessary. The succeeding generations have to seize control of the agenda, and stop the prior generations over-reaching their stated goals.

I was just thinking we don't get enough physical activity and we eat too much junk.

I’ve had these exact same issues for the past 1 1/2 years. This is the time when I switched from a part-time to a full-time job, which often times leaves me utterly exhausted in the evenings and feels like I can never get to a „it‘s done“-point. Boy, am I looking forward to a break over christmas time!

GenX here: we were raised with the assumption that if we didn't die in the looming nuclear holocaust, it would be AIDS that gets us.

Add to that the recessions and stagflation of the '70s and the fear that the Japanese would overtake the US economically in the '80s.

We've made good progress on the AIDS crisis, but nuclear warfare seems back on the table again.

This is either the best time to be alive ever, or pretty close to it. Get some perspective.

You don't need to serve the economy, just the customers of your employer. Furthermore, even if that's too burdening, in many countries you can still move to the forest and live free of any ties to the economy.

Legitimately wondering, which countries are those?

The United States for all practical purposes. The Intermountain West is full of public land where dispersed camping is okay. You just have to move your camp every two weeks but humans lived like that for a long, long time...

In Siberia there are areas where you'll be the only human for dozens of miles in any direction. Canadian north and Amazon in Brazil should be similar. Of course, these are not the friendliest environment, but neither were the US before they were civilized by "the economy", that the OP seems to loathe so much.

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