I didn’t read the Generation X book until maybe mid to late 90s, but some of the stuff really hit home, especially thing about lessness. Also, in Microserfs I think it is he had a part where one of the characters’ dads was sitting in his car after getting canned from IBM after decades of work - that really hit close to home, since my own father went through something very analogous to that.

Some of the comments on DU are pretty poignant, I think.

I honestly wonder once there is a closer inspection, it might turn out that Gen Y and Gen Z might actually fare better in some ways - it certainly seems they are going to get a massive wealth transfer. When I entered the market, it was during a recession. Things were okay for a bit in the mid to late 90s, but I was facing a lot of age discrimination aimed at people that were younger. I start digging out of debt and almost bought a new car and then didn’t (thankfully), then the dot-com bubble started to burst and 9/11 hit and things were fucked for years in IT. I made way less than I did before and went through multiple layoffs. Just when things are getting sorta stable again, along comes the real-estate crash and causes more layoffs…IT/engineering has always been boom and bust though, and so it’s hardly something relegated to any one generation, I guess. And now, with the ageism on the other end of the equation, there is pressure trying to people in my age bracket out of a job…which is really fucking ironic when people bitch about how “no one wants to work”.

Yeah, if people - and by that, I mean corporations - only value workers between a very narrow range of ages - say, 30-40, ideally with no kids and no responsibilities outside of work of any kind, and everyone else gets kind of the side-eye, can you blame people that start looking for ways to get out of the rat race “early” (meaning, in their 40s or 50s) or can you blame the very young for getting tired of being side-lined in a different way until they are “experienced” (but not too experienced as to demand too much money).

It’d be nice if our culture would stop with wanting only a very narrow range of ages when it comes to work. I get that you want people with some experience, but often those are set very arbitrarily as gate-keeping, and then, on the other side of it, the culture is trying to push people out that are “too old”…a whole lot of people actually do want to work, and into a very late age in fact but ageism is still not only politically correct, but actively sanctioned by the culture.

screwing the next in line.

Honestly, I feel like this understates it. They’re destroying creative communities and obliterating the knowledge of artistic techniques that were passed through those communities because those techniques aren’t deemed to have any market value, which leads us all into a world filled with generic and boring songs and stories being built from widely used materials and perspectives and pushed through generic structures. They’re effectively setting fire to the library of books that haven’t been written yet.

Back in the 50s they claimed automation would lead to 20 hour work weeks and that our biggest problem would be filling our free time.

They didn’t account for people making up bullshit jobs and both political parties making “MOAR JOBS” the only thing they agree on.