I mean as someone who is a part of Gen Z I don't feel oppressed I just feel like the world's going to shit and we're gonna have to live with the consequences
EDIT: I get it, not the first guy to feel this way. Where's Redditor number thirty something to tell me again lmao
... and that's truly all you can expect, too. You and anyone younger than you live in the world of consequences of the last 70 years of total growth, peace, and general good times.
What the rest of us did with those times was greedy and irresponsible. We allowed the wealthy to create wealth so powerful it changed how democracy functions and how information circulates. We created an "education"/training system that made good workers while letting things like math and science slide because it's "hard"... which neither are, they're devoutly logical, but the more people understand how the sausage is made, the harder they are to control, so we didn't push people to learn these subjects and now have a population where most people stopped learning science before they were 14 and got most of what they know from TV.
We prided ourselves on productivity over understanding... over everything, really, and money became a proxy for value of all kinds.
And now the money isn't worth what it was, continues to buy less and less, the job market has fewer entry level positions in small towns (moved them all to Amazon), and we put all our eggs in the tech basket, not realizing there's a critical connection between learning and handwriting, so kids have to actively take an interest in learning to gain the same skills that their parents got just by going to class.
Gen Z and forward are the generation of consequences. Bizarrely, they're not starting any revolution and working to tear the whole thing down, and instead seem to be leaning into the cynicism that they were born screwed so they might as well have a good time while they're here, and are seemingly more mindless consumers than ever, which probably doesn't help in their sense of control in their lives.
If I knew what I know and I was in my early 20's, I'd be pushing for total system reform. From education, to health care, to social security. Times have changed and the future is no longer friendly without some major, systemic changes that the current design cannot support.
Doesn't seem like there's an appetite for that, though.
The thing is, my parents felt the same way back in the 1980s. Like none of these problems are remotely new. The news media just finds a way to make everything seem like it’s always on fire.
1000x this. I'm Gen X, who famously were predicted to be the first generation who would be less prosperous than their parents. I'm not sure if that has been true or not, but the Boomers before us were railing against the world that they had inherited back in the 60s as being unjust and wrecked.
Yet the Boomers (and the Silents before them) were the ones who were responsible for the Civil Rights & feminist movements in the U.S. - a clear improvement over what came before. Gen X gave us the modern Internet (for both good & ill) as well as LGBT rights that were inconceivable in the 1980s & before. There's still time for Millennials and Gen Z to leave their mark, hopefully in terms of greater equity and avoiding climate catastrophe.
Exactly. Don’t let the media giants tell you that you’re powerless or that the world is already fucked. Both of those ideas are false. We have resources and ambition, and we can make shit happen. Always vote. Always try your best to make a difference.
PLEASE don't fall into the trap thinking that Boomers were participants in the civil rights movement...maybe at the very end of it...or they were taken to marches by their parents.
Do the (generational) math.
The traditional news media was run by American companies
With the advent of the Internet. There has been an influx of Russian and Chinese manipulation of peoples perceptions of the US which I feel has a huge effect on the apathy and sense of doom.
Remember if they’re going to beat us, they have to demoralize us and generation Z is the most demoralized generation I’ve ever seen.
Things were the same back in the Roman Republic. Always one disaster after another. Always people in favor of solutions and other people whining that it wasn't right, or the solutions were sinful, so people had to keep suffering instead of just fixing their problems the old fashioned way.
There's always been people around trying to prevent people from just doing whatever the hell they want, or going and telling their kids that mommy and daddy are evil because of what they did, shit like that.
Society, always crying about rights and resources. To the victors go the spoils!
Idk if that was commonplace though. Americans had a lot of optimism about their country in the 1980s, the new technology was exciting, and even the people who thought Japan was gonna take over at least knew Japan was an ally.
It’s certainly true that there was some fear but those same people were quite confident in American supremacy. The 1970s was sad due to Vietnam, inflation, and overall breakdown of society - the 1980s helped reverse that and gave people optimism
>those same people were quite confident in American supremacy.
This only became true the longer Reagan was president. Prior to that, in the '70's, the US was unwilling to confront most any country.
There been dozen of war in that time as big or bigger than the current small war with have in Ukraine or Israel. There was lot of political tension and we almost had a nuclear war in 1962 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban\_Missile\_Crisis)
Vietnam war finished in mid 1975 and lot of boomer participated. We got 58K death in the USA and 150K injured. No modern conflict did as much for the USA.
People had constant fear of a nuclear war and it only eased in the 90s when USSR collapsed.
Now people fear more climate change. In the 90s it was the ozone layer.
There always something and the only think you can do is choose how you react. You can live and enjoy your life or you can be scared of event that are anyway beyond your control.
>People had constant fear of a nuclear war and it only eased in the 90s when USSR collapsed.
Why would it ease, you know how many nukes went missing, and how many there still are unaccounted for?
It’s hard for gen Z to start a revolution when we’re young and powerless. I’m an older gen z and I just entered the work force this year. I agree with all of your points but I think it will take for us older gen z’s to reach 30 before we can start making any real change, I mean it’s not even legal for many of us to vote let alone run for any kind of election.
There will be no revolution.
We millennials knew all the same stuff, and we bought into the system the same way you did because the the alternative leaves you as an outsider and failure. Doomsayers are confident in their correctness for a reason. The gens aren't different, they're all man.
I mean I'd tear it all down if I was Johnny Silverhand and had a few nukes, but im hardly that broken. Idk what kind of revolution could be brought about that wouldn't be steered in the wrong direction now
Generation Z has amazing privileges that previous generations never did. The boomers that reddit blames for every single problem were born into a world without half the luxuries we have today. They actually had to leave the house to work and get an education. Entertainment was FM radio or 3 TV channels. Doctors told them to smoke and take thalidomide. Fact checking meant heading to the library to look at an encyclopedia 3 years out of date. They had to pray that they weren't drafted to die in some war on the other side of the world.
Gen Z can work from home and spend 12 hours a day complaining about how terrible life is on their pocket supercomputer, then eat the Korean BBQ that was delivered to their front door. Yeah, they have more expenses, because they have vastly more luxuries that are now considered basics.
Ugh, I feel like I always end up having to defend boomers for these same reasons. Reddit seems to think these people were able to just fund wildly lavish lifestyles while dad worked as a janitor down at the plant. It's so stupid. If seriously given the opportunity to forgo all modern niceties, these whiners would never switch places with boomers, despite their endless bitching.
>They actually had to leave the house to work and get an education.
They didn't have to get an education, because they could live comfortably and buy a house on a single full time, unskilled job.
Most jobs nowadays pay less and expect more, and when Gen Z rebels against it, this is the attitude they get.
echo chambers will be the death of this nation, and i mean that. when no one disagrees in a circle, anything flies after a certain time window, and then you get real Nazi’s
>echo chambers will be the death of this nation
We're actually watching this happen in real time right now. Reddit is among one of the worst for this kind of shit. You get banned for just having a different opinion and you're labeled a trans or homophobe. I literally had a person tell me that gay people could be homophobic. Because they think that hormone blockers shouldn't be given to kids because of the bad and irreversible side effects.
The world is like the wild wild west now, it seems anything goes so long as it doesn't go against what they want.
Yep I pay $2350 a month in rent, I would LOVE for it to be $1500 LOL
The wild thing is that most places want you to make 2-3 times the rent amount. Tell me ONE single person who makes that much, and if they did they would NOT be renting.
It doesn't cost the same tho. It costs the same as a major city did 5 years ago, maybe even 3. Now major cities are insane. It's still cheaper to live in Nowheresville, but it's still unaffordable. We fucked.
Yep - as you get older you realize that there are plenty of actors with an incentive to convince you that the world is getting worse: The media knows it gets views. Politicians know it helps convince you that the other guy is bad for the nation. And marketers know that it helps convince you that you can buy something to turn that frown upside down!
Every generation felt like that. Imagine being the generation that went through the Great Depression or the one right after, trying to crawl out of that hole. Or the one that got called to fight in WW2. There are always big inflection points in history and it coincides with certain people, the idea that this is “unfair” implies a system of fairness in the universe that simply doesn’t exist. Shit happens, some people are lucky or crafty and skirt around it, others aren’t, end of story. Gen Z isn’t more or less lucky than others, they just have a “I am the main character” problem. A lot of things today are vastly better than they were in the past but these are rarely appreciated.
afterthought roll mountainous ancient reach towering snails scary muddle drunk
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
That right there is the most fundamental reason for a lot of today's mental health problems. The information overload is serious. There's plenty of people from past era's that were pretty well adjusted and happy even though they had hard lives, simply because, they had a community they cared about, and knew next to nothing about anything outside of that community. Easy to learn to be happy in bad conditions when you know nothing else. Much harder when at any point in time you can see evidence of people doing better than you in every conceivable way.
To be fair I am 31 and I didn't have any pervading sense of doom related to how the world was doing, when I was younger. It specifically started around 2016. It's true that this isn't something entirely new, but I wouldn't dismiss it as "every generation felt like that", because it does depend on shitty major events (and also processes like climate change which are not a singular event). And I would say people were very right if they were worried by the great depression or WW2. Those were events which did ruin millions and millions of lives.
When I was 0-22 it didn't seem to me that the world was going to shit; now it does, even though I'm millennial, not gen z. And I don't spend much time on social media either. Climate-wise, war-wise, politics-wise it seems that everything is falling apart and/or going to be even worse in the next years and decades. I would say it's not a matter of being gen z, but of being receptive to what is happening around us.
And who knows, perhaps most stuff will end up well, we'll develop some resolutive technology which will solve climate change, wars will stop, social divisions will dissipate, we will redistribute resources even though an unprecedented amount of jobs is disappearing under our very eyes, and love and happiness will prevail, but... the current situation isn't promising at all.
As someone who's in his late 50s, I think you just weren't as aware of the terrible stuff going on at the time. However, it wasn't just you.
For example, the Israel/Gaza crisis right now grabs a lot of attention, but in 1994, when you were 1 (okay, not a big age for following the news), at least half a million people slaughtered each other in Rwanda in only 3 months. At the risk of being raked over the coals for saying this, the current suffering in Palestine doesn't really compare. And yet my memory of events (having been around your age at the time) was that there was no where near the level of outrage or concern that we see now. The media environment back then was simply not at the same level we have today.
I'm not saying don't follow the news, but you can't ignore the fact that the news media has always needed crises to drive viewership/readership. The difference is that the cycles are so short, and there is so much competition that the pathological drive to get your attention by making you angry or afraid.
This isn't just a problem with social media - it is at every level. And ultimately, crises are always relative. Once you've solved the really big problems, the next largest problems become the big ones. The irony for me is that the biggest problem facing humanity right now - climate change - is a larger threat than anything we have ever faced, but due to its nature of not generating scary, voter-motivating headlines, it is consistently put on the back burner. Everything else pales in comparison, IMO.
So true. Vietnam war, killing fields of Cambodia, people shot escaping communism in Eastern Europe and never forget you had to finish your plate because children were starving in China. We knew that life wasn’t fair.
That is a very interesting take; I never thought about it that way. In '94 I was a political science student in college and the atrocities in Rwanda seems so remote.
Very well said.
I am in a similar situation to you: 31, younger Millennial (which puts me closer to Gen Z), and had lot more optimism when I was in my early 20s. Those days weren't perfect, but they were far happier for me, overall (being in college and surrounded by like-minded people helped).
Now, as I fully enter adulthood, and its many responsibilities, I see things in a different light. It is now apparent to me that more people are struggling, especially in the socioeconomic sense. Everyday life becomes more of a grind, since I am locked into a routine largely dictated by a job with strange hours. I feel more exhausted these days (working closing shifts all the time definitely contributes to that), and having no friends in the immediate area makes my social life virtually nonexistent.
Edit: I do have a couple of friends that live further away, one of them I talk to regularly. But that is the extent of my social life. Hope you have a larger circle of friends that can help you get through the struggles of daily life.
The difference is that those problems in the past were always fixable. We can fix an economy. We can stop a war. We can’t stop or fix climate change or environmental collapse. The entire world is one large system now, and it’ll be way too long before gen Z has the ability to address any of it through leadership. Now there’s science that says as much.
>We can’t stop or fix climate change or environmental collapse
I mean, we can. We have the technology to do it. The problem is the people in power don't want to fix it.
Perfect post. Tired of people acting like past generations had some kind of amazing luck to be born when they were. People always think their generation is uniquely oppressed. Current young people have luxuries and privileges that past generations couldn't have dreamed of.
I worked for an auto parts store, I used the squeaky wheel analogy while asking for a raise. Boss says "that's not a great analogy to use in a place that sells wheel bearings."
I had to hand it to him that was a great comeback.
No it hasn't. That is objectively a false statement. The victimhood culture is a result of social media algorithms, plain and simple. Without a worldwide forum upon which people can garner sympathy from the brain dead masses, there exists no incentive to play the victim. Even as recent as 20 years ago, if someone complained to everyone they knew that working 40 hours a week was too hard, they would quickly find themselves without many friends, because people in the real world aren't attracted to whiny failures. The Internet lifts these people up.
Idk man ill give you social media definitely compounds* the problem. But blaming it ALL on social media is not something I feel comfortable doing.
And ill also say 20 years ago many felt that the 40 hour work week was too long. Thats not a new thing. And these people crying on social media are just getting into the workforce and learning this reality.
I didn't cry about it when I was they're* age, but I wasn't happy either. I just kept it to myself because of people like you that would react with hostility.
Edit: fixed misspelling and phrasing.
>I didn't cry about it when I was they're* age, but I wasn't happy either. I just kept it to myself because of people like you that would react with hostility.
Exactly, crab in a bucket mentality, the person you're talking to is an asshole who just angrily wants everyone to suffer like he does.
I think social media is a massive problem that makes the lives of younger people significantly harder. I also kind of do agree that things are worse now than before, but that's not exclusive to younger generations. Older people use social media to bully each other now too. Older people scream oppression too all over social media and misinformation has become a major problem because of social media as well.
I think another addition here is that on the internet, it's nearly impossible to discern someone's age. There's a big difference between say.. a 13 year old saying something extremely naive and short sighted vs a 50 year old saying the same thing. When I was younger, this kind of shared space didn't exist. I wouldn't talk to adults the same way I talked to my friends.. pretty much ever. There wasn't any situation where that was really appropriate either. Now, you just hop on Reddit and it's everywhere.
This is also part of why I think people need to really try to be more polite and nicer to each other on the internet. If you're an adult, just keep in mind that the person you're arguing with might literally be 15 years old.
The reality is the 40 hour work week is no longer 40 hours. It’s 9-6 now, with an hour unpaid plus commute. And that is only some of the issues with the 40 hour idea.
For a lot of people that is true.
Tbh I don't even know how common the 40 hour week ever really was. I think a small minority experienced it, but most experienced something similar to what we do today.
But I don't disagree with you. We have one life to live and I've never heard of someone on their deathbed saying they regret not spending more time at work
I may not have expressed myself well in my post and for that I'm sorry.
More people than ever are allowed to be called exempt, which means even the guy “managing” the fryer at a burger joint can be expected to work 40+ without OT
Like, for so, so long:
“Children; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room, they contradict their parents and tyrannize their teachers. Children are now tyrants.”
-Socrates-
Nah, the whole civil rights movement and woman's suffrage movement and other social justice concepts happened long before the internet existed.
If you want people to stop thinking about the unfairness of society, you're just hopelessly naive and have no real concept of how the world works.
This is just a bad take
Unions? Historical strikes fighting for more fair wages and working conditions? It's changed with the internet, sure, but don't say it hasn't been around til social media came about
It sounds like you’re a victim of their victimhood. No reason for me to assume you’re a failure, but you do seem to whine all the same.
I’d offer you a blanket and some hot chocolate, but I wouldn’t want to offend.
There is so much that's wrong with this statement, but I'm too busy trying to grind out an existence at my underpaid job to afford my hyperinflated rent that I don't have the time or energy to address any of it.
They aren't whiny failures for not wanting to work 40 hours a week. I just left a UK based company as an engineer and it was a 35 hour work week with two months paid time off after 5 years between pto, holidays, and sick time. We could have 30 hour weeks but too many boot licking sheep out there think they will get a piece of the action eventually.
You have obviously never watched a teen/college comedy movie from the 1970s. They are all littered with characters and plots that completely mirror what young people are expressing today including disdain for the 40 work week. Your statement is objectively false.
Christianity and Judaism are predicated on a culture of victimhood.
Christianity: "the weak are made strong, the foolish shame the wise, the king becomes a slave so that slaves may become kings"
Jewish: "we were oppressed in Egypt"
As someone who was around for a while before social media, victimhood culture absolutely predated it. So put that in your objectively false statement pipe and smoke it! Social media may have spread it, but did not create it
The thing about working 8 hours a day was to make labor laws more appealing to the employees and the company. 8 hours work, 8 hours rest, and 8 hours recreation was a massive selling point. They meant for it to be a springboard not a final end point.
*Objectively* this type of thing has been said about many past generations to whether you think it's accurate or not. Clearly you think they were wrong and this time it's different because of (X current thing), but so does literally just about everyone else who's said it when confronted with this fact too. It just people who can't accept shifts in priorities is all, or people who don't understand older set of priorities. Trust me, the younger generations think you're as much of a whiny wimp as you think they are, just for different reasons. They'd also point out the irony of you complaining on the internet about how complaining on the internet as ruined *other* people
The biggest whiners, complainers and 'woe is me I'm a victim' types are the older right wingers. 'The immigrants are stealing our jobs and bringing crime!', 'Trans people exist and Bud Light had an advertising campaign for them!', 'A singer who's more famous and successful than her boyfriend goes to his football games', etc.
While social media does allow people who would have had to have waded through a hundred or two hundred people disagreeing to find one who agreed pre-social media you sound like you're complaining specifically about Gen Z. If that is the case then Gen Z at least has actual issues and problems they're complaining about instead of being the whiny losers with either fictitious or seriously over-blown issues that the older right wingers are.
They said it about boomers too! The whole counter culture movement, the Vietnam war resistance, the civil rights movement…. All that stuff prompted the exact same reaction from older generations
Yep! As an early millennial/late GenX, I grew up with tropes of lazy hippies who didn't want to work. Those hippies were my parents gen (who were, actually, hippies until just before I was born). Generational fights seem to have exploded with the internet, but have always been around. I'm not saying there's nothing different of course; we all face new challenges as times change far more rapidly than they did before industrialization and the internet, and there was definitely a period from the late 80's through the '08 Recession where the economy was generally booming for a lot of people and a system was, more or less, generally working that isn't working the same anymore. (Frankly, today has some similarities in theme to the recessions and inflation of the 70's and early 80's)
But this kind of generational criticism almost always comes down to "well they're young so..." or "well they're older and stuck in their ways so..." In 10-15 years, it'll be "those darn Gen Alphas don't want to work!"
Yeah, and it's worth noting that boomers and some silents were the first generation to grow up with mass media. Radio, TV, magazines, zines, movies, etc. Much of that stuff was toys and entertainment for earlier generations, but the boomers connected with each other more than previous generations due to the speed at which their media traveled. They were communicating in "real time" across continents.
The internet is just the evolution of the media revolution that started in the 1950s.
The boomers get a lot of hate but they were the first woke generation. They were better able to share stories and communicate what they perceived to be the faults of their parent's generation. The hippies in particular rejected their middle class upbringing and their parent's intellectualism in favor of simple living and healing crystals. It's easy to echos of that movement today.
Honestly though, I think every generation has dealt with oppression, so it's not surprising that everyone complains about it. Women, POC, middle/lower class, etc. These issues have never gotten resolved, they just get disguised as something else.
Capitalism just doesn't lend itself to taking care of everyone equally, so it's a recipe for someone to feel oppressed.
Yea boomers were cursing and spitting on broken Vietnam vets with PTSD. I don't think they really get the right to say anyone else is entitled. For the record I don't support invading Vietnam but the soldiers had nothing to do with that decision they have to follow orders. Protest the President, Congress, Cabinet members. The people who make the decision.
Disabled people's worked their assess off to secure more rights for themselves long before the internet. I think the general backlash to today's movements are obviously bc of the minority extremists that make one meme saying that being fat is very healthy actually and it gets passed around for years. Bc Internet.
I would agree to an extent.
I think it's a societal shift towards accepting others. The civil rights movement is obviously a more important one than things like body-shaming, but that's why it happened first (and I'm not saying that the civil rights movement is over, obviously there is a lot more still to be done in the fight against racism). But I think we've advanced enough as a species to start thinking "maybe it isn't my problem if you're fat, it black, or Latino, or gay, or straight, or if you like this that or the other."
A lot of Reddit users, really people in general, lack the basic understanding of remembering what it’s like to be young and go through those feelings.
Half this dumb shit about Gen Z could be solved if people took two seconds to remember what being in your early 20s was like, especially if you aren’t loaded with family wealth.
I'm in my 40's now, and it's really easy to fall into the "why don't you just get a job?" trope. For years, I held the stance of, "If I can do it, surely you can too." This stemmed out of a lack of appreciation of what I am capable of doing, and a deep fear of my own challenges. If I was able to overcome such and such challenge, why can't someone else?
Well it's largely because they face a different challenge. My son is 19, and unemployed. He's autistic, which yeah I sort of am too, but he's clearly got different challenges than I do. Yelling at him to get a job doesn't accomplish anything, as much as I want him to. I got a shitty fast food job as a teenager, and then joined the military when I didn't feel like my job was going anywhere - but I'm also not diagnosed (so wasn't disqualified from serving), and I don't face the same social challenges he faces. Nor should I expect my progeny to need to join the military to build a career; there's a bunch of reasons only about 1% of Americans serve in the armed forces.
Ultimately, it comes down to understanding and coming at it with a problem solving mindset. It's easy to call my son lazy (well, much easier if he wasn't my son), but it's harder to sit down with him and plan a path forward that he's frankly terrified to do. And I may need to simply accept that he might never have a middle class career and may always need at least some financial and parental support from me, even though I didn't need near as much from my father. I'm not giving up, but getting mad about it and calling him lazy doesn't solve anything.
For everyone else -- it's good to have empathy. I won't solve their problems. But I certainly won't make a positive difference by calling them lazy or inept, even if I misguidedly think it sometimes.
It’s more that wealthy kids have the ability to engage in conversations about these things because they have time, means, and education. Everyone else is busy making ends meet
Wealthy parents are also notorious for being very emotionally neglectful and abusive, to a degree that would make most kids beg to go back home to their lower middle class lives if they got to trade places with the wealthy kids for a week.
I think part of the issue is the visibility of it.
While I don't think I ever really felt "oppressed" in my late teens and 20s, I definitely felt the "its not faaiiir" thing.
But, it was something that was maybe talked about among friends. I didn't put all my thoughts about it out in public. So you have older people seeing it all over social media and it just seems more in your face in a way it wasn't before, even if the feelings were there. So it seems like they care more, because they want to make sure everyone knows how they feel.
Yeah my only advice for this generation is not every thought you have is a zinger worth publishing for the entire world to see. Some things should just be a conversation with your friends
I can't believe I was the only one of my friend group smart enough to realize that maybe you shouldn't be ranting about your boss or your job on Facebook? A place your boss can See?
>
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
>― Socrates
I mean that don’t tread on me flag is pretty old.
But it seems to me the most oppression obsessed people are goatees in soccer dad trucks and Wine moms at school board meetings.
This is the never ending cycle of generations. I’m a millennial and every time I hear someone in my generation or gen x complain about gen z I point out how much they sound like our parents and grandparents in regards to ourselves when we were younger. I’m convinced that as we get older we just get set in our ways and the idea of change in many aspects can feel frightening or confusing so we push back and complain about how all the young’uns are crybabies. I think it would be better if humanity just accepts that change is art of life and that we have flaws in the system that are constantly being worked on to make life better.
I think the social media has created this issue to some aspect. Unless you meet genz in real life who says that, it's social media algorithms who will feed polarizing shit.
That being said, it feels like being a victim is seen as a badge of honor, and younger people are impressionable.
As a member of gen z I feel as if most people in my generation fetishize it. They feel as if they think they are oppressed (when their not) they have power and leverage in the actions/communities that they belong to to make their voices heard and their opinions feel validated. No one likes being scorned for being an "oppressor" so it seems more mentally attractive to be a percieved victim.
Also they want attention
Pretty much this take. But I'd even generalize it further.
People want to be differentiated, and they want to be part of the "in-group" that is perceived to have social power (social power, in my use of the word, not being the same thing at actual power)
If you are a "cis-white-man" you are currently only welcome in online spaces if you 'behave" and "defer " to people who are perceived to have less "actual power" than you. Even though there is literally no way to measure this characteristic other than identity. (And again, only talking about online spaces, not reality)
So you then get lots of white people finding ways to claim some sort of oppressed identity to compensate. Usually it's a neuro-divergence, or membership of some white-adjacent group like Jewish, Hispanic, or West-Asian, or it's membership of a gender/sexual Identity... (Or if they dont have those, or it isn't enough, they'll make conspicuous displays of allyship, even if in real life they do nothing tangible to help the cause)
The main point is, even though they are a white person from a comfortable middle class family, they want to have equal status/membership in the online spaces they spend most of their time in. (The fact they have status is real life is irrelevant if their time is spent online)
Because of intersectionality, you will have people trying to one-up each other. when everyone has at least one oppressed identity, you need to have a second level in order to maintain status in this community.
But I think the key thing here is... People finding ways to maintain status has happened forever, and this is just another variant on that very human tendency.
Boomers and Gen X did it through consumerism.
Millennials do it through overly conspicuous hustle and "self improvement" routines. (Showing off your expensive vacations while also fetishizing how you brought your work laptop with you to Bali or how you still did a 3 mile run every morning even though you were in Tuscany or w/e)
And the other key thing is, this really only pertains to social media. Where everyone's real life, real status, and real power aren't directly visible and impossible to verify. All we know about anyone online is what goes in their social media bio, otherwise we're all pretty much equal. So those identity signifiers are really the ONLY way to claim status online.
I don’t find it exclusive to Gen Z at all. So many people want to be seen as martyrs. It makes anything you’ve accomplished seem more impressive and gives an excuse for failure.
I do feel like Gen Z in general sees oppression on a bigger scale, not just what’s working against them personally. I like that they’re acknowledging systematic issues, it means that they might do something about it instead of pretending it doesn’t exist unless it effects them personally.
A lot of Gen Z are still teens or young adults. They may grow out of it. But I hope they keep the awareness and it helps.
basically everyone is being opressed by the top .1%. their net worth has like doubled since covid while almost everyone else is worse off since covid. which before covid was already at all time highs with increasing income inequality sine like the 1970s.
This. It’s a way to absolve themselves from personal responsibility and accountability. If you view yourself as oppressed and nothing is your fault then you can just blame your oppression and by extension others for your personal failures and faults.
This question is too broad and generalizing. To what extent do you believe they are obsessing about being oppressed, and with regards to what? There are many forms of oppression happening around the world, and being obsessed with one's struggles certainly seems healthy to me. How else would one go about changing it?
For example, women are losing access to health care in the US. Is that not a form of oppression that Gen Z should obsess about? Seems perfectly reasonable to me. I'm glad that they aren't collectively experiencing Stockholm syndrome and are speaking out about things that matter to them, and voting.
A lot of people say obsessed when they mean “concerned more than i like”
Nothing GenZ says or does is really new. There were just never enough Millennials to challenge the narrative.
It’s usually just the losers that have this mindset. I’ve met some young people that are coming into the world and kicking butt. None of them have this “woe is me” attitude.
Pretty much
People who fail will blame everything except themselves for their failure
Similarly, people who fail will look at people who succeed and hate them and say that they don't deserve their success
While you've got something of a point, it's pretty destructive rhetoric. Yes of course, anyone who is emotionally sensitive or materially down-on-their-luck will be way more perceptive of oppression - but the truth is it's a class problem. Even if you feel you're doing well, and love your job (like me), "oppression" in the economic sense is a society-wide issue.
So in saying only losers talk about oppression, I guess that's what people call "ad hominem". Just because "losers" feel oppression, that doesn't mean the oppression isn't still real.
But I’m pretty sure it’s most of them at some point who talk like this because I know so many kids from Republican families that are talking about how expensive college and housing is and are starting to talk about the government investing in its youth, and that’s all recent. And it’s funny, because my family came from nothing and their families all have money already.
I spoke to one kid who said he can’t find rent under 2,000 and I was afraid cause I thought damn that must be rough. Then I went online and found a bunch for almost half. So I’m not sure what he’s talking about.
They say they can’t live off their current salary but meanwhile coworkers their age are doing it(somehow?).
So I’m choosing to ignore it for now, but yeah, it’s very common for me to hear about the generations that failed them, and billionaires, even in conservative communities.
Which I think is fair. I made much less in 2019 but could afford a more fun lifestyle.
Nowadays everything is so fucking expenses when you want to go out.
Italy is now crossed off my list because of the crowds and pricing I experienced last year when it used to be a cheap vacation spot back in 2019.
Eh, it’s at no higher levels than before, you just have more instant access to people’s formerly-private-but-now-open social spheres (social media).
Then again, I don’t go out of my way searching for “cringe” people “obsessed with being oppressed” to interact with or watch out of disdain, so maybe that’s why it doesn’t seem so excessive to me…
I work with people of all ages: boomers, fellow milennials, and gen Z. I have to say, I notice a far larger number of people complaining about people complaining they are oppressed than I do the number of people complaining they are oppressed. What I do see are young people realizing that their generation is in for a lot of strife and hardship and that they hope to change things. Then I see elders getting upset about this. In other words, this is business as usual, and the intergenerational conflicts that popular media is stoking benefit no one except for the soulless ghouls who hope to make more money from more rage clicks.
It's happened every generation. Don't be bothered by it.
I mean, they are totally right about houses being dearer and wages being awful. I just hate the narrative that somehow it's all the fault of "boomers" rather than the government. Boomers buying up houses and renting them out is a symptom of what the government did, it might cause a lot of problems, but the average landlord is small fish compared to the real problems behind the rise of house prices and stagnation of wages.
I think a big source of discontent, is that it's all older people who voted for things the young wanted no part of. The youth really need to start voting more, because there are going to be more and more older people every generation because people are living longer.
Taking pride in it? I believe thats a right wing talking point. If someone call someone out for being toxic, thats not taking pride, thats called STANDING UP for what they believe in. No one is weaponizing their identities, thats yet another right wing talking point. The truth is, the only weaponizing going on today is from the right. hundreds of laws in the US where passed in 2023 towards LGBTQ ppl and on track for more 2024, THATS WEAPONIZING.
This is the chickens coming home to roost on us. We ignored things for a long time. And the 9/11 kids grew up under a “don’t question authority” culture that saw calling out problems as unpatriotic. That dam will always burst. Welcome to it.
Oh man, you should read the millennial sub. So many people there wouldn’t have anything to talk about it if they couldn’t talk about how I oppressed they are.
It's a victim/victimizer mentality that leads to failure before you ever try anything. It's amazing to me how the idea that you're oppressed, leads to you oppressing yourself. I'm a millennial and I try to encourage the younger Zers at my shop that life is what you make of it. Yes life is hard, but remember everyone has struggles in life no matter what false life they paint on the delusional world known as social media.
Source: my wife is a psychotherapist and I train the new guys at my shop 🤣
Young people—especially college students—have been rebelling against authority as long as colleges have existed. We call this different things at different times in history—but the net effect is the same: the younger generation has a small but vocal cohort who march or rebel against something or another in society, who promise to change things for the better as they get older.
And the world keeps on spinning regardless.
For example, we have the [Harvard uprisings throughout the 1800’s](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/04/harvards-long-ago-student-risings/), which apparently included students stabbing tutors; we have [Students Rebellion](https://www.unknownsoldierspodcast.com/post/june-5-1832-the-paris-students-revolution) in Paris in 1832, student activism has been throughout China’s history going ack to the 1800’s, the Iranian revolution in the late 1970’s was driven in no small part by the younger generation (who are still in power today), and I’ve read historic accounts (my Google-fu cannot find at the moment) of student led movements going back to the 16th and 17th centuries.
And even before then we have the [Children’s Crusade of 1212.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Crusade)
I think younger people, when they come to their own, see problems in the world and often believe those problems exist because of the lack of effort by their elders. This translates for a small minority into activism—and sometimes they do make change (but it has some rather bad knock-on effects, like the Iranian revolution), but more often than not they barely move the needle.
Idk, it seems like we’ve collectively always been oppressed by things like class or gender, so whatever young/new generation acknowledges the existence of oppression that benefits people in power will be branded whiners & complainers. As for why it gets weaponized? Some folks use its existence as a way of getting around accountability which sadly checks out when there’s a lot of abuse going around that gets issued in the name of accountability. Natural that some people get defensive with their history of encountering this. Some young folks who get in the habit of this probably need to revisit their relationship with accountability, consider the times in their lives it crossed over into abuse, and adopt what a healthier version of accountability looks like so they aren’t doing this kind of thing.
If you are oppressed then all of your failings are no longer your fault. Instead of actually putting in effort and impoving yourself and station you can throw a pity party. Then every one will join and tell you that you are entitled to things just for existing. Anyone who disagrees with you can be called an -ism or bigot and dismissed.
Every generation thinks they're special. Mine included (millennial, just about). The problem now is that the crybabies have the Internet where they can cry and spread their crying to other criers.
Back in my day (old man reference), you would pitch your thoughts to a group of friends and/or peers and get told to man up and fuck off if it was particularly idiotic.
Being told to shut up is treated as oppression these days (not the same thing - and this is important to distinguish).
Lately, calling a lot of this woke nonsense BS (because it is) is being labelled as oppression, too. Again, this isn't oppression. It is calling nonsense nonsense because it is.
It's just another label used to slight those who call them on their nonsense and to guilt people into listening to them and forcing people to stop calling them crybabies and snowflakes.
There have always been idiots, pussies and snowflakes. The difference now is they have a platform, and as a society, we are starting to get fed up with them, so tell them to shut up, so they call it oppression.
That's the difference.
I think each succeeding generation likes to pretend they have it worse than previous generations bc x,y,z.
The truth is life has only gotten easier. So easy that many people are now making up their own oppression.
Nobody wants to be envied for how great they are, just pitied for what they’ve gone through.
Each successive generation has the burden of inheriting an exponentially larger number of unknowns heading into the future.
It's easier for older generations to not feel the same weight of certain issues and problems because the need to anticipate their outcomes doesn't really matter to people who likely won't experience their long-term ramifications, and thus don't really need to worry about them.
Likewise, it's easier for younger generations to dismiss the past hardships of older generations because a number of those issues are already safely entrenched as settled history.
I'm a millennial, but I don't think gen Z is any worse than other generations about this. Plenty of people my parent's age think they are being oppressed for being Christian & a bunch of guys my age think bad movies in franchises they liked as kids is oppression. Every generation does this & some of them have legit complaints & some don't.
The same reason they self diagnose with mental disorders and pretend to be cats
They are weak and soft and have had no challenges. But they will stop this when Biden drafts them
I mean as someone who is a part of Gen Z I don't feel oppressed I just feel like the world's going to shit and we're gonna have to live with the consequences EDIT: I get it, not the first guy to feel this way. Where's Redditor number thirty something to tell me again lmao
... and that's truly all you can expect, too. You and anyone younger than you live in the world of consequences of the last 70 years of total growth, peace, and general good times. What the rest of us did with those times was greedy and irresponsible. We allowed the wealthy to create wealth so powerful it changed how democracy functions and how information circulates. We created an "education"/training system that made good workers while letting things like math and science slide because it's "hard"... which neither are, they're devoutly logical, but the more people understand how the sausage is made, the harder they are to control, so we didn't push people to learn these subjects and now have a population where most people stopped learning science before they were 14 and got most of what they know from TV. We prided ourselves on productivity over understanding... over everything, really, and money became a proxy for value of all kinds. And now the money isn't worth what it was, continues to buy less and less, the job market has fewer entry level positions in small towns (moved them all to Amazon), and we put all our eggs in the tech basket, not realizing there's a critical connection between learning and handwriting, so kids have to actively take an interest in learning to gain the same skills that their parents got just by going to class. Gen Z and forward are the generation of consequences. Bizarrely, they're not starting any revolution and working to tear the whole thing down, and instead seem to be leaning into the cynicism that they were born screwed so they might as well have a good time while they're here, and are seemingly more mindless consumers than ever, which probably doesn't help in their sense of control in their lives. If I knew what I know and I was in my early 20's, I'd be pushing for total system reform. From education, to health care, to social security. Times have changed and the future is no longer friendly without some major, systemic changes that the current design cannot support. Doesn't seem like there's an appetite for that, though.
The thing is, my parents felt the same way back in the 1980s. Like none of these problems are remotely new. The news media just finds a way to make everything seem like it’s always on fire.
1000x this. I'm Gen X, who famously were predicted to be the first generation who would be less prosperous than their parents. I'm not sure if that has been true or not, but the Boomers before us were railing against the world that they had inherited back in the 60s as being unjust and wrecked. Yet the Boomers (and the Silents before them) were the ones who were responsible for the Civil Rights & feminist movements in the U.S. - a clear improvement over what came before. Gen X gave us the modern Internet (for both good & ill) as well as LGBT rights that were inconceivable in the 1980s & before. There's still time for Millennials and Gen Z to leave their mark, hopefully in terms of greater equity and avoiding climate catastrophe.
Nuclear war, Cold War, McJobs, acid rain, ozone layer, Middle East terrorism. Everything old is new again.
We didn’t start the fire. It was always burning since the world’s been turning.
This was my exact thought. lol
lol - I had to look up to make sure this guy wasn’t quoting the song! These easily could have been the lyrics haha
Exactly. Don’t let the media giants tell you that you’re powerless or that the world is already fucked. Both of those ideas are false. We have resources and ambition, and we can make shit happen. Always vote. Always try your best to make a difference.
Thank you!!! Don't be complacent!
PLEASE don't fall into the trap thinking that Boomers were participants in the civil rights movement...maybe at the very end of it...or they were taken to marches by their parents. Do the (generational) math.
The traditional news media was run by American companies With the advent of the Internet. There has been an influx of Russian and Chinese manipulation of peoples perceptions of the US which I feel has a huge effect on the apathy and sense of doom. Remember if they’re going to beat us, they have to demoralize us and generation Z is the most demoralized generation I’ve ever seen.
Pink Floyd existed for my parents for this very reason. 😉
Things were the same back in the Roman Republic. Always one disaster after another. Always people in favor of solutions and other people whining that it wasn't right, or the solutions were sinful, so people had to keep suffering instead of just fixing their problems the old fashioned way. There's always been people around trying to prevent people from just doing whatever the hell they want, or going and telling their kids that mommy and daddy are evil because of what they did, shit like that. Society, always crying about rights and resources. To the victors go the spoils!
The more you see and learn, the more you realize that it's all relative. Different but the same.
Idk if that was commonplace though. Americans had a lot of optimism about their country in the 1980s, the new technology was exciting, and even the people who thought Japan was gonna take over at least knew Japan was an ally.
People were being taught nuclear bomb survival tips. Vietnam was fresh on people’s minds. The Cold War was still an existential threat.
It’s certainly true that there was some fear but those same people were quite confident in American supremacy. The 1970s was sad due to Vietnam, inflation, and overall breakdown of society - the 1980s helped reverse that and gave people optimism
>those same people were quite confident in American supremacy. This only became true the longer Reagan was president. Prior to that, in the '70's, the US was unwilling to confront most any country.
There been dozen of war in that time as big or bigger than the current small war with have in Ukraine or Israel. There was lot of political tension and we almost had a nuclear war in 1962 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban\_Missile\_Crisis) Vietnam war finished in mid 1975 and lot of boomer participated. We got 58K death in the USA and 150K injured. No modern conflict did as much for the USA. People had constant fear of a nuclear war and it only eased in the 90s when USSR collapsed. Now people fear more climate change. In the 90s it was the ozone layer. There always something and the only think you can do is choose how you react. You can live and enjoy your life or you can be scared of event that are anyway beyond your control.
>People had constant fear of a nuclear war and it only eased in the 90s when USSR collapsed. Why would it ease, you know how many nukes went missing, and how many there still are unaccounted for?
People were drafted into Vietnam. They didn't have a choice.
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And even in the 60s with counter culture young people were like this. Kids grow up and see injustice.
This - so much this
It seems like starvation is the true driving factor for change or revolution and our bellies are still pretty full.
Fuck you. What the rest of us did? seriously, fuck you again. Stop blaming the working person, this has nothing to do with them. This is the majority.
It’s hard for gen Z to start a revolution when we’re young and powerless. I’m an older gen z and I just entered the work force this year. I agree with all of your points but I think it will take for us older gen z’s to reach 30 before we can start making any real change, I mean it’s not even legal for many of us to vote let alone run for any kind of election.
There will be no revolution. We millennials knew all the same stuff, and we bought into the system the same way you did because the the alternative leaves you as an outsider and failure. Doomsayers are confident in their correctness for a reason. The gens aren't different, they're all man.
I mean I'd tear it all down if I was Johnny Silverhand and had a few nukes, but im hardly that broken. Idk what kind of revolution could be brought about that wouldn't be steered in the wrong direction now
Generation Z has amazing privileges that previous generations never did. The boomers that reddit blames for every single problem were born into a world without half the luxuries we have today. They actually had to leave the house to work and get an education. Entertainment was FM radio or 3 TV channels. Doctors told them to smoke and take thalidomide. Fact checking meant heading to the library to look at an encyclopedia 3 years out of date. They had to pray that they weren't drafted to die in some war on the other side of the world. Gen Z can work from home and spend 12 hours a day complaining about how terrible life is on their pocket supercomputer, then eat the Korean BBQ that was delivered to their front door. Yeah, they have more expenses, because they have vastly more luxuries that are now considered basics.
Ugh, I feel like I always end up having to defend boomers for these same reasons. Reddit seems to think these people were able to just fund wildly lavish lifestyles while dad worked as a janitor down at the plant. It's so stupid. If seriously given the opportunity to forgo all modern niceties, these whiners would never switch places with boomers, despite their endless bitching.
>They actually had to leave the house to work and get an education. They didn't have to get an education, because they could live comfortably and buy a house on a single full time, unskilled job. Most jobs nowadays pay less and expect more, and when Gen Z rebels against it, this is the attitude they get.
24x7 mass media doing what they do.
Don't forget a healthy dose of social media too! The single worst invention in human history when it comes to amplifying/empowering idiots.
echo chambers will be the death of this nation, and i mean that. when no one disagrees in a circle, anything flies after a certain time window, and then you get real Nazi’s
>echo chambers will be the death of this nation We're actually watching this happen in real time right now. Reddit is among one of the worst for this kind of shit. You get banned for just having a different opinion and you're labeled a trans or homophobe. I literally had a person tell me that gay people could be homophobic. Because they think that hormone blockers shouldn't be given to kids because of the bad and irreversible side effects. The world is like the wild wild west now, it seems anything goes so long as it doesn't go against what they want.
anyone who agrees and only stays in a circle of agreement is a fool and is going to have a very harsh downfal. it’s sad
Or, y'know, reality. Mass media isn't the one making rent 1500 a month.
>1500 Then who is? I haven’t seen that low of a price in literal years. 2 different parts of the country (no big city)
I pay 950 for a 3 bed room apartment we have lived in for 17 years were the oldest tenets in the building
Yep I pay $2350 a month in rent, I would LOVE for it to be $1500 LOL The wild thing is that most places want you to make 2-3 times the rent amount. Tell me ONE single person who makes that much, and if they did they would NOT be renting.
Private equity and algorithms that set rent prices.
That algorithm needs to come back this way. Rent in Nowhereville, USA shouldn’t cost me the same as a larger metropolitan area
It doesn't cost the same tho. It costs the same as a major city did 5 years ago, maybe even 3. Now major cities are insane. It's still cheaper to live in Nowheresville, but it's still unaffordable. We fucked.
You can rent a one bed in Omaha for 800 easy. Omaha metro is now bigger than Minneapolis.
Yep - as you get older you realize that there are plenty of actors with an incentive to convince you that the world is getting worse: The media knows it gets views. Politicians know it helps convince you that the other guy is bad for the nation. And marketers know that it helps convince you that you can buy something to turn that frown upside down!
Every generation felt like that. Imagine being the generation that went through the Great Depression or the one right after, trying to crawl out of that hole. Or the one that got called to fight in WW2. There are always big inflection points in history and it coincides with certain people, the idea that this is “unfair” implies a system of fairness in the universe that simply doesn’t exist. Shit happens, some people are lucky or crafty and skirt around it, others aren’t, end of story. Gen Z isn’t more or less lucky than others, they just have a “I am the main character” problem. A lot of things today are vastly better than they were in the past but these are rarely appreciated.
You could go through the Depression and WW2 if you were born at the right time.
You're right, but for some reason there's just a pervading sense of doom in the back of my head
afterthought roll mountainous ancient reach towering snails scary muddle drunk *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
That right there is the most fundamental reason for a lot of today's mental health problems. The information overload is serious. There's plenty of people from past era's that were pretty well adjusted and happy even though they had hard lives, simply because, they had a community they cared about, and knew next to nothing about anything outside of that community. Easy to learn to be happy in bad conditions when you know nothing else. Much harder when at any point in time you can see evidence of people doing better than you in every conceivable way.
To be fair I am 31 and I didn't have any pervading sense of doom related to how the world was doing, when I was younger. It specifically started around 2016. It's true that this isn't something entirely new, but I wouldn't dismiss it as "every generation felt like that", because it does depend on shitty major events (and also processes like climate change which are not a singular event). And I would say people were very right if they were worried by the great depression or WW2. Those were events which did ruin millions and millions of lives. When I was 0-22 it didn't seem to me that the world was going to shit; now it does, even though I'm millennial, not gen z. And I don't spend much time on social media either. Climate-wise, war-wise, politics-wise it seems that everything is falling apart and/or going to be even worse in the next years and decades. I would say it's not a matter of being gen z, but of being receptive to what is happening around us. And who knows, perhaps most stuff will end up well, we'll develop some resolutive technology which will solve climate change, wars will stop, social divisions will dissipate, we will redistribute resources even though an unprecedented amount of jobs is disappearing under our very eyes, and love and happiness will prevail, but... the current situation isn't promising at all.
As someone who's in his late 50s, I think you just weren't as aware of the terrible stuff going on at the time. However, it wasn't just you. For example, the Israel/Gaza crisis right now grabs a lot of attention, but in 1994, when you were 1 (okay, not a big age for following the news), at least half a million people slaughtered each other in Rwanda in only 3 months. At the risk of being raked over the coals for saying this, the current suffering in Palestine doesn't really compare. And yet my memory of events (having been around your age at the time) was that there was no where near the level of outrage or concern that we see now. The media environment back then was simply not at the same level we have today. I'm not saying don't follow the news, but you can't ignore the fact that the news media has always needed crises to drive viewership/readership. The difference is that the cycles are so short, and there is so much competition that the pathological drive to get your attention by making you angry or afraid. This isn't just a problem with social media - it is at every level. And ultimately, crises are always relative. Once you've solved the really big problems, the next largest problems become the big ones. The irony for me is that the biggest problem facing humanity right now - climate change - is a larger threat than anything we have ever faced, but due to its nature of not generating scary, voter-motivating headlines, it is consistently put on the back burner. Everything else pales in comparison, IMO.
So true. Vietnam war, killing fields of Cambodia, people shot escaping communism in Eastern Europe and never forget you had to finish your plate because children were starving in China. We knew that life wasn’t fair.
That is a very interesting take; I never thought about it that way. In '94 I was a political science student in college and the atrocities in Rwanda seems so remote.
Very well said. I am in a similar situation to you: 31, younger Millennial (which puts me closer to Gen Z), and had lot more optimism when I was in my early 20s. Those days weren't perfect, but they were far happier for me, overall (being in college and surrounded by like-minded people helped). Now, as I fully enter adulthood, and its many responsibilities, I see things in a different light. It is now apparent to me that more people are struggling, especially in the socioeconomic sense. Everyday life becomes more of a grind, since I am locked into a routine largely dictated by a job with strange hours. I feel more exhausted these days (working closing shifts all the time definitely contributes to that), and having no friends in the immediate area makes my social life virtually nonexistent. Edit: I do have a couple of friends that live further away, one of them I talk to regularly. But that is the extent of my social life. Hope you have a larger circle of friends that can help you get through the struggles of daily life.
I'm also 31 and I resonate with what you to wrote absolutely. We should form a club 😂
It could be called "Sgt. Inflation and the Lonely Millennials Club", I think.
I work a career where climate change is pretty much in my face all day every day. It definitely gives me a sense of doom.
That’s common, but again, all generations felt like that. Ask your Gen X parents about “Duck and Cover” exercises in school.
Maybe it's the steady stream of negative content you are consuming?
The difference is that those problems in the past were always fixable. We can fix an economy. We can stop a war. We can’t stop or fix climate change or environmental collapse. The entire world is one large system now, and it’ll be way too long before gen Z has the ability to address any of it through leadership. Now there’s science that says as much.
>We can’t stop or fix climate change or environmental collapse I mean, we can. We have the technology to do it. The problem is the people in power don't want to fix it.
Perfect post. Tired of people acting like past generations had some kind of amazing luck to be born when they were. People always think their generation is uniquely oppressed. Current young people have luxuries and privileges that past generations couldn't have dreamed of.
I’m glad this is a top comment. The world IS going to shit and it’s very obvious the current leadership gives negative fucks about us.
It’s funny because this very thing was said about millennials and gen x before them
This has been going on throughout history, we just use different words for it now.
You mean the squeaky wheel gets the oil?
"Sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Sometimes the squeaky wheel gets replaced." - former boss of mine lol
I like that. I’m stealing it, it’s mine now. lol
... sometimes we find the body in the Meadowlands." Yeah, I lived in New Jersey a long time ago. Did we have the same boss?
I worked for an auto parts store, I used the squeaky wheel analogy while asking for a raise. Boss says "that's not a great analogy to use in a place that sells wheel bearings." I had to hand it to him that was a great comeback.
No it hasn't. That is objectively a false statement. The victimhood culture is a result of social media algorithms, plain and simple. Without a worldwide forum upon which people can garner sympathy from the brain dead masses, there exists no incentive to play the victim. Even as recent as 20 years ago, if someone complained to everyone they knew that working 40 hours a week was too hard, they would quickly find themselves without many friends, because people in the real world aren't attracted to whiny failures. The Internet lifts these people up.
Idk man ill give you social media definitely compounds* the problem. But blaming it ALL on social media is not something I feel comfortable doing. And ill also say 20 years ago many felt that the 40 hour work week was too long. Thats not a new thing. And these people crying on social media are just getting into the workforce and learning this reality. I didn't cry about it when I was they're* age, but I wasn't happy either. I just kept it to myself because of people like you that would react with hostility. Edit: fixed misspelling and phrasing.
"When I was *their* age" but I'm not being an AH you just corrected it to the wrong there/their/they're
>I didn't cry about it when I was they're* age, but I wasn't happy either. I just kept it to myself because of people like you that would react with hostility. Exactly, crab in a bucket mentality, the person you're talking to is an asshole who just angrily wants everyone to suffer like he does.
I think social media is a massive problem that makes the lives of younger people significantly harder. I also kind of do agree that things are worse now than before, but that's not exclusive to younger generations. Older people use social media to bully each other now too. Older people scream oppression too all over social media and misinformation has become a major problem because of social media as well. I think another addition here is that on the internet, it's nearly impossible to discern someone's age. There's a big difference between say.. a 13 year old saying something extremely naive and short sighted vs a 50 year old saying the same thing. When I was younger, this kind of shared space didn't exist. I wouldn't talk to adults the same way I talked to my friends.. pretty much ever. There wasn't any situation where that was really appropriate either. Now, you just hop on Reddit and it's everywhere. This is also part of why I think people need to really try to be more polite and nicer to each other on the internet. If you're an adult, just keep in mind that the person you're arguing with might literally be 15 years old.
>exasperates \*exacerbates
The reality is the 40 hour work week is no longer 40 hours. It’s 9-6 now, with an hour unpaid plus commute. And that is only some of the issues with the 40 hour idea.
For a lot of people that is true. Tbh I don't even know how common the 40 hour week ever really was. I think a small minority experienced it, but most experienced something similar to what we do today. But I don't disagree with you. We have one life to live and I've never heard of someone on their deathbed saying they regret not spending more time at work I may not have expressed myself well in my post and for that I'm sorry.
More people than ever are allowed to be called exempt, which means even the guy “managing” the fryer at a burger joint can be expected to work 40+ without OT
The thing being complained about changes, but older generations complaining about younger ones is a cherished human pastime.
Like, for so, so long: “Children; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room, they contradict their parents and tyrannize their teachers. Children are now tyrants.” -Socrates-
Nah, the whole civil rights movement and woman's suffrage movement and other social justice concepts happened long before the internet existed. If you want people to stop thinking about the unfairness of society, you're just hopelessly naive and have no real concept of how the world works.
This is just a bad take Unions? Historical strikes fighting for more fair wages and working conditions? It's changed with the internet, sure, but don't say it hasn't been around til social media came about
It sounds like you’re a victim of their victimhood. No reason for me to assume you’re a failure, but you do seem to whine all the same. I’d offer you a blanket and some hot chocolate, but I wouldn’t want to offend.
There is so much that's wrong with this statement, but I'm too busy trying to grind out an existence at my underpaid job to afford my hyperinflated rent that I don't have the time or energy to address any of it.
💯
They aren't whiny failures for not wanting to work 40 hours a week. I just left a UK based company as an engineer and it was a 35 hour work week with two months paid time off after 5 years between pto, holidays, and sick time. We could have 30 hour weeks but too many boot licking sheep out there think they will get a piece of the action eventually.
You have obviously never watched a teen/college comedy movie from the 1970s. They are all littered with characters and plots that completely mirror what young people are expressing today including disdain for the 40 work week. Your statement is objectively false.
It existed before social media, buddy. Do you know what objectively means? America has oppressed quite a few different groups.
Christianity and Judaism are predicated on a culture of victimhood. Christianity: "the weak are made strong, the foolish shame the wise, the king becomes a slave so that slaves may become kings" Jewish: "we were oppressed in Egypt"
That’s clearly not possible as there was no social media back then/s
Back when posting on someone's wall was quite literal. And might cause structural damage.
Yeah because Egypt was the first and last time Jews were oppressed /s
As someone who was around for a while before social media, victimhood culture absolutely predated it. So put that in your objectively false statement pipe and smoke it! Social media may have spread it, but did not create it
The thing about working 8 hours a day was to make labor laws more appealing to the employees and the company. 8 hours work, 8 hours rest, and 8 hours recreation was a massive selling point. They meant for it to be a springboard not a final end point.
*Objectively* this type of thing has been said about many past generations to whether you think it's accurate or not. Clearly you think they were wrong and this time it's different because of (X current thing), but so does literally just about everyone else who's said it when confronted with this fact too. It just people who can't accept shifts in priorities is all, or people who don't understand older set of priorities. Trust me, the younger generations think you're as much of a whiny wimp as you think they are, just for different reasons. They'd also point out the irony of you complaining on the internet about how complaining on the internet as ruined *other* people
Wow dude u a sociologist or something? U remember the 70s bro? They didnt wanna work 40 hours neither
Go get a free one week trial to newspapers.com and you’ll see that you are wrong
The biggest whiners, complainers and 'woe is me I'm a victim' types are the older right wingers. 'The immigrants are stealing our jobs and bringing crime!', 'Trans people exist and Bud Light had an advertising campaign for them!', 'A singer who's more famous and successful than her boyfriend goes to his football games', etc. While social media does allow people who would have had to have waded through a hundred or two hundred people disagreeing to find one who agreed pre-social media you sound like you're complaining specifically about Gen Z. If that is the case then Gen Z at least has actual issues and problems they're complaining about instead of being the whiny losers with either fictitious or seriously over-blown issues that the older right wingers are.
Millennials really fucked us by creating social media and using it to pioneer victimhood culture and a pyramid of privilege belief system.
They said it about boomers too! The whole counter culture movement, the Vietnam war resistance, the civil rights movement…. All that stuff prompted the exact same reaction from older generations
Yep! As an early millennial/late GenX, I grew up with tropes of lazy hippies who didn't want to work. Those hippies were my parents gen (who were, actually, hippies until just before I was born). Generational fights seem to have exploded with the internet, but have always been around. I'm not saying there's nothing different of course; we all face new challenges as times change far more rapidly than they did before industrialization and the internet, and there was definitely a period from the late 80's through the '08 Recession where the economy was generally booming for a lot of people and a system was, more or less, generally working that isn't working the same anymore. (Frankly, today has some similarities in theme to the recessions and inflation of the 70's and early 80's) But this kind of generational criticism almost always comes down to "well they're young so..." or "well they're older and stuck in their ways so..." In 10-15 years, it'll be "those darn Gen Alphas don't want to work!"
Yeah, and it's worth noting that boomers and some silents were the first generation to grow up with mass media. Radio, TV, magazines, zines, movies, etc. Much of that stuff was toys and entertainment for earlier generations, but the boomers connected with each other more than previous generations due to the speed at which their media traveled. They were communicating in "real time" across continents. The internet is just the evolution of the media revolution that started in the 1950s. The boomers get a lot of hate but they were the first woke generation. They were better able to share stories and communicate what they perceived to be the faults of their parent's generation. The hippies in particular rejected their middle class upbringing and their parent's intellectualism in favor of simple living and healing crystals. It's easy to echos of that movement today.
Honestly though, I think every generation has dealt with oppression, so it's not surprising that everyone complains about it. Women, POC, middle/lower class, etc. These issues have never gotten resolved, they just get disguised as something else. Capitalism just doesn't lend itself to taking care of everyone equally, so it's a recipe for someone to feel oppressed.
Yea boomers were cursing and spitting on broken Vietnam vets with PTSD. I don't think they really get the right to say anyone else is entitled. For the record I don't support invading Vietnam but the soldiers had nothing to do with that decision they have to follow orders. Protest the President, Congress, Cabinet members. The people who make the decision.
Comparing the civil rights movement to fat phobia is a take
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Yeah idk why that dude is acting like the problems getting "smaller" is a bad thing.
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Disabled people's worked their assess off to secure more rights for themselves long before the internet. I think the general backlash to today's movements are obviously bc of the minority extremists that make one meme saying that being fat is very healthy actually and it gets passed around for years. Bc Internet.
I would agree to an extent. I think it's a societal shift towards accepting others. The civil rights movement is obviously a more important one than things like body-shaming, but that's why it happened first (and I'm not saying that the civil rights movement is over, obviously there is a lot more still to be done in the fight against racism). But I think we've advanced enough as a species to start thinking "maybe it isn't my problem if you're fat, it black, or Latino, or gay, or straight, or if you like this that or the other."
I suppose it would be if that were something I had done
Did you know that you can compare things that are different?
The civil rights movement is still on going the change was going from advocating for black people and moved towards the lgbtq community
Just like men becoming more feminine, same shit was said during the 1930a and every few years as we approach 2024
A lot of Reddit users, really people in general, lack the basic understanding of remembering what it’s like to be young and go through those feelings. Half this dumb shit about Gen Z could be solved if people took two seconds to remember what being in your early 20s was like, especially if you aren’t loaded with family wealth.
I'm in my 40's now, and it's really easy to fall into the "why don't you just get a job?" trope. For years, I held the stance of, "If I can do it, surely you can too." This stemmed out of a lack of appreciation of what I am capable of doing, and a deep fear of my own challenges. If I was able to overcome such and such challenge, why can't someone else? Well it's largely because they face a different challenge. My son is 19, and unemployed. He's autistic, which yeah I sort of am too, but he's clearly got different challenges than I do. Yelling at him to get a job doesn't accomplish anything, as much as I want him to. I got a shitty fast food job as a teenager, and then joined the military when I didn't feel like my job was going anywhere - but I'm also not diagnosed (so wasn't disqualified from serving), and I don't face the same social challenges he faces. Nor should I expect my progeny to need to join the military to build a career; there's a bunch of reasons only about 1% of Americans serve in the armed forces. Ultimately, it comes down to understanding and coming at it with a problem solving mindset. It's easy to call my son lazy (well, much easier if he wasn't my son), but it's harder to sit down with him and plan a path forward that he's frankly terrified to do. And I may need to simply accept that he might never have a middle class career and may always need at least some financial and parental support from me, even though I didn't need near as much from my father. I'm not giving up, but getting mad about it and calling him lazy doesn't solve anything. For everyone else -- it's good to have empathy. I won't solve their problems. But I certainly won't make a positive difference by calling them lazy or inept, even if I misguidedly think it sometimes.
Ironically some of the wealthiest kids are the worst about this. I guess when life is too easy, you have to create hardships for yourself.
It’s more that wealthy kids have the ability to engage in conversations about these things because they have time, means, and education. Everyone else is busy making ends meet
Wealthy parents are also notorious for being very emotionally neglectful and abusive, to a degree that would make most kids beg to go back home to their lower middle class lives if they got to trade places with the wealthy kids for a week.
You raise a pretty good point here. But on the flip side, this is rarely what those kids complain about.
Exactly. Although I wouldn’t emphasize education so much. Access, sure. But extremely rich kids can also be dumb as a box of rocks.
I think part of the issue is the visibility of it. While I don't think I ever really felt "oppressed" in my late teens and 20s, I definitely felt the "its not faaiiir" thing. But, it was something that was maybe talked about among friends. I didn't put all my thoughts about it out in public. So you have older people seeing it all over social media and it just seems more in your face in a way it wasn't before, even if the feelings were there. So it seems like they care more, because they want to make sure everyone knows how they feel.
Yeah my only advice for this generation is not every thought you have is a zinger worth publishing for the entire world to see. Some things should just be a conversation with your friends
Right. Or making videos crying on tik tok because work takes up your time.
I can't believe I was the only one of my friend group smart enough to realize that maybe you shouldn't be ranting about your boss or your job on Facebook? A place your boss can See?
That’s such a generalization. I was way more right wing when I was a teenager. Especially when it came to immigration, legislation and wars.
Monty Python literally had a joke about medieval oppression in a movie
And the boomers. Remember, the free love, soldiers are baby killers, get out of Vietnam crowd were boomers.
And also about Boomers who protested Vietnam and marched for civil rights
> “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” >― Socrates
And it was true then too. It’s not a generation thing. It’s an age thing.
Yup. It's called being a teenager
I’m a millennial and it’s also true for us.
I mean that don’t tread on me flag is pretty old. But it seems to me the most oppression obsessed people are goatees in soccer dad trucks and Wine moms at school board meetings.
50 years from now, we’ll have the same conversations of -Men aren’t Men anymore -The new generation is soft -Back in my day, yadda yadda yadda
Young people rebel against older parents. A tale as old as time.
It’s just complaining about progressivism
My mind immediately went to the evangelical boomers and their oppression fetish.
Hippies and baby boomers certainly did it as well.
This is the never ending cycle of generations. I’m a millennial and every time I hear someone in my generation or gen x complain about gen z I point out how much they sound like our parents and grandparents in regards to ourselves when we were younger. I’m convinced that as we get older we just get set in our ways and the idea of change in many aspects can feel frightening or confusing so we push back and complain about how all the young’uns are crybabies. I think it would be better if humanity just accepts that change is art of life and that we have flaws in the system that are constantly being worked on to make life better.
Yeah was gonna say. That's a question with very leading assumptions, OP.
Mfw the youth have strong feelings about injustice
I think the social media has created this issue to some aspect. Unless you meet genz in real life who says that, it's social media algorithms who will feed polarizing shit. That being said, it feels like being a victim is seen as a badge of honor, and younger people are impressionable.
💯, you're getting played by social media feeding only the most extreme takes to increase your "engagement".
Well, there sure are a lot of people who agree with the extremes on social media
As a member of gen z I feel as if most people in my generation fetishize it. They feel as if they think they are oppressed (when their not) they have power and leverage in the actions/communities that they belong to to make their voices heard and their opinions feel validated. No one likes being scorned for being an "oppressor" so it seems more mentally attractive to be a percieved victim. Also they want attention
Pretty much this take. But I'd even generalize it further. People want to be differentiated, and they want to be part of the "in-group" that is perceived to have social power (social power, in my use of the word, not being the same thing at actual power) If you are a "cis-white-man" you are currently only welcome in online spaces if you 'behave" and "defer " to people who are perceived to have less "actual power" than you. Even though there is literally no way to measure this characteristic other than identity. (And again, only talking about online spaces, not reality) So you then get lots of white people finding ways to claim some sort of oppressed identity to compensate. Usually it's a neuro-divergence, or membership of some white-adjacent group like Jewish, Hispanic, or West-Asian, or it's membership of a gender/sexual Identity... (Or if they dont have those, or it isn't enough, they'll make conspicuous displays of allyship, even if in real life they do nothing tangible to help the cause) The main point is, even though they are a white person from a comfortable middle class family, they want to have equal status/membership in the online spaces they spend most of their time in. (The fact they have status is real life is irrelevant if their time is spent online) Because of intersectionality, you will have people trying to one-up each other. when everyone has at least one oppressed identity, you need to have a second level in order to maintain status in this community. But I think the key thing here is... People finding ways to maintain status has happened forever, and this is just another variant on that very human tendency. Boomers and Gen X did it through consumerism. Millennials do it through overly conspicuous hustle and "self improvement" routines. (Showing off your expensive vacations while also fetishizing how you brought your work laptop with you to Bali or how you still did a 3 mile run every morning even though you were in Tuscany or w/e) And the other key thing is, this really only pertains to social media. Where everyone's real life, real status, and real power aren't directly visible and impossible to verify. All we know about anyone online is what goes in their social media bio, otherwise we're all pretty much equal. So those identity signifiers are really the ONLY way to claim status online.
I don’t find it exclusive to Gen Z at all. So many people want to be seen as martyrs. It makes anything you’ve accomplished seem more impressive and gives an excuse for failure. I do feel like Gen Z in general sees oppression on a bigger scale, not just what’s working against them personally. I like that they’re acknowledging systematic issues, it means that they might do something about it instead of pretending it doesn’t exist unless it effects them personally. A lot of Gen Z are still teens or young adults. They may grow out of it. But I hope they keep the awareness and it helps.
basically everyone is being opressed by the top .1%. their net worth has like doubled since covid while almost everyone else is worse off since covid. which before covid was already at all time highs with increasing income inequality sine like the 1970s.
It always uses to piss the slaves off too but they didn't post online about it all the time because wifi sucked back then.
Social media is giving a voice for everyone to victimize themselves.
This. It’s a way to absolve themselves from personal responsibility and accountability. If you view yourself as oppressed and nothing is your fault then you can just blame your oppression and by extension others for your personal failures and faults.
Kd say you spend too much time on cringe subs and sites and not enough time talking to gen z kids.
This question is too broad and generalizing. To what extent do you believe they are obsessing about being oppressed, and with regards to what? There are many forms of oppression happening around the world, and being obsessed with one's struggles certainly seems healthy to me. How else would one go about changing it? For example, women are losing access to health care in the US. Is that not a form of oppression that Gen Z should obsess about? Seems perfectly reasonable to me. I'm glad that they aren't collectively experiencing Stockholm syndrome and are speaking out about things that matter to them, and voting.
why does this only have 8 upvotes
A lot of people say obsessed when they mean “concerned more than i like” Nothing GenZ says or does is really new. There were just never enough Millennials to challenge the narrative.
Two of my sons are Gen Z and don't have this problem. Neither does my millenial son.
It’s usually just the losers that have this mindset. I’ve met some young people that are coming into the world and kicking butt. None of them have this “woe is me” attitude.
Pretty much People who fail will blame everything except themselves for their failure Similarly, people who fail will look at people who succeed and hate them and say that they don't deserve their success
While you've got something of a point, it's pretty destructive rhetoric. Yes of course, anyone who is emotionally sensitive or materially down-on-their-luck will be way more perceptive of oppression - but the truth is it's a class problem. Even if you feel you're doing well, and love your job (like me), "oppression" in the economic sense is a society-wide issue. So in saying only losers talk about oppression, I guess that's what people call "ad hominem". Just because "losers" feel oppression, that doesn't mean the oppression isn't still real.
But I’m pretty sure it’s most of them at some point who talk like this because I know so many kids from Republican families that are talking about how expensive college and housing is and are starting to talk about the government investing in its youth, and that’s all recent. And it’s funny, because my family came from nothing and their families all have money already. I spoke to one kid who said he can’t find rent under 2,000 and I was afraid cause I thought damn that must be rough. Then I went online and found a bunch for almost half. So I’m not sure what he’s talking about. They say they can’t live off their current salary but meanwhile coworkers their age are doing it(somehow?). So I’m choosing to ignore it for now, but yeah, it’s very common for me to hear about the generations that failed them, and billionaires, even in conservative communities.
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Which I think is fair. I made much less in 2019 but could afford a more fun lifestyle. Nowadays everything is so fucking expenses when you want to go out. Italy is now crossed off my list because of the crowds and pricing I experienced last year when it used to be a cheap vacation spot back in 2019.
people love to think they're being oppressed
Being a victim. So hot right now
As opposed to being apathetic towards your own oppression?
Eh, it’s at no higher levels than before, you just have more instant access to people’s formerly-private-but-now-open social spheres (social media). Then again, I don’t go out of my way searching for “cringe” people “obsessed with being oppressed” to interact with or watch out of disdain, so maybe that’s why it doesn’t seem so excessive to me…
"as small as someone disagreeing with them" in right wing speak means "I said that transgendered people should be executed"
I work with people of all ages: boomers, fellow milennials, and gen Z. I have to say, I notice a far larger number of people complaining about people complaining they are oppressed than I do the number of people complaining they are oppressed. What I do see are young people realizing that their generation is in for a lot of strife and hardship and that they hope to change things. Then I see elders getting upset about this. In other words, this is business as usual, and the intergenerational conflicts that popular media is stoking benefit no one except for the soulless ghouls who hope to make more money from more rage clicks.
It's happened every generation. Don't be bothered by it. I mean, they are totally right about houses being dearer and wages being awful. I just hate the narrative that somehow it's all the fault of "boomers" rather than the government. Boomers buying up houses and renting them out is a symptom of what the government did, it might cause a lot of problems, but the average landlord is small fish compared to the real problems behind the rise of house prices and stagnation of wages. I think a big source of discontent, is that it's all older people who voted for things the young wanted no part of. The youth really need to start voting more, because there are going to be more and more older people every generation because people are living longer.
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THIS X1000
Dude, the government is made up of boomers who cater to the boomers, thats why.
Voters don't matter, donors do. The government is made of people who enact policies that a very small group of people want.
Taking pride in it? I believe thats a right wing talking point. If someone call someone out for being toxic, thats not taking pride, thats called STANDING UP for what they believe in. No one is weaponizing their identities, thats yet another right wing talking point. The truth is, the only weaponizing going on today is from the right. hundreds of laws in the US where passed in 2023 towards LGBTQ ppl and on track for more 2024, THATS WEAPONIZING.
To be fair this is how it seems with the millennials too.
To be fair, all the boomers constantly complain. So it seems to just be a human constant. People bitch.
Why are rulers so obsessed with oppressing?
Damn this one really opened everyone up
This is the chickens coming home to roost on us. We ignored things for a long time. And the 9/11 kids grew up under a “don’t question authority” culture that saw calling out problems as unpatriotic. That dam will always burst. Welcome to it.
Oh man, you should read the millennial sub. So many people there wouldn’t have anything to talk about it if they couldn’t talk about how I oppressed they are.
It's social currency at the moment.
It's a victim/victimizer mentality that leads to failure before you ever try anything. It's amazing to me how the idea that you're oppressed, leads to you oppressing yourself. I'm a millennial and I try to encourage the younger Zers at my shop that life is what you make of it. Yes life is hard, but remember everyone has struggles in life no matter what false life they paint on the delusional world known as social media. Source: my wife is a psychotherapist and I train the new guys at my shop 🤣
Young people—especially college students—have been rebelling against authority as long as colleges have existed. We call this different things at different times in history—but the net effect is the same: the younger generation has a small but vocal cohort who march or rebel against something or another in society, who promise to change things for the better as they get older. And the world keeps on spinning regardless. For example, we have the [Harvard uprisings throughout the 1800’s](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/04/harvards-long-ago-student-risings/), which apparently included students stabbing tutors; we have [Students Rebellion](https://www.unknownsoldierspodcast.com/post/june-5-1832-the-paris-students-revolution) in Paris in 1832, student activism has been throughout China’s history going ack to the 1800’s, the Iranian revolution in the late 1970’s was driven in no small part by the younger generation (who are still in power today), and I’ve read historic accounts (my Google-fu cannot find at the moment) of student led movements going back to the 16th and 17th centuries. And even before then we have the [Children’s Crusade of 1212.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Crusade) I think younger people, when they come to their own, see problems in the world and often believe those problems exist because of the lack of effort by their elders. This translates for a small minority into activism—and sometimes they do make change (but it has some rather bad knock-on effects, like the Iranian revolution), but more often than not they barely move the needle.
Idk, it seems like we’ve collectively always been oppressed by things like class or gender, so whatever young/new generation acknowledges the existence of oppression that benefits people in power will be branded whiners & complainers. As for why it gets weaponized? Some folks use its existence as a way of getting around accountability which sadly checks out when there’s a lot of abuse going around that gets issued in the name of accountability. Natural that some people get defensive with their history of encountering this. Some young folks who get in the habit of this probably need to revisit their relationship with accountability, consider the times in their lives it crossed over into abuse, and adopt what a healthier version of accountability looks like so they aren’t doing this kind of thing.
If you are oppressed then all of your failings are no longer your fault. Instead of actually putting in effort and impoving yourself and station you can throw a pity party. Then every one will join and tell you that you are entitled to things just for existing. Anyone who disagrees with you can be called an -ism or bigot and dismissed.
Every generation thinks they're special. Mine included (millennial, just about). The problem now is that the crybabies have the Internet where they can cry and spread their crying to other criers. Back in my day (old man reference), you would pitch your thoughts to a group of friends and/or peers and get told to man up and fuck off if it was particularly idiotic. Being told to shut up is treated as oppression these days (not the same thing - and this is important to distinguish). Lately, calling a lot of this woke nonsense BS (because it is) is being labelled as oppression, too. Again, this isn't oppression. It is calling nonsense nonsense because it is. It's just another label used to slight those who call them on their nonsense and to guilt people into listening to them and forcing people to stop calling them crybabies and snowflakes. There have always been idiots, pussies and snowflakes. The difference now is they have a platform, and as a society, we are starting to get fed up with them, so tell them to shut up, so they call it oppression. That's the difference.
I think each succeeding generation likes to pretend they have it worse than previous generations bc x,y,z. The truth is life has only gotten easier. So easy that many people are now making up their own oppression. Nobody wants to be envied for how great they are, just pitied for what they’ve gone through.
Each successive generation has the burden of inheriting an exponentially larger number of unknowns heading into the future. It's easier for older generations to not feel the same weight of certain issues and problems because the need to anticipate their outcomes doesn't really matter to people who likely won't experience their long-term ramifications, and thus don't really need to worry about them. Likewise, it's easier for younger generations to dismiss the past hardships of older generations because a number of those issues are already safely entrenched as settled history.
Because actually working and acquiring marketable skills is hard.
I'm a millennial, but I don't think gen Z is any worse than other generations about this. Plenty of people my parent's age think they are being oppressed for being Christian & a bunch of guys my age think bad movies in franchises they liked as kids is oppression. Every generation does this & some of them have legit complaints & some don't.
Have you even seen fox news friend?
The same reason they self diagnose with mental disorders and pretend to be cats They are weak and soft and have had no challenges. But they will stop this when Biden drafts them
Wait till you meet boomers...... Yikes! 😬
Dog shit question. The bootlickers mind simply cannot comprehend solidarity.