7 ms·

Imagine you were born in 1900. When you're 14, World War I begins and ends when you're 18 with 22 million dead. Soon after a global pandemic, the Spanish Flu,

Imagine you were born in 1900. When you're 14, World War I begins and ends when you're 18 with 22 million dead. Soon after a global pandemic, the Spanish Flu, appears, killing 50 million people. And you're alive and 20 years old. When you're 29 you survive the global economic crisis that started with the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange, causing inflation, unemployment and famine. When you're 33 years old the nazis come to power. When you're 39, World War II begins and ends when you're 45 years old with a 60 million dead. In the Holocaust 6 million Jews die. When you're 52, the Korean War begins. When you're 64, the Vietnam War begins and ends when you're 75. A child born in 1985 thinks his grandparents have no idea how difficult life is, but they have survived several wars and catastrophes. --Quoted from somewhere

mjevans 4y ago
A child born in the 80s is lucky to still have living parents today, and if they have living grandparents they were probably reluctant to speak to the child during the years both could understand the conversation. Also I don't think those dates quite line up. A better estimate is the range of 20 to 33 (ish) years for most families (I personally would like to hope some start later but kind of doubt this offhand...) Between 1900 and 2020 that's anywhere from 6 to about 3 different generations, with different windows of experience overlap.
- moistly 4y ago
  > A child born in the 80s is lucky to still have living parents today Wut?! Born in 1966 here, still have living parents. Ditto for my wife. Where do you live that parents are lucky to make it past their sixties? And where grandparents shun their grandkiddies? Such bizarre claims!
  - watwut 4y ago
    > And where grandparents shun their grandkiddies? Grandparents who went through wars dont talk much about ugly details of those with their small grandchildren. Instead, they try to protect kids from those. If they talk about those, they wait till kids are adult and even then they talk about it only if it is relevant to something. In addition, generations that went through wars seem to generally not to talk about it much with others. That seems fairly universal - ex-solders tend to feel that non-soldiers dont understand their experience. They have hard time to put experience into words that non-soldiers do understand. > Born in 1966 here, still have living parents. That is cool. My dad is death and I am younger. Not everyone lives till 80.
  - tremon 4y ago
    To counter your anecdata with mine: Born in 1982, lost the last remaining grandparent when I was 12. Lost my father five years ago, luckily my mother is still in good health.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > A child born in the 80s is lucky to still have living parents toda Average age of the parents at birth in 1980 was around 26-27 years, life expectancy at birth for 1953 is around 74 (men) and 77 (women); even using expectancy at birth instead of life expectancy at 26-27, an average-age parent of a child born in 1980 would be expected, on average, to live into about the late 2020s. And that just gets later for people born later in the 1980s.
rejectfinite 4y ago
Was going to post something like this. Agreed. They have 0 perspective.
bmitc 4y ago
Times are certainly tough at different points in history, but they are extremely mentally and emotionally taxing right now and we keep hitting new peaks. We continue to accelerate the destruction of the earth and yet nothing is being done about it. When the everyday person is obsessed with EV cars instead of composting and planting native plants in their yard instead of wastelands of homogeneous lawns and committing genocide against insects and other animals in their yard, it becomes extremely demoralizing. People don't do anything useful about anything now, and I think that is the most depressing of all. There's rabble about stuff on social media, politicians don't do anything but move the U.S. more towards and oligarchy, and corporations keep selling us stuff to consume, which consumers then lap up. The Internet is the single most divisive technology ever created by humanity, and it does nothing but distance us from one another. There's never been greater threats to humanity than the Internet and its woes and the already arrived environmental and climate crisis. That's not even considering the deep financial stress people are under these days. Even just 30 years ago, my parents bought a lot and built a house for $100,000. That barely covers tuition at most universities, and a similar sized house now costs around $1,000,000 just to buy. Just as recent as the late 90s and early 2000s, gas was under a dollar. We're sitting at $4.50 now. People can't afford the number of kids people used to have and must delay even having one or two kids well into their 30s, often due to financial constraints. Minimum wage has barely doubled since my teenage years, and yet everything is exponentially more expensive. Then there is the onslaught of several other socioeconomic factors. People, aside from the wealthy, are getting slammed from literally every direction, and there is no concerted effort to improve any of it. It's not hard to understand why people are depressed more than ever.
watwut 4y ago
Massive issue here is that I did not seen anyone say "grand-grandparents had it easy". Especially not, I have not seen anyone in places affected with above say that. What I have seen is American 20-40 years old saying boomers had it easier. Boomers were not affected by any of the above, they were born after WWII. If you was born in 1900, you would be 122 years old now.
- refurb 4y ago
  1950's - Korean war (either boomer or their parents), Berlin wall 1960's - Vietnam War draft, terrorist bombings in the US, race riots, Cuba missile crisis, ramping up the cold war 1970's - Oil embargo, massive (stag)-flation, "general malaise" 1980's - Recession, airline hijackings, multiple mid-East wars 1990's - Gulf war, another recession, leading up to massive tech bubble and crash If you want to be stressed and disillusioned, there has never been a lack of options.
  - watwut 4y ago
    And here, you assume everyone was affected by all of those ... which is unlikely. For overwhelming majority of people, multiple of these are happening in distant places and don't affect them all that much.
    - refurb 4y ago
      Riots? Recessions? Threat of nuclear war? Threat of being drafted? You’re kidding right? For someone growing up during that time those threats are as severe or more than those today.
somenameforme 4y ago
Just posted something quite similar to this. Something I would really add here is what those numbers mean in terms of global %, or scaled to modern times. The WW2 death toll is also understated, and closer to 80 million. But that really hits home when you start to consider that in 1939 the world population was around 2.3 billion. So those 80 million deaths would be 275 million scaled to current population, primarily among the youth and those in the prime of their lives. The thing that's exceptional in contemporary times is not how bad things are, but rather how unimaginably good things were during the bubble of time most of us grew up in. And we seemingly took that extreme outlier in the history of humanity for granted.

mjevans 4y ago

A child born in the 80s is lucky to still have living parents today, and if they have living grandparents they were probably reluctant to speak to the child during the years both could understand the conversation. Also I don't think those dates quite line up. A better estimate is the range of 20 to 33 (ish) years for most families (I personally would like to hope some start later but kind of doubt this offhand...) Between 1900 and 2020 that's anywhere from 6 to about 3 different generations, with different windows of experience overlap.

moistly 4y ago
> A child born in the 80s is lucky to still have living parents today Wut?! Born in 1966 here, still have living parents. Ditto for my wife. Where do you live that parents are lucky to make it past their sixties? And where grandparents shun their grandkiddies? Such bizarre claims!
- watwut 4y ago
  > And where grandparents shun their grandkiddies? Grandparents who went through wars dont talk much about ugly details of those with their small grandchildren. Instead, they try to protect kids from those. If they talk about those, they wait till kids are adult and even then they talk about it only if it is relevant to something. In addition, generations that went through wars seem to generally not to talk about it much with others. That seems fairly universal - ex-solders tend to feel that non-soldiers dont understand their experience. They have hard time to put experience into words that non-soldiers do understand. > Born in 1966 here, still have living parents. That is cool. My dad is death and I am younger. Not everyone lives till 80.
- tremon 4y ago
  To counter your anecdata with mine: Born in 1982, lost the last remaining grandparent when I was 12. Lost my father five years ago, luckily my mother is still in good health.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> A child born in the 80s is lucky to still have living parents toda Average age of the parents at birth in 1980 was around 26-27 years, life expectancy at birth for 1953 is around 74 (men) and 77 (women); even using expectancy at birth instead of life expectancy at 26-27, an average-age parent of a child born in 1980 would be expected, on average, to live into about the late 2020s. And that just gets later for people born later in the 1980s.

rejectfinite 4y ago

Was going to post something like this. Agreed. They have 0 perspective.

bmitc 4y ago

Times are certainly tough at different points in history, but they are extremely mentally and emotionally taxing right now and we keep hitting new peaks. We continue to accelerate the destruction of the earth and yet nothing is being done about it. When the everyday person is obsessed with EV cars instead of composting and planting native plants in their yard instead of wastelands of homogeneous lawns and committing genocide against insects and other animals in their yard, it becomes extremely demoralizing. People don't do anything useful about anything now, and I think that is the most depressing of all. There's rabble about stuff on social media, politicians don't do anything but move the U.S. more towards and oligarchy, and corporations keep selling us stuff to consume, which consumers then lap up. The Internet is the single most divisive technology ever created by humanity, and it does nothing but distance us from one another. There's never been greater threats to humanity than the Internet and its woes and the already arrived environmental and climate crisis. That's not even considering the deep financial stress people are under these days. Even just 30 years ago, my parents bought a lot and built a house for $100,000. That barely covers tuition at most universities, and a similar sized house now costs around $1,000,000 just to buy. Just as recent as the late 90s and early 2000s, gas was under a dollar. We're sitting at $4.50 now. People can't afford the number of kids people used to have and must delay even having one or two kids well into their 30s, often due to financial constraints. Minimum wage has barely doubled since my teenage years, and yet everything is exponentially more expensive. Then there is the onslaught of several other socioeconomic factors. People, aside from the wealthy, are getting slammed from literally every direction, and there is no concerted effort to improve any of it. It's not hard to understand why people are depressed more than ever.

watwut 4y ago

Massive issue here is that I did not seen anyone say "grand-grandparents had it easy". Especially not, I have not seen anyone in places affected with above say that. What I have seen is American 20-40 years old saying boomers had it easier. Boomers were not affected by any of the above, they were born after WWII. If you was born in 1900, you would be 122 years old now.

refurb 4y ago
1950's - Korean war (either boomer or their parents), Berlin wall 1960's - Vietnam War draft, terrorist bombings in the US, race riots, Cuba missile crisis, ramping up the cold war 1970's - Oil embargo, massive (stag)-flation, "general malaise" 1980's - Recession, airline hijackings, multiple mid-East wars 1990's - Gulf war, another recession, leading up to massive tech bubble and crash If you want to be stressed and disillusioned, there has never been a lack of options.
- watwut 4y ago
  And here, you assume everyone was affected by all of those ... which is unlikely. For overwhelming majority of people, multiple of these are happening in distant places and don't affect them all that much.
  - refurb 4y ago
    Riots? Recessions? Threat of nuclear war? Threat of being drafted? You’re kidding right? For someone growing up during that time those threats are as severe or more than those today.

somenameforme 4y ago

Just posted something quite similar to this. Something I would really add here is what those numbers mean in terms of global %, or scaled to modern times. The WW2 death toll is also understated, and closer to 80 million. But that really hits home when you start to consider that in 1939 the world population was around 2.3 billion. So those 80 million deaths would be 275 million scaled to current population, primarily among the youth and those in the prime of their lives. The thing that's exceptional in contemporary times is not how bad things are, but rather how unimaginably good things were during the bubble of time most of us grew up in. And we seemingly took that extreme outlier in the history of humanity for granted.