Read on Twitter
i know i'm 40 but don't ever call my cohort "boomers." we are generation x, which is a bad name that i hate, but chronologically we are the very first victims of boomers, who absolutely destroyed our lives
reagan and clinton were the essential presidencies of the baby boomer generation. both administrations leaned way the fuck into massive international income inequality and made it much easier to accumulate and hoard wealth, as long as you were already wealthy to begin with
i'm the youngest of the generation x'ers, as people around my age also are. we were raised without the internet, so we were still being taught to find one company and stick with it, work towards the pension and retirement as early as possible
the oldest of generation y are guys like zuck, who are young enough to have gone to college at a time where computer science had just begun to start teaching things newer than c++. if we wanted programming experience we had to do it on our own, post-undergrad
most of the things i was trying to major in were reasonably stable industries when i entered college in 1998, but by 2003 when i dropped out i looked back and realized i had spent five years learning shit that was going to be useless in the internet age
we, specifically, got trapped in the middle: not old enough to have been through the higher ed system and already into an industry before they started to loudly collapse, and simultaneously too old to have had educational access to these literal brand new occupations like web dev
when something as earth-changing as the internet becomes mainstream as you're a year or two away from graduating college and all of your life has been preparing you for a non-connected world, what are you supposed to do lol
anyway, boomers are not just "old people," they're a generation that went through economic precarity in the 70s and spent the whole 80s and 90s enabling the massive hoarding of wealth because they grew up swimming in that feeling of insecurity
and then, when it turned out that the wealth hoarding they were enabling was not going to trickle down to them, they doubled down and raided our college funds to try to score big. all of that money is gone, taken by wealthier hoarders and sitting in offshore accounts
that money didn't make its way to us, gen x. the boomers were our parents and they absolutely ruined us
anyway it's actually fine if you call me a boomer, i just wanted to write this thread lol
also i would like to acknowledge the very white collar-ness of this thread. when i was growing up that was the whole point of higher ed, to be white collar when your precedents were all blue collar. i'm not as invested in classism anymore but my reflections are of their time
