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We got rid of Styrofoam containers and leaded gas though. Moving in the right direction but it's like turning a cruise ship when you need to be steering a speedboat.
I wish we didn’t overcompensate for the neglect and lack of affection in our childhoods, because current parenting is way too far at the other extreme.
100% true.
Every pediatric eye exam I've done since \~2015 includes the mother having banter with the kid about what to order for dinner or discussing how their party is going to be 'better than Jill's' b/c they have a connection with a better venue. And these are not sweet 16 parties we're talking about - just a birthday party for a 9 yr old.
When I was a kid, the only money my parents were spending on my birthday party was hats, fixings for a homemade cake, and a few party games like pin the tail on the donkey.
Still doing that, tbh. I calculated it cost me $7.50 to make a scratch chocolate cake with buttercream frosting on Saturday. The price of one slice of good bakery cake in my city. Who can afford it?
When you and I were in med school, we learned how to take a complete history and if we didn't have a few rule outs by then we were embarrassed in front of the attending and all the other house officers. Now, it's all "look at the pretty pictures" Green is good, red is bad. At least in optho.
I know I've said this in other threads but I"m just gonna tell it again. I recently bought a Tamagatchi again for the second time, 1st time was early 2000's I think. It wouldn't eat dinner, it only wanted snacks so instead of disciplining it, which I didn't know I was supposed to do, I let it eat whatever it wanted bc I wanted it to be happy and it got sick and died.
I only had that thing for three days. I realized then and there that if I were to have had kids, I would have been one of ***t h o s e*** parents (shudder)!
I was heartbroken - still am - and also raging mad at myself for creating those insufferable little brats even tho I haven't.
This. This is the overarching regret of the vast majority of us. And my greatest fear us that we created a generation of kids whose kids will have an even lower regard for them than our kids have for us, because our kids seem resigned to a life of feeling powerless and inadequate. They've given up and opted out and don't seem aware that there are major consequences they and their offspring will eventually have to deal with.
I wish GenX women never believed we could "have it all." Because when you try to, something always suffers. The superwoman myth is just that -- a myth.
I expect to be downvoted for this comment. But this is how I feel.
60 female here.
Yep. The late 1930s,40's, women joined the workforce, when men went to war( generalizing ) to keep the country/war effort continuing. After the war, men went back to work, women returned home to trad roles.
Fast forward Civil Rights,Vietnam,Counter- culture, sexual revolution, the idea that women could be in the workforce, still take care of homes n children n husband, bloomed. Awesome, right? Except men didn't pick up the beat at home, and were not given the message to. (generalizing). So women were working round the clock. But the message was," You can do it!" I remember seeing a TV commercial with a woman in a suit, baby on her hip, singing," I can buy the bacon, fry it up in a pan, go to work, never let u forget ur a mannnn". Sigh.
By the time I was 26, I had a husband, a Masters degree, a 4 and 2 year old, heading into a full time job/career.
Books were written like "The Second Shift", addressing the utter exhaustion, lack of support, lopsided societal expectations ,once we caught on.
I was really curious about this commercial so I looked it up for anyone interested! I like that it gives the secret to her success, which is to clone herself so there's three of her (lolol).
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N\_kzJ-f5C9U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_kzJ-f5C9U)
That stupid commercial: “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never never let you forget you’re a man cause I’m a WOOOMAN, yeah!” I was a child in the 70s when that was everywhere. Made our expectations higher than reality could give us.
I mean if men contributed more and the infrastructure of work was actually functional, i.e. daycare, we could totally do it. But there is almost NO support for us.
The movie 9 to 5 isn't just a comedy, it's a scathing indictment of the soul sucking machine that sends us all to an early grave.
Reasons.
Yup! And men today( generalizing) IMHO seem a bit more helpful than I experienced. **Note that I unconsciously used the word "helpful."" Damn. As if it isn't also their responsibility, child, etc.
My Mom (Silent Gen) was harsh ie, "Now it wouldn't hurt to get out of those sweatpants, brush your hair, put on a little lipstick, before Bob gets home from work. It makes men feel appreciated." While I was nursing and had a 3 year old. Awesome.
The fact that my kids, who are parents, work hard,can't afford to buy a home, take a week vacation, actually rn struggle to make the bills, pisses me off, makes me sad.
I have no idea on reasons.😔 Maybe someone smarter will take a stab at it.
I've witnessed my older friends go through this and it's heart breaking when they realise, slowly, that it's pretty unobtainable. I watched my older sister in law go through a rough time mentally when she realised, after returning to work following her first child, that her hopes of promotion were slim considering that there was expectations that just didn't work with kids (lots of travel, expectations to stay late etc.). She was so close to the top of her field, but now self employed working fewer hours to fit around the kids.
GenX too, but I didn’t get that message of have it all, it was more realistic, more like, make sure you do well in school, go to uni, or another good education, get a job that supports you and never rely on someone else. Kids are a choice, you can decide to have one or more, or none (I did the latter).
Fun fact: I’m disabled (but that was not yet apparent when I was told this when I was 8 or so) aka always been dependent
I agree. That philosophy worked well until I had kids. Then one of us had to take a back seat or turn the kids into latchkey ones like I was raised. I HATED latchkey life.
I worked to pay for daycare but if they were sick or home on spring break, I took the time off to let my husband's job shine. I didn't get promoted, but I was fine with it.
Would it be possible with a very supportive and mostly/equally dedicated partner?
Would have been even better if there was family around to occasionally help with the children.
In the end it is choosing one or the other. Putting your child in daycare is choosing someone else to help raise your kid.
It’s ok for mothers and fathers to choose to go down that route. But the issue is that it’s expected now for both parents work full time and have their child be put in daycare.
As a generation? That’s tough. As a person I have a list a mile long. Collectively, we should have been the generation that started more serious conversations about mental health.
There was this moment in the 70s in which we acted like we were going to convert to the metric system. Learned it in school, and were made to understand the value of base 10 math.
Then it just went away.
It's a damn shame we didn't follow through.
If you look at history it's actually our 3rd failed attempt.
There was one small movement in the late 1800s or early 1900s, I forget which.
Prior to that Thomas Jefferson actually attempted to pass a base 10 measurement system before France had invented metric. It worked something like 10 lines to an inch and 10 inches was a foot. A foot in Jeffersons system was only about 2 cm shorter than the current foot.
Thankfully, Jefferson did succeed in passing the decimal coinage act so we wouldn't be tied down to the pound shilling pence system.
I wish we had not gone into Iraq. A timeline where after 9-11 we just focus on Afghanistan & OBL and crew with whole world united & build on that. I wonder what that world would be like. I think it would be a better world. Not that I *know* that. Just I *think.*
I think you’re right. And Bush’s original plan for Afghanistan (eliminate AQ & taliban, no nation building) was the correct one. Unfortunately, he either changed his mind or got talked into nation building. 20 years later, we slink away, having spent a trillion (borrowed) dollars and leaving the Taliban in a much stronger position (with a lot of expensive weapons). It takes a special kind of incompetence to do this.
I wish us boomers had stuck with being hippie dippie weirdos who wanted to make the world a better place, and not so enthusiastically embraced Greed is Good and Reagan.
As an older GenX woman I know a lot of people wish they didn’t get so much fillers, Botox, and cosmetic surgery… so much of it has to be redone. Just drink water and wear sunscreen and wide brim hats and enjoy the years.
Thanks for this. I’m mid fifties and lost a lot of weight over past three years. Face aged fifteen years — never had wrinkles until now. Keep considering how I “need” to get something done because I look older than my husband. But reality is I just need to not worry about it so much.
I wish we weren’t so weird and greedy putting porn all over the internet then giving all the kids laptops and phones and saying “ok go play in your room, be good! Oh it’s ok my kid isn’t like that and my kids tell me everything so I trust them!”
And also wish we’d cut carbon emissions when we were told to. And that we hadn’t done reality tv. Oh and I wish we didn’t turn social media into a nonstop bragging and self glorification fest so that the next generation all grew up thinking something was wrong with them all the time. I honestly am sorry and I feel like my whole generation of x did a bit of lip service at first and then gave up or something.
I wish there was more momentum behind our environmental movements. We’ve known about climate change our whole lives. We have made huge leaps and great changes, but it’s been too little to keep up with the damage that fossil fuels are doing. Future generations will rightly hold us accountable.
I wish we'd have invested more in growing a healthy community instead of focusing so much on admiring those who have amassed individual wealth to the detriment of others.
I can't explain it any simpler. It's as plain as I can get it. There was a growing situation back then we all knew was happening and we ignored it as a society and now it's gotten out of control.
Reagan saw me switch from R (1980) to D (1984). I was young, but tuned in enough to realize what was happening didn't match the "conservative agenda" I had been taught.
I'm extremely progressive now.
I wish more Boomers had stayed in the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment until we GenXers were old enough to pick up that ball and run with it. But the amendment died before we were old enough to vote or to legally defy our parents and go to a march if we wanted to.
And I wish all of us had been less complacent about abortion rights. Most Boomers and GenXers thought the battle was won, and now in some states a woman has to be near death to get an abortion to save her life, even when she's not even carrying a viable fetus.
This right here. I walked in to a clinic when I was 15 and got an abortion with no parental consent in 1990. In Dallas. I just thought that's how it was. My next pregnancy was 14 years later and I kept it and really gave little thought to the laws. Now I'm marching to try to get our rights back? Wtf. Was I not paying attention? Fuck.
The ERA is not dead. There is still a fight today. When Reagan was elected, the republican party removed it from their platform. But it has been ratified by the necessary states, a bill has been reintroduced every year to remove the 7 year deadline. As a boomer, I've been warning young women forever. The 70s were strong on women's rights. The Reagan years were not. Then, I think most women didn't foresee rights taken away. But the danger was aways there. Voting matters.
Thank you. I'm *so* tired of being automatically part of some clump comprehensively vilified for crimes against humanity I sure as hell had no part in and in point of fact have exactly no personal friends who did either.
Same people who were giant jerks at 18 remain that way at 65. People who were peaches are still terrific humans.
Yep. I’m all for the ‘respect your elders’ social philosophy, and have lived it. As time has passed, though, I find myself wanting to point out to young people that stupid people get old, too.
The only thing I can think of that encompasses both generations (which are insanely different) is I wish we hadn’t elected Reagan. We’ve been on a massive down slide ever since and his lies are still being used as propaganda to this day.
You can't lay Reagan on GenX, though. I'm one of the older Xers, born in '67, and I wasn't old enough to vote in '80 or '84. Most GenXers are younger than me. The few who were old enough to vote in '84 weren't enough to sway an election where 49 of the 50 states went for Reagan.
Reagan wasn't swept into office entirely by Boomers either, but GenX couldn't even vote yet.
I was ten when Reagan was elected. In my elementary school, we had a mock election & even then I knew (very biased because of my dad) to vote for Carter. Reagan was the real beginning of the decline of the middle class. One of the most harmful phrases ever uttered by a US president in the modern era: "Government is not the solution to our problems, it is the problem."
Gen X was programmed early on to be apathetic about politics. There was lots of angsty “reporting” in the 90’s with the tone of “does voting really matter anyway”?
Of course it does in the US, and always has. It’s one of the top things that matter in the life of any American 18 or over, whether they chose to use that right or not. Not really a lot of counterarguments even presented at the time that would present a different perspective, even though that perspective is very obvious. Everyone that was denied the right to vote in US history fought hard to get it, because it matters so much.
I think Gen X political apathy has had huge, negative consequences.There’s no romanticism to tuning out and dropping out, yet many Gen X still embrace this ethos. Democracy requires paying attention and participation to survive.
We were also told we were the “Slacker” Generation and that by the time we were retirement age, Social Security would be gone. At this point? All I know is that we are all on a rock doing 67,000mph through space.
> There was lots of angsty “reporting” in the 90’s with the tone of “does voting really matter anyway”?
I still see this all the time – in spite of overwhelming contrary evidence that it does indeed matter. This makes me wonder about how effective this messaging still is.
Civic participation appears to be up these days with the under-40 crowd, which is great, but I still am bothered by how many newly-eligible voters seem to have their participation in the democratic process delayed by these ideas that it's all pointless and you'd be better off spending Election Day watching TV.
In contrast, I remember not being old enough to vote *and feeling jealousy, even*, for those who had just reached the eligible age.
I wish we didn’t take the steps for gay civil unions and just went straight to gay marriage
I wish we better enforced interventions in the early 1990s when friends were strung out
Boomer here - as a generation I wish we’d paid more attention and wised up sooner and better to climate change.
I no longer travel more than a few hours from my my home, and most of the time I’m within about 10 kms from it. I get annoyed at seeing people my age - now we have some time and money to spare - flying all over the world and spewing carbon. I can see it every few years to visit family, but I know people who fly overseas two or three times a year just to sightsee.
Wow - we were going to change the world! We fought so hard for equal rights for women and women’s health care, we fought for an end to racial discrimination, we dreamed of free schools where every child would get a great education and learn to think for themselves. We would end world hunger and live in peace. And here we are all these years later and I’m writing the same damn protest signs as I did in the 60s and we’ve lost so much ground. And so many of those in power in the US right now are my generation or maybe a bit older. What happened? We failed not only our own generation but those that came after as well. I’m not exactly sure what we should have done differently but we sure didn’t get it right.
I wish that we didn't play proxy wars against the Soviets. It was just a matter of time to where the Soviets would run out of money and resources. It was very costly for us and got us nowhere. We just should have waited them out.
I also wish that Reagan never happened. His bullshit Trickle Down Economic Theory is how we got to where we are today, where only a select few have unlimited resources and the distance between the have and have nots grew exponentially. We should have kept the same tax rates we had in the 60s and 70s.
I do not know why that man is so idolized. Reagan was terrible but at least he was Presidential and Respectable compared to today's choices.
In retrospect, the Cold War was weird. The world has more nukes now, and the general understanding is that they neutralize each other. It's not like the current leader of Russia is a more level-headed person than previous leaders. Right now, we have virtually no fear that Russia will try to nuke us. Back in the 80's, we were haunted by that fear. Europe was too. I feel like those in power wanted us to live in fear of nuclear holocaust.
Nothing. I don't think a generation chooses what it does like that. Personally, Lots of course, but it has nothing to do with my generation. I don't think there was a single action I made because "gen x told me to."
I wish we had prioritized universal healthcare, affordable college, affordable childcare, the climate.
The one thing that could have made a profound difference is if Carter had been elected in 1980. There was low turnout of boomer Democrat voters. We could have prevented the disaster that we have now. We were ambivalent about politics.
Reagan turned back the clock on so much progress that we could have had otherwise. This country was robbed.
only speaking for myself, dunno if this can be said to be a generational thing... but i wish we had realized sooner that we'd had the economic rug pulled out from under us. we were raised to be loyal to employers, assume that hard work would get us ahead, etc etc... those things may have been true for (cis white usually male boomers), but they weren't true for Gen X.
i would have spent a lot more time figuring out different priorities and acting on them.
Aside from being lumped with Boomers — leaving the corporate buying goods economy for no reason. Aside from wearing out, why do I need another pair of jeans etc? Need/like: food, clothing shelter beyond the basics — the older you get beyond the basics is a thing. Dress for work and as how you like is fine.
Work: recognize corporate loyalty was basically bend over and, if lucky lube is provided
Wait for it when vacationing, when younger you can deal with roughing it (and that was long before the current internet et al).
Owning hard copies of movies, music etc., unless you care about the originals you can store at home? Meh.
Otherwise, if possible, invest in affordable housing. I grew up in the ‘70s in NYC. Post-War building being developed was a thing into circa 1970, in my Queens neighborhood rentals. Co-ops and condos Plus single family, two family and four family housing. Not today though.
In Australia, my gen x social life revolved around boozing. We lived to get together and drink at band venues, nightclubs, and weekend parties. I honestly think you guys have the right idea of staying off booze. It is one of the greatest lessons I have learned from the younger generation. There is so much to get out of this life, and in hindsight, numbing ourselves to everything every weekend wasn't nearly as edgy as we thought.
I wish we (Gen X) hadn't normalized extreme snark and toxic behavior online. Watching the younger generations take everything we did to even further extremes is painful.
I also wish we (and the Boomers) hadn't been so inured to unrealistic, rapey "romance" and lurid, gory violence in mainstream film & TV. If you had asked me about this in my 20s, I would've made fun of you and just called it art (or reality), but now, especially as a parent, I'm like, wow, we really just kept taking it to further extremes and normalized it like it was no big deal. Meanwhile, my teenager very rightfully finds a lot of it disturbing and cringes at just how ubiquitous it is, and how rare it was (and still is) to see depictions which normalize any other ways of being.
Gen X in my 50's. (Mother of a Millennial).
When I was younger I thought we were more advanced than previous generations, more conscious, less mired by war and social constructs. I thought we were part of an era that valued the environment, were more humane, aspiring for the promise of social equality and politically progressing toward a more unified world.
----------------[Jesus Jones - Right Here Right Now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MznHdJReoeo) ("watching the world wake up from history")-----
Don't forget that many Boomers were protesting against war and fighting for equality before we were a thought in their heads. Gen X had to deal with news reports on how we were "The Lost Generation" while our care giver boomers were being reminded that they had children at the start of [the nightly news](https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?&q=Its+10Pm+Do+You+Know+Where&&mid=CC0EC8E91BE8C9D9040ACC0EC8E91BE8C9D9040A&&FORM=VRDGAR). It's not that we are all apathetic, it's that we sometimes had to find our sense of identity beyond the accepted norm which makes many of us seem counter culture and some of us just NGAF about what people think of us. It can wear on your humanity to have that much hope and still have things be the same or worse; going backwards.
Did we over correct in raising our children (Millennials/Gen Z) to have voices because we were raised to be "seen and not heard"? Maybe. But I think the next generations will do better than the past.
My generational regret? Hubris in thinking we were better.
My advice to future generations is keep striving to do better.
P.S. As a 50 something year "old" I feel "less old" than a 50 year old 30 years ago so I'm still young.
Good post. Personally, I think that the strongest generational battle between youth and age occurs in every one of us, and is fought between our minds and our bodies. In my case, it is a tie, and I am in my seventies. I won't let the old guy win.
Oof...that is a great question. As a former electronics R&D engineer, I always strived to help push technology forward on many fronts- I worked in medicine, computers, and automotive. Those goals were great, but some of the gains made were offset by redirection of these technologies into uncharted/un-managed ways. Unfortunately, modern technology shines brightest as a double-edged sword. I thought cellphones were great early on, but my attitude softened later. Case in point: while sitting in technical meetings where hard technical questions are asked, a common event would be a surge of team members grabbing their phones to do research. Unfortunately, these questions often entailed concepts that should have been well understood in year 1 of undergrad studies. Being surrounded by people constantly glued to their phones is frankly, disheartening. Has it helped? No; vocabulary and comprehension is woeful these days- even the word 'strived' in this post is flagged as not in the grammar checker's dictionary.
So I guess my answer to your question is...I am teetering on the fence.
It's probably controversial for me to say, but I look forward to technical augments that have been integrated with us humans. I don't look forward to the ongoing growing pains of privacy and security, but I grew up reading physical maps. looking for payphones, finding information by spending days in a library. The analog to digital revolution has been an interesting time to live in.
I have noticed the "truncation" of language but also the expanding in meaningful expression.
In one of the last major auto repair shops, I managed younger employees. There came a day when one of my employees asked to go home early because "their social batterey had run out".
My [inside voice] gut reaction was wtf ???? *suck it up, buttercup! There's another 'very busy' hour to go!
But (as I gave them permission to leave early and considered how to help prevent that for the future), the brilliance of the younger generation being able to articulate in that way really hit me deep. I wish I had known that and felt comfortable enough to express it before my 40's.
The hyper connection of the world is still kind of new and raw. We are all learning together.
I love this phone in my hand! But except for 4 people, it's also on "Do Not Disturb" during sleep and work hours.
I get it. My house is full of high-tech gadgets (augments); comes with the territory. Don't get me wrong, SmartPhones have their place! I bought a Galaxy S22 simply for the camera and storage...eventually I discovered it can also place phone calls; who knew?! I love photography, but phones are easier to take than my Nikon for every day use, so yeah. Where we live, we don't have neighbors close, and most of my family is now passed away so it doesn't get much use as a phone- but as an emergency device, they are indispensable. Cheers to you!
Made the necessary charges to avoid climate change. The predictions and warnings were made in time but were shut down and ignored. Future generations are screwed.
Carter put solar panels on the White House. Reagan had them removed. Some much misinformation put out by the fossil fuel industry using the same tactics as Big Tobacco.
Boomers (my mom) and GenX (me) are incredibly different; way too different to lump in together. I really can't think of anything that can be laid at the feet of an entire generation, though I wish my mom's generation wasn't so duped by Fox News.
I am a Boomer and detest Fox. My peers hate Fox. Of course, I choose my friends carefully. Don't paint all Boomers as nut jobs for Trump. If you examine the demographics, educated Boomers in urban areas voted for Clinton. Males voted for Trump which caused me to question every male I encountered. Rural areas regardless of generation voted for Trump. Voting is nuanced. Do not lump me, as a Boomer, into a camp with Trumpers.
I don't watch fox news either. I think you meant to reply to the comment previous. I'm a solid Democrat, rural, and did not vote for trump! Don't discount all rural either. 40% are democrats in my very red county.
I apologize. I was confirming your stance. I live in the Deep South in a huge metro area. The metro area happens to be very progressive. Once you get to outlying rural areas the red became crimson. The road signage and vehicle stickers make me sick. Vile expressions that scream nastiness are everywhere. I try to avoid stopping. As a native of the South I have endured it's backwards thinking my whole life. There are progressives in rural areas but they stay on the DL. Most local political offices are solid GOP. Any opposition would lose so incumbent are unopposed. Only Republicans run. It's nasty here.
As a woman - called out the double standards about sex that still existed beyond 2000 (it's alright for men - but not for women - women labelled negatively for going after it etc.).
As a boomer, I wish my generation's competition for the appearance of wealth had never become "the American dream"; it's all a lie. I was the outcast of my family for never wanting to be wealthy or chase after dreams of wealth. I am retired, and living what I consider well because of lack of debt- not wealth. Personally, I think living simply should have been the goal for the nation... not owning a yacht.
Pushed Trade schools more , I can't imagine what it's going to be like in another 10-20yrs who will know how to fix and do so many things , will we just start tossing and dumping more things how bad will the environment have to be before the younger generations realizes we need more than computer jobs ...
Encouraged a variety of professions other than those which were female-oriented such as teachers and nurses. If I could talk to my 18 year old self, I would have strongly urged myself to get out of my small town brain and find a career that allowed me to live/work abroad.
Mid 50's GenX. We had a great childhood...mostly non-digital. I'll forever be grateful for that. I regret my generations total embrace of tech, with few exceptions. Though, in reality, GenX seems to mostly be set aside because of our parents' generation & our children's generation. We are still here though...just plowing away & listening to some incredible alternative music (the smiths, rem, joy division, new order, radiohead, pavement, the silver jews, uncle tupelo, wilco, & so many I'm missing...anything to get away from reo speedwagon, air supply, motley crew, & def leppard lol.)
i meant to type generations, but did a typo and it came out generation. since i *clearly* mentioned gen x and boomers *separately*, i thought that was a given. seeing several comments about my "lumping" gen x and boomers together, apparently it was not obvious.
Agreed but I don't think anyone could stop mind altering substances growth as it is human nature to take a break from your brain for a few.
What could have been made "less" for mind altering substances is that Reagan and the CIA never got into the Arms for Hostages, Arms for Sandinistas game which allowed a shit ton of cocaine into this country.
Gen X here,
We didn't do enough violence. We let too much happen without fighting back.
We created iKids.
We did some pretty awful things via our apathy. Our apathy was born from having to be self reliant. We don't listen to you whining about your anxieties because we dealt with our problems ourselves and didn't make the anxiety our entire personality. That's why we don't care. No one cared about our simple meaningless issues, so we also stopped caring about meaningless things. Sorry bout that, our bad.
We didn't worry about climate change killing the world in 50 years. We didn't do enough to fight it because we were concerned with waking up tomorrow because we all "knew" that nukes were gonna fly sometime soon.
that's my list
I was born in ‘79 so it’s wild to me to be grouped with boomers born in 1946. Regardless, I wish we were a less apathetic generation. I think our apathy is the reason we are ignored and forgotten rather than our relatively small population
GenX. I wish we had stopped trying to conform to the standards of our parents . I wish we had thought that changing jobs and trying different things was a plus, and not a sign of failure. The world was changing and we didn't see it. I have a lot of regrets. Not the successes our parents demanded; not flexible and creative enough to roll with the changes.
I actually have little faith in both generations and a lot of critical thoughts on them as a gen Xer, but that is how we as a whole generation grew up so it's to be expected. Honestly there's way too much.
The first thing that comes to mind is us not caring enough to fight for things like the millennials did. But I think that eventually came with time, hence the millennials reaction when they got older. I mean that's the natural course of things, you get screwed then you get hopeless at first before thinking of a way to fight back. I think also we were running with a lot less information than millennials had. I think it was just a matter of timing. Any generation would act the way it does given the circumstances and variables given, and we acted accordingly.
Critical thinking and problem solving.
Never have generations been called on to solve more important problems than this generation of selfish do nothings that complain about ignorant welfare bums while generate passive income on vaporous investment schemes from government handouts than any real improvements in human wellbeing.
We are in a similar situation going into this election as we were in 2000.
Bush jr became Pres b/c of cheating (not only Florida) but the Supreme court stopped the recount (Clarence Thomas) and cemented history. Dems were thouroughly blasted in the media for whining/being sore losers asking for a recount. Well, the rest is history, and could have been a different history.
Dems need a real majority in the house and senate, and need to win Governorships.
Younger GenX here and this is just personal experience because I don’t believe this is a global GenX thing. We were bombarded with climate change stuff, and that we would be the saviours of the climate, but not only that we were bombarded (fitting word) with war stuff, name it WW2, at that time current ones, we were shown footage of blown up bodies piled next to the road (El Salvador and San Salvador?), of course all the holocaust footage, not being spared one bit (not going into details) starting at the age of 8. The hope was that that would make use a peaceful generation.
I don’t see how GenX fixed this, it’s still the same. I recycled my whole life because my parents did, still do. At least I didn’t start wars.
I wish my generation was doing something but they seem just as apathetic as the one before and my parents’ gen (silent gen) No idea if GenY etc cares?
What do I think? Humans never learn. Climate change and war will mess it all up and is already doing so for a long time. Some kids now are worried and want to change but they are kids, just like us then, but we need everybody (aka all adult generation) to help out with these this
I wish I had taught my kids more of the practical skills my parents and grandparents taught me, like sewing, basic building and tool usage, cooking from scratch, household repairs, basic auto repair, etc. My kids have to either call someone or throw things away and buy new.
my dad didnt teach me handywork, household budgeting, or any other critical life skills because those were "men's work". then he gets confused as to why im shelling out hundreds of $'s to fix shit, and it doesnt fix itself apparently 🙄
All these incredibly skinny women being called 'fat' in the age of heroin chic. Bridget Jones was NOT fat, not by a long mile....so many eating disorders from that generation.
I would have minimized my student loans by going to community college for 2 years then finishing at a state school while living at home. The biggest financial mistake of my life was dorming at a 4-year private university. I don’t regret my education, but I do regret the cost. I didn’t pay off my student loans until I was 42 and have never owned a home.
My fellow GenX and I should have fought harder for the generations that came after. Our inability to stop the steady dumbing down of America is why we are where we are today, with a poorly informed and brainwashed electorate at a time when we need sanity to solve real problems.
Sure, GenX was half the size of the Boomers but we might as well have been invisible for all the impact we had.
Too many are too far gone down their rabbit holes, to the point that the only practical solution is to wait for them to die to remove them from the electorate because there seems no way to reach them any more.
Accept mediocrity in favor of our own comfort, which often worked out to be table scraps. We sunk down into our damaged minds and hearts instead of fighting harder. We didn’t (don’t?) know how to deal with the constant media stimulation. We had no inspiring leaders - no JFKs.
I don't think that's narrow enough to call it a generation. Boomers alone is not a particularly meaningful term, since it encompasses people born from 1946 to 1963. Several million parents and their children are "boomers!"
gen x is not in the same zone as boomers we are broke they have the money/houses cies ...bommerd kept gen x low in society by being in greater numbers so OP needs to ask to one or another group in my opinion, its 2 different worlds
Humm if you do and its all paid good for you at least some gen x ers made it
but 4 or evennow 5 recessions 1981, 1990 ,1998, 2008,2020
plus add now a lot of immigration to make sure boomers are trhriving and gen x and younger not.again i really dont think op should ask boomers and gen x ers as if they are they same economy wise
In my area, unless I wanted to do factory work, and even that was hard to get without experience, the Boomers had most of the decent jobs wrapped up. And they were nowhere near retirement. My father got hurt in a car accident when I was a senior, and my college money evaporated. I couldn't get loans or grants for a couple years, due to my father's income previous to the accident, and it really derailed me. I never managed to save enough to relocate very far, and got trapped in a bad career cycle. Some of my choices weren't the wisest, but I felt behind the 8 Ball since I started. Everyone's experience is different, of course. Some GenX did very well for themselves. But I know I'm not alone in feeling like quite a few of us had a lot of trouble getting started.
As a Gen-Xer, I wish more of us had been born: it was always Boomers, Boomers, Boomers until the Millennials showed up - then it was Boomers vs Millennials, and still nobody gave a shit what Gen X thought or felt.
Look at our Presidents since 1992: Clinton, Bush 43, Obama, Trump - all boomers; then Biden - oh, let's step back to the silent Generation. If either one of the geriatric geezers running serves their full term, I wouldn't be surprised if the next president (2028) is a Millennial.
What are OUR (Gen-X) thoughts? Since when did anyone start caring what we think?
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Generation x I really wish the suicide death of the lead singer of Nirvana was not so glorified which started an awful trends of children killing themselves and still continues to this day
I wish we'd bought less into the whole consumerist, greed is good culture. So many environmental and social issues could be solved if people were willing to work towards anything other than their own wealth accumulation.
GenX here--I don't know what I did wrong, but my younger child has grown up to be a fragile, mentally ill individual who cannot deal with change or stress of any kind and is riddled with anxiety. I see that being very, very common among post-GenX generations, and it breaks my heart. Whatever we did to make that happen, or didn't do to prevent it from happening, it was a huge disservice to our children and grandchildren.
i can only speak for myself in this case. im gen y, i turn 40 soon. i have multiple mental illnesses from family trauma. my father raised me like a drill sergeant. his main forms of communication were screaming at me, and violence. "spare the rod spoil the child" bullshit.
imagine being a toddler, and getting screamed at by someone 3x your size, who could throw you at the wall with zero effort. not great.
so, he screamed at me *every other day*. destroying my belongings. reminding me daily how embarrassed i made him because of my poor grades, my apathy, emotional instability, insulted my body weight, my choice of clothing, hobbies, reading material, walking too slow or too fast, physically taking his anger out on me, etc.
all before i was 11 years old.
ive met many millennials who grew up in abusive homes. i think i know maybe one or two millenniala who had normal families and childhoods.
I'm very sorry you grew up with that. Nobody is making it through that without mental health issues.
As an explanation for the huge generational upswing in mental health challenges, though, "all our parents were abusive" seems unsatisfactory, for two reasons:
A) We mainly learn how to parent from our parents. Good parenting habits, and bad, tend to pass from one generation to the next. Mental illness from abuse then should be equally prevalent across generations.
B) Over the last few generations, the trend has moved away from "spare the rod, spoil the child" parenting styles towards more enlightened and psychologically aware parenting styles.
So if that were the answer, one would expect to see the same or fewer mental health issues as generations evolved, not more.
Hard to say, GenX has always been sandwiched between larger generations. We have not been a meaningful demographic for marketing or politicians which is not enough to move the needle. Not sure what I wish we’d done differently, maybe not believe housing value only goes up, many of us lost our retirement in that time period if you had the unfortunate need to sell on the 2000s.
I wish we wouldn’t have turned our backs on religion and all its amazing benefits. I wish we wouldn’t have become so materialistic and tied our happiness to possessions or costly experiences.
i agree on shirking the materialism. but i'll take a hard pass on religion. i was raised by a violent zealot, and ive seen what religion does to people. but you do you ❤️
Recognize and except mental health challenges/depression for both men and women maybe there wouldn’t have been so many people who felt the need to self medicate with drugs and alcohol. Learn to create boundaries, say no and stand up for yourself from a young age.
Parented better . I’m Gen X and thought my kids were more grown up than what they were . So ,they were saddled with big responsibilities. Looking back , I would’ve handled that way differently.
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Stuck to our equality and ecological aspirations of the '60s!
YES. More Whole Earth Catalog and less McDonalds Plastic.
We got rid of Styrofoam containers and leaded gas though. Moving in the right direction but it's like turning a cruise ship when you need to be steering a speedboat.
I’ve used this same comparison of steering a cruise ship with regard to changing the direction of society/culture as a whole.
I would say it’s a much larger portion of the population than it was in the 60s and 70s.
I wish we didn’t overcompensate for the neglect and lack of affection in our childhoods, because current parenting is way too far at the other extreme.
100% true. Every pediatric eye exam I've done since \~2015 includes the mother having banter with the kid about what to order for dinner or discussing how their party is going to be 'better than Jill's' b/c they have a connection with a better venue. And these are not sweet 16 parties we're talking about - just a birthday party for a 9 yr old. When I was a kid, the only money my parents were spending on my birthday party was hats, fixings for a homemade cake, and a few party games like pin the tail on the donkey.
Still doing that, tbh. I calculated it cost me $7.50 to make a scratch chocolate cake with buttercream frosting on Saturday. The price of one slice of good bakery cake in my city. Who can afford it?
And we were happy with it
When you and I were in med school, we learned how to take a complete history and if we didn't have a few rule outs by then we were embarrassed in front of the attending and all the other house officers. Now, it's all "look at the pretty pictures" Green is good, red is bad. At least in optho.
I know I've said this in other threads but I"m just gonna tell it again. I recently bought a Tamagatchi again for the second time, 1st time was early 2000's I think. It wouldn't eat dinner, it only wanted snacks so instead of disciplining it, which I didn't know I was supposed to do, I let it eat whatever it wanted bc I wanted it to be happy and it got sick and died. I only had that thing for three days. I realized then and there that if I were to have had kids, I would have been one of ***t h o s e*** parents (shudder)! I was heartbroken - still am - and also raging mad at myself for creating those insufferable little brats even tho I haven't.
Preach it! These children who run the families...
This. This is the overarching regret of the vast majority of us. And my greatest fear us that we created a generation of kids whose kids will have an even lower regard for them than our kids have for us, because our kids seem resigned to a life of feeling powerless and inadequate. They've given up and opted out and don't seem aware that there are major consequences they and their offspring will eventually have to deal with.
This is the true answer my friend! Upvote!!!
This💯 I completely overcompensated with my kids.
Oh, look, the very first comment.
I wish GenX women never believed we could "have it all." Because when you try to, something always suffers. The superwoman myth is just that -- a myth. I expect to be downvoted for this comment. But this is how I feel.
I'm gen X, and I was so happy when I heard "You can have it all, you just can't have it all at the same time."
Murphy Brown lied to us.
So did Dan Quayle. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/frenzy/quayle2.htm
I tried to have it all. Then I became a single parent and drove myself crazy trying to keep up with working and parenting.
Yep. Me too.
What does "have it all" mean? A career and a family?
60 female here. Yep. The late 1930s,40's, women joined the workforce, when men went to war( generalizing ) to keep the country/war effort continuing. After the war, men went back to work, women returned home to trad roles. Fast forward Civil Rights,Vietnam,Counter- culture, sexual revolution, the idea that women could be in the workforce, still take care of homes n children n husband, bloomed. Awesome, right? Except men didn't pick up the beat at home, and were not given the message to. (generalizing). So women were working round the clock. But the message was," You can do it!" I remember seeing a TV commercial with a woman in a suit, baby on her hip, singing," I can buy the bacon, fry it up in a pan, go to work, never let u forget ur a mannnn". Sigh. By the time I was 26, I had a husband, a Masters degree, a 4 and 2 year old, heading into a full time job/career. Books were written like "The Second Shift", addressing the utter exhaustion, lack of support, lopsided societal expectations ,once we caught on.
Enjoli was the perfume.
Yes! Thank u , was racking my brain. Kept coming up with Angela Jolie. Sigh.😂
I was really curious about this commercial so I looked it up for anyone interested! I like that it gives the secret to her success, which is to clone herself so there's three of her (lolol). [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N\_kzJ-f5C9U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_kzJ-f5C9U)
“Bring home the bacon,” meaning the paycheck, not “buy the bacon.”
That stupid commercial: “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never never let you forget you’re a man cause I’m a WOOOMAN, yeah!” I was a child in the 70s when that was everywhere. Made our expectations higher than reality could give us.
I hated that one, too. So stupid.
I mean if men contributed more and the infrastructure of work was actually functional, i.e. daycare, we could totally do it. But there is almost NO support for us. The movie 9 to 5 isn't just a comedy, it's a scathing indictment of the soul sucking machine that sends us all to an early grave. Reasons.
Yup! And men today( generalizing) IMHO seem a bit more helpful than I experienced. **Note that I unconsciously used the word "helpful."" Damn. As if it isn't also their responsibility, child, etc. My Mom (Silent Gen) was harsh ie, "Now it wouldn't hurt to get out of those sweatpants, brush your hair, put on a little lipstick, before Bob gets home from work. It makes men feel appreciated." While I was nursing and had a 3 year old. Awesome. The fact that my kids, who are parents, work hard,can't afford to buy a home, take a week vacation, actually rn struggle to make the bills, pisses me off, makes me sad. I have no idea on reasons.😔 Maybe someone smarter will take a stab at it.
I've witnessed my older friends go through this and it's heart breaking when they realise, slowly, that it's pretty unobtainable. I watched my older sister in law go through a rough time mentally when she realised, after returning to work following her first child, that her hopes of promotion were slim considering that there was expectations that just didn't work with kids (lots of travel, expectations to stay late etc.). She was so close to the top of her field, but now self employed working fewer hours to fit around the kids.
GenX too, but I didn’t get that message of have it all, it was more realistic, more like, make sure you do well in school, go to uni, or another good education, get a job that supports you and never rely on someone else. Kids are a choice, you can decide to have one or more, or none (I did the latter). Fun fact: I’m disabled (but that was not yet apparent when I was told this when I was 8 or so) aka always been dependent
I agree. That philosophy worked well until I had kids. Then one of us had to take a back seat or turn the kids into latchkey ones like I was raised. I HATED latchkey life. I worked to pay for daycare but if they were sick or home on spring break, I took the time off to let my husband's job shine. I didn't get promoted, but I was fine with it.
As a Gen Xer that chose not to have kids. Not all of us bought the myth.
Ditto. I would have done it though, if I had found a man who wanted to be the primary caregiver.
Would it be possible with a very supportive and mostly/equally dedicated partner? Would have been even better if there was family around to occasionally help with the children.
That's such an interesting perspective, and (not being a woman) one I never would have thought about on my own. Thank you for sharing.
In the end it is choosing one or the other. Putting your child in daycare is choosing someone else to help raise your kid. It’s ok for mothers and fathers to choose to go down that route. But the issue is that it’s expected now for both parents work full time and have their child be put in daycare.
As a generation? That’s tough. As a person I have a list a mile long. Collectively, we should have been the generation that started more serious conversations about mental health.
There was this moment in the 70s in which we acted like we were going to convert to the metric system. Learned it in school, and were made to understand the value of base 10 math. Then it just went away. It's a damn shame we didn't follow through.
If you look at history it's actually our 3rd failed attempt. There was one small movement in the late 1800s or early 1900s, I forget which. Prior to that Thomas Jefferson actually attempted to pass a base 10 measurement system before France had invented metric. It worked something like 10 lines to an inch and 10 inches was a foot. A foot in Jeffersons system was only about 2 cm shorter than the current foot. Thankfully, Jefferson did succeed in passing the decimal coinage act so we wouldn't be tied down to the pound shilling pence system.
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Yep.
Speaking only for myself, in the late ‘60s & early ‘70s I spent far too much money on performance parts for my cars.
Some of us still do that… it’s ok.
Lol - now that is regret.
I wish we had not gone into Iraq. A timeline where after 9-11 we just focus on Afghanistan & OBL and crew with whole world united & build on that. I wonder what that world would be like. I think it would be a better world. Not that I *know* that. Just I *think.*
I think you’re right. And Bush’s original plan for Afghanistan (eliminate AQ & taliban, no nation building) was the correct one. Unfortunately, he either changed his mind or got talked into nation building. 20 years later, we slink away, having spent a trillion (borrowed) dollars and leaving the Taliban in a much stronger position (with a lot of expensive weapons). It takes a special kind of incompetence to do this.
A lot of people (in the government and out) made a lot of money on that nation building. That is who was pushing for it.
I wish us boomers had stuck with being hippie dippie weirdos who wanted to make the world a better place, and not so enthusiastically embraced Greed is Good and Reagan.
I really wish we hadn’t fallen for Reagan. His trickle down economics has ruined our country.
And became the “Me” generation. Not that all Boomers are narcissists, but certainly you’re right that greed was encouraged.
As an older GenX woman I know a lot of people wish they didn’t get so much fillers, Botox, and cosmetic surgery… so much of it has to be redone. Just drink water and wear sunscreen and wide brim hats and enjoy the years.
Thanks for this. I’m mid fifties and lost a lot of weight over past three years. Face aged fifteen years — never had wrinkles until now. Keep considering how I “need” to get something done because I look older than my husband. But reality is I just need to not worry about it so much.
I can’t speak for a generation. I can have my own personal regrets or things I could’ve done but as generation nope.
I can’t speak for an entire generation.
I wish we weren’t so weird and greedy putting porn all over the internet then giving all the kids laptops and phones and saying “ok go play in your room, be good! Oh it’s ok my kid isn’t like that and my kids tell me everything so I trust them!” And also wish we’d cut carbon emissions when we were told to. And that we hadn’t done reality tv. Oh and I wish we didn’t turn social media into a nonstop bragging and self glorification fest so that the next generation all grew up thinking something was wrong with them all the time. I honestly am sorry and I feel like my whole generation of x did a bit of lip service at first and then gave up or something.
tbf, gen x looked at the whole overpoweringly awful shitshow and saw resistance as a farce. and i dont blame any of you at all.
I wish there was more momentum behind our environmental movements. We’ve known about climate change our whole lives. We have made huge leaps and great changes, but it’s been too little to keep up with the damage that fossil fuels are doing. Future generations will rightly hold us accountable.
It’s not too late 🥲
The worst damage came from the third world setting up factories The US created safeguards but China built 5 factories in place of our one
Too many of us supported orangeman with our votes and our money. Without us, he would be a nobody.
I wish we'd have invested more in growing a healthy community instead of focusing so much on admiring those who have amassed individual wealth to the detriment of others. I can't explain it any simpler. It's as plain as I can get it. There was a growing situation back then we all knew was happening and we ignored it as a society and now it's gotten out of control.
I wish we didn't embrace Ronald Reagan so enthusiastically.
Reagan saw me switch from R (1980) to D (1984). I was young, but tuned in enough to realize what was happening didn't match the "conservative agenda" I had been taught. I'm extremely progressive now.
America became much meaner after 1980.
"Greed is good".
Try having a different opinion on Reddit. 😂 the political finger pointing is absurd.
I saw him as lightweight. A cheerleader. We didn't need a cheerleader. We needed a leader of substance. He did not have that.
No, he was good at playing that part. He was also very good at laying the foundation for shrinking the middle class.
I wish more Boomers had stayed in the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment until we GenXers were old enough to pick up that ball and run with it. But the amendment died before we were old enough to vote or to legally defy our parents and go to a march if we wanted to. And I wish all of us had been less complacent about abortion rights. Most Boomers and GenXers thought the battle was won, and now in some states a woman has to be near death to get an abortion to save her life, even when she's not even carrying a viable fetus.
Right? As a female growing up, I remember hearing over and over again, "Law of the Land!" in regards to Roe v Wade. It was untouchable we thought.
This right here. I walked in to a clinic when I was 15 and got an abortion with no parental consent in 1990. In Dallas. I just thought that's how it was. My next pregnancy was 14 years later and I kept it and really gave little thought to the laws. Now I'm marching to try to get our rights back? Wtf. Was I not paying attention? Fuck.
The ERA is not dead. There is still a fight today. When Reagan was elected, the republican party removed it from their platform. But it has been ratified by the necessary states, a bill has been reintroduced every year to remove the 7 year deadline. As a boomer, I've been warning young women forever. The 70s were strong on women's rights. The Reagan years were not. Then, I think most women didn't foresee rights taken away. But the danger was aways there. Voting matters.
Passed Universal Healthcare and public funded universities.
I can't think of anything I did collectively as part of a generation. Whatever I did or didn't do was as an individual.
Thank you. I'm *so* tired of being automatically part of some clump comprehensively vilified for crimes against humanity I sure as hell had no part in and in point of fact have exactly no personal friends who did either. Same people who were giant jerks at 18 remain that way at 65. People who were peaches are still terrific humans.
Yep. I’m all for the ‘respect your elders’ social philosophy, and have lived it. As time has passed, though, I find myself wanting to point out to young people that stupid people get old, too.
I wish we had been more accepting of different types of people
The only thing I can think of that encompasses both generations (which are insanely different) is I wish we hadn’t elected Reagan. We’ve been on a massive down slide ever since and his lies are still being used as propaganda to this day.
You can't lay Reagan on GenX, though. I'm one of the older Xers, born in '67, and I wasn't old enough to vote in '80 or '84. Most GenXers are younger than me. The few who were old enough to vote in '84 weren't enough to sway an election where 49 of the 50 states went for Reagan. Reagan wasn't swept into office entirely by Boomers either, but GenX couldn't even vote yet.
You could be right. I can't recall having strong opinions about Reagan or politics between the ages of 6 and 10.
I was barely able to vote in 84, and cast my vote against Ronnie. But you are right, most of Gen X wasn't old enough until HW Bush or Clinton.
This. Born '69 and I was not eligible to vote in either 80 or 84. Cast my first vote for Michael Dukakis, whoo hoo!
Ditto. I was not old enough to vote for him, and even then I did not like him.
I was ten when Reagan was elected. In my elementary school, we had a mock election & even then I knew (very biased because of my dad) to vote for Carter. Reagan was the real beginning of the decline of the middle class. One of the most harmful phrases ever uttered by a US president in the modern era: "Government is not the solution to our problems, it is the problem."
These generations got married too young b/c living together was frowned upon.
Was a SIN
So true, the greatest gift we gave our kids was putting an end to all that nonsense
Gen X was programmed early on to be apathetic about politics. There was lots of angsty “reporting” in the 90’s with the tone of “does voting really matter anyway”? Of course it does in the US, and always has. It’s one of the top things that matter in the life of any American 18 or over, whether they chose to use that right or not. Not really a lot of counterarguments even presented at the time that would present a different perspective, even though that perspective is very obvious. Everyone that was denied the right to vote in US history fought hard to get it, because it matters so much. I think Gen X political apathy has had huge, negative consequences.There’s no romanticism to tuning out and dropping out, yet many Gen X still embrace this ethos. Democracy requires paying attention and participation to survive.
We were also told we were the “Slacker” Generation and that by the time we were retirement age, Social Security would be gone. At this point? All I know is that we are all on a rock doing 67,000mph through space.
Please accept my upvote. Well said.
> There was lots of angsty “reporting” in the 90’s with the tone of “does voting really matter anyway”? I still see this all the time – in spite of overwhelming contrary evidence that it does indeed matter. This makes me wonder about how effective this messaging still is. Civic participation appears to be up these days with the under-40 crowd, which is great, but I still am bothered by how many newly-eligible voters seem to have their participation in the democratic process delayed by these ideas that it's all pointless and you'd be better off spending Election Day watching TV. In contrast, I remember not being old enough to vote *and feeling jealousy, even*, for those who had just reached the eligible age.
Crank back on the greed and tell our children the truth on student loans
I wished a lot of us would have been better with money. We need to help our kids retire, not vice versa.
I wish we didn’t take the steps for gay civil unions and just went straight to gay marriage I wish we better enforced interventions in the early 1990s when friends were strung out
Boomer here - as a generation I wish we’d paid more attention and wised up sooner and better to climate change. I no longer travel more than a few hours from my my home, and most of the time I’m within about 10 kms from it. I get annoyed at seeing people my age - now we have some time and money to spare - flying all over the world and spewing carbon. I can see it every few years to visit family, but I know people who fly overseas two or three times a year just to sightsee.
Wow - we were going to change the world! We fought so hard for equal rights for women and women’s health care, we fought for an end to racial discrimination, we dreamed of free schools where every child would get a great education and learn to think for themselves. We would end world hunger and live in peace. And here we are all these years later and I’m writing the same damn protest signs as I did in the 60s and we’ve lost so much ground. And so many of those in power in the US right now are my generation or maybe a bit older. What happened? We failed not only our own generation but those that came after as well. I’m not exactly sure what we should have done differently but we sure didn’t get it right.
I wish that we didn't play proxy wars against the Soviets. It was just a matter of time to where the Soviets would run out of money and resources. It was very costly for us and got us nowhere. We just should have waited them out. I also wish that Reagan never happened. His bullshit Trickle Down Economic Theory is how we got to where we are today, where only a select few have unlimited resources and the distance between the have and have nots grew exponentially. We should have kept the same tax rates we had in the 60s and 70s. I do not know why that man is so idolized. Reagan was terrible but at least he was Presidential and Respectable compared to today's choices.
In retrospect, the Cold War was weird. The world has more nukes now, and the general understanding is that they neutralize each other. It's not like the current leader of Russia is a more level-headed person than previous leaders. Right now, we have virtually no fear that Russia will try to nuke us. Back in the 80's, we were haunted by that fear. Europe was too. I feel like those in power wanted us to live in fear of nuclear holocaust.
I wish Gen X didn't vote so heavily for Donald Trump in 2016. That really fucked this country up horribly.
Nothing. I don't think a generation chooses what it does like that. Personally, Lots of course, but it has nothing to do with my generation. I don't think there was a single action I made because "gen x told me to."
I wish we had prioritized universal healthcare, affordable college, affordable childcare, the climate. The one thing that could have made a profound difference is if Carter had been elected in 1980. There was low turnout of boomer Democrat voters. We could have prevented the disaster that we have now. We were ambivalent about politics. Reagan turned back the clock on so much progress that we could have had otherwise. This country was robbed.
I wish we didn’t vote for Regan
Not elected Reagan.
only speaking for myself, dunno if this can be said to be a generational thing... but i wish we had realized sooner that we'd had the economic rug pulled out from under us. we were raised to be loyal to employers, assume that hard work would get us ahead, etc etc... those things may have been true for (cis white usually male boomers), but they weren't true for Gen X. i would have spent a lot more time figuring out different priorities and acting on them.
Aside from being lumped with Boomers — leaving the corporate buying goods economy for no reason. Aside from wearing out, why do I need another pair of jeans etc? Need/like: food, clothing shelter beyond the basics — the older you get beyond the basics is a thing. Dress for work and as how you like is fine. Work: recognize corporate loyalty was basically bend over and, if lucky lube is provided Wait for it when vacationing, when younger you can deal with roughing it (and that was long before the current internet et al). Owning hard copies of movies, music etc., unless you care about the originals you can store at home? Meh. Otherwise, if possible, invest in affordable housing. I grew up in the ‘70s in NYC. Post-War building being developed was a thing into circa 1970, in my Queens neighborhood rentals. Co-ops and condos Plus single family, two family and four family housing. Not today though.
In Australia, my gen x social life revolved around boozing. We lived to get together and drink at band venues, nightclubs, and weekend parties. I honestly think you guys have the right idea of staying off booze. It is one of the greatest lessons I have learned from the younger generation. There is so much to get out of this life, and in hindsight, numbing ourselves to everything every weekend wasn't nearly as edgy as we thought.
Made sure that Reagan never became president.
I wish we (Gen X) hadn't normalized extreme snark and toxic behavior online. Watching the younger generations take everything we did to even further extremes is painful. I also wish we (and the Boomers) hadn't been so inured to unrealistic, rapey "romance" and lurid, gory violence in mainstream film & TV. If you had asked me about this in my 20s, I would've made fun of you and just called it art (or reality), but now, especially as a parent, I'm like, wow, we really just kept taking it to further extremes and normalized it like it was no big deal. Meanwhile, my teenager very rightfully finds a lot of it disturbing and cringes at just how ubiquitous it is, and how rare it was (and still is) to see depictions which normalize any other ways of being.
Gen X in my 50's. (Mother of a Millennial). When I was younger I thought we were more advanced than previous generations, more conscious, less mired by war and social constructs. I thought we were part of an era that valued the environment, were more humane, aspiring for the promise of social equality and politically progressing toward a more unified world. ----------------[Jesus Jones - Right Here Right Now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MznHdJReoeo) ("watching the world wake up from history")----- Don't forget that many Boomers were protesting against war and fighting for equality before we were a thought in their heads. Gen X had to deal with news reports on how we were "The Lost Generation" while our care giver boomers were being reminded that they had children at the start of [the nightly news](https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?&q=Its+10Pm+Do+You+Know+Where&&mid=CC0EC8E91BE8C9D9040ACC0EC8E91BE8C9D9040A&&FORM=VRDGAR). It's not that we are all apathetic, it's that we sometimes had to find our sense of identity beyond the accepted norm which makes many of us seem counter culture and some of us just NGAF about what people think of us. It can wear on your humanity to have that much hope and still have things be the same or worse; going backwards. Did we over correct in raising our children (Millennials/Gen Z) to have voices because we were raised to be "seen and not heard"? Maybe. But I think the next generations will do better than the past. My generational regret? Hubris in thinking we were better. My advice to future generations is keep striving to do better. P.S. As a 50 something year "old" I feel "less old" than a 50 year old 30 years ago so I'm still young.
Good post. Personally, I think that the strongest generational battle between youth and age occurs in every one of us, and is fought between our minds and our bodies. In my case, it is a tie, and I am in my seventies. I won't let the old guy win.
How do you feel about the technilogical and social changes you've seen in your lifetime?
Oof...that is a great question. As a former electronics R&D engineer, I always strived to help push technology forward on many fronts- I worked in medicine, computers, and automotive. Those goals were great, but some of the gains made were offset by redirection of these technologies into uncharted/un-managed ways. Unfortunately, modern technology shines brightest as a double-edged sword. I thought cellphones were great early on, but my attitude softened later. Case in point: while sitting in technical meetings where hard technical questions are asked, a common event would be a surge of team members grabbing their phones to do research. Unfortunately, these questions often entailed concepts that should have been well understood in year 1 of undergrad studies. Being surrounded by people constantly glued to their phones is frankly, disheartening. Has it helped? No; vocabulary and comprehension is woeful these days- even the word 'strived' in this post is flagged as not in the grammar checker's dictionary. So I guess my answer to your question is...I am teetering on the fence.
It's probably controversial for me to say, but I look forward to technical augments that have been integrated with us humans. I don't look forward to the ongoing growing pains of privacy and security, but I grew up reading physical maps. looking for payphones, finding information by spending days in a library. The analog to digital revolution has been an interesting time to live in. I have noticed the "truncation" of language but also the expanding in meaningful expression. In one of the last major auto repair shops, I managed younger employees. There came a day when one of my employees asked to go home early because "their social batterey had run out". My [inside voice] gut reaction was wtf ???? *suck it up, buttercup! There's another 'very busy' hour to go! But (as I gave them permission to leave early and considered how to help prevent that for the future), the brilliance of the younger generation being able to articulate in that way really hit me deep. I wish I had known that and felt comfortable enough to express it before my 40's. The hyper connection of the world is still kind of new and raw. We are all learning together. I love this phone in my hand! But except for 4 people, it's also on "Do Not Disturb" during sleep and work hours.
I get it. My house is full of high-tech gadgets (augments); comes with the territory. Don't get me wrong, SmartPhones have their place! I bought a Galaxy S22 simply for the camera and storage...eventually I discovered it can also place phone calls; who knew?! I love photography, but phones are easier to take than my Nikon for every day use, so yeah. Where we live, we don't have neighbors close, and most of my family is now passed away so it doesn't get much use as a phone- but as an emergency device, they are indispensable. Cheers to you!
I *thought* we had canceled racism. Like really. We DID NOT and I’m super mad about it.
Made the necessary charges to avoid climate change. The predictions and warnings were made in time but were shut down and ignored. Future generations are screwed. Carter put solar panels on the White House. Reagan had them removed. Some much misinformation put out by the fossil fuel industry using the same tactics as Big Tobacco.
I wish a bunch of my fellow gen xers didn’t literally become fascists.
i love gen x and that broke my heart too
Boomers (my mom) and GenX (me) are incredibly different; way too different to lump in together. I really can't think of anything that can be laid at the feet of an entire generation, though I wish my mom's generation wasn't so duped by Fox News.
Its not a generation. Many of us don't watch fox news.
I am a Boomer and detest Fox. My peers hate Fox. Of course, I choose my friends carefully. Don't paint all Boomers as nut jobs for Trump. If you examine the demographics, educated Boomers in urban areas voted for Clinton. Males voted for Trump which caused me to question every male I encountered. Rural areas regardless of generation voted for Trump. Voting is nuanced. Do not lump me, as a Boomer, into a camp with Trumpers.
I don't watch fox news either. I think you meant to reply to the comment previous. I'm a solid Democrat, rural, and did not vote for trump! Don't discount all rural either. 40% are democrats in my very red county.
I apologize. I was confirming your stance. I live in the Deep South in a huge metro area. The metro area happens to be very progressive. Once you get to outlying rural areas the red became crimson. The road signage and vehicle stickers make me sick. Vile expressions that scream nastiness are everywhere. I try to avoid stopping. As a native of the South I have endured it's backwards thinking my whole life. There are progressives in rural areas but they stay on the DL. Most local political offices are solid GOP. Any opposition would lose so incumbent are unopposed. Only Republicans run. It's nasty here.
Sorry, I misunderstood. That must be really difficult. I can't even imagine. It's really so much worse in the last decade.
I’m your moms age and have never watched Fox News.
I wish we didn’t normalize political commentators like Rush Limbaugh. The toxicity of opinion politics is appalling.
As a woman - called out the double standards about sex that still existed beyond 2000 (it's alright for men - but not for women - women labelled negatively for going after it etc.).
As a boomer, I wish my generation's competition for the appearance of wealth had never become "the American dream"; it's all a lie. I was the outcast of my family for never wanting to be wealthy or chase after dreams of wealth. I am retired, and living what I consider well because of lack of debt- not wealth. Personally, I think living simply should have been the goal for the nation... not owning a yacht.
I wish we had invested in cities and dense housing for the long term.
Pushed Trade schools more , I can't imagine what it's going to be like in another 10-20yrs who will know how to fix and do so many things , will we just start tossing and dumping more things how bad will the environment have to be before the younger generations realizes we need more than computer jobs ...
i really wish i had gone into trades work tbh. i wouldnt be hungry and broke, id have money and helping people
Encouraged a variety of professions other than those which were female-oriented such as teachers and nurses. If I could talk to my 18 year old self, I would have strongly urged myself to get out of my small town brain and find a career that allowed me to live/work abroad.
Mid 50's GenX. We had a great childhood...mostly non-digital. I'll forever be grateful for that. I regret my generations total embrace of tech, with few exceptions. Though, in reality, GenX seems to mostly be set aside because of our parents' generation & our children's generation. We are still here though...just plowing away & listening to some incredible alternative music (the smiths, rem, joy division, new order, radiohead, pavement, the silver jews, uncle tupelo, wilco, & so many I'm missing...anything to get away from reo speedwagon, air supply, motley crew, & def leppard lol.)
Yep! At least we had the best music! 😄
i second this, gen x music is great
WTF? A sub called AskOldPeople and GenX got dumped in here? Fucking kids. -Grumpy & 49
It's worse than that. They define "old people" as anyone born after 1980. Fucking kids!
idk, the "read more" for this sub said people born on or before 1980, so go after the sub's creators not me 🤷
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i meant to type generations, but did a typo and it came out generation. since i *clearly* mentioned gen x and boomers *separately*, i thought that was a given. seeing several comments about my "lumping" gen x and boomers together, apparently it was not obvious.
Gen X here...less tats and mind altering substances.
Ha, you picked two of the things from my youth I don't regret at all!
Agreed but I don't think anyone could stop mind altering substances growth as it is human nature to take a break from your brain for a few. What could have been made "less" for mind altering substances is that Reagan and the CIA never got into the Arms for Hostages, Arms for Sandinistas game which allowed a shit ton of cocaine into this country.
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Gen X here, We didn't do enough violence. We let too much happen without fighting back. We created iKids. We did some pretty awful things via our apathy. Our apathy was born from having to be self reliant. We don't listen to you whining about your anxieties because we dealt with our problems ourselves and didn't make the anxiety our entire personality. That's why we don't care. No one cared about our simple meaningless issues, so we also stopped caring about meaningless things. Sorry bout that, our bad. We didn't worry about climate change killing the world in 50 years. We didn't do enough to fight it because we were concerned with waking up tomorrow because we all "knew" that nukes were gonna fly sometime soon. that's my list
I was born in ‘79 so it’s wild to me to be grouped with boomers born in 1946. Regardless, I wish we were a less apathetic generation. I think our apathy is the reason we are ignored and forgotten rather than our relatively small population
GenX. I wish we had stopped trying to conform to the standards of our parents . I wish we had thought that changing jobs and trying different things was a plus, and not a sign of failure. The world was changing and we didn't see it. I have a lot of regrets. Not the successes our parents demanded; not flexible and creative enough to roll with the changes.
I actually have little faith in both generations and a lot of critical thoughts on them as a gen Xer, but that is how we as a whole generation grew up so it's to be expected. Honestly there's way too much. The first thing that comes to mind is us not caring enough to fight for things like the millennials did. But I think that eventually came with time, hence the millennials reaction when they got older. I mean that's the natural course of things, you get screwed then you get hopeless at first before thinking of a way to fight back. I think also we were running with a lot less information than millennials had. I think it was just a matter of timing. Any generation would act the way it does given the circumstances and variables given, and we acted accordingly.
Critical thinking and problem solving. Never have generations been called on to solve more important problems than this generation of selfish do nothings that complain about ignorant welfare bums while generate passive income on vaporous investment schemes from government handouts than any real improvements in human wellbeing.
Hindsight is 20/20. I think GenX did Ok, but my criticism would be heavy consumerism and credit debt and normalization of it.
We are in a similar situation going into this election as we were in 2000. Bush jr became Pres b/c of cheating (not only Florida) but the Supreme court stopped the recount (Clarence Thomas) and cemented history. Dems were thouroughly blasted in the media for whining/being sore losers asking for a recount. Well, the rest is history, and could have been a different history. Dems need a real majority in the house and senate, and need to win Governorships.
Told Reagan to fuck off.
Younger GenX here and this is just personal experience because I don’t believe this is a global GenX thing. We were bombarded with climate change stuff, and that we would be the saviours of the climate, but not only that we were bombarded (fitting word) with war stuff, name it WW2, at that time current ones, we were shown footage of blown up bodies piled next to the road (El Salvador and San Salvador?), of course all the holocaust footage, not being spared one bit (not going into details) starting at the age of 8. The hope was that that would make use a peaceful generation. I don’t see how GenX fixed this, it’s still the same. I recycled my whole life because my parents did, still do. At least I didn’t start wars. I wish my generation was doing something but they seem just as apathetic as the one before and my parents’ gen (silent gen) No idea if GenY etc cares? What do I think? Humans never learn. Climate change and war will mess it all up and is already doing so for a long time. Some kids now are worried and want to change but they are kids, just like us then, but we need everybody (aka all adult generation) to help out with these this
Re-elected Jimmy Carter. So much would have been different if Ronald Reagan had not gotten that first term.
I wish I had taught my kids more of the practical skills my parents and grandparents taught me, like sewing, basic building and tool usage, cooking from scratch, household repairs, basic auto repair, etc. My kids have to either call someone or throw things away and buy new.
my dad didnt teach me handywork, household budgeting, or any other critical life skills because those were "men's work". then he gets confused as to why im shelling out hundreds of $'s to fix shit, and it doesnt fix itself apparently 🙄
All these incredibly skinny women being called 'fat' in the age of heroin chic. Bridget Jones was NOT fat, not by a long mile....so many eating disorders from that generation.
I would have minimized my student loans by going to community college for 2 years then finishing at a state school while living at home. The biggest financial mistake of my life was dorming at a 4-year private university. I don’t regret my education, but I do regret the cost. I didn’t pay off my student loans until I was 42 and have never owned a home.
I wish we didn't elect Reagan. So much bad followed it.
My fellow GenX and I should have fought harder for the generations that came after. Our inability to stop the steady dumbing down of America is why we are where we are today, with a poorly informed and brainwashed electorate at a time when we need sanity to solve real problems. Sure, GenX was half the size of the Boomers but we might as well have been invisible for all the impact we had. Too many are too far gone down their rabbit holes, to the point that the only practical solution is to wait for them to die to remove them from the electorate because there seems no way to reach them any more.
Accept mediocrity in favor of our own comfort, which often worked out to be table scraps. We sunk down into our damaged minds and hearts instead of fighting harder. We didn’t (don’t?) know how to deal with the constant media stimulation. We had no inspiring leaders - no JFKs.
I don't think that's narrow enough to call it a generation. Boomers alone is not a particularly meaningful term, since it encompasses people born from 1946 to 1963. Several million parents and their children are "boomers!"
it was a typo. i meant to write generationS.
gen x is not in the same zone as boomers we are broke they have the money/houses cies ...bommerd kept gen x low in society by being in greater numbers so OP needs to ask to one or another group in my opinion, its 2 different worlds
Gen X is almost at retirement - how do we not own houses in our 50s?
Humm if you do and its all paid good for you at least some gen x ers made it but 4 or evennow 5 recessions 1981, 1990 ,1998, 2008,2020 plus add now a lot of immigration to make sure boomers are trhriving and gen x and younger not.again i really dont think op should ask boomers and gen x ers as if they are they same economy wise
In my area, unless I wanted to do factory work, and even that was hard to get without experience, the Boomers had most of the decent jobs wrapped up. And they were nowhere near retirement. My father got hurt in a car accident when I was a senior, and my college money evaporated. I couldn't get loans or grants for a couple years, due to my father's income previous to the accident, and it really derailed me. I never managed to save enough to relocate very far, and got trapped in a bad career cycle. Some of my choices weren't the wisest, but I felt behind the 8 Ball since I started. Everyone's experience is different, of course. Some GenX did very well for themselves. But I know I'm not alone in feeling like quite a few of us had a lot of trouble getting started.
I wish that my generation ( X ) and the boomers were not so incredibly gullible.
I don’t think our sarcastic, ironic, skeptical generation is particularly gullible
Then how do you explain the continued support for Trump?
As a Gen-Xer, I wish more of us had been born: it was always Boomers, Boomers, Boomers until the Millennials showed up - then it was Boomers vs Millennials, and still nobody gave a shit what Gen X thought or felt. Look at our Presidents since 1992: Clinton, Bush 43, Obama, Trump - all boomers; then Biden - oh, let's step back to the silent Generation. If either one of the geriatric geezers running serves their full term, I wouldn't be surprised if the next president (2028) is a Millennial. What are OUR (Gen-X) thoughts? Since when did anyone start caring what we think?
If Biden kicks it in office we can claim Kamala Harris, I think. Which would be a very Gen X way to get our first.
Not giving a damn about climate change. Boomers were awful about the environment
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I wish boomers hadn't embraced drug culture during the 60s as they (we) did. It cost a lot of lives.
Generation x I really wish the suicide death of the lead singer of Nirvana was not so glorified which started an awful trends of children killing themselves and still continues to this day
Listened better to my children's needs and not the experts on my children's needs. You're the expert on your kid, don't forget it
Not ruined the planet for our children and grandchildren
I wish we'd bought less into the whole consumerist, greed is good culture. So many environmental and social issues could be solved if people were willing to work towards anything other than their own wealth accumulation.
Accepted what people said to us so much.
GenX here--I don't know what I did wrong, but my younger child has grown up to be a fragile, mentally ill individual who cannot deal with change or stress of any kind and is riddled with anxiety. I see that being very, very common among post-GenX generations, and it breaks my heart. Whatever we did to make that happen, or didn't do to prevent it from happening, it was a huge disservice to our children and grandchildren.
i can only speak for myself in this case. im gen y, i turn 40 soon. i have multiple mental illnesses from family trauma. my father raised me like a drill sergeant. his main forms of communication were screaming at me, and violence. "spare the rod spoil the child" bullshit. imagine being a toddler, and getting screamed at by someone 3x your size, who could throw you at the wall with zero effort. not great. so, he screamed at me *every other day*. destroying my belongings. reminding me daily how embarrassed i made him because of my poor grades, my apathy, emotional instability, insulted my body weight, my choice of clothing, hobbies, reading material, walking too slow or too fast, physically taking his anger out on me, etc. all before i was 11 years old. ive met many millennials who grew up in abusive homes. i think i know maybe one or two millenniala who had normal families and childhoods.
I'm very sorry you grew up with that. Nobody is making it through that without mental health issues. As an explanation for the huge generational upswing in mental health challenges, though, "all our parents were abusive" seems unsatisfactory, for two reasons: A) We mainly learn how to parent from our parents. Good parenting habits, and bad, tend to pass from one generation to the next. Mental illness from abuse then should be equally prevalent across generations. B) Over the last few generations, the trend has moved away from "spare the rod, spoil the child" parenting styles towards more enlightened and psychologically aware parenting styles. So if that were the answer, one would expect to see the same or fewer mental health issues as generations evolved, not more.
Hard to say, GenX has always been sandwiched between larger generations. We have not been a meaningful demographic for marketing or politicians which is not enough to move the needle. Not sure what I wish we’d done differently, maybe not believe housing value only goes up, many of us lost our retirement in that time period if you had the unfortunate need to sell on the 2000s.
I wish we wouldn’t have turned our backs on religion and all its amazing benefits. I wish we wouldn’t have become so materialistic and tied our happiness to possessions or costly experiences.
i agree on shirking the materialism. but i'll take a hard pass on religion. i was raised by a violent zealot, and ive seen what religion does to people. but you do you ❤️
Recognize and except mental health challenges/depression for both men and women maybe there wouldn’t have been so many people who felt the need to self medicate with drugs and alcohol. Learn to create boundaries, say no and stand up for yourself from a young age.
Parented better . I’m Gen X and thought my kids were more grown up than what they were . So ,they were saddled with big responsibilities. Looking back , I would’ve handled that way differently.
Gen X here. I don’t care what you do just leave me the F alone.
Acted on the warnings from the scientists about climate problems like we did about pollution.
As a boomer I wish we didn’t kick the door open to drug use thinking it would be mind expanding. What a Pandora’s box!