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Really?! Now it's the X-ers who are spoiled? There weren't many $200 apartments or free rides when I was just getting started in '97.
I can't wait to see what the Z'ers and ZZ'ers (if that's what they end up being called) say about the Millennials. They'll probably be asking grandpa when he's gonna finally let facebook die and maybe consider moving out of great-grandma's basement.
I'm an old Gen X member. Word was the older Baby Boomers had lots of good things like decent jobs but the dudes DID have to face the draft for Vietnam. Younger BB's didn't have to deal with Vietnam but, the economy sucked from what they told me.
....Younger BB's didn't have to deal with Vietnam but, the economy sucked from what they told me.
The 1970s saw the nation's first mass layoffs, inflation, wage & price controls, energy shocks, defacto gas rationing, environmental issues, etc. By the end of the decade interest rates were approaching 18% making it close to impossible for anyone to buy a home.
The Baby Boom generation is often thought of as the generation that had the easiest time getting into a middle-class lifestyle, since an ordinary high school graduate could get a factory job at age 17 that allowed him to support a family, pay off a house in 2 years, etc. Let's be honest, though: How many of us today would take a job at a Plymouth motor plant even if it paid well? I wouldn't.
The luckiest generation was the one born in between the Baby Boomers and the Millenials, the one that was young adults during the computer revolution of the 80s and 90s. That's when women had entered the workforce, there will still enough jobs to around, and the new types of jobs being created were desk jobs that paid a lot (in the purchasing power of their era). Back then, college wasn't expensive, and if you got a college degree, it actually meant something and you could easily get a job in the booming computer industry. Median wages in dollars were about the same as today, but you could get a 1-bedroom apartment for $200/month. The high-paying white-collar jobs hadn't yet been shipped to India or reserved for H1B Visa workers from India.
LOL, generation X came of age during the 80s and 90s, while the corporate consolidation and raiders were all over the place laying off millions of people, the oil fields booming and busting, the savings and loans bust, and the rise of technology to take over entry level jobs. That is not even mentioning the latch key kid phenomenon where our selfish parents were too busy working 80 hours a week buying the newest, biggest, best crap they could get financed for leaving us to fend for ourselves from early ages. Yep we were real lucky.
I'm a Gen Xer and historically speaking, we have been very lucky. Economics aside, too many of history's generations have faced wars and terrible qualities of life.
I can't imagine living before something as currently mundane to us as penicillin.
sorry maybe you missed desert storm, Afghanistan, or even the beginning of the current war in Iraq, all fought primarily by generation X kids on the front lines.
The 1970s saw the nation's first mass layoffs, inflation, wage & price controls, energy shocks, defacto gas rationing, environmental issues, etc. By the end of the decade interest rates were approaching 18% making it close to impossible for anyone to buy a home.
LOL, generation X came of age during the 80s and 90s, while the corporate consolidation and raiders were all over the place laying off millions of people, the oil fields booming and busting, the savings and loans bust, and the rise of technology to take over entry level jobs. That is not even mentioning the latch key kid phenomenon where our selfish parents were too busy working 80 hours a week buying the newest, biggest, best crap they could get financed for leaving us to fend for ourselves from early ages. Yep we were real lucky.
I'm right on the cusp of Baby Boomer and Gen X'r depending on which chart you look it. I can tell you that the 90's was a FABULOUS time to be a corporate employee with 8-10% raises (corporations still valued their employees then and wanted to keep them) AND job hopping was really just beginning with most corporations scared to death of it.
The average employee was MUCH better off in the 90's than they are now. Remember pensions? Remember those? Remember yearly raises of a decent amount? Anyone?
That's how it used to be.
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