The biggest struggle in Gen X was "not selling out, maaaaan". Tells you all you really need to know.
The ultra rich living in palaces while us mere peasants can't even afford housing or vehicles isn't a dystopian future. It's right the fuck now in many parts of the western world.
Nah, man. Thats one of those media projections that broadly speaking has not applied to any gen-xer I've known.
It wasn't about not selling out, it was about being and creating something with value that wasn't directly projected onto them by the corporate media complex. The gen-xers I know have idiosyncratic hobbies that wouldn't be trendy on instagram. The boomers? They don't even have hobbies, they legitimately do not understand the concept
there's a tendency amongst the boomers whom i know of being incredibly wasteful, especially with the things to which they consider themselves entitled. turning the faucet on and letting it run while doing dishes or brushing your teeth, gen x will do that. but i watch my boomer friend turn the cold water on and let it run a bit before filling the ice cube trays. why? because "the ice will freeze faster". but what about all that water you're wasting? "i pay the water bill."
slightly wet hands from spilling that tray? eighteen papertowels to dry them off. do you need that many, can't you just use one, or just use a hand towel? "i'm not doing more laundry. i bought a huge case at costco, and i'm gonna use them."
leaves every light in every room that he enters on? "i pay for the electricity."
it's not even about the money; it's the mindset of commodification, of anything and everything. i can point out to my friend that he's wasting money, but in his mind, because he bought something, it is his right to use as much of whatever that thing is, in whatever indiscriminate way he chooses, for as long as he chooses. it's absolutely maddening.
But whats wrong with that? If he gets pleasure out of wasting his money on paper towels, it's his prerogative. I don't, but hell, I buy paper towels in the first place. That shit is insanely wasteful but it's useful. The real issue with this mindset is that they don't understand other people don't have the ability to do that, or that there are cost or manpower barriers in place that prevent the kind of conspicuous consumption they feel entitled to. It blinds them to the real world.
Story time: I was a manager at McDonald's when they first added those self-order kiosks (they sucked) and I remember a conversation I had with an old boomer, clad in under-armor sportswear, about how they were total trash and they should have just used iPad's. Yeah, the software was absolutely dogshit. But they were regular computers that you could replace each part on, and at the scale McDonald's operates at it's probably cheaper to buy the parts in bulk and replace them when they break than to use an iPad and replace it every time something breaks. He literally said "
you guys have the money to pay for that, just take the old iPad out, throw it away, slap a new one in and you're good to go"
I should not have said that iPads are probably more expensive than a cheap embedded pc because he got flustered and started telling me that he only paid
TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS for his new iPad retina, that he's had one since they first came out in
2004, that he's been using them for longer than I have, and that nobody would make software as bad as the kiosks if it was an iPad, and that McDonald's is rich enough to afford quality stuff.
Its one of those conversations that's been burned in my memory because of how absolutely fucking insane it was. It's like I threw him a bone about how shitty the kiosks were, because he was right, but just being right wasn't enough, he felt entitled to the whole hog. The whole hog being his very precise world view about conspicuous consumption. It's smalltalk from a bored wagie dude, holy shit
Super fundy religious beliefs in a coming day of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth sound realistic compared to this.
www.scientificamerican.com
