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Generation Jones is a grossly underutilized concept imo. It’s totally unfair to lump people born after 1960 in with the Baby Boomers.
Generation Jones were children during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and were young adults when HIV/AIDS became a worldwide threat in the 1980s.
The name “Generation Jones” has several connotations, including a large anonymous generation, a “keeping up with the Joneses” competitiveness and the slang word “jones” or “jonesing”, meaning a yearning or craving. Pontell suggests that Jonesers inherited an optimistic outlook as children in the 1960s, but were then confronted with a different reality as they entered the workforce during Reaganomics and the shift from a manufacturing to a service economy, which ushered in a long period of mass unemployment. Mortgage interest rates increased to above 12 percent in the mid-eighties, making it virtually impossible to buy a house on a single income. De-industrialization arrived in full force in the mid-late 1970s and 1980s; wages would be stagnant for decades, and 401Ks replaced pensions, leaving them with a certain abiding “jonesing” quality for the more prosperous days of the past.
kiwifoxtrot@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Didn’t they also live through all of what you just mentioned? What makes their experience of those events different than yours? It is all perspective. How do you know what it was like to be alive during the civil right’s movement, the Cuban missile crisis, the oil crisis, the assassinations of JFK and MLK Jr, the Vietnam war and the draft, the real estate crash in the 1980’s, etc.
It turns out that people are rubbish at understanding others perspective and life experiences. There is no hand book on how to be an adult and how to live. Giving advice is difficult. Give your parents a break and realize that they are people too.
lizzard@thelemmy.club 8 months ago
The Internet is what’s different. They lived through all of that but it wasn’t in your face. Not broadcast 24/7 on networks. On every social media feed. With the Internet and constant information it all can seem way more overwhelming.
People are people and giving them a break is a good idea. But the idea that things are the same now as they were back then is wrong in my opinion.
imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
No one is saying that things are the same now.
Things have been fucked up in completely different, but similarly severe ways, for all of human history.
The flipside of the internet is that we have an ability to search for and find the truth, if we have the critical thinking skills. Before the internet, knowledge was controlled by institutions. All information that you could consume was filtered through the authorities first.
It fucking pains me to my soul how profoundly naive and petty our generation appears when we start making these criticisms of previous generations. Not only do we reveal our complete ignorance of history, we reveal our lack of empathy as well, because even without understanding exactly what prior generations had to contend with, it’s not that hard to simply give them the benefit of the doubt and figure that they were more or less the same as us, given that we share the same genome.
tory@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Are you contending that boomers don’t use the internet and, therefore, were sheltered for decades? Because I assure you they’re very present in right wing spaces online.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 8 months ago
As a society, we suck at understanding media. Intentionally, of course. But yeah.
PopOfAfrica@lemmy.world 8 months ago
We haven’t just the last few years Sped run a lot of these types of events.
George Floyd, the imposing threat of World War III, COVID.
We seem to have a lot better coping mechanisms than the older generations had. Mostly through memes and nihilism.