It feels like no matter where I turn some septuagenarian, or older, is making life miserable for myself and others. Usually these are older white Christian conservatives, obsessed with a delusional sense of reality that no longer has a basis in fact, or perhaps never did.
There is a disproportionate amount of wealth concentrated in the older generation and those who will inherit it will probably be even worse with that money than the last generation. Certainly we see evidence of that already, anyone in their 30’s who has parents who help them out VS those who don’t have that have radically different outcomes. For some reason those lucky enough to come from good families ascribe laziness and bad attitude to those who don’t have the family support, as if they are somehow enjoying “self made success” while mummy does their laundry for them.
No generation previous needed this kind of assistance well into adulthood, but this infantilisation of working adults has happened because of the hoarding of wealth, refusing to pass on the torch in workplaces and just blocking change for the sake of stoking petty politics. Most of us will never own our own home but all the politicians want to talk about is whether it’s OK to dehumanise trans people or not.
I’m 36 this year. For most of my teens I thought there’d be some kind of tipping point where the conservative boomers would fuck off or at least let the next generation step in, but that hasn’t happened. Back in the 1990’s you could be a girl and wear jeans and be empowered, now this is considered some kind of woke statement. As if we recently invented this idea of women and men being equal.
The faces of my two dogs, my cat and my husband are all that keep me going. Knowing they need me gives me just enough to get out of bed in the morning and start moving… but I’m struggling to do even that without having a breakdown. My husband and I have medical expenses we can’t afford and are borrowing money to survive right now. I run my own business and just feel this immense pressure on my shoulders, that again is compounded by how unfair the world is right now.
Anyone got any advice for coping with this late stage capitalist hellscape?
The entire world is going through this right now. Many of us will never own a home - and no I don’t mean just Gen-Z and maybe Millenials, I mean people your age even. Fwiw, you/we still are doing better off than at least 95% of the world, but that is not to diminish the pain that we are losing hope b/c we are not doing as well as we thought we would. Find a way of coping that works for you - I am still searching for mine…:-( I just thought it might help to say that you are not alone:-).
Take a hiatus from social media and from doomscrolling- it can be so incredibly damaging.
Old people squeeze their eyes & ears shut so that they will neither see nor hear the cries of pain screams of agony as the world burns, and they say: “This is fine”.
Ngl, there is some merit to that - maybe that is how they survived as long as they have, as opposed to those that died young (selection bias). I too could become a zombie, numb to the world, and I would then exist even after it ceased to. But I choose to live - and that means to suffer, especially when my brethren and sistren all across the world suffer too.:-( It is not madness to feel pain when things are WRONG - I would argue that it is, in fact, sanity.
All that is the context for why I agree - we NEED to stay connected, but not 24/7; also it helps to balance doomscrolling with positive experiences: as described in what I thought was a super-excellent article on that subject.
I can’t even figure out what “doom scrolling” is supposed to be. I just regular scroll.
It’s regular scrolling but when the longer you do it, the worse you feel, but you still feel compelled to do it, it’s called doom scrolling.
don’t mean just Gen-Z and maybe Millenials, I mean people your age even
They said they’re 36. That’s millenial. At 41, I’m what Iliza Schlesinger coined an Elder Millennial (a little under two months older than Iliza herself).
Great comment otherwise, though, and I sincerely hope you find your coping method(s)!
It is really weird how no one can imagine generations getting old. It’s like they think millenial is slang for teens, and Gen z is slang for younger kids.
I wouldn’t mind splitting the difference and being 30 again tbh 😄
It’s that perfect middle where you’re (just barely) old enough that most people take you seriously (or at least don’t dismiss you based on youth alone), but also young enough that your body doesn’t ache from approaching middle age yet 😉
Gen-Z and younger Millenials
The above is what I probably should have said. Interestingly (to me at least:-D), historically “Millenial” used to refer to what is now called “Z”, it once having been the term used to describe the generation that came after “Y”, but has shifted all the way over to now having absorbed Y and then replacing it entirely.:-P But yes, in 2018 (according to Pew) that situation finished switching and the old Z is now the new Y - though if you google search these terms, most results are how to market to these groups, and that likely confuses things further.
What I mean is that imho it is best to take these terms extremely loosely - e.g. an elder Millenial may share more in common with a late-stage Gen-Xer (“righteous dude!”, e.g. having watched similar TV programs even if as re-runs) than with the later half of what is now called “Millenial”, and similarly late Millenials with earlier Gen-Zs (no cap no skibidi, def no Ohio), and so on.
Though whether someone has rich parents or not seems to override all other factors such as generation or responsibility to work hard and save money for the future, when talking about owning a home:-(.
Like many else suggests: Cut the media. The world doesn’t care if you follow it or not, and you’ll be much happier all the time.
Alternative, try to follow positive media. I created my own community for this purpose only, called /c/worldinprogress
taps link to what is supposed to be a community about all the good stuff happening in the world
“Error: no posts”
Well, fuck.
Kidding aside, !upliftingnews@lemmy.world probably has what you’re looking for
There’s 8 posts or something, because I just started the community.
And it’s not like UpliftingNews, because they focus more on individuals, as this is for general progress in the world.
Hope you’d like it!
Already doing this, that doesn’t stop my next door neighbour from being harassed by the old couple on the corner. It doesn’t stop my narcissist mother from coming to my door even when I tell her I’m going to call the cops. There are real problems beyond people’s perceptions and feelings from the news.
I feel like you’ve got some other issues going on that you aren’t letting any one in on. Statements like “neighbour from being harassed by the old couple” and “stop my narcissist mother from coming to my door even when I tell her I’m going to call the cops” are definitely not normal experiences. I don’t think you will find general answers to your original question until you first address these more specific problems head on.
I’m almost exactly the same age as you. If I’ve learned anything up to this point, it’s that people would start to have better and richer lives as soon as they cancel their cable TV subscriptions, delete all social media accounts*, and delete all news apps from their mobile devices. I really believe smartphones are a huge culprit in making people miserable, and it’s because we’ve let these things get totally out of hand instead of consciously making them as boring and utilitarian as possible.
The issue of being ‘informed’ or not can be covered by reading Wikipedia’s current events page for a few minutes each week. That should also free up plenty of time for people to focus more on what really matters day-to-day, which is their local community, friends, family and neighbors. Useful information is actionable, and actionable information can be found when you’re laser-focused on your local area and the ways you can help improve it.
- Lemmy / kbin isn’t social media, IMO. ; )
I think they mean social media with algorithmicly generated content feeds.
All the feeds are algorithms in leemmy - hot, top, new, etc. They’re just simpler algorithms and they’re open source.
IMO Lemmy’s a new version of old-school web forums and link aggregators (which have been around since the beginning- kind of like Fark, Slashdot, etc). Using this site feels the same as using those sites.
Think social media’s a very specific thing that started off in the early-to-mid 00s- i.e., a site / app where you keep a profile that’s tied to your real-life identity and real-life social circles (myspace, friendster, linkedin, facebook). And that’s where the harm kicks in, since suddenly you have to worry about having some kind of curated digital persona, which has some kind of real-life impact. So if we can’t talk about the harms of social media in a specific way (i.e., the harm of constantly comparing your life to these idealized representations of other people’s lives), then ‘social media’ isn’t a meaningful term anymore.
I’ve been struggling with this too, but doing ok mostly. Here’s what works for me:
- Spend time with people who make me feel hope instead of despair. It sounds like you know some entitled assholes; don’t spend time with them if they don’t improve you.
- Focus on local. What is happening right around me? What can I do to make it better? How am I interacting with my immediate environment?
- Focus on what is improving. In many, many ways it’s better now that it has been at any time in human history. Women have more freedom and power now than they ever have. I can learn anything I want to, find out anything I want to, almost instantly. More people are aware of systemic oppression now than ever before, and more people are willing to resist it than ever before.
- Pick what to be mad about. There are too many things to be angry about, so I try to pick the ones that I think are the most worth it. For me, they are: wealth accumulation (we’ve come so far, and built such a great civilization, and we let a few rich fuckers loot it. It was a mistake! We tricked ourselves into thinking it was a good idea! But we’re realizing it’s not, and it’s fixable) and systemic racism in the US (Black infants in America being twice as likely to die before they reach a year old than white infants is UNACCEPTABLE). Yeah, there’s an infinite amount of other shitty stuff, but I’m only one person.
- Picking and choosing social media/other news sources that don’t send me into a doom spiral. I don’t go on Twitter. I don’t go on Reddit any more. I don’t have Lemmy on my phone (sorry Lemmy, nothing personal, but it’s a bad doomscrolling hole for me). I go on Discord and I read blogs I subscribe to.
I believe that a person can only handle three big things at a time, and everything else needs to take a back seat to those three. You have your business, your family, and your medical debt. Those are your three burdens. When one of them gets light enough, you can take on something else. Gender equality and entitled rich people and identity politics are not your burdens right now. They can take a back burner until other stuff gets better for you.
Good luck, it’s hard.
One of the reasons that older people have money is because society was sane when they were young. It was even possible for only one parent to work and the other to stay at home and take care of kids and the house.
Every decade since then, things get worse because capitalism wants everyone to work, everyone to buy things, and as few people as possible having enough money to not work. Because money is power and if you are living thanks to a monthly check, you have no power.
The main strategy from the top has always been to divide people as much as possible and distract them from the fact that they can’t get out of the hamster wheel. So there are public discussions about gender politics, environmental issues and other things that divide people into groups, so they argue with eachother and stay distracted from the big picture.
Big picture, we are kind of like slaves but much more comfortable. As long as we can’t stop working, we are slaves in a way, because we don’t have freedom to spend our lives doing what we want in most cases. So we waste our days trying to care about company problems that are all about increasing their profits while paying everyone as little as they can.
Yeah this is not a encouraging post, sorry. I just say what I think here.
One of the reasons that older people have money is because society was sane when they were young.
Also because they’ve had more time to make money.
As for the original question, “How to cope with existing right now?”, I find that apathy helps.
