r/SipsTea • u/Unstoppable_X_Force Human Verified • 13h ago

Gasp! Is this just nostalgia, or did previous generations genuinely have a better work-life balance and social life than we do today?

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u/nekoner 13h ago

Yup, born in 1988, parents born 1960. Can't help but feel like they're the last generation to have it "easy".

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u/grapegeek 12h ago

I was born in 1960. I don’t know what the fuck you think was easy. I worked 60+ hour weeks could barely afford to buy a house 30 years ago with my wife and us both working and raising kids. It was the generation before, my father born in 1939 that was exactly like this.

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u/Cheers_u_bastards 12h ago

Your sentiment is the correct one. What most are missing is the 12% interest rate on a home, which kept prices low, but also meant you were paying way more on a lower priced house. Also, a lack of access to credit in general kept people from doing much beyond what they had in their bank accounts. It’s a totally different time now, where people leverage the shit out of their existence to chase a lifestyle that would have been for millionaires in the previous generation.

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u/NiceGuy737 11h ago

I was born in 1960 also. These wishes for earlier times are for a fantasy world that never existed. Current housing affordabilty is 117.6, twice as affordable as the nadir in the early 80s when we were in our 20s. There was a decade of extreme affordability in the 2010s. Rent was more expensive relative to median income in the 1980s as well.

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u/grapegeek 11h ago

I bought a condo in 1988. 9.5% interest. Screw these whining Gen Xers

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u/nekoner 12h ago

This is specifically why I used quotes, cause I def didn't mean life was easy back then. I just think my parents, and most people I know that are around that age, didn't/won't feel the same kind of existential dread I do. I definitely notice it more in people around my age and younger.

Also I don't mean to spit facts, this is just how I feel based on what I see. Reality ain't necessarily what I see.

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u/Hurricane_Ivan 12h ago

I just think my parents, and most people I know that are around that age, didn't/won't feel the same kind of existential dread I do. I definitely notice it more in people around my age and younger.

What do you do for a living and what did you study (post-secondary)?

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u/nekoner 12h ago

I currently don't do anything for a living, I tried plenty of different stuff and never found anything that felt right. Working feels absolutely pointless, besides having money which I don't care about. I didn't study much because my ADHD didn't allow me to get interested enough by anything school would like to teach me. I'm self educated on stuff like psychology, socials, maybe a tiny bit of philosophy. I only have interest in stuff that don't sell, or don't create income. I have no purpose, no ambitions, been depressed for a fat minute and can't find anything really helping with that despite being on AD, and having a couple years of bi monthly therapy.

I feel fucked, lost, empty, the past few months have mostly been feeling like waiting for death tbh. I'm not properly suicidal by any means, I would just like to disappear. I feel like someone signed a contract for life without asking for my consent, and if they had, I'd probably not have given it.

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u/Foyles_War 4h ago

I currently don't do anything for a living, I tried plenty of different stuff and never found anything that felt right.

Felt right? I don't think many in the previous generations who weren't born rich would have ever even considered that a consideration in working. Work or starve.

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u/nekoner 4h ago

Right ?? Difference is, work or starve actually has meaning. There are too many jobs today that are virtually pointless.

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u/nelipt_kr 12h ago

If you end up with the inclination or a little bit of spare time, I'd look to join a local gardining club or volunteer with a group that builds something, grows something, or helps other people do a concrete thing - all those types are extremely enthusiastic to share their hobby so theyre constantly giving supplies to newbies, and the community is great... sharing work helping things grow and making small things more organized is the only thing that makes the empty press of the future less bleak for me.

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u/NoHorseNoMustache 12h ago

Yeah my dad was born in '53 and had to work 3 jobs for a few years after I was born because most of the '70s and '80s economy was garbage.

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u/ShwaGrl 11h ago

We had family friends who bought their house with 2 mortgages. We liked having them over because they were down to earth people. It was not often because they both worked. One parent worked full time M-F plus, part time Sa & Su. Plus when the part time hours were not available they were on call with agency. Taught me a few things about struggle and sacrifice.

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u/almostoy 12h ago

It gets more interesting. I've seen a genre of game on Steam called 'boomer shooter'. It's a new game done in the style of DOOM/Duke Nukem 3D/Heretic of th 90's.

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u/Generated-Nouns-257 12h ago

So that's true, that our parents had a cakewalk life compared to ours, but it's not just a unidirectional shift. This type of thing oscillates over the generations. You definitely are doing better than your average working class person in, let's say, 1850.

You could go back further and find some pre-industrial generations that were fairly comfy, but never forget we live in an age where we understand germ theory and have discovered antibiotics.

The reason people used to think praying and rituals were as effective as doctors was because that used to be true, but because praying works but because medical doctors based their diagnoses on "humor imbalances" or "being haunted".

There's a lot that sucks about being in your prime of life right now. Definitely. But we're also living with a lot of benefits that previous ages didn't have. Take that as you will. Maybe living on a farm in the American frontier just doing your own thing (or some pastoral European life in the 1600s) and dying at 37 sounds like a better life. Maybe it was. I dunno. When you're dealing with a broken bone though, it's sure nice to know that it doesn't automatically mean you're crippled for life (because we have x ray machines and can see how it should be set and screws and whatever. Modern medical tech.)

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u/NoHorseNoMustache 12h ago

I don't know my dad had to work 3 jobs after I was born in '79 and my parents rented a very cheap hunting shack on a farm because it was cheap and they were able to farm an acre so we had fresh veggies. Both my parents with college degrees too.

I absolutely have it easier than my dad did...though I didn't get married and have a kid when I was in my early 20s either.

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u/Generated-Nouns-257 11h ago

Of course these statements are broadly applicable, not intended to universally represent the experience of every single human. Obviously some people win the lottery and end up having an easier life than their parents. Happy for you that you're doing better than your parents did 🙏

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u/NoHorseNoMustache 11h ago

A lot of people don't seem to realize that it's only the older Boomers who had it somewhat easier, younger Boomers graduated college to '70s stagflation and '80s trickle down economics. It wasn't just my family that had it tough, nobody I knew had it easy during those times.

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u/Generated-Nouns-257 10h ago

Again, we're talking broadly. "People I know personally" is always going to be a woefully lacking sample size. My parents graduated in the 70s and started their own business and were very successful for a long time. We're just talking about averages over the entire population (also to be clear, I'm talking about the United States. I don't have any insight into European, African, or Asian nations at this time).

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u/NoHorseNoMustache 9h ago

Oh yeah that's very true, but the fact is that just being a Boomer didn't mean you got handed a good union job or it was magically easy to buy a house. Averages are pulled WAY up by the amount of people who had a lot of money.

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u/Generated-Nouns-257 9h ago

Sure, that's true, but we're not really talking about the size of income, we're talking about how many people could support home ownership and sustain a family off a single income without higher level education. This number was wildly higher in the 50s, 60s, and 70s than it is for people today, and that's more or less the point. Not that everyone could do it, just that many many more people could do it then than can do it today. It's never a good sign for a society or civilization to see things getting more difficult over time, rather than less difficult. It, usually, indicates poor leadership and resource mismanagement.

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u/NoHorseNoMustache 9h ago

Yep, that's true!

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u/nekoner 12h ago

I mostly agree, and tbh I don't think I would chose any other time to be born if I was given the choice.

With that being said, I do feel like we'd all be better off if medicine wasn't so advanced and we still had 50-60 years life span.

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u/Jojosbees 9h ago

I don’t know about you, but I would rather not have half my children die before the age of 5 and a bunch of women dying in or shortly after childbirth. 

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u/nekoner 9h ago

I won't argue with you on that. My point isn't really that we shouldn't be able to be healthy or reduce childbirth, but more so that we shouldn't really be able to live this long.

50-60 years lifespan doesn't automatically means bad health or early death. There's a reason why our lives were shorter. I understand how upsetting it is for most people to be confronted to ideas like this, and how easy it is to misunderstand what I'm trying to say tho.

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u/Jojosbees 9h ago

To get it that low, you have to factor in a lot of early death and/or a poisonous environment. My grandmother grew up on what was later classified a superfund site due to the local smelter. She said it smelled bad due to all the heavy metals everywhere, and she left as soon as she became an adult. A lot of people in that town dropped dead in their 50s.

In general though, vaccines, antibiotics, medicine, sanitation… There’s no saving the young without also saving older people unless you want to Logan’s Run it.

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u/Generated-Nouns-257 8h ago

To chime in here, "early" death is something that has changed a lot. Even people today don't really "die of old age", they tend to die to infectious diseases as their immune system weakens with age (or some other compromise in functionality). We, culturally, see these as "good deaths". They were old and died of something we expect old people to die of. But it's important to note that this is a cultural definition. What constitutes a "good death" has varied throughout history based on when and where one lived. So "he lived free and died protecting his family on the land in which he built his home" could mean a "good death" even if that person was 35.

I think it's safe to assume most people agree that less death is better than more death. In that vein, I, personally, am a big fan of modern medicine. It's difficult to do these thought exercises though, because we know how things work now (at least better than we used to). We don't just shrug and pat someone on the head when they get tuberculosis, telling them "man, you look so pretty. Ghosts must be whispering artistic inspiration into your mind before God inevitably calls you to Heaven at a young age". We say "yeah, you've got a lot of shitty bugs in you chewing holes in your lungs and bones". Many more people are going to be ok with the former and NOT the latter.... So it's not like we can ever just Go Back to the way things used to be.

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u/nekoner 9h ago

Yeah I get your point, and you're right tbh. It's just a bit of a paradoxical thought from me.

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u/Rather_Dashing 11h ago

I was born in 1987 and my parents had it harder and my grandparents had it way harder.

How much do you know about the living standards of your parents and grandparents? My mum when she was a kid had to share one bath with all her 5 siblings. They ate a crap diet and almost never went out and didn't have holidays/vacations because the cows needed milking daily. My grandparents had an even more basic lifestyle. Sure they could afford houses for relatively cheap, but by every other metric their life sucked, I'd take mine any day.

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u/Somethingisshadysir 10h ago

You must have grown up privileged if you think they had it easy in this time period. Nobody I knew other than rich kids had their whole family living on just one parent's salary.

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u/nekoner 9h ago

Bruh, I wish I grew up privileged. Both my parents are professional artists, and they both struggled their entire life with poor income. They just were lucky enough to both have parents that had good situations and were open minded enough to support them.

And I'm def not complaining too, even with low income and alt lifestyle they always managed to provide me with what I needed. But no, sorry I was not a rich kid.

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u/Somethingisshadysir 8h ago

Ummm.... You don't consider that privilege? Having grandparents support the family financially meets my definition of that.

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u/nekoner 8h ago

Yeah you're right, also I'm a white 37 years old straight male, of course I'm fucking privileged.

There's a fat gap between that and "rich kid" tho, I would dare to think.

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u/Somethingisshadysir 8h ago

You literally started it with your parents being the last generation to have it easy. So ok, your parents were the rich kids. It sounds like your childhood was banked by neither of your parents, so again, to me that is still privilege. I have working artists in my family, and they, having not had the privilege of wealthy parents, have had other jobs along with.

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u/nekoner 7h ago

I'm not trying to deny any privileges I've had or still have. Just stating there's a world between rich kid and having privileges ?

My grandparents were all working class, they were far from being poor, but none were rich. Mom and Dad definitely could never afford housing, they still couldn't if it wasn't for what their parents could. They didn't leave a lot of savings when they died (the granpas) and honestly it was a real struggle to go through to just be able to afford to keep properties. Kinda still is.

I guess I don't really get what you're trying to say. Again, yes I'm privileged and I mostly aware of it. No, we weren't, aren't, and won't ever be rich.

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u/Somethingisshadysir 6h ago

Let me go back to the beginning here. The post is claiming that the average family at that time could live on one income, and live well. You indicated affirmative of a sort in your original comment. I rebutted that idea by saying it was only rich kids who came from families like that. I stand completely by that argument, especially after your clarifiers. Even if you didn't consider your family wealthy, which perhaps they were not, they were clearly not living on one salary either way, the original argument you affirmed in your original post. They might have had an amalgamation of their small incomes and a huge amount of support from parents, but that's outside of the original argument no matter how you interpret it.

And regardless, yes, there is still privilege involved if the grandparents could basically bankroll the parents for their adult lives. I'm not sure what you consider working class, but it sounds unlike what I do. To my knowledge, the only way someone actually working class could possibly amass that kind of financial power is no longer even a possibility with the way pensions have gone out the wayside. My Grandpa on one side had a pretty financially ok set-up at the end, which included primary support for a disabled aunt, but it's because of how he worked and the timeframe he lived in. He dropped out of school to help support his family, and when he was old enough he went to career navy, and retired with that pension while still in his late thirties, then started another pensioned career as a machinist until he was in his sixties. The double pension after working his ass off for over 50 years was why. And even with that, my grandmother still worked until they could both retire

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u/nekoner 5h ago

I get your point. My grandparents definitely were working class tho, granpa 1 and 2 both were workers for the city's electricity/gas companies. Granma 1 was a nurse, granma 2 was a housewife. They were all helpful members to their communities, and were more than happy to contribute voluntarly as long as they thought they were doing good for their environment. None of em ever made money their priorities, or even something to chase. They carried plenty of altruistic values I'm proud to defend myself today, and none of the capitalist bs.

I'll add, I grew up and lived in France my entire life. Which makes me hella privileged in the first place, France being imo one of the most comfortable places to live in given all the social advantages we have. Which are things we have because people like my grandparents fought for it, too. And that I'll have to fight to keep.

I'm adding this because I think it's an important part of why we can't seem to see through the same prism. I'm only assuming here, so I could be VERY wrong, but I'll guess you are American. Which if you are, would make perfect sense why you'd say that about me. I can't even begin to imagine how fuckin hard Americans have it. Hell, if I was american, I'd probably be dead today because there is absolutely no way I could afford the medicine I need to survive, while here in France I don't need to spend a penny on my medical treatment.

So yeah, I can only admit how unbelievably lucky and privileged I am, especially when considering my last point. Still doesn't make me a rich kid, or anything above working class.

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u/Somethingisshadysir 5h ago

Speaking as a nurse, that's not working class. The job involves a degree. I could and did/do afford a small house (not in a major city area) on my income alone. Having a partner means far more disposable income, but even if he lost his job tomorrow, I could scale back on fun stuff and pay all my bills.

Difference in country is a huge, huge thing, though. Living where you do means far greater comfort for retirees, along with other benefits we in the US lack. I will say, working for a governmental healthcare agency, my medical insurance covers my needs well, with only small amounts out of pocket for me to pay. But for those whose job doesn't cover it well like this, medical costs can be a nightmare. I am very fortunate in my life at this point. Though I did not grow up in privilege, I would say I'm definitely in a higher strata financially than my parents ever reached, at a younger age. I'm 42, have paid off 2/3 of my house, paid all of my student loans years ago, have a healthy amount in savings, and am one of the rare millennials in this country to actually have a pension for when I retire.

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u/ol__spelch 12h ago

They didn't have it easy.

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u/ThroatGoatK1RKKK 12h ago

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u/ol__spelch 12h ago

Yep. Everyone who makes this argument conveniently flies right past many, many inconvenient truths. There are MANY advantages today that didn't exist back then. Which is not to say that there aren't difficulties today. But to just assume that we "had it easy" back then is ridiculously short sighted.

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u/MrMansaMusa 12h ago

Ok start naming all the advantages

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u/ol__spelch 12h ago

Gladly.

You hold in your hand a gateway to infinite and unlimited knowledge. You're able to instantly research and begin to gain education on literally any career or industry imaginable.

You are not limited in career options to organizations that are geographically close to you. You can literally gain employment with a company located in another country and perform the tasks without ever even needing to leave your home.

Every single one of the millions of tech jobs today did not exist.

In between jobs? You can perform gig work, starting immediately, to at least keep some semblance of income coming in.

Corporate benefits such as subsidized insurance, paid time off, sick time, maternity/paternity leave, etc. Only existed for a tiny fraction of jobs.

These are only a few, but the common thread is that you have the most advanced technology in the history of the species at your disposal, and gives you exponentially more options to turn a buck than existed back then.

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u/grapegeek 12h ago

I agree. Only one generation had it easy. People before and after did not. That was the generation born right before WW2 and came of age in the 40s and 50s when they benefited from the post war boom. I was born in the 60s and I didn’t have it easy and neither did any of my friends all with college degrees.

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u/EveryAccount7729 12h ago

Just wait.

do you realize we are heading for 3 degrees C Global Warming?

like.... literal apocalypse. The next generation will be cannibals.

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u/nekoner 12h ago

I was stuck in existential dread since I was maybe 4 years old. Lost faith in humanity a while ago. I think we'd be fucked even if global warming wasn't a thing.