At World's End

    Because I deal with middle-aged to senior customers at work, and have parental units that fall under that age group as well, and watch a lot of content creator’s videos surrounding this same topic, I have a pretty solid understanding of the outlook that those of older generations have. It is not a positive one aimed at my generation, the millennials before me, and the youth that are just getting started. Essentially, those who are being raised by the same people that look down on us. 
    You hear a lot of those “back in my day”’s and “when I was a kid”’s at my age. The statements following are usually declaring how difficult it was to be a person back then in the nineteen-thirties all the way to the nineteen-seventies. These folks love to shove the privilege young people have right in their faces because our lives are just so damn easy these days and we’re so spoiled now.
    Well, let me learn you boomers and beyond a thing or two. From a young person’s perspective. A young person who’s in the midst of their young person life. Let me tell you just how it is for a significant number of people around my age…
    I was chatting with a customer today as my computer rebooted after shutting down because technology is not always our friend. She was saying how computers have helped us a lot despite not always working in our favor, how before, everything had to be written out in person and whatnot. When fax machines came into play, people realized they had to make copies from those machines as the marking on the fax paper would eventually disappear. After that though, it made work significantly easier as inventory and purchases could be printed on paper by a machine rather than a human. We then got to chatting about how back in the day, a person could support a whole family with one mundane occupation and now… well this is why us young folk have it harder. 
    It doesn’t take a relatively simple, if repetitive job to support our lives. Nay, now it takes three insanely complicated and overwhelming jobs to barely support our individual selves. Before, one person could support a house, spouse, and offspring with a single, straightforward  occupation because the pay was a livable wage. Now, we young folk have to work our asses off for far more than our job description entails for pay that is laughable. Minimum wage doesn’t cut it anymore and we have far more to spend it on when it comes to necessities. That’s something older folk didn’t have to worry about and often seem to forget. We have phones with a monthly payment. They need internet connection, another monthly payment. We have computers that are a pretty integral part of day to day life and though that might not be a monthly payment, they cost a shit ton of money to begin with. Then there’s rent which is not cheap, not anymore. People charge insulting amounts of money for small, old, apartments, some of which don’t even have a full kitchen and instead boast a hot plate and microwave rather than an oven and stove. Single bedrooms can cost around a thousand dollars per month, a one bedroom could cost thrice that. 
Then you have groceries, car insurance, gas money, college tuition, and the things you can actually enjoy. Lots of people don’t even bother with a car because it’s too expensive. Lots of people don’t bother with post secondary either for that same reason. I fall under both those categories and I’m still going to have to work more to build up my chequing account. Here’s a fun thing that most of us young folk don’t have to help with the things we do, work benefits and raises. Employers don’t like handing out benefits anymore, nor raises. I’ve worked full time more than once with no benefits. I’ve worked at places for over a year with no raise. That means dental, mental, and eye care are all out of pocket. You’ll find a lot of us haven't gone to the dentist for awhile because of that too. We work seventeen different jobs as part of the one job we’re getting paid for and we stay at minimum wage the whole time. Because of that we either need more than one job, or one job that we work very overtime at (generally without getting overtime pay because employers don’t like doing that either). 
This is just the cost of living! Do you know what else we have to worry about these days? It’s the demise of the fucking planet! Whilst we are going broke trying to further our schooling despite it not even guaranteeing a career afterwards, we also have to fix all the planetary issues that past generations bestowed upon us. The climate crisis is screwing us over mentally, physically, and probably financially as wild weather can keep people from getting to their jobs to make that shitty pay. Every day we have to face this impending doom, wondering to what extent it’s going to ruin our futures and all we can do is hope that someone out there has more time and money to help stop it because the rest of us can barely make ends meet.
And then there’s the pandemic. Working continuously as an essential worker watching humanity go to hell and having to continue to carry out thankless work that drains the soul each passing moment really is a topper on all this. So many young lives were halted by an ever changing and merciless virus. So many futures, and presents, put on hold. So many dreams and plans crushed.  Faith just gets ripped away as more and more people you see act selfishly and stupidly and endanger what unfulfilling life you have left. 
Whenever someone pulls the “we had the Cold War to worry about and thought that bombs would fall on us at any given moment” card, I chucke to myself. I chuckle because if the Cold War happened now, most of us wouldn’t give a damn. What would we have to lose? Our rubbish apartments? Our painstaking jobs? Our lives? Well, a scary amount of people around my age don’t want to be alive anyway so that wouldn’t matter much. The majority of us would not care if that reality came to be for we are already so depressed, emotionally drained, physically exhausted, and out of fucks to give. Every day we have to wake up to a dying planet, to work during a pandemic, at our horrible jobs, for unworthy paycheques, to pay for our sad apartments and bedrooms in houses with seven other roommates. 
This is why us younger folk appear angsty and frustrated, why we seem so fed up with everything. It’s because we are. We have so much on our plates and most of it is unrewarding. And all the while our parents, our grandparents, strangers that fall into both those age groups shame our very beings, call us weak, embarrassing, undeserving of respect. Most of our problems came from those before us, most of our mannerisms came from those who raised us. Maybe instead of criticizing the way these newer generations turned out, criticize yourself first because we didn’t start the fire. That shit was burning long before we were even conceived.