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You have a tremendous number of potentially severe cognitive biases in just these few sentences. In fact, it strikes me as wearing a sense of pessimistic self-fulfillment in as much as the article author suffers from self-entitlement.

You're not the only generation Xer I've conversed with. I'm right on the cusp between that generation and the next, so I know a number of people from both; it's an interesting place to be for perspective.

And yes, the other generation Xers say these same thing. They were more humble; they were less entitled; they dealt with pain we never had to, and it made them better. I don't think I can say what I want less strongly, so forgive the profanity when I do say it: fuck that noise. With this sort of line of arguing, there is nowhere we can go, because the whole thing has decayed into a battle of generation identity. Reason has exited the building, because you have a vested interest in preserving your sense of superiority in your own identity. At what point could any of us convince you to rethink that? If you say never, then you have a sense of entitlement brought about by your generational brand. You don't get a pass for that any more than the author here gets for his sense of entitlement to some form of employment.

It's ridiculous: I'm supposed to pay more attention to your thoughts, simply because you felt forced into certain sacrifices. How about I pay more attention to your thoughts because they seem more right, and we yank generation identity out of this?

There are a few tidbits I pulled out of the conversation that I think would be interesting to discuss apart from the context of self-entitlement, but I worry they're going to get drowned out in the noise. We're too busy beating down someone else, ostensibly because we think they need to be brought down a peg, but then we say shit like this that is so logically fallacious that it makes this whole thread seem not for the purest of ends. I was with you when you made your first reply above; now I'm not so sure.



Well, I don't think you can discuss this particular topic without making gross over generalizations and employing some type of bias. We're talking about generations of people after all.

Gen X'ers will see the world the way we see it. It may be ridiculous, but keep in mind that we've lived through both yours and our own experiences, when you have not. That doesn't mean we're right, but it does mean we have a lot more data to work with.

Of course, there is a tendency to imply "walk 6 miles to school uphill in snowstorms" with our memories, which I acknowledge.

The particular challenges of Generation X are well documented. The fact that these aren't also attributed to Millennials tells you pretty much all you need to know: The environment has changed.

It's not a good/bad thing, it's just a thing.

Finally, I put this forward: We wouldn't have had this discussion had this been written in 1990. He would have been dismissed as delusional.


> We wouldn't have had this discussion had this been written in 1990.

Right, and why would that be? Perhaps because the 1990s were golden economic years?


Except that to new grads, they weren't.

All the gold was going to your parents. :-)


It's highly dependent on the exact year and geographic location. You definitely can't generalize to Generation X here.




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