This will sound ridiculous to most people:

I didn’t go to school after the 8th grade. I dropped out for several reasons, but even without lying, I talked my way into a very good career in IT. There was no database of schooling and I was hired on my personal merits, then I built a user experience department before that was actually a thing.

Within a few years, I was responsible for hiring but couldn’t hire anyone like myself. I wasn’t allowed to even consider anyone without a college degree, so I would have had to reject myself.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. That was 2002, and now in 2024, we’re rejecting people who might be awesome at their job (not to toot my horn, but I was very good at what I did and won industry awards) because they can’t afford to get a degree, as I couldn’t.

Most industries are pay to play now, and you can’t even break in by being exceptional nowadays. We’re trapping people out of what they’re great at and would love to do just because they were born into poverty.

Imagine the gifts we’re suppressing and squandering.

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Here’s what’s changed

• The market has collapsed into a few companies. That means that monopolistic forces are in nearly full force
• Labor unions have been severely weekend. In the 60s almost out of fear companies were practicing “corporate charity” to try and keep employees from unionizing. They’ve lost that fear.
• Regulations around corporate stock price manipulation have been all but eliminated. Buybacks use to be illegal because they allow a company to artificially inflate their stock completely unrelated to the actual performance of the company.
• Social safety nets have been gutted or underfunded.
• Public education has been destroyed. We used to have a fairly robust public university system that’s been uber privatized with funding reduced to almost nothing.
• Hospital systems have consolidated as has insurance agencies which not only drives up the price of medical care, it drives down the wages of doctors and nurses while keeping them as minimally staffed as possible. This translates into terrible care that fucks you over when you need any medical work done.

Okay look this needs to stop.

First, the economic success has become overstated at this point. There was a relatively brief period in US history where this could happen. Being an adult during that period required living through both the great depression and WW2. The only people who truly got a free lunch were boomers born before 1955.

These times were also marked by extreme bigotry. Anyone who wasn’t a straight white neurotypical cisgendered man faced comical levels of oppression.

Even for that subgroup, life could have a million difficulties. You know how a lot of seemingly successful boomers talk about how money isn’t everything? There’s a reason for that. All but the most privileged had to deal with shit like this:

• A culture where it was not acceptable to show emotion as a result of millions of men trying to collectively repress their massive PTSD
• Marrying (for life) the first woman you date.
• Having kids by 22
• having all the stress and responsibility that comes with being the sole provider with that, again at an extremely young age
• Coming home every day (until you get married) with the knowledge that there might be a Vietnam draft card in the mailbox

It feels like 90 percent of online discourse revolves around oppression, trauma, and marginilized groups. Yet everyone still pretends that the boomers all lived some super easy life.