Why I hate my parents' generation.

Baby boomers have raped the world, this is true on so many levels. Ex-hippies get very greedy...which makes sense if you accept that hippie culture was for a large part about personal indulgence. I will NEVER be able to buy a house, unless I get rich or manage to get some crazily well paid job. I have a degree...but so does every other fucker, hence devalued. Student loans, shit NHS, public services/council housing sold off. It feels like everything's been creamed and there's not a lot left for anyone in their twenties, thirties or younger. This is clearly not a just and tenable situation.

Whoever said earlier that the trick is to be either very rich or very poor and not in the middle, is probably right.

This applies to other fields... a lot of music/cultural journalists who started doing their thing and got established before the advent of the internet have managed to forge lucrative careers from it. Look at Paul Morley or someone. Try making any money from journalism nowadays. These guys would be working in call centres and submitting pieces for free to various websites. (But they'd get lots of promo CDs and guestlist...)

re: noah baby food

The thing is 30 years ago, only a fraction of people had degrees, so this small elite of young people had better prospects. The percentage this elite takes up now is probably roughly similar, only it applies to people going to a redbrick uni, doing a skilled vocational course (computer science, engineering, etc) and getting a high 2:1 or a first. So you have that same demographic of people fortunate enough to realise what they want to do at an early age and focus on it. The problem is for all the people shoehorned into uni because they felt it was the thing to do, rather than to seek any sort of academic gain (love of the subject) or a career in a specific field. I know people around my age who have recently finished uni/PHDs/masters and are going into well paid jobs, I also know people that have spent three years doing "communications" or something and are now working in call centres.

btw, update your blog, it's class!

cheers swears. updates soon come. have started a story called 'Human Cancer Cannon' which will prolly go up soon...

re: degrees/% of population etc, yes, you're spot on. I think a lot of people were sold a dummy and would have been WAYYY better off training to become plumbers or joiners. Myself, I went to university at 20 after some very hairy drug/crime type teenage years...I did Politics and Sociology at a decent-ish uni, got a 2:i, found it very fulfilling and I did it for the academic aspect, for the learning itself, and the confidence and experience that comes with it. I don't regret it for a minute...but perhaps naively part of me DID think "right, sorted...now I'll get some fulfilling well-paid job and a great lifestyle" and then proceeded to spend my 20s doing all manner of malarkey (and not getting rich). It's down to expectations I guess.

Come to think of it, the friends of mine who earn the most money are those WITHOUT degrees...ones with trades and one who taught himself a high level of computing skills then got in there and blagged, learning more all the way...

Noah Baby Food said:

Whoever said earlier that the trick is to be either very rich or very poor and not in the middle, is probably right.

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Yeah - I read the other day that we now have the ridiculous situation in Britain whereby families/households in the middle income bracket are paying a greater total percentage of their income in tax (one way or the other) than the top earners. This isn't some middle-England-outrage half-truth cooked up my the Daily Mail, it's from official figures. Not exactly what I'd call progressive.

If you think about this whole argument (and it's i've thought about it a lot) where we blame the baby boomers for ruining the world, I think it's not too hard to tie the idea in with what k-punk or others call "hauntology", where if music is "dead" it's because the cultural revolution killed it. Especially in the U.K., where OF COURSE the spectres that haunt a post-imperialist society are going to be ghosts from the cultures it so fiercely colonized.

I guess what I'm saying is that, from an American perspective, "hauntology" is basically another neurosis born of the baby boomers' narcissism on the one hand (like New York magazine said of apocalypse mania), on the other it's the U.K.'s turn to pay the piper and "post-colonialism" has become a cultural theme.

The U.K. really does sound like it's become the U.S. 20 years ago...

Edward said:

Reminds me of that experiment where they put people in pairs and give one of them the choice to either: (a) get £20 and the other guy gets £40 or: (b) get £10 and the other guy gets £5.
Most people chose (b) which says something bad about huan nature innit.

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wow that is crazy. i immediately thought (a)!!! that could be why i'm not rich yet.

nomadologist said:

Especially in the U.K., where OF COURSE the spectres that haunt a post-imperialist society are going to be ghosts from the cultures it so fiercely colonized.

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True, although I think it also has a lot to do memories of a pre-Thatcher socialist/modernist UK, which may or may not be entirely accurately recalled. Public information films, Brutalist architecture, etc...

At that level, it's become a very conscious pose, though, no? If you're talking about hauntology as a sonic set of precepts. Ghost Box and those types are very very very self-consciously posing as hauntologists...

I think in the U.S. we've been at peace with our own hauntedness for quite a while...

You all can kill me now for using the h word and derailing this

nomadologist said:

wow that is crazy. i immediately thought (a)!!! that could be why i'm not rich yet.

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really? B wouldn't be my choice too - seems like a no-brainer to me. who cares what the other guy gets? good luck to him.

i know, right? seems really childish and petty to take less money just so other people get less! what??

Originally Posted by Edward
Reminds me of that experiment where they put people in pairs and give one of them the choice to either: (a) get £20 and the other guy gets £40 or: (b) get £10 and the other guy gets £5.
Most people chose (b) which says something bad about human nature innit.

Click to expand...

wow that is crazy. i immediately thought (a)!!! that could be why i'm not rich yet.

Click to expand...

The whole point is that if you choose (a) you ARE richer.
But the other guy is richer still.
People choose (b) even though it makes them poorer because they are happy to see the other guy poorer than them.

If it's true that most people choose (b), that's ridiculous.
Perhaps they've been indoctrinated into the idea that it's *relative* wealth that's important?

Edward said:

The whole point is that if you choose (a) you ARE richer.
But the other guy is richer still.
People choose (b) even though it makes them poorer because they are happy to see the other guy poorer than them.

Click to expand...

MY whole point is, were I to get more ruthless in my thinking, and do things that keep other people down, I would probably be richer in comparison.

I wish I could remember where i saw it and who did the experiment etc.

I think I could've mis-remembered this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game


sorry for getting it twisted.