He and Linda began dating in the 1980s…He was a chef by then. He’d arrived in the United States from Thailand, speaking no English and washing dishes to pay for an electrical engineering degree.
This is the most shocking part of this story to me…
When people complain that their parents were able to afford an education and a home off the back of a single part-time income… yeah that isn’t exaggeration. You really could do that in the 70’s-80’s. Now it takes 4 full-time employed unrelated roommates sharing an apartment to make rent every month.
I don’t know if you were present in the “millennials just need to stop eating avocado toast and pull themselves up by their bootstraps” conversations, but all the rampant hate for the Baby Boomers didn’t come from nowhere. This is why it exists. Our parents (and their parents, depending how old you are) had the easiest and most luxurious existence that has ever been possible in American history, ever, and then pulled up the ladder behind them. When faced with the fact that they’ve made the life they lived impossible for following generations, the popular response is to blame the children and call them lazy.
“When I was your age, I walked into a car dealership with a smile and a firm handshake right after high school graduation and that’s all it took to get a job. A year later I owned a home and was married expecting a child. It’s easy, you just don’t want to work.”
No grandpa, because you and your buddies decided the purpose of your life was to extract all possible value out of everything and leave behind a shriveled up husk of a country, not one single independent detail of that story is still possible.
Kids these days don’t even know the future that was stolen away from them by their own parents or grandparents.
This is the most shocking part of this story to me…
When people complain that their parents were able to afford an education and a home off the back of a single part-time income… yeah that isn’t exaggeration. You really could do that in the 70’s-80’s. Now it takes 4 full-time employed unrelated roommates sharing an apartment to make rent every month.
I don’t know if you were present in the “millennials just need to stop eating avocado toast and pull themselves up by their bootstraps” conversations, but all the rampant hate for the Baby Boomers didn’t come from nowhere. This is why it exists. Our parents (and their parents, depending how old you are) had the easiest and most luxurious existence that has ever been possible in American history, ever, and then pulled up the ladder behind them. When faced with the fact that they’ve made the life they lived impossible for following generations, the popular response is to blame the children and call them lazy.
“When I was your age, I walked into a car dealership with a smile and a firm handshake right after high school graduation and that’s all it took to get a job. A year later I owned a home and was married expecting a child. It’s easy, you just don’t want to work.”
No grandpa, because you and your buddies decided the purpose of your life was to extract all possible value out of everything and leave behind a shriveled up husk of a country, not one single independent detail of that story is still possible.
Kids these days don’t even know the future that was stolen away from them by their own parents or grandparents.
That was before republicans destroyed upward mobility in America.
most people still don’t realize how far we’ve fallen
In the 1980s one could actually afford a degree off of washing dishes on the side or working 3 months in the summer
And yet the boomers just think we’re lazy