politics

I am in my mid 30s and I can honestly I have never worked for a company that was interested in developing my skills.

Every job has tried to devalue me and actively treated any kind of investment in me as a liability or waste of time. Actually when I stop and think about it, every business I have worked for is always trying to fight fires and the people running them say they never have any time to actually train employees. Everyone needs to come in to jobs with the specific qualifications listed needing absolutely zero training even if it is an entry level job in that particular industry.

It doesn’t feel like I am wanted as a human being by my society, my body is wanted for its physical capacity but I inhabiting my body am unwanted. I have no investment in this society and or economy in terms of work because I have always been spit on and treated as useless. Why would a job care about training me and giving me career opportunities when everything is a short term contract or the company will go through layoffs in the next economic cycle just around the corner?

The place I grew up in, my parents generation were the first generation in the area to really populate the rural beach town I grew up in, a lot of people my parents age spent their entire lives there always finding a place they could fit in no matter what stage of life they were in. Not for my generation, housing costs and other local factors lead to the door getting slammed shut on any of us making a life where we were raised… while at the same time we were raised hearing older people talk all the time about how wonderful it is to live their whole lives in this place.

When I think about this and how much my parents generation (boomers) destroyed the planet and locked us into a warming trajectory that will lead to millions and millions (if not billions, honestly who actually knows?) of people dying from climate related wars or famines not to mention the extinction of countless species, I feel this deep sense that there is no bridge between me and my parents nor between my generation and theirs.

We stand, each on opposing cliffs, with the remnants of a bridge far below in the canyon, and I watch as the wealthy of the older generation pack up everything and recede into retirement (“fuck you I got mine”). I turn around and look to the future and see that a division like this, of this supremely existential severity, is unlikely to happen again soon in humanity. For an entire generation of wealthy boomers to so catastrophically foreclose the futures of their children and betray their basic responsibility to pass the future on to the next generation is honestly disgusting and future generations will not and can not make the same mistake.

Boomers always get upset when I say this and say stuff like “Not all Boomers ok!” and yes I get that (I understand there are many people from the boomer generation who care and fought hard!) but I really think older people in general have zero fucking clue how their generation will be remembered for tens of thousands of years at a minimum for destroying the planet.

I don’t consider my parents my family, and I don’t consider the older people around me as possessing an adult wisdom that will be passed on to me about how to steward our lives and the landscape around us, they are part of a sickness of ideology that forces me into a much closer identification with the masses of unborn future humans who will have to also deal with the catastrophic consequences of the later half of the 20th century.

I share nothing in common with the vast majority of older people on the other side of the cliff, especially because most of them pretend it was a normal healthy thing that they blew up the bridge between their generation and the next generation of young people, and I just want to punch older people in the face when they start hemming and hawing about whether climate change is real seeing as they won’t have to really deal with it even though they participated every day of their lives in causing it.

Idk the economic division this article talks about makes perfect sense to me, it feels like a direct embodiment of what it is like to be a young person and feel that your future has been foreclosed.