When I was a kid in the early 80s, “no tomorrow” meant nuclear annihilation. These days… well, we have so many more options and possibilities!
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Funny thing: both my nieces (ages 8 and 6) HATE ads. Not even the clever ones. Nothing inspired them to learn how the remote worked as the desire to avoid ads. My eldest niece makes fun of her dad because he told her when he was a kid there was no way to skip them (we’re still trying to figure out how to tell her we had an aerial and a black & white set – that might totally make her head explode).
Whether it’s on TV, Youtube, or anywhere else – both nieces want to skip the ads. They will protest very loudly if this is not possible, and make a point of ignoring the ad.
They were heavily into Disney princesses for a long time, but lately that’s shifted to Star Wars. So tie-in toys etc. they get into, but not anything just advertised.
But they also love handmade stuff – the older one has started drawing her own comic strip. It would be interesting to see what a marketer would make of them.
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Oregon Trail was pretty popular in schools in the States from the mid-late 80s to the mid-late 90s. I’m not sure how that ends up being a small slice of the born between 1980-2000 pie…
I mean I’m solidly millennial and Green Day was popular almost all the way through college, plus we were heavily influenced in high school by bands like Rage Against the Machine (Battle of Los Angeles was huge when I was entering high school.
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Often the older person is simply not being replaced, so that job no longer exists.
I got really turned off to consumerism just by reading Mad magazine (and Consumer Reports) during the late 60’s/early 70’s. Made me realize how much crap’s out there I don’t need. Didn’t help keep our house from getting full of stuff, but I rationalize it by thinking that most of it is tools and supplies for a number of hobbies. We both are hoarders by nature, though, which I guess is related to consumerism.
I have only two watches though. The one I wear every day, and a backup. Who needs more than that? On the other hand, I have a bunch of fountain pens. “It’s a hobby!” Well . . .
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In my case it was an older teacher dying mid-term, so they were kind of stuck. I did get laid off at the end of the school year.
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Figures. That’s sad.
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Hear, Hear! I sometimes get positively nostalgic for the threat of nuclear annihilation. It was nominally terrifying, in a sort of abstract way, but I knew if it ever actually happened it would likely be quick and relatively painless, as we lived near an Air Force base that was presumed to be a target.
And if you did manage to survive the initial exchange, well, all you had to do was stick it out for a few years in an underground bunker and then emerge to be pioneers in the strange new world of nuclear radiation-induced mutations.
The disaster scenarios of today are all basically death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts, in comparison. Climate change? Global pandemic? Economic collapse? All are long, drawn-out affairs with no dramatic punch, just an endless stream of incrementally worse individual humiliations, indifferent in their application – but stinging nonetheless, until the inevitable end and final indignity transforms into a barely-comprehended release.
I mean, honestly, the best I can hope for today is a giant meteor strike (but I’m not holding my breath).
I guess what I’m trying to say is that when the world ends, I’d prefer the bang over the whimper.
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There’s definitely no Mr. Rogers or Jim Henson out there right now advocating for children to be educated and loved, free from corporate influence (though interesting in the Mr Rogers clip above to have him mention Ford’s sponsorship of his program). I know we all grow up to be consumers and kids want to participate, I just find it jarring.
There was a great YA book I read when I was about 11 which was an old, not well known book. I wish I remembered the name of it. The story is a memoir style book about a boy, the author (but I think it was fictional), writing as an adult about his childhood. In the stock market boom of the 20s, this boy figured out that if he bought penny stocks he could get a pretty certificate of stock ownership. He bought a lot of stock and had certificates all over his walls. He liked feeling like he had all this stock, liked the certificates. Then the crash happened. His dad would bring his friends in to see his stock certificates and they all would laugh.
I Guess kids have always been interested in participating in consumerism but now I’d thd first time they’ve been given such a big opportunity.
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That makes sense. I was born in 85 and my wife in 86; and we grew up on opposite ends of the political, economic, family, US geographically, and any other spectrum. We both land smoothly into what the article describes. We both played Oregon Trail (or the like) in elementary school evolving into Carmen San Diego and stuff. We didn’t have computers in our houses until we were a little older, and had all those early internet experiences because 56K or two phone lines was crazy expensive. In high school p2p file sharing was monstrous, so once high speed internet became commmon is when it took over. Facebook was out for college students when we were freshmen, and went global before we left. Those are considered the true millennial experiences, and not a gap generation really.
But I would also say one of the most millennial things millennials do is deny they are millennials, usually reserving the right to complain about them along with everyone else.
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I was born in 72. So 100% GenX. But I probably have more in common with my brother who was born in 1960 than I do with you and yet the age gaps are about the same.
As always, generational dividing lines are arbitrary and porous. 
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Hmm, interesting. I was born '69 but a lot of that applied to me.
I learned to program on an Apple II+ in 6th grade - one of a group of 6 kids in programming. We learned to blink random dots random colors, and we played Pong. The computer was hooked to a TV set because monitors weren’t a thing yet.
I played Castle Wolfenstein at a friend’s house on her Apple II+.
My brother and I had a TII computer in high school. We had one or two cartridge games we quickly tired of. We studied the programming instructions in the 3 ring binder that came with it - what else would one do with a computer but programming? - and we programmed a stock market game in BASIC. We even learned to program arrays.
My mom was the one who introduced Oregon Trail to us. She was a school teacher and she had it as part of her gifted ed classroom. We would sometimes play it on our TII, or maybe it was at her school? Vague memories of journeys West and ASCII graphics.
Typewriters were the norm when I entered college, but some kids had computers. By the time I left, more and more kids had computers, and I would use the computer lab more often than my typewriter.
I learned PASCAL in college and learned email when I was given access to the mainframe computer. I had a weird email relationship with a guy who volunteered for the video production club with me - a guy I would hardly give the time of day to in person. My friends and I used to start chain emails and then the head of the Computer Department would get mad at us because it would hog up too much data.
I got onto CompuServe at my first job through dialup, and had a programmer co-worker who would show us how he accessed BBS sites, though that seemed too techy to me. My brother, meantime, was seriously into AOL- spending about $300/mo on access to chat rooms.
I first got on a fast connection and into the WWW when I was 27. Most people didn’t have it, but I worked at BellSouth Cellular’s R&D Lab, so we had a T1 connection. I don’t think there was much to find then. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I was living in the DC area and it seemed like more and more people were getting online. My yahoo email address has only 7 characters - I still have that email address. I moderated the largest and longest running discussion board related to yoga - in the years before Facebook came around and message boards were all the rage.
Guess you could say I’m an Oregon Trail Pioneer.
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Haha, see!? Its not just when you were born, its what you were born into!
We had computers in our house growing up long before anyone else because my Dad and brothers were engineers. We didn’t get internet for soooooo long though cuz Dad didn’t see the point. LOL - I was not computer literate, never did any programming or anything like that all, but I was far more comfortable navigating DOS to find the games hidden in there than a lot of people my age.
In 1995 when I went to college I had a home computer and internet and a printer. Which almost no one I went to school had. IRC baby! IRC all the time! 
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It’s weird to see people who are growing up with the Internet and Social Media; how it is so different for them. I really liked watching The Americans because it reminds me what it was like to only have the Big 3 channels and mass media as an avenue into the larger world.
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“An ad that’s bad will be spoofed in Mad” - from their parody of Pygmalion in which a nice young man is turned into a copywriter. Great stuff.
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Oh yes! “My Fair Adman,” based on the play, “You’re A Pig, Malion.” Malion was the young man’s name, and he looked a lot like Frank Sinatra, IIRC.
That was the kind of thing I learned when I was a kid. Capital of Iowa? Nope.
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One of the better surplus finds my public school teacher parents salvaged was an actual mimeograph machine. So many D&D character sheets and Car Wars car sheets were made on that.
I can still remember the smell.
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