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Comment by SQueeeeeL | Hacker News Reader

The world became big and complicated while the older generation was already fat on their success. It's very hard for a 55 year old manager of a small town bank to understand his daughter literally will not have the same opportunities he had as globalization eats all of the small town opportunities.

She'll almost certainly have to move to a city and probably utilize computers all day, get a serious education in an engineering field. The fact that the parent was so absorbed in their own life this doesn't occur to them until literally their child exiles them from their life for being toxic is just wild.

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> It's very hard for a 55 year old manager of a small town bank to understand his daughter literally will not have the same opportunities he had as globalization eats all of the small town opportunities.

I am 50. I make good money as a software developer in an agrarian community of 50,000. I have 4 children with one left at home.

It IS (and has been) very clear to me that my children are having a harder time enjoying the same opportunities I have. Which makes me profoundly sad and frustrated. The comforts and excess I do enjoy, can't offset that, as much as I am willing to try.

So I'm not sure what the conclusion you're reaching here is? Are you saying that bank managers (and other moderately successful/wealthy people) are inherently self absorbed?

From my experience it's that moderately well-off to well-off older folks rarely recognize that the opportunities that enabled their lifestyle don't exist anymore.

For example, when I was in high school, I was told that just getting any college degree would enable me to get into a good paying career, or talking with older folks about buying a home, they rarely understand how unaffordable homes are now. Lots of older folks also seem to be completely surprised that people in their 20s and 30s don't want kids simply because of the cost. Or student loan debt, how many times have I heard someone in their 50s+ talk about how they worked hard so they didn't have any student loans when they left school while failing to acknowledge how much cheaper school was in the past?

Not all old people are unaware, but a significant amount are oblivious to how much worse the world is today.

Great points. I know I've experience miscommunication going both ways with this.

The problem is that history does not repeat itself. It rhymes with itself. This means that "do it the way we did it" won't work. And is frustrating for younger generations. But it also means it's stupid to ignore the rhymes and ignore near and present and easily lectured history available. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater kind of thing.

It's hard to navigate this. A great example of this (to me) is the "getting a job" thing. The boomer advice would be that you "pound the pavement", "call back", etc. Younger people are frustrated with how out of touch this is, because even if they're willing to try, human resources and other forms of automation have rendered this just about pointless. And yet... the value of networking is stronger than ever. The better advice from the boomer would be to realize that the "technique" they used was about networking with and impressing potential employers, admit that those techniques are no longer relevant, but that the value of networking into an organization still has a lot of influence on whether you're going to work there or not.

This is of course generalized, and prone to a litany of counter exceptions. Because all of these "make life better" are rarely absolute, but more stochastic in nature.

Not sure where you're from, but everyone I know in their 50s (and 60s) lived under the constant threat of losing their job to macroeconomic and market forces beyond their control. Many of them did.

I feel like you skipped a step here. Why would needing to move to a city and use computers cause "toxic" behavior?

I think they mean the parents behave in a toxic way.

They were referring to the parents being toxic, not the child.

Sure, I got that. I just don't see how it obviously follows that the parent's assumed ignorance about the modern economy would automatically lead to toxic behavior. I think that step needs some spelling out.

>Why would needing to move to a city and use computers cause "toxic" behavior?

What if you don't want to do those two things?

I understand this even less. A child being forced by the economy to be a white collar urban worker would automatically cause their parents to behave toxically towards them? Again, I feel like steps are being skipped here. I'm not saying it's wrong, just that I don't understand the connection and would appreciate elaboration.

My interpreting of the use of the word “toxic” is that there is an unbridgeable communication and understanding gap between generations when it comes to professional opportunities. In 2009, I had someone in the older generation tell me that success is simple, just have to get a temp job like they did in finance and rent an apartment.

I'm willing to bet that one of the largest contributing factors to a child's resentment is the gap in expectations between generations (My parents would say to apply for a job in-store, but then I would be told to apply online). I'd tell them that asking in-store doesn't work but my parents just didn't seem to understand that things operate differently now.

I agree to some degree, but what I don't get is the mechanism by which that's assumed to translate into toxicity, let alone enough toxicity to engender estrangement. Parents not understanding their children's world is as old as time, or at least as old as industrialization.

I experienced this myself to a pretty significant degree, and I wouldn't describe my parents' misunderstanding of the modern economy as "toxic" in any way, so my personal data point is not helpful here. Hence my question: what is the mechanism by which this understanding gap is assumed to lead to toxic behavior?

I think “toxic” is a bit hyperbolic. It’s likely they’re just frustrated with how out of touch some baby boomers can be.

Perhaps, but it's different enough in meaning that I'm not convinced hyperbole is plausible, and I don't want to accidentally dismiss an interesting claim by assuming it was just incoherent.

I know middle-aged managers of small town banks. They are encouraging their children to take their careers completely differently.

You might see the entitled “just walk in and apply” from someone who worked their way up into an insulated position at a large Chase branch, but you won’t see it in a modest position in a small town that directly encounters dozens of struggling people every week.

due to the exponential nature of progress, the span between ourselves and our kids will be greater than between us and our parents. whenever I read about how evil the boomers are, I imagine how we will be getting it one day for reasons nobody would have thought of today

> due to the exponential nature of progress, the span between ourselves and our kids will be greater than between us and our parents. whenever I read about how evil the boomers are, I imagine how we will be getting it one day for reasons nobody would have thought of today

Which supports the argument that such rapid change should be slowed down, because it's anti-human.

good luck slowing it down though. It might work in one country, but the result will only be this one country falling behind and becoming an irrelevant province of the earth. so not unless we have a world government one day. Then indeed we could end up in a society that is balanced and stable for indefinite time, like a isolated tribe in the amazonas, with thousands of years at the same stage of progress, just at a larger scale. This is btw one of the possible explanations of Fermi's paradox

> It might work in one country, but the result will only be this one country falling behind and becoming an irrelevant province of the earth.

I really doubt that, but that's one of the boogeymen that scares us away from questioning a lot of things.

It probably comes from false assumptions like "'we're' smart" or the "market makes the ideal decision", so all other paths except the one taken were inferior, perhaps fatally so.

mmh, but really. You can pass laws forbidding certain stuff. But you cannot enforce that globally. Bans on certain weapons do work to some extent, but there are still people creating and using them. And these things are not only unethical, but also not really useful. Every attempt to use them ended badly for those who tried. Now imagine ruling out a technology that is effective and profitable and not so obviously unethical.

You're focusing too much on technology, but OK, let's go with that:

Let's say Canada banned social media tomorrow. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, etc. are all blocked and go dark. Implementation of the ban is perfect. In exactly what way would this cause Canada to "[fall] behind and [become] an irrelevant province of the earth"?

Rapid change already has slowed down. Not too much significant has happened over then past decade. The period of greatest change is already behind us in the early 20th century. Technological and social change can not be ever accelorating. It follows a logistic curve.

I agree that macro scale change did fuel a lot of micro social behavor changes like increase in divorce rates, etc.

In the past family was more sacrosanct because it had more utility for example working on farms together, family cottagw industry. With the industrial revolution the individual became relatively more valuable than before.

I hope you’re right. Maybe in the future we’ll look back on the 20th century as a time of Great Change and the 21st was when we had to figure out how to make it all work.

> Not too much significant has happened over then past decade

That's a bold statement, and IMO a very incorrect one. You just can't see it right now because you're too close.

Electric cars, batteries, and solar power in general have taken off. Autonomous driving draws ever closer.

Covid has changed work culture, education, and lifestyles the world over, probably permanently. And mRNA tech could revolutionize healthcare.

SpaceX made great strides in making launches cheaper.

FAANG became a thing. Social media really came into its own, meaningfully affecting the real world at scale.

The Trump presidency set the world on a radically different course, on issues such as climate change, the West's relationship with China and Russia, and NATO.

Gay marriage became legal in a slew of countries.

This is just the stuff I can recall off the top of my head.

most of these things, in my studied opinion, are either insignificant or overhyped. To pick a few examples driverless cars as a usable transportation commodity are no where near close.

True AI is no where near close.

Spacex is a stunt, not something like inventing AC.

Trump was far less significant than Bush II and 9/11, while that was less significant than the fall of communism, and that in turn was less significant than WWI...

I suppose time will tell.

IMO the only difference between my examples and yours is the amount of time that has passed, giving us perspective.

What's the difference between FAANG now and IBM, HP, Dell, Sun, Yahoo!, and Apple of yesteryear?

Market cap and size relative to the rest of the market.

Prior to the 2010s, Microsoft was the only tech company consistently on the list of top 10 by market cap (IBM and Intel made fleeting appearances). The top 10 used to be more diverse - telecom, healthcare/pharma, oil and gas, finance.

Now that list is absolutely dominated by tech: Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Tencent, and (sometimes) TSMC.[1] It's not a turn-of-the-century-style dotcom bubble either; all of these companies are highly profitable.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...

People with different values and living situations can understand each other if they want to. It is factually true that after the age of majority, family relationships technically become optional. Burning bridges for petty reasons or annoyances would be a terrible idea: there's no one like family.

I've befriended a few sane, educated, elderly homeless people.

Turning your back on your parents if they haven't done anything "wrong" would be coldly, cruelly throwing them away like garbage. That's what happened in Korea and the suicide rates are awful. It's disgusting and embarrassing.

In my case, I haven't talked to my father in 25 years because he is very much a petty, unstable, irrational, unforgiving, un-empathetic, pathetic, unreasonable, hateful, venomous narcissist no one likes, my mother escaped, and he browbeat his late parents to take all of their money when my mother (their nearly adopted daughter/daugther-in-law) needed it more. If it weren't for the terrible way he treated people and the terrible things he's done (like molest my cousin), I would at least still want to know him.

I'm close to my mom.

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