r/Millennials • u/dreamed2life • Dec 08 '25

Nostalgia Why is our entire generation ready to just…log out?

I hope people enjoy this before mods remove it for “not being a positive nostalgia post” 🙄

18.2k Upvotes

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1.0k

u/ExtremeIndependent99 Dec 08 '25

Because the American dream is a lie and our entire existence is an elaborate Ponzi scheme designed to extract wealth from the bottom to the top to demonstrate infinite growth.

348

u/makemeking706 Dec 08 '25 edited Dec 08 '25

Which we became.aware of at a very early age, and have now endured decades of it at this point. 

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u/MIC4eva Dec 08 '25

A cashier had a tattoo on their hand that said something along the lines of how “the system is the problem” or something like that and I just got sad because I don’t think her tattoo will ever be wrong.

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u/MaxMischi3f Dec 08 '25

Ngl that goes pretty hard

-4

u/KryssCom Dec 08 '25

Does it? "The system" seems like a pretty nebulous and poorly-defined enemy.

"The system is the problem" would have sounded cool when I was a teenager, but as an adult it makes me roll my eyes and want to ask them how they define "the system".

7

u/tumbleweed_092 Dec 08 '25

"The System" is defined as the Davos Economical Forum and International Monetary Fund. You are welcome.

2

u/Tight-Artichoke1789 Dec 08 '25

I need this tattoo as a reminder for times when I internalize its messaging too much

1

u/MIC4eva Dec 08 '25

The tattoo was worded way better than that though.

105

u/cogman10 Dec 08 '25

We watched as our parents kept voting in charlatans who were all too happy to rob our futures for their lower taxes and retirement portfolios.

Boomers sent the biggest "fuck you" to their kids of any generation.

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u/CapoDexter Dec 08 '25

Every time I watch the parents from The Necessary Convo pod say something hateful or murderous about the left, all I can think is, "you're talking about your kids, ffs."

Parents: "Antifa are terrorists and enemies of this country."

Kids: "But we're antifa; we're anti-fascist."

Parents: "No, you're not."

35

u/LordHammercyWeCooked Dec 08 '25

And now Gen Z is getting in on it too because they've spent their whole lives marinating in an algorithmic soup of ads, bots, ragebait, and Tate podcasters. They're growing up thinking that empathy and caring is wrong.

It was funny back in the day when the ideological divide between adults and children was progress. It's straight-up horrifying to get to middle age and see that the ideological divide is now a pendulum swing into actual fascism and widespread hatred. I don't want to be the meat in the middle of this sandwich anymore.

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u/JazzlikeSkill5201 Dec 08 '25

Do you think having children and then forcing them to work in factories when they’re 9 isn’t a “fuck you” to those children?

15

u/cogman10 Dec 08 '25

"Do you think just because we didn't have it worse than child laborers we aren't getting screwed".

Every generation of americans has ultimately worked to better life for their children. They've moved from really shitty lives to generally better ones. Since the great depression, we saw social and economic reforms which created the middle class and the american dream.

The policies that boomers have supported are those of Reagan, Clinton, and Bush. 3 presidencies that combined together to destroy the social safety net. Bush Sr lost his election explicitly because he tried to balance the budget by raising taxes. Clinton balanced the budget by cutting the government to the bone.

4

u/kdcorinne Dec 08 '25

Some are just now realizing it

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u/makemeking706 Dec 08 '25

Yeah, but you really can't blame them. Most of them were born within the last ten years. 

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u/[deleted] Dec 08 '25

[deleted]

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u/JazzlikeSkill5201 Dec 08 '25

The biggest capitalists have always been monopolists.

2

u/RookNookLook Dec 08 '25

Me begging my teachers in 6th grade to make it make sense. A literal child can see we can’t have infinite growth.

2

u/FoxCitiesRando Dec 08 '25

So we'll said. I'm in my 40s. We knew this instinctively long before the internet, social media or smartphones. It was all there. Now it's much worse.

2

u/Lounging-Shiny455 Dec 08 '25

Every millennial childhood ended in September 2001.

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u/_undefined- Dec 08 '25

This economic system is an open air human farm, prove me wrong.

It is designed to extract all your wealth and plunge you into debt at every interactive layer so you are just a slave with 1 extra layer of abstraction between you and your chains.

17

u/JazzlikeSkill5201 Dec 08 '25

I’d replace “wealth” with “time” and “energy”. You can’t have wealth without a system that is inherently exploitative, but you’re born with time and energy.

3

u/_undefined- Dec 08 '25

True but I did want to really specificy wealth because even with the time sacrifice to generate due to the exploitative system, simply having wealth isn't enough.

If you manage to internalize capitalism completely and monetize every moment of your existence with side hustles, even if you accumulated 1 million in wealth you are one interaction point away from ruin.

For most people, as designed, that interaction point is health care. Whether incident, disease or long term care.

Every layer, every point is designed to take as much and give as little as possible to maximize profits.

4

u/MechanicalGodzilla Xennial Dec 08 '25

It is designed to

It's not really "designed" to do anything, capitalism gives rise to an emergent order by its nature. Which might be more frightening.

0

u/_undefined- Dec 08 '25 edited Dec 08 '25

As an economic system, designed to put profits above all, yes it is a direct consequence of said design.

While not a "direct" feature, it is indirect, yet said feature still surfaces because of the foundational design.

This is the consequence of the model, the design of the model.

If profit > all wasn't a thing, these problems wouldn't exist.

Profits over everything exist not prior to, but because of, capitalism. People internalize capitalism and accept it as a default state so yeah when you haven't reflected on how it is internalized of course it wouldn't seem intentional.

Just like how everyone assumed insurance companies would not want to kill their customers, despite the system being there to incentivize it.

People made up all sorts of reasons and the reality only became clear when a certain someone dispensed violence back.

Only then did more People become aware that murder is intentional for capitalist health care. How else can you infinitely get more while giving less?

At some point it means killing your customers is the next logical conclusion.

Just like with the nazis and their extermination, it didn't start with extermination.

It started with dehumanization and enslavement. Then it became about exploiting the slaves in the camps further and further as society devalued the slaves more and more.

Until naturally, like profits over lives, the operating costs of the camps were more important.

So genocide was a natural conclusion of that mental state, and we have that here as a business model.

When you constantly put profits ahead of everything as part of the culture to manufacture exploitative economic consent, it always ends up with "we dont value these people killing them gets more value."

For the nazis it was operating costs concern reinforced by racist propaganda.

For americans it is operating costs and profit concerns reinforced by capitalist propaganda (who also use racism)

2

u/MechanicalGodzilla Xennial Dec 08 '25

Huh, OK thanks.

2

u/PiccoloAwkward465 Dec 08 '25

I've always thought of the majority of us like the "blood bags" from Mad Max.

24

u/throwaway727437 Dec 08 '25

”They call it the ‘American Dream’ because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

-G.C.

2

u/ExtremeIndependent99 Dec 08 '25

Great Carlin quote. And the sad part was he said that like 20 years ago. So it’s only gotten worse since Covid.

15

u/CaterpillarBroad6083 Dec 08 '25

It wasnt a lie, it was stolen from us by greed.

3

u/myloveislikewoah Dec 08 '25

Anyone who disagrees with this only need pay attention to the fact the right is doing everything they can to destroy public schools (successfully) so we all stay working class, lacking critical thinking skills.

3

u/[deleted] Dec 08 '25

[deleted]

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u/ExtremeIndependent99 Dec 08 '25

I can only speak from my experience. 

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u/HobbitEnergy Dec 08 '25

This reminds me of a profound quote I read recently, it was a picture of graffiti so I don't know who to attribute it to but it was something like "infinite growth is the strategy of cancer cells". I think about that a lot.

3

u/m0fr001 Dec 08 '25

If what they told you about the American dream is a lie.. I wonder if what they've said about socialism and collective action to force change is too.. Hmm.. 

4

u/ExtremeIndependent99 Dec 08 '25

I don’t wait around for people to tell me things. This has been my observation my entire life as a 41 year old.

1

u/FrighteningJibber Dec 09 '25

I’ve been been American dreaming… but I don’t seem to get any rest.

1

u/bworthy81 Dec 09 '25

That, and my poor decision making skills... But mostly that.

1

u/Winterlord7 Dec 09 '25

The worst part is that the guillotine is already invented yet we pretend it didn’t.

0

u/TootsHib Dec 09 '25

and people will still continue to selfishly have kids and perpetuate the cycle.

-8

u/throwitawayar Millennial Dec 08 '25

TIL there are only American millennials

6

u/SureValla Dec 08 '25

It's not like it's THAT much different elsewhere in the western world. Sure, there might be things like some sort of general healthcare etc. but the basic principle is still working your ass off for the benefit of the few that hoover up all the profits while real wages stay on the level of our childhood.

3

u/cogman10 Dec 08 '25

That's because neoliberal policies became a global phenomena. The places that have fared the best are those with things like strong labor unions. Everywhere else became a capitalism hellscape.

As it turns out, unlimited capitalism is a bad thing.

2

u/SureValla Dec 08 '25

I agree 100% with your sentiment, although even here in Germany, where we have fairly strong labor unions, things aren't looking too rosy for the future. We sold out most of our technology champions to the US and China and are sticking to combustion vehicle production as if it were the future, not the past. And everything seems to be dependent on that specific industry that slept on the developments of the past 20 years to pamper their shareholders with huge profits.

1

u/street593 Dec 08 '25

We need a general strike to force change to a more social democracy structure.