AIBU to ask you your opinion on 9/11 and millennials?

[CorianderDestroysFamilies]

I read a tweet this weekend that went - why do millennials complain all the time and the answer is basically because we saw 2000 die on tv when we were 10 and the world has got worse ever since.
Reading the following tweets made me realise that actually it must have had a massive effect for the mindset of that group, myself included, and I’ve never really thought about it - obviously more so for those in the US but even in the UK I remember seeing it happen and then it does feel like everything has just got worse. The war in Iraq, the demonisation of Muslims, so so many mass shootings and terrorist attacks, it sometimes feels like we’re sitting on the edge of the abyss. I know a lot of this is to do with non stop news and how small the world has become but it just struck a nerve with me.
One thing I read that I’d never heard about before was that Nick Jr and PBS in the US played cartoons all day to basically distract the kids whilst the adults took in what had just happened and that alone made me want to cry.
Anyway I’m not putting it very well but hopefully it’s makes sense as I just wondered what other people thought because I can lose myself in MN debates and there’s always angles that I’ve not thought about.

Millennials have been fucked in so many ways that 9/11, while important, is small compared to the real life circumstances of losing friends in war, being burdened like no generation before for educational debt to lead to underemployment, house prices rising far faster than income, and the game of life becoming so unbalanced that many can't find a way to survive. Some are smart or have family to help out, but many have been fucked beyond belief with a safety net that has been ravaged and jobs that have lost their security (thanks to our gig economy).

I know I'm lucky to have been helped by family but my friends who didn't have that have been couch surfing with no hope of having any sort of quality of life.

I saw that tweet too.

Honestly its making me have a good hard think about what kind of world would a child grow up in if I had one.

And the difference between past wars and tragedies is you didnt have to see them. Now, everything is constantly bombarding you on social media, including graphic videos and pictures.

9/11 was a very life defining moment for a lot of people, it changed the world in a lot of ways.

Yes you’re right, it does feel like the balance has been tipped for this generation and the ones behind. The whole eating avocados but not buying houses thing 🙄 and other such generalisations is such a deflection and actually increases in quick fix joys are a necessary when the future looks grim.

Has anyone got a link to the tweet?

Yes @Butters83 I remember watching the footage and it was repeated over and over again. That’s pretty fucked up for a whole generation of children to watch people jumping to their death and it was shown at schools etc. and then there was the Iraq bombing that was shown in every channel.
We see so much gruesome stuff now that the only way to cope is to become numb to it which can’t be great on a social scale.

twitter.com/itsdansheehan/status/1157929910880485376?s=21 I hope this works!

Wow.

I’ve never really put a lot of thought into it but people harp on about the innocence of days gone by, but that’s sort of true isn’t it?

Things really have gotten worse since 9/11 and millennials have grown up with it.

Gen Z have it worse but don’t know any different. Millennials were so young when the scales tipped.

That’s quite sad.

Hmm I grew up during Chernobyl and AIDs......

CorianderDestroysFamilies

Anyone who brings up avocados can get fucked, especially when it comes from a generation who had the financial ability to gather in pubs on a nightly basis.

Every generation thinks it is the most hard done by. Life today is more visual, things are thrown at us 24/7, it's not just the news at 6 and 10. 9/11 was of course tragic and has a direct impact on history - but I'd possibly say the Third Reich was worse . Others will disagree. History is peppered with genocides, famine, war.

To put everything into perspective:

WAR AND PEACE. SINCE THE END of the Second World War in 1945 there have been some 250 major wars in which over 50 million people have been killed, tens of millions made homeless, and countless millions injured and bereaved.

By far the most costly war in terms of human life was World War II (1939–45), in which the total number of fatalities, including battle deaths and civilians of all countries, is estimated to have been 56.4 million, assuming 26.6 million Soviet fatalities and 7.8 million Chinese civilians were killed.

AlpenCrazy but did you see it live on tv? Were you constantly exposed to graphic videos and pictures? Or did you see it in the daily paper and the evening news?
This is such a huge contributing factor. No one is saying the world is 'worse' now but bloody hell has it changed how we see it.

At the risk of sounding trite, I think Paul Simon (one of the English languages most lyrical lyricists) nailed it:

It's a turnaround jump shot, it's everybody jump start;
^Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts

I was 11 when 9/11 happened and I agree it is very much a stand out moment in my life. I remember I had more fear growing up after that, and like a lot of children had never properly realised that such bad things could happen in the world.

@AlpenCrazy children watched people jump to their deaths on live tv.

And the whole world changed that day. Airports were genuinely scary places to be for a while until we got used to the changes.

And the ramifications were HUGE. The spread of hate and racism, right wing fascism...it call all be traced back to 9/11.

One thing I will say is the generation after millennials has it worse. The reason for that is they have all the difficulty that millennials have, but also are forced in to a social media driven world from day 1. Social media is cancer, especially for the children who are being used as their parents' bread and butter, to become little "influencing" sales people and hated by strangers. These poor kids will be raised never knowing what is a real interaction.

Agree, I was 10 when it happened and the videos of people jumping haunts me.
All I have know is violent attacks. 9/11, London bombings, Paris, the Norway island attacks etc

Its sickens me the 2 shootings in America didn't even seem that out of the ordinary to me.

When I was a child:

1. Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Apartheid was taught in most primary schools.
2. The Berlin Wall fell and as kids we were all taught about why it went up and the atrocities that occured while it was up.
3. The internet was invented.
4. Iraq invited Kuwait. Then we saw the ensuring search for weapons of mass destruction.
5. The atrocities in Romania / Yugoslavia were in every newspaper.

I think these all were far more soul destroying than 9-11 for which I was a young woman at the time. Most kids who weren’t brown weren’t even directly impacted by the racism that resulted and it was just another thing for them to watch on TV - for many the event was about as real as a movie.

Christ I grew up seeing photos of the Holocaust and hearing stories about it.
9-11 was horrific. But no they are not the only children to see horrific things. There is a real lack in many young adults of history.

There’s the whole baying for blood afterwards which is everywhere too. In the press, on social media - there’s so much hate and it’s everywhere and if you happen to be part of the group that it’s okay to hate at that given point it must be terrifying. Obviously not if you’re a white male though, they’re just mentally unwell and it’s well know that white males can’t catch that from each other unlike other ethnic groups 🙄

And I remember as a tiny child seeing footage of famine victims on John Craven's Newsround.

I dunno. I remember the IRA and seeing the effects of their campaigns on the news and I was terrified. I couldn't sleep at night because of it.

The gulf war the first one we saw a lot on tv.

Probably many more things too..::

It's the Millennials who weren't taken in with the bs of 9/11. It's the older generations taking their time to catch up.
I think they are just a lot more savvy than previous generations and question stuff they hear.

The world isn’t any worse but technology means we hear about it and see it constantly in a way that didn’t exist some years ago.

It's not just about watching one bad thing though. It's about how crap the world has been since then. Wars, politics failing, financial crash, no affordable housing. Even a degree and an amazing job doesn't guarantee you a livable wage anymore.

When you watch old TV shows from the 90s you can see how optimistic the world was before 9/11 happened.