To ask - Which living generation do you think has had it the hardest?

[catsinpinkhats]

• Silent Generation: Born 1925-1945.
• Baby Boomers: Born 1946-1964.
• Generation X: Born 1965-1980.
• Millennials: Born 1981-1996.
• Generation Z: Born 1997-2012.
• Generation Alpha: Born 2013-2025.

I think each generation has had varying degrees of things that are hard, socially, financially, politically etc.

My grandparents were of the silent generation and there's no doubt their childhood and young adulthood was hard during and after the war. Plus many men still did national service.

I am a millennial and most of my generation is old enough to remember life pre-internet but also young enough to embrace it. Things are hard for my generation and younger due to house prices etc, but society is more open generally with more possibilities.

We all think our generation has it harder, but what do you think if being objective?

Yes to this. And the thought of conscription makes me feel ill. Sons, brothers etc

I worry greatly about future generations and how their lives will be negatively impacted by the internet.

I am a millennial, and home internet use began when I was a pre-teen. As my parents had no concept of how dangerous the internet can be, I wondered about online freely without restriction as many of my peers did - usually in chat rooms. I was fortunate in that I didn’t see anything illegal or damaging. I certainly engaged in conversation with strangers who may well have been adults, believing them to be children my own age. I have close friends who took enormous risks online as teens - one girl I knew went and met up with multiple ‘boyfriends’ she’d met online whom she had never seen.

Now it all seems so much worse. Children are so vulnerable online - it’s as if my generation bearly learnt a thing.

The internet has revolutionised the world and bought us closer - but the challenges we face with it now are terrifying.

I’m mid-Gen X and we had (admittedly not many) computers at my bog-standard secondary school and I had a Commodore 64 around the mid-eighties.

I would say generation X but I'm from northern Ireland and the time frame they lived their young years through was so tough to put it mildly and everything that followed

Alpha, then Z

I'm an older millennial and have zero trouble with computers!

The Silent Generation for sure, although anyone born at the tail end of that can’t be compared to someone born in 1925.

The previous generation to the silent one didn’t have it easy either.

I read the Nella Last diary recently and it’s really heartbreaking to read the effect the war has on her young adult sons born before 1925 and their friends.

This

First and last from your list. Those who lived through WW2 and the aftermath, and todays youngest generation who face a bleak future. Those in the middle have generally had it better than the youngest and oldest generations.

It’s not hatred it’s envy- I’m jealous of reasonable housing, free uni, women affording to stay home because 1 income was enough. It’s not hatred

Silent generation.

After that it’s complicated and depends on your circumstances and the impact of social restrictions.

I don’t think you can judge it until our lives are over anyway. If on my aged deathbed I’ve not lived through any war that directly impacts me and my loved ones, and not lost loved ones in a terrible tragedy, I’ll consider myself to have been born in a good time and a good place and count myself luckier than the majority of humans who’ve ever lived!

The silent generation without a shadow of a doubt. They really knew suffering. War, real poverty and hardship that we can't even imagine today. Children with little luggage labels gathering on railway platforms to be sent away from their families to strangers in the countryside for their own safety..... absolutely incomprehensible suffering. My grandparents were of that generation and never spoke about it. They must have endured terrible trauma 🥲

I think that the differences between generations are dwarfed by the differences between richer and poorer within each generation.

i was born in 1972. We fundraised at primary school for a BBC micro. There was a “computing” course at secondary school (taught by a woodwork teacher). From half way through my degree (which I started in 1990) we weren’t allowed to hand in handwritten essays and everyone had a Pc, borrowed someone else’s or spent hours in the computer labs. My first job was 100% on a PC using the same excel (plus some SQL) I use today - I had a basic excel proficiency test as part of the interview and I knew nothing so had had to get my friend to show me the basics. I suspect schools are still poor at teaching this stuff - my school-aged DCs use iPads for school work and have no idea how to use have MS packages. This does my head in as they have laptops and they are missing out on developing some simple skills without even realising they’ve done it - only the kids who do courses in “Business & Admin” seem to have any knowledge of this stuff but most of it they don’t need to actually go to lessons to get taught.

Yes, you quite likely had a computer in 81, but they weren’t standard office equipment. From the 70s scientists would expect to use computers, and they were used in financial fields, but not for general wordprocessing and general stuff, so you wouldn’t be looking for general office staff to have IT skills. I was in a highly academic scientific organisation through the 70s and 80s. No personal computers for staff, one mini computer which you could use if you came up to the computer room, no email, typists to type up research papers. JANET (joint academic network) was around but very limited.

I fastened on the BBC because that marked the start of personal computers (not just BBC) being used by adults for word processing and the sort of stuff we do nowadays, rather than everyone with a computer having to learn to program it (how many people today know a programming language?) I suppose I’m overestimating what people remember of their childhood years, so I was surprised at a Gen X not remembering a time before everyone being expected to be computer literate.

In some ways the Silent Generation are still struggling.

My mum is 87. She's a widow living on a measly pension, trying to heat her home with sky high energy bills. She never got the hang of smartphones or computers and every company expects you to "go online" or have an email address to do anything. Technology has moved on in wonderful ways, but a lot of elderly people have been secluded because the world has moved too fast for them to keep up.

Also, there are huge time differences within each generation. Bob was born in 1925. He spent much of his childhood in poverty, often without having enough to eat, and at the age of 18 was called up to fight, and spent the next two years in war zones. Joe was born in 1945. He spent his childhood under conditions which were physically tough compared with nowadays, but he always had adequate if unexciting food; saw steady improvement in conditions over time; and was never directly involved in a war. Yet both are 'the Silent Generation'.

Joan was born in 1946. She left school at 15 and had no opportunity for higher education. She may not have had an opportunity for paid employment at all; if she did, her employers could openly pay her less than a man: she would have no legal redress against this until she reached her 30s. Linda was born in 1964. She had schooling until at least 16, and if she chose, could continue into the sixth form and had some chance of higher education. She may have experienced sex discrimination at work, but it wasn't an open, legal policy. And she had far more options than Joan about choosing whether and when to have children, and how many to have. On the other hand, Joan grew up in a guaranteed full-employment state. and Linda started adult life under Thatcherite austerity with three million unemployed. Yet both are 'Boomers',

I agree with you, however during the war our queen was here, working as a mechanic and doing her best for the war effort and I'm sure she'd have driven a tank through Germany if she was allowed

Any generation that goes through a war - my mum was in the women's army (ATS) and dad was a serving soldier when WW2 began and was in for the duration.

I realise i’m talking at cross purposes. You were at school, and expected to become computer literate. But for those already in the workplace, computer literacy was not generally expected until the second half of the decade. So gen X were expected to become computer literate, but spent their early years in a society where computer literacy wasn’t a universal requirement

I'm so sorry that you and your mum are struggling. It's absolutely shocking x

It would surely be older Gen Xs that might have been in this position though, not early Millennials.

My DCs have had a much more materially comfortable childhood than I had. I was absolutely haunted by the idea of nuclear war when I was young and I know my DM worried about it a lot in the context of the potential impact on her children’s future.

And of course since she’s over 70, even if she’s on a full state pension, it’s still £47 a week less than the pension of someone retiring today (or only about 3/4 of what pensioners under 70 get).

The Silent Generation. Every one of them would have lived through terrifying times.

It would surely be older Gen Xs that might have been in this position though, not early Millennials Yes, I was replying to people questioning my previous post which was in a reply to a Gen X who said she couldn’t remember a time when there wasn't a requirement for everyone to be computer literate.

The question of Millennials exposure to computers was a separate conversation that I didn’t take part in.