A Vital Conversation: Bridging the Generational Divide With Hakeem Anwar

Off the Cuff Public Off the Cuff
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When I was young moving out often meant 4 kids getting an old beach apartment together and riding bikes to jobs until they saved up for a car. People worked bars, restaurants, car washes, retail and the like until they found something better. Some road the bus into town to attend the community college or university. There were many old utility wire spools that served as tables and had interesting airbrush paintings of fish and shells and such that got passed around as people found real furniture. Bean bag chairs were a thing. The local burger king manager would let kids eat something free until they got their first check and she also brought food from home. Wendys would let kids eat off the salad bar for free until they got paid. Those macrame type hammocks in frames were popular as was used lawn furniture because it could be dragged outside on hot nights when everyone sat around outside and cooked on hibachi grills and played music and mingled with the townies that were out at the beach. Most of those cheap apartments had no AC. Young people had a few records, cassettes and coat hangers and foil on old tvs for entertainment. A 6 pack and a couple pizzas over the weekend meant life was good. Iced tea, grilled cheese sandwiches and cans of soup was good eating, so was pb&j with a banana and chocolate milk and no one was fat. Expectations were different. Household goods were gained a few items at a time and you leveled up along the way and passed the old stuff off to another person moving out, had a yard sale, or took it to the Catholic thrift shop where it got recycled into the community. People did not go get into debt at Rooms to Go when they first moved out. For many kids it was expected they would be moving out pretty quickly after graduation.

Sadly I am not sure 3 or 4 high school grads could get a lease today.

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Likely, the best education money could buy. Hang in there.

When I got out of high school, I headed home on the last day, and my dad met me at the front door, with his hand out. He said “Well, kid, the rent starts today.” Mean as that sounds, he did give me a 1 month grace period, in which to find a job. :wink:

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I feel for you. That’s rough. You love your son, but he’s making a train wreck of his life. Let’s pray he comes to his senses and turns it around. I hope someday he appreciates you and all you tried to do for him.

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I feel the same thing. We started out young and poor. I moved straight from my father’s house to living with my husband after our honeymoon week at the beach. We had no idea what our future held, we just loved each other and knew we’d work jobs to pay the bills.
Our first table was the cardboard box the microwave came in. The microwave was a wedding gift. We had many fun meals sitting on the floor around that box.
We drove an old car handed down from his parents which we bought from them for $500. We fixed it when it broke until we could afford a small loan for a slightly better car.

The ways we have given our sons a better start is warning then to avoid debt like the plague, and we bought them their first car. They each had $3000 to choose their first car, so it was always a fixer-upper that at least ran. Years later, they still have those vehicles and are still keeping them running. And they are still debt free. $3000 for a used vehicle worked 10 years ago, but it probably wouldn’t today.

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Funny thing is that all these kids I went to school with did not think that was poor. Poor meant not having a place to live and not having money to buy a soda or a pizza. Moving out with a few things and buying a couple items on pay day was the way it worked for us. Getting your pay check and grocery shopping for a couple pounds of hamburger a pack of hot dogs some ham and cheese and assorted fruits veggies, a box or cereal and a container of milk and canned goods was living large. Watching the cabinets fill up with food as an item or two overlapped into the next week and seeing a few dollars accumulate in savings felt like you were really making it. People put things they were getting rid of at the curb on a given day of the week. Everyone cruised the evening before or early morning to find home funishings, BBQ grills, boxes of dishes, books and book shelves were common finds. Not going back home or asking parents for money was success.

We lived a couple blocks from the beach, so surfing, swimming, shore fishing, peer fishing, riding bikes, walking, playing pool, air hockey and pinball machines at the board walk, were all minutes away. When you were off work you did the things others call being on vacation so it never felt like poverty, it was just the beach life.

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Come to Florida. The number of Boomers living in a gated community thinking that none of what is happening will ever remotely touch them is staggering. They really think DeSantis will keep the evil federal government away. They drone on constantly about how great their life is and those 3rd worlders are needed to keep their grasses cut and lush.

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It’s interesting to see those gates community homes all change hands over and over as people feud with neighbors over HOA issues then leave because of social isolation. About 15-20 years in there is a massive changeover when all the homes need either painted or new siding and new roofs, and the landscaping is all overgrown and the roads need repaired.

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Sad to say, those boomers are everywhere, in bc you just add some self righteousness and moral superiority

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That is an interesting point. We lived rather like that when we first moved out. Our first appartment together was the university family student housing, the rent was so much we had no money left over for basically anything else. All our furniture and most of our household goods came from whatever other students left by the dumpster. My sister moved in with us and because she was only 16 my parents would sometime contribute to rent for her, not often, they didn’t usually have anything extra. Later my grandma also moved in with us and payed for half the rent and my sister and I took care of her.

Compared to the rest of my peers, I absolutely felt poor. I would go out to eat with them, but I would never order anything, and always dreaded someone suggesting we split a check. I couldn’t buy hardly any of my textbooks. I would never buy one without first seeing if the professor actually used it and I really needed it. I read them in the library if they had them, I photocopied necessary worksheets. When I had my son I brought him to class with me and nursed him in class. I definitely felt starving while I was pregnant with him, my mother bought me like 10 meals for the dining hall and i would judiciously use them on a day when i could spend the whole day there eating, plus I would sneak food back for later in my bag. There were only a handful of “poor” kids in our department and we all knew who they were, I don’t think any of them were quite as poor as I was though, they all had textbooks.
I think things like this used to be more normalized, but today it seems even the poor kids have so much help, grants, scholarships, assistance, that they aren’t really that poor.

Today though, any situation even slightly similar to this is used as an excuse not to have kids, not to start a family. Yes, it is hard to have a family when you are broke, but it is worth it, and honestly it’s not quite as hard as people let pn. Babies don’t need much. A few clothes, diapers (we did cloth- way cheaper and you can reuse them for the next kid), and if you are nursing they don’t really need food even for quite a while. Sleep with them, don’t need a crib. A good carrier is nice, you can get one used easy. There is such a prevalence of cheap, used,baby items now days, thinking you need to wait to have children because you need to buy all this stuff is really nonsensical.

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I see that kids paying 50-80 dollars extra on their cellphone bills so they can have a flagship phone instead of the free one. I see them drinking expensive coffee and sporting tats and piercings and sucking on a vape or cigarette while they complain about how hard life is and that the boomers are screwing them.

Somewhere the priorities and values are different.

I understand the challenges have changed but expectations and entitlement have also.

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How does anyone make it in this rigged system? I think the kids are an obvious victim but we’re all going to get it in the end. Take a look at this chart from this morning. This level of manipulation is unsustainable. Pray for our protection during the times ahead.

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I think those are poor decisions but I sorta get it. This is their way of dealing with a world that has left them behind. They’ve been left so far behind, they may as well enjoy the little things. They could get all the tattoos and cell phones they want and it wouldn’t even equal what most pay in property taxes. Those boomer level jobs are few and far between these days, long gone are retirement pensions.. It’s a new world, be glad you’re not young and average.

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Smoking a pack and a half a day is 300.00 dollars a month. Extra cell costs above that required to work and conduct normal email and texting etc 60. Spotify and Netfix 30.00. Coffee and eating out instead of home 200. Make an average piercing and tat per year a monthly cost 50.

640 a month in luxuries before alcohol, vapes, lottery tickets, marijuana, nails, hair color, movies, concerts, games, clubs, trips, jewelry, cable TV, clothes and other luxuries are in the mix.

Add to this the fact alot of it is done with CC or other debt and the cost of the chosen luxuries are even higher.

Sadly kids are creating lifestyles that lock them into where they are and they don’t see it. I am not a boomer but just old enough that I don’t consider the things listed above necessities. They are things you do after meeting obligations and goals. Luxuries!

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Reading all these comments on how we boomers made things work in our youth with minimal money and plenty of work, creativity, making-do etc. reminds me that we really were resourceful and hard-working. My story is similar. Amongst my friends, a work ethic was a given and included being competent at work, not just showing up. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t luxury living. It was fun and productive. We can take pride and remember fondly, and be glad of the skills acquired.

With youth now, though my sample is small, I notice very few have that sharpness of being able to figure out what’s needed and do it. With some delightful exceptions, there’s something distracted and hapless even with smart and personable teens when it comes to work, and an obvious lack of investment.

It’s odd and frustrating but comparison isn’t useful because it isn’t a stand-alone characteristic. Conditions in the world are so different now. We had far less easy, meaningless distraction as a normalized mainstream addiction. There was no internet. TV was as bad as it got, if you had one, or getting lost in a book. No cell phones or social media. Imagine being born into a world where almost everybody was already 1000% entrained to their cell phone, and it was normal living to spend half your waking hours looking at a screen.

Also, it never, EVER crossed my mind that banks might collapse, steal my savings or be busy devaluing my spending power, or that the entire monetary system was a)broken and b)fraudulent and c)going to fail in my lifetime. Criminal activity amongst political and other leaders was understood to be an exception, and punishable by law, not the very fabric of the system. The worst motivation was greed, not global domination through digital control of every citizen. Pedophilia was absolutely reviled and second only to pushing an A-bomb button in the list of human abominations.

Much more of the natural world, which I think we should occasionally remember is actually our HABITAT, without which we do not live, was still intact. Even if we ignore the existential threat of habitat degradation for a moment and only think about resources, back then we were not at or near the end of any particular resource. Even the fisheries still had fish in them.

So I don’t think comparison or competition between our youth years and the youths of now is going to help. The unrecognized anchors that stabilized our youthful decades are obviously MIA to anyone who takes a second look, and that is the massively daunting reality current youths are attempting to mature into.

I wonder if it’s more like a case-by-case exercise in human connection. Is there any child, youth or young adult we can learn to be present with, work with, stand our ground with, learn from? Maybe not sometimes. Maybe yes. Maybe it no longer matters much that our youth times were so different, and we were so different then. Maybe a position of blame in either direction is a distraction.

I’m glad to hear from Hakeem that spiritual awareness, emotional awareness and healing, community building and working with the land are such a huge part of his sustenance. I think our strengths and limitations in these realms define our potential as a species. We can’t overwrite our trauma with something new and fantastic. It will not have space in our collective psyche until we develop mastery with our pain, grief, rage and disconnection and clear some space for deeper joys. Now THAT is daunting, though it is also work I hunger for.

Susan

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Yes!
I had coffee with a friend yesterday who is probably at least five years younger than I, and I can tell they are struggling financially. Why though? He husband is an attorneys, his salary is public information and it is far above the median household incomes in our area.

I bet they have a lot of debt though. They have two newer cars (loan?), bought a 650k house, you can get a decent starter home for half that here, and I bet they both have student loans too. It is nice to be able to live beyond your means but it doesn’t work for long. People seem to think they can keep it up forever.

I think it is definitely harder now, it’s harder to make a decent living and maybe you feel you shuld be able to afford basic expenses if you are working full time, but also maybe people need to learn to do without more and get creative.

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He talks as though this is a new thing. It’s been going on since time immemorial - certainly the raping kids stuff. Also nations/international entities exercising power over nations by various means - eg the catholic church.

So it’s a bit daft to:

  1. Talk as though America was recently (or at any time) pure and bathed in goodness and the American Dream

  2. That if we don’t fix this >2,000 year old problem NOW, we’re “done” because it will suddenly have been going on for too long.

It lacks any sense of time or perspective of history. But that’s a common American trait.

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I can see why folks hope that this might be true… but I don’t see it at all. In fact, it’s coming faster and faster, and Elon for one can see a path around the energy constraint problem by placing the compute power on a large network of satellites in space, where always-in-the-sun solar can achieve 5X the solar flux and cooling is free. I work with various technologies that are aiming at incrementally increasing the power efficiency of datacenters on earth.

What is really happening? This;

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2021831201787461915

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All the older people on this thread:

“Everything I got was all down to me and how hard I worked and how much I suffered. There was no rising tide that lifted all boats or anything. No no no. It was 100% me. Therefore, anyone else who doesn’t have what I have is morally defective in some way.”

In another sentence, they will maybe acknowledge that the job market is tough today, wages are low and bills are high. But it’s like talking to a ChatBot with no memory. A sip of tea and then they are off again with their “I worked so hard and suffered so much” narrative. With a side order of: “I am aware of one young person who is lazy (maybe one raised by a friend - or by themselves per this thread) so they all must be. That’s it, that’s the answer to all questions on this topic. Aaaah.”

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You have a real ageist, generationalist chip on your shoulder dude. We should be able to talk about these things, i.e. how life and opportunity may have changed over time, without trying to characterize people by assumptions about the color of their skin, or their age. You are acting in a bigoted way.

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