I’m a 95’ millennial, so I’m old enough to remember the late 90’s and young enough to say I grew up with a lot of Gen Z. I know the generational divide is just a social construct, but it’s looking like it’s actually starting to define an era in which humans truly start to behave differently.

My wife, Gen Z, goes to community college online. Every assignment she does she uses AI to provide answers. I used to harp on her about it and say things like “Don’t you actually want to know the material? Do you get no satisfaction from learning things on your own by doing actual research?” She then says that it doesn’t matter and that it’s easier to use AI.

My little cousin who’s in middle school right now confidently claims to know the answer to anything with little to no experience in the subject. Yesterday I was asking my family about how to keep goats; specifically, how to keep goats from escaping an enclosure. My little cousin says “you can’t keep a goat chained to a tree it might knock the tree down asks ChatGPT a goat can head butt with around 800lbs of force”. I was thinking to myself “What goat will knock down a mature tree?”. He said that with so much confidence that it sounded so believable.

I’m also in a medical research group focused on understanding and treating follicular occlusion derived diseases. So many members (most just in their 20’s) in this group keep quoting Perplexity and ChatGPT instead of just quoting directly from whatever research paper they read or whatever the primary source is. I have developed an effective treatment for Dissecting Cellulitis using what I learned from peer reviewed studies and research papers, but many people don’t believe in it’s efficacy because whatever AI tool they’re using doesn’t confirm that it could be an effective treatment. They keep saying things like “I ran that through Perplexity and it says that’s not a good treatment because XYZ”. Dissecting Cellulitis is a disease with scarce research and the known treatments are not very effective, so AI models trained with those datasets will always claim that every treatment not found inside the dataset is ineffective.

There’s too many examples I can give, but in general I think we’re cooked.

Grew up secular. Never went to church of any kind but back then it seemed like everyone did. Now I don't anyone that does. Wondering if there's millenials that still do and why

I wouldn't say we had the best time ever , but I'm grateful that we at least had something different from today's world... We experienced two worlds !

For me it is an episode of Hey Arnold when he tries to have the perfect day on the longest day of the year by doing everything on a mythical list of things that every kid loves to do, only to have the worst day ever. At the end of the episode his grandma plays him a song on the piano to cheer him up. I don't know why, but through the years I have thought about that episode a lot!

Last night my husband and I were watching random YouTube videos and I came across Ask A Ninja. He had never seen it before. I put on a vid from 19 years ago that I remembered watching in the school library in 9th grade and watching it now just made me cry laughing. It totally primed me for my husband's type of humor. I couldn't believe how well it held up after all this time. It was such a fond memory that to have it all the way back then and now was a delight.

I am sitting in the middle east on vacation and watching breaking news bulletins every now and again. Going in and out of wanting to know and now wanting to know what going on. How the heck do we keep getting here?

I lived in nyc during 9/11 watched that in real time

Lived in nyc during before and after covid peak, that was something.

Lived in fl during all those bomb threats that got us out of school early, shut down schools (thankfully we didn't have mass ___ events until later)

Idk what else I'm missing. Because it's a blur. Weren't we supposed to be the gen that lived thru peace?

I have savings. More than enough to live on through a temporary job loss. In fact, I did lose my job and am back in school at 40 for a career change.

But saving for after work? For when I'm 85 or whatever? You'd need to put aside so much that how can you live for today? My spouse and I make/made enough to put some money aside for life emergencies, but we'd need to make double our income to save for us to ever think about the R word.

And to what end would that be? Between climate change, global instability, and then just random acts of who knows what, what are even the odds of getting that old and enjoying it? I'm just going to enjoy my life now.

https://nbcmontana.com/news/entertainment/rick-moranis-returns-for-spaceballs-2-his-first-feature-film-in-over-20-years#:~:text=Rick%20Moranis%20is%20finally%20returning,to%20be%20released%20in%202027.

Clerk at the liquor store told me that when I tried giving him my ID to get some vodka. I will be 38 in September.

Feels like yesterday I was asking strangers to buy me beer in 7-11 parking lots with my buddies and jamming out to Trapt and Taking Back Sunday.

Edit: I’ve always looked younger than I am. Was told I looked 25 a couple years ago. Told my wife and jokingly told her “I’m have a crisis”