Generational Advice: Hardships Youth Shouldn't Face
The baby boomer generation became adults in the midst of conflicts like the Vietnam War and revolutions like the Civil Rights Movement.
Gen X grew up facing the impact of multiple economic recessions while at the same time, being the first generation to really have widespread access to technological advancements like computers and the internet.
And millennials (also known as Generation Y) are often called unlucky due to high numbers of unemployment, student loan debt, and mental health struggles.
If you're a part of a generation that is considered to be "older," what's something you wish younger generations, such as Generation Z and Generation Alpha, didn't have to deal with?
Is it the rising worries about climate change and the environment?
White smoke is pouring out of the chimneys of the power plant.
Are you concerned about how artificial intelligence (AI) might impact them?
Do you feel it's harder for younger generations to find work and afford homes, especially with inflation and rent eating up most of their earnings?
Whatever it is, we want to hear it. Use our anonymous form or comment below!
What's something you wish the younger generations didn't have to deal with, and why?
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Newsweek
18 hours ago
- Newsweek
Gen Z Woman Chooses Labrador Over Career, Here's How It's Going
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. A Generation Z woman has explained why she quit two jobs because they weren't suitable for her dog's needs, and she wouldn't have it any other way. Ever since Samantha, 27, brought home Betty the black Labrador puppy in 2023, she's heard countless times about how she goes "above and beyond" as a dog owner. Whether it's moving house so that Betty could have a garden, or giving the pup her very own bedroom, Samantha is undoubtedly a doting dog mom. But she told Newsweek that she to center big life decisions on her dog before she even brought Betty home. After years of working in real estate and doing a job she loved, she made the decision to leave and find something that would enable her to give more time to a dog. "In October 2022, I left my job in real estate which was fully office-based to find something more flexible, knowing I wanted a dog," Samantha, from the UK, said. "I was in that role for around three years and progressed quickly within the company. Samantha and Betty pictured together during a vacation. Samantha and Betty pictured together during a vacation. @bettyscountrytails / TikTok "I loved the work and the people. It wasn't an easy decision to leave, but having a dog was a lifelong dream and I knew I needed a job that gave me more flexibility." After telling her friends and family, Samantha said they weren't surprised because they all knew just how much having a dog meant to her. Instead, she got a job with an animal pharmaceutical company that was hybrid and allowed dogs in the office. For Samantha, it seemed like the perfect fit, and she loved the idea of having Betty by her side all week. Unfortunately, the office environment just wasn't right for young Betty. She only wanted to play with the other dogs and run around—not exactly conducive to a productive work environment. "Betty is from a working line, so she has lots of energy and needs stimulation. The office environment was too quiet and restrictive for her. She cried, wanted to play with the other dogs, and didn't settle," Samantha continued. The Gen Z (people born between 1997 and 2012) owner tried to help Betty relax in the office, but she was "clearly unhappy" in that environment. After several months, Samantha knew it wasn't going to work, and she made the decision to leave that job too. The Covid pandemic changed the global workforce in unprecedented ways, giving workers a whole new outlook on what they want from a job. This led to what's been dubbed the Great Resignation of 2021, when the rate at which American workers quit their jobs reached a 20-year high, according to The Pew Research Center. The top reasons for leaving a job included low pay, lack of advancement, and feeling disrespected. But for many people, pets are also a big factor. A 2024 survey by OnePoll on behalf of Vetster highlighted that 7 percent of pet parents have left a job in order to find one that allowed them to better care for their pet. An additional 24 percent have considered doing so, while 60 percent would think about leaving their job if it conflicted with their ability to look after their pet. After all, pets are part of the family and owners want to ensure their lives are just as fulfilling. Samantha during the second job before quitting, and Betty in the office environment. Samantha during the second job before quitting, and Betty in the office environment. @bettyscountrytails / TikTok Leaving two jobs wasn't an easy decision for Samantha, but she wouldn't change a thing. Since leaving the pharmaceutical role in 2024, she has set up her own marketing agency, Shropshire Marketing, which supports small businesses across the country. It's a role she loves, and the company is thriving, as Samantha told Newsweek that she has "Betty to thank" for the career change. Samantha said: "This genuinely feels like a dream come true. Being able to structure my life around Betty, go on long walks during the day, work flexibly, and prioritize her wellbeing, is everything I hoped for. I know I'm in a privileged position, but it hasn't come without its risks and sacrifices." The proud dog mom recently took to TikTok (@bettyscountrytails) to share some of the "extra" things she's done. Aside from quitting her jobs, the list also included giving Betty Egyptian cotton bedding, buying a bigger car, and selling her house after a year. The post certainly captured attention online, leading to over 83,400 views and 8,400 likes on TikTok at the time of writing. While some people still react negatively, Samantha's been blown away by the positive responses she's received on social media. She's connected with plenty of likeminded dog owners who support her decisions. "I know Betty's very lucky to have the life she does. Most people, especially other dog lovers, totally understand and support it," Samantha continued. Many TikTok users took to the comments section to praise Samantha for putting Betty first, while others shared their own experiences. One comment reads: "This is how all doggies should be treated, you're a queen." Another TikTok user wrote: "This SHOULD be a tutorial on how to be the best dog parents." While one person replied: "Same, glad I've found my people." Do you have funny and adorable videos or pictures of your pet you want to share? We want to see the best ones! Send them in to life@ and they could appear on our site.
Boston Globe
3 days ago
- Boston Globe
Award-winning AP photographer Bob Daugherty captured history with speed and persistence
In a 43-year career, he covered nine presidents, 22 political conventions, the Watergate hearings, the Paris Peace Talks over the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and presidential trips overseas. He also covered dozens of high-stakes sporting events including the Olympic Games, Masters Tournaments, and Kentucky Derby races. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up J. David Ake, who retired as AP's director of photography, said Mr. Daugherty also became a 'tack-sharp leader' focused on helping photojournalists do their best work. Advertisement 'His goal was to make everyone who worked with him or for him better,' Ake said. 'Because he understood what it took to make a good frame and get it on the wire, no matter what, he was always there to lend a hand, make a suggestion, or just run interference. And it didn't hurt; he was the kindest man you will ever meet.' Mr. Daugherty learned the power of photography early as he distributed a community newspaper to local farmers. He later recalled one of the recipients telling him, 'You know I can't read, but I sure like the pictures.' Advertisement After the family moved to Marion, Ind., Mr. Daugherty shot pictures for his high school yearbook, which led to a job with the local Marion Chronicle-Tribune. He next worked at the Indianapolis Star, where he met Stephanie Hoppes, a staff writer. They were married on Dec. 7, 1963. With no money to pay for college, Mr. Daugherty later said, 'I earned my junior college degree at the Marion Chronicle, bachelor's degree at the Star, and master's with the Associated Press.' Although the couple traveled extensively in retirement, Stephanie Daugherty said she never accompanied her husband on his overseas work trips, such as Nixon's groundbreaking visit to China in 1972. 'He was very dedicated to doing his best and he didn't want me as a distraction,' she said. Persistence, timing, and speed were keys to Mr. Daugherty's success in Washington. Hearing that Johnson was writing a speech on a Saturday in the spring of 1968, Mr. Daugherty badgered a press aide until he was let in to shoot a haggard, open-collared LBJ writing the speech declining his party's nomination. President Johnson, working on his speech in the White House Cabinet Room in Washington, on March 30, 1968. Bob Daugherty/Associated Press Mr. Daugherty positioned himself for a straight-on view of Nixon flashing 'V for victory' hand signs at the door to a helicopter on the White House lawn, minutes after becoming the first president to resign in 1974. When Carter grasped the handshake of Israel's Menachem Begin and Egypt's Anwar Sadat after the signing of a 1979 peace treaty between the two countries, Mr. Daugherty captured the moment in nearly identical color and black-and-white images. At the time, this required him to use two separate cameras. Advertisement When Carter visited Kentucky in July 1979, other photographers ditched what was expected to be a routine motorcade to an event at a school. But Mr. Daugherty stayed, catching the normally staid Carter seated on top of the presidential limousine to greet well-wishers. He later said that photo was a favorite among all the images he made of US presidents. 'You must stay alert when you're with the president,' Daugherty said. 'You must be prepared.' President Carter leaned across the roof of his car to shake hands along the parade route through Bardstown, Ky., on July 31, 1979. Bob Daugherty/Associated Press 'Bob was a legend,' said Pablo Martínez Monsiváis, assistant photo chief for AP's Washington bureau. Asked about an iconic photograph, Mr. Daugherty would describe all the planning that went into the shot or simply say, 'I got lucky.' 'If anyone was lucky, it was me who got to work with him,' Monsiváis recalled. In 2009, the White House News Photographers Association presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award. He was also a soccer coach and swim-meet official for his son John, said his wife, and in retirement never missed a chance to watch the sun set over the Morse Reservoir, where the couple lived.
The Hill
4 days ago
- The Hill
Sydney Sweeney isn't dangerous — and that has academia in a panic
Few cultural figures have triggered the academic elite more effortlessly than Sydney Sweeney. Her recent American Eagle ad campaign — featuring a young woman in denim Americana, smiling beneath sunlight — was met with ideological panic. To the untrained eye, this appeared to be another social media overreaction. It wasn't. It was a reaction calibrated by the very institutions that claim to shape young minds, but in practice, infect them with fear. And the outrage didn't originate in Generation Z, but in the aging adults who taught them to distrust anything unexamined or un-theorized, and to treat freedom, joy, and beauty with suspicion. Sweeney's image didn't threaten academia because it was political. It threatened academia because it wasn't political at all. In showcasing her 'great jeans,' Sweeney doesn't posture. She doesn't apologize for her 'privilege' — whether attractiveness, 'whiteness', or able-bodiedness. She doesn't pretend that her ads are activism. She simply exists — luminous, intact, and unburdened by the guilt that academia falsely equates with social awareness. Her image disrupts the narrative that joy signifies ignorance of ongoing injustices. The backlash to these ads wasn't spontaneous. It was incubated in elite institutions. According to a 2023 FIRE study, 63 percent of college students say they cannot express their honest opinions on campus. Among conservative students, that figure jumps to 74 percent. This reflects a system of ideological conditioning, in which compliance is rewarded and dissent pathologized. Pedagogy in higher education is increasingly rooted in projection rather than education. A 2022 Chronicle of Higher Education report found that 42 percent of tenured professors under 55 express 'frequent regret' about their careers. Among identity-focused departments, that number exceeds 60 percent. Steeped in postmodern theory, which flattens human complexity into a rigid oppressor-oppressed binary, these professors have deconstructed beauty, joy, and meaning to the point of alienation. Their fixation on moral relativism erodes any stable sense of ethical significance or intrinsic purpose in their actions. Rather than confront their own disillusionment, many professors offload it onto students, teaching them to similarly deconstruct both themselves and the world around them into existential oblivion. It is no coincidence that student mental health has collapsed under this ideological regime. In 2024, the American College Health Association reported that 77 percent of students experienced 'overwhelming anxiety' — a 33 percent increase over a decade. This is not accidental, but the predictable consequence of drilling it into the heads of an entire generation that happiness is selfish and confidence is unsafe. Moreover, today's curricula often encourage students to devalue and disavow any aspect of identity not classified as 'marginalized,' such as maleness or heterosexuality. A 2023 NAS report found that 76 percent of top universities require diversity statements for faculty hiring, a means of engineering conformity to this orthodoxy. Simultaneously, the line between cognitive discomfort and psychological harm has blurred so much that honest debate is treated as an emotional assault. Students aren't simply acquiring knowledge — they are internalizing confusion and anxiety, while learning to signal social belonging by policing others' ideological alignment. A figure like Sweeney — marked by ease, absence of political dog whistles, and comfort in a traditionally beautiful body — quietly opposes this climate. She does not align with activist causes, making her invulnerable to ideological attacks. Resisting deconstruction and theory, she remains illegible to the academy. She thus represents a loss of control for the prevailing ideological apparatus, which demands punishment. Her campaign is read in bad faith as complicity with oppression, despite her neutrality. She is scapegoated not because she provokes, but because she doesn't: Her femininity goes unexplored, her body isn't a battleground, and her looks are not an indictment of the structural powers-that-be. In a moral order built on struggle, her wholeness is heresy. She threatens by refusing to seek validation from frameworks demanding constant self-scrutiny. She simply is—a direct affront to those who built careers teaching that selfhood must always be in crisis. This is not a critique of students but a reckoning with the adults who taught them to see 'silence', or political neutrality, as violence. From a clinical perspective, this is projection-driven moralization: unresolved internal dissatisfaction externalized as political critique. The backlash against Sweeney is affective transference on a generational scale. A disoriented intellectual class now enforces fragmentation as virtue — replacing self-awareness with institutionalized self-rejection and calling it progress. The culture war is no longer generational but institutional. It's not left versus right, but between those who believe the human spirit can exist without ideological oversight — and those who cannot imagine that possibility. Sweeney didn't harm anyone. She disrupted a schema. And for academics whose authority relies on perpetually locating grievance to prove their relevance and justify their role, that kind of disruption is intolerable. Kevin Waldman and Forest Romm are clinical psychology researchers at Northwestern University. Waldman specializes in male psychology, examining how cultural narratives and social expectations shape masculinity and emotional development. Romm focuses on female psychology, exploring the impact of media, sexuality, and trauma on women's identity and mental health.
