The single biggest influence on our lives was the inescapable sameness of everything, which is probably true for most generations.
Jefferson Morely makes a brilliant point about inflation in his 1988 essay “Twentysomething”: “For us, everything seemed normal. I remember wondering why people were surprised that prices were going up. I thought, That’s what prices did.” Consider that those sentiments come from a guy who was already in high school during Watergate – roughly the same year I was born. To be honest, I don’t know if I’ve ever been legitimately shocked by anything, even as a third-grader in 1981. That was the year John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan, and I wasn’t surprised at all (in fact, it seemed to me that presidential assassinations didn’t happen nearly as often as one would expect). From what I could tell, the world has always been a deeply underwhelming place; my generation inherited this paradigm, and it was perfectly fine with me (both then and now).