Knowing history well is sort of a superpower. When you’re well-educated and skeptical, you’re less likely to fall prey to misinformation, weird gossip, and blatant propaganda. However, it’s a bit of a shock when somebody from a younger generation starts lecturing about historical events that you lived through.
Inspired by a post on X (formerly Twitter), some members of Generation X took to the eponymous r/GenX subreddit to share the times that younger people told them inaccurate things about historical events. Just because someone’s convinced that something’s true doesn’t make it so! Scroll down to see why overconfidence isn’t a good look when you’ve got your basic facts wrong.
#1
I had someone tell me that AIDS wasn’t a big deal because well “they had d***s for that” 👀 I literally said to them I need you to shut up right now because you’re looking like the most stupid person in the planet right now. Pulled out old Google and showed them how many people died, why, and how horrid it was. Like I had friends who died. Complete A** Clown 🤡.
#2
Yup. My favorite is when they are like: “What’s your source? You have no proof!” and it’s like: “I didn’t read about this, I lived it.”.
Image source: squirtloaf, Mimi Thian
#3
For me the most jarring thing is hearing people refer to records as “vinyls”.
THEY’RE NOT CALLED VINYLS. THEY WERE NEVER CALLED VINYLS. CALLING RECORDS VINYLS IS LIKE CALLING CDS “PLASTICS”. FFS, STOP THE MADNESS!!!
Records. They’re called records. 12″ records are also called LPs, short for Long Playing Records. 10″ records are EPs, short for Extended Play Records, or 78s (if they are 78RPM). 7″ records are 45s (because 45RPM) or singles.
GET OFF MY LAWN.
Image source: fkyourcanoes, Alina Vilchenko
#4
LOL my oldest kid told me how OJ Simpson may have not k*lled his ex wife and the matching DNA was likely his son Jasons. Listen here, I didn’t watch court TV for 6 weeks and read 20 books on the case to have you lecture me about a 10 second Tik Tok clip that “solved” the crime of the century!! You don’t even know who Kato is !!!
Image source: FaceMaulingChimp, Gerald Johnson
#5
My son came home from High School one year and pulled out his phone so I could hear this great new Band.
Aerosmith….
Image source: Outrageous_Brick7472, Aerosmith
#6
Or, being told you’re not an ally because you aren’t up to speed on pronouns, or what all the letters after LGBT mean, but you used to literally beat up a******s who messed with my gay friends.
Image source: Instimatic, Markus Spiske
#7
I admit to getting tired about hearing how easy it was for me to get through college and such 25ish years ago. I also remember the 70s and 80s, and amazingly, my parents could not afford a giant house with one person working as a coffee shop attendant.
Every generation has some hardships, and today’s young people have been screwed over in some ways, but they go way overboard with how easy it was for everyone before them.
I was there. I literally have social security tax records since I was 12, because I had to work. It was not some magical paradise.
Image source: SlyFrog, Stanley Morales
#8
Imagine being a person who grew up in former soviet union listening to young people talk about the benefits of communism.
Image source: daperdingus, Elina Fairytale
#9
I most recently remember this in 2020, after the election, when Trump was still challenging the results. Even after Biden was declared the winner, I remember seeing posts on Twitter from Trump supporters saying things like *”Don’t give up! Back in 2000 the liberal media spent a month calling Gore the winner and referring to him as President-Elect, until the Supreme Court declared Bush the rightful winner!”* And I was sitting there going, no, that’s not what happened at all. How you are lying about something that was 20 years ago? This isn’t ancient history?
Image source: chace_thibodeaux, René DeAnda
#10
My dad got laid off twice in the early ’80s, when I was a kid. It was a rough period for a lot of my relatives also. You never hear about that early-’80s recession anymore, people just go, ‘Oh, everyone could buy a big house with just a high school degree.’ There were a ton of homeless people in the ’80s where I grew up also.
Image source: WhoDatNinjaToo, Phil Hearing
#11
I had a dude argue with me that there was absolutely no way the National Guard ever shot American college students… pft pft pft.
Image source: Necron9x11, Mws77
#12
Missy Elliott at the Super Bowl and the young people posting about how she was trying to be Cardi B or some other current rapper. Lol, when I read those tweets I laughed so hard.
Image source: FormerChange
#13
A younger Millennial once insisted to me that we dial 911 for emergencies in honor of the victims of 9/11.
Image source: sabat, RDNE Stock project
#14
I’ve had people tell me I’m making up the nuclear bomb drills we did in elementary school in the 80s.
Image source: PsychoWyrm, Photo courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration
#15
I heard a younger coworker complain that NIN ruined Johnny Cash’s ‘Hurt.’
Image source: doglvr48, Johnny Cash
#16
Close, close friend of mine was killed in Iraq (w me there). At the funeral, his son accepted the flag the military presents to the next of kin. The photo became really famous. Had a Gen Zer tell the picture was staged by the military as military propaganda (without realizing how dumb the thought of the military spreading pictures of crying 7-year-olds in an attempt to improve their image, is). I tried showing them pictures, etc to show the family is real. She responded by saying I was one of “those”.
Image source: Darth-Newbi, Brett Sayles
#17
“In 1986 you could work part time at a yogurt shop in LaJolla, CA and afford a 3 bedroom home on the ocean”
No. Parts of this country have always been super expensive to live in.
Image source: MikeinAustin, James Lee
#18
The most common one I see is from younger writers proclaiming that “The entire country was up in arms about [insert major event]”…
I was there, the reality is that most of the country didn’t really care either way, but a few hundred protestors made a lot of noise.
Image source: Bashirshair, Sawyer Sutton
#19
Just the other day some young person tried to passionately tell me that “shout” by tears for fears was actually written and performed by depeche mode. I was so embarrassed for them. They were so sure they were right. Bless their heart.
Image source: cuppyturkey
#20
Slenderman is the one that really baffles me. Kids are all “It’s real” or treat it like it’s as old as Bloody Mary or something, meanwhile I’m like “I helped invent Slenderman on the Something Awful forums when I was in my 30s.”
My own children were terrified of Slenderman when they were younger, and I told them “You know why he has really long fingers? Because a forum Goon called WIIWW suggested it. I know that cause WIIWW is me.”.
Image source: blackest_francis, Tifith Site
#21
I was chaperoning my daughter’s trip to Washington DC. The Millennial tour guide said he was going to take the kids to see the Challenger Space Shuttle.
Image source: Ineedzthetube, NASA
#22
A few years back, in an open office, I was quietly listening to music and singing along (my desk was far away from all others so I wasn’t being rude), when a much younger coworker came up and asked how I knew the words to ‘the song’ already, since it just released two days ago by a popular young artist. I said that I had been singing the original for decades. They laughed and said, “No, really?”. I repeated the answer and they said I was wrong because that was a new song by ‘popular young artist’. I said “No, the song was written and performed by ‘washed up, once popular old artist’. They reiterated that I was wrong. I looked it up online and showed them. Their response: ” ‘Washed up, once popular old artist’ must have covered it from ‘popular young artist’. She wouldn’t even admit that that was a problem, unless one of them was a time traveller, because she refused to admit that she was wrong or that she liked an “OLD” song.
Edit: Sorry guys, I can remember the conversation clearly but I can’t dredge up whatever song it was from the depths of my swiss cheese memory.
Image source: Adastria, Annie Spratt
#23
Can confirm. I was very young but can still clearly remember watching the touchdown on the moon, the first steps, the placing of the American flag…. the whole thing. Even at that young age it was emotional for me. My deep southern home town got to watch some of the truly enormous parts be transported verrrrry slowly on huge trucks right past our house. My dad took photos. They had been manufactured at a nearby site. Before the launch we drove all the way to the launch site and those enormous pieces of equipment we’d seen were now in place. He showed the photos to a NASA guide, the guide recognized the giant parts immediately and enthusiastically pointed them out to us. It was an incredibly cool moment.
Another historic moment was the horrific Challenger disaster. Everyone in the country was so excited and proud for the teacher, Christa McAuliffe, from Concord, New Hampshire, who was selected for and had trained to become a payload specialist on the Space Shuttle Challenger mission STS-51-L. On the day of the launch the whole world ….. including her husband, children, family, friends, her school, and all her students…. were excitedly watching the broadcast live as the Space Shuttle went up….. and exploded just 1 minute 13 seconds after launch. Unbelievably, they didn’t cut the live feed immediately. It was horrible watching the shuttle disintegrate and fall, knowing there was no possibility of survivors. Just…. horrible.
And one more moment: September 11. We had 2 daughters in basic training at the time, right at the point of graduation. My husband and I both watched live feeds as the planes slammed into those 2 towers. We sobbed as we watched the towers collapse, forever burying those still within them. We watched thousands of people out of their minds with grief, desperately wandering the streets, posting photos and notes, searching for their loved ones.
And through it all, we were totally paralyzed with the fear of absolutely knowing that our two barely 18 year old little girls were going to be caught up in whatever this had been.
All this is to say: Look around and know your audience. If they’re a good bit older than you, you might want to hold up on the faux passion about 9/11….. because many of us lived that s**t and will never get it out of our heads.
Image source: SkootchDown, Pixabay
#24
I’m the daughter of WW2 Vets. (My parents born 1922,had me at 45yrs) Australian. My uncle also KIA over Germany 1942.
I grew up knowing many WW2 vets. Some had been POWs of Japanese. Tortured by them. I always took a keen interest and asked lots of questions and learned heaps off my parents & these people.
My parents taught us a LOT about how it was in those years. What they knew when, the states of minds of people at that time, details about living during that period and the politics of the time.
Both my parents well educated, intelligent people. Not prone to “flights of fancy” or stretching truth etc etc etc.
And as a result of my parents I have studied, read and learned about WW2 era extensively. I believe I am somewhat of minor “expert” of sorts. I know a LOT more then the average punter, from books but also from 1st hand accounts.
So when 25 year olds try to tell me “how it was during WW2”!! I get very freakin annoyed. They will argue about things they know nothing about. It’s infuriating.
Image source: Gracie1994, Museums Victoria
#25
Someone was explaining how we had to invade Iraq to find the people who did 9/11. It was just too much for me to even try.
Image source: zombuca, RDNE Stock project
#26
In the same vein – I was chaperoning a trip to Disney and one of the teens confidenty told me The Haunted Mansion ride was based on the movie with Eddie Murphy. She was wondering why Eddie Murphy didn’t appear in the ride. The other Gen Xer I was with explained the ride came first, like Pirates of the Carribean.
Image source: FuzzyScarf, SolarSurfer
#27
One thing I’ve found interesting from younger generations recently was the idea that Boomers have always been old and have always been in power politically. Like I’ve heard people talk about events in the 70s and 80s under the assumption that it was the Boomers who controlled everything (or even back to the 60s). Even something like Watergate was supposedly with Boomers in charge. When in reality it was the World War II Greatest Generation like Reagan (and Silents) who dominated politically from the 60s until the 90s (and there were a ton of politicians from those generations that stuck around forever).
Bill Clinton’s win in 1992 was the start of Boomer political power really and it wasn’t until the 00s that they began to truly dominate the Senate. However in the 70s and 80s, Boomers were mostly in their twenties and thirties (or even teens in the 70s). But younger Millenials and Gen Z, barely know about the long dominance of the World War II Generation…they controlled the presidency from JFK to the first Bush, that’s 32 years of the presidency. Younger people today seem to think Baby Boomers were always old and probably never even really knew their great grandparents from the Greatest Gen. Hell, I remember relatives from the Lost Generation born in the 19th century that were still alive when I was a kid in the 80s who remembered World War I. But today all old people have been grouped as “Boomers”.
Image source: anon, Laura Musikanski
#28
This guy told me I must not actually be Gen X because if I was, I would know that straight guys didn’t buy Milli Vanilli. Crazy
Image source: CreatrixAnima, Milli Vanilli
#29
I keep getting lectured on how awesome socialism is and how the socialist country I grew up in wasn’t really socialist.
Image source: Pile_of_Walthers, Ling Tang
#30
Listening to people say they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary because of their completely bogus interpretations of events during Bill C’s presidency. Not fun.
Image source: nautius_maximus1, cottonbro studio
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