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Many people from Generation X are comparing themselves to the Silent Generation.
Generation X, those born between 1965 and 1980, hold a unique place between Baby Boomers and Millennials. But its a previous generation that many are claiming to relate to even more: the Silent Generation.
In an online community of Gen Xers, a member named @bravenewwhorl shared with fellow Gen Xers about the similarities they share with the Silent Generation, those born between 1925 and 1945. "My parents were born before World War Two and my older siblings are younger boomers. Let’s hear it for the Silent Generation who were very much like us; went through the Depression, the war, took care of themselves and knew how to conserve resources," they wrote.
The user when on to add, "For example my mom scraped ALL the butter off the foil wrapper, and used every frying pan and leftover chicken bone as an opportunity to make soup."
Chicken Soup GIF Giphy
The post seemed to resonate with many Gen Xers, who also shared their thoughts and experiences that connect them to the Silent Generation. These are some of the best comments from Gen Xers on why they feel simpatico with the Silent Generation.
No Drama Allblk GIF by WE tv Giphy
"My parents are Silent Gen. Very low key, no fuss or drama sorts of people." Dark-Empath-
"Mine too. That's basically their defining generational trait -- head down, work, and stay out of the way." stevemm70
"Oh the way my Dad could say nothing so very loudly. There are still things I wouldn't dream of doing now because his silence was so deafening. I am 56." Maleficent_Bit2033
"Mine were born during the war, but same. Extremely frugal and practical. Parents were way into reusing everything and not wasting. My mom still has a drawer full of Ziplock bags and sheets of tinfoil that have been used 10x. My dad drilled into me that social security probably will not be there for our generation, so save save save. Cars are tools, not investments. Drive it into the ground. My Honda is 20 years old, Dad!" Haunting-Berry1999
No Way Wow GIF by RatePunk Giphy
"My parents are Silent Generation, and because I was born in the mid 60s, so are the parents of almost everyone I grew up with. I am tired of this narrative that all GenX parents were boomers; that is simply not true, especially for those of us born 1970 or earlier. My parents were always very concerned about economic security, both for themselves and their kids. They transferred that concern to my siblings and myself." Ineffable7980x
"I still put ham bones in the freezer (Great grandma thing) for the soup I never make. Maybe this time :)." motherofguinaepigz
"My parents' parents definitely conserved resources - would wash and reuse 'tin foil', made food carry over into 4 or 5 different meals, shopped wisely, were extremely frugal with money and tried to be financially savvy. For them, cars, clothes, and appliances were maintained and repaired and lasted for years and years. My parents inherited a lot of those traits by example, and it followed down to us, too. Cars, clothes, and appliances aren't made today the way they were 'back then', of course, but we still try to make it work. I know people who change cars, or get new appliances, or even remodel or move to a new house every several years, and that just doesn't make sense to me. I just hope upcoming generations maintain and improve the 'reduce, reuse, recycle' mindset we were taught." DrewHunterTn
Reduce Climate Change GIF by INTO ACTION Giphy
"My grandparents were Silent Generation. I am young GenX (but still GenX ‘76). I wouldn’t be who I am today if it weren’t for my Silent Generation grandparents. They taught me a lot, and I feel more in touch with their generation than I’ve ever felt with Boomers. The boomers were such a let down; not great parents and worse grandparents." kemberflare
"My folks are both silent generation (both born in 41) and I'm a young gen x (born in 75, last of 3), and farm kids to boot. They taught me a lot of important things. You do what you want, but think it through because all actions have consequences. Don't waste money on frivolous stuff, but when you buy something big, buy quality and make it last. Most importantly, while they loved me and thought I was special, the world at large doesn't think about me at all. Also, my mom still washes out ziplock bags. I did not keep that lesson." No_Hedgehog_5406
"Mine are young Silent gen’s, so didn’t know the war strife, but their parents knew how to be frugal, could fix anything, and passed that down through the generations. My parents said they were too old to be hippies, but almost went to Woodstock. My dad got a PhD to stay out of Vietnam. Like others have said, very low key, very private, and didn’t live in the past at all. Compared to my friends’ parents, I wouldn’t trade them for anything else." ZuesMyGoose
This article originally appeared in May.Half moons allow water to be retained for agriculture and even replenish the groundwater table.
When the Great Green Wall initiative began in 2007, it was just a vision of a big, beautiful wall of greenery spanning the width of Africa to keep the Sahara Desert from encroaching on the rest of the continent. Despite years of successes and failures, celebration and criticism, we can see the progress being made as an inspiring example of how local and global collaboration can help counter the effects of climate change.
Just a few years ago, the Sahel region at the northern edge of Senegal was a "barren wasteland" where nothing had grown for 40 years. But the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and local villagers teamed up to regreen the area, bringing back agriculture, improving the economy of the people who live there, and preventing the climate migration that desertification ultimately leads to.
A barren desert.Canva Photos
According to Andrew Millison, a permaculture designer and instructor at Oregon State University, the Sahara desert has expanded by about 10% in the past 100 years. The idea behind the Great Green Wall is to build a barrier of vegetation to stop that expansion, which threatens the ecosystems and economies of the Sahel—the region south of the Sahara that separates the desert from the savanna.
In a video from February of 2024, Millison shared the collaborative nature and progress of one Great Green Wall project in Senegal, including the rejuvenation of 300,000 hectares (about the equivalent of 600,000 football fields) of seemingly unusable land.
- YouTube youtu.be
"The process started with the community-based participatory planning," WFP program policy officer Bakalilou Diaby shares in the video. "By the end of this process, it was agreed that one of the major actions is the land reclamation or land recovery project."
At first, it took some time to convince the community that the regreening of the degraded landscape was even possible, but after learning about how to improve the land, "the people believe and they are convinced, and they are also committed," says Diaby.
One of the keys to this particular regreening project is using long-forgotten techniques for harvesting water. When soil is crusted and sunbaked and hard as cement, rainwater doesn't penetrate and it's impossible for plants to take root. The solution? Half-moon shaped ditches dug in such a way that water flows into them on the straight side with an embankment built on the rounded side to hold the water in. Each half moon is four meters in diameter and takes about a day for one person to dig.
Local vegetation domesticated on the Sahel thousands of years ago, such as sorghum and millet, are planted in these half moons, rehabilitating the land and feeding the local community at the same time.
"This is nothing new—we have not invented a technology here," explains Sebastian Muller from the WFP resilience team. "The half moon technology is actually an endogenous technology to the Sahel and has been forgotten over time. We have rescued it from the past."
Not only does capturing water in the half moons help with the immediate need to grow food and contribute to the Great Green Wall, but 10%—15% of the water will actually soak into the ground to replenish the water table, creating a more sustainable agricultural process.
"That way we actually achieve a balance of water. So we are not depleting the water resources, but we're making sure that we keep enough water in the ground for future generations," says Muller.
Other crops such as okra and tomatoes are grown in horizontal horticulture beds, and between those ditches grow trenches with fruit trees in them.
Fruit trees.Canva Photos
"This is just a very first step in this pilot," adds Muller. "We'll also be using other native species that will be planting in the pits that will drive the rejuvenation of the soil and the protection of the soil as the system starts growing into abundance and producing food and life for the people here."
According to Muller, the "syntropic farming" methods being employed were developed in Brazil and are based on global indigenous practices that mimic the way natural forests grow and thrive. These natural growing dynamics make agriculture more sustainable, continually replenishing the land rather than continually depleting it—truly a testament to global collaboration carried out at the local level with local community support.
"This project was really, really interesting because the World Food Programme wanted to demonstrate how you could take the most devastated areas and turn them back into resilient, food-producing locations," says Millison. "And they specifically placed their project on a very degraded landscape that had been taken down to bare, compacted earth."
If this desertified "wasteland" can be rejuvenated so successfully, it provides hope for recovering other land that many people might write off as useless or barren. As climate change continues to alter the Earth's landscape—literally—we'll need to keep working together both locally and globally to find solutions like the Great Green Wall and support their implementation.
You can learn more about successful permaculture practices on Andrew Millison's YouTube channel.
This article originally appeared in January.
The woman from the famous Great Depression photo didn't know about her fame for 40 years.
Nearly everyone across the globe knows Florence Owens Thompson's face from newspapers, magazines, and history books. The young, destitute mother was the face of The Great Depression, her worried, suntanned face looking absolutely defeated as several of her children took comfort by resting on her thin frame. Thompson put a human face and emotion behind the very real struggle of the era, but she wasn't even aware of her role in helping to bring awareness to the effects of the Great Depression on families.
It turns out that Dorothea Lange, the photographer responsible for capturing the worry-stricken mother in the now-famous photo titled "Migrant Mother," told Thompson that the photos wouldn't be published. Of course, they subsequently were published in the San Francisco News. At the time the photo was taken, Thompson was supposedly only taking respite at the migrant campsite with her seven children after the family car broke down near the campsite. The photo was taken in March 1936 in Nipomo, California when Lange was concluding a month's long photography excursion documenting migrant farm labor.
Worried mother and children during the Great Depression era.Photo by Dorothea Lange via Library of Congress
"Migrant worker" was a term used in the 30s to describe poverty-stricken Americans who moved from town to town harvesting the crops for farmers. The pay was abysmal and not enough to sustain a family, but harvesting was what Thompson knew as she was born and raised in "Indian Territory," (now Oklahoma) on a farm. Her father was Choctaw and her mother was white. After the death of her husband, Thompson supported her children the best way she knew how: working long hours in the field.
"I'd hit that cotton field before daylight and stay out there until it got so dark I couldn't see," Thompson told NBC in 1979 a few years before her death.
A mother reflects with her children during the Great Depression.Photo by Dorthea Lange via Library of Congress
When talking about meeting Thompson, Lange wrote in her article titled "The Assignment I'll Never Forget: Migrant Mother," which appeared in Popular Photography, Feb. 1960, "I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed."
Lange goes on to surmise that Thompson cooperated because on some level she knew the photos would help, though from Thompson's account she had no idea the photos would make it to print. Without her knowledge, Thompson became known as "The Dustbowl Mona Lisa," which didn't translate into money in the poor family's pocket. In fact, according to a history buff who goes by @baewatch86 on TikTok, Thompson didn't find out she was famous until 40 years later after a journalist tracked her down in 1978 to ask how she felt about being a famous face of the depression.
It turns out Thompson wished her photo had never been taken since she never received any funds for her likeness being used. Baewatch explains, "because Dorothea Lange's work was funded by the federal government this photo was considered public domain and therefore Mrs. Florence and her family are not entitled to the royalties."
While the photo didn't provide direct financial compensation for Thompson, the virility of it helped to feed migrant farm workers. "When these photos were published, it immediately caught people's attention. The federal government sent food and other resources to those migrant camps to help the people that were there that were starving, they needed resources and this is the catalyst. This photo was the catalyst to the government intercepting and providing aid to people," Baewatch shares.
When Thompson's health declined with age, people rallied around to help pay her medical bills citing the importance of the 1936 photo in their own lives. The "Migrant Mother" passed away in 1983, just over a week after her 80th birthday. She was buried in California.
"Florence Leona Thompson, Migrant Mother. A legend of the strength of American motherhood," her gravestone reads.
Disney trips have a lot of parents frustrated, and it shows why parents are so burnt out.
"The good old days" may be a tired cliche, but that doesn't mean the phrase doesn't hold a kernel of truth. Some things really used to be better. Different isn't always just different, and it's definitely not always better. Sometimes different is objectively worse!
Take a "simple" theme park vacation with your family and kids, for example. In the 1990s, you could go to Disneyland or The Magic Kingdom relatively on a whim, show up at the park, wait in line to get a ticket, grab a map, walk in, and have a good time. However, these days, things are a lot more complicated. In 2025, the price of the park changes with demand, and you have to make reservations for the day you hope to visit. Want to eat dinner at a sit-down restaurant? Better reserve your table a few days (or even weeks) ahead of time. Want to get on the newest ride? Better hop in the virtual queue when the park opens at 9 am, and that's assuming you remembered to book and pay for enough Lightning Lane passes.
This image strikes fear into the hearts of many parents. Photo by Kitera Dent on Unsplash
Further, the entire time you’re at the park, you’re staring at your phone, following instructions on where to go based on the app. And there aren’t any days when the park isn’t crowded—it’s always crowded. It’s a wonder people have any fun at the park when things are so complicated and expensive. Planning the trip is a months-long equivalent of a part-time job for many parents, and being in the parks is a grueling rat-race. Fun, yes, but absolutely exhausting!
Sarah Biggers-Stewart, founder of CLOVE + HALLOW, a clean cosmetics line, believes the stress of going to Disney mirrors what everything is like for parents in 2025. “The hardest thing about parenting in 2025 is that the parenting part isn't really that hard. It's everything else,” she said in a post with over 70,000 views. “The amount of participation and engagement expected of parents in literally everything related to raising kids is insane.”
Warning: Strong language.
@thebiggersthebetter Like the parenting is ofc hard but it’s literally everything else that sucks 😂 #parenthood #momlife #raisinglittles #realtalk #girltalk #motherhood #disneyworld #parentlife
“And nothing perfectly illustrates this better than this Disney trip we're going on next week and the multi-month booking process I've had to go through in order to make sure that we can have a normal Disney trip. Sixty days ago, I had to pre-book at six am, restaurants, activities,” she continued.
Indeed, many Disney experiences open for booking at odd hours long before the actual dates of your trip, like first thing in the morning or even at midnight months beforehand. If it seems crazy to you that you'd have to wake up in the middle of the night to book a meeting with your kid's favorite cartoon princess or risk disappointing them when all the spots are booked up, you're not the only one.
Biggers-Stewart adds that it makes her mad because "it doesn't have to be this way.”
Biggers-Stewart says the same thing is happening in children’s sports. “We're treating these seven-year-olds like they're all gonna go pro. They can't even go with their families for a week vacation during the summer break because if they miss a week, they're like shunned and benched,” she told her 602,000 followers. "The seven-year-olds are talking about their protein intake, and the parents are being lectured by the coaches about their protein intake. These kids are seven.”
Youth sports are supposed to be fun, but they've gotten way too intense. Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash
And it goes beyond sports! Want to take your kids to a free storytime at the library? Better hope you remembered to reserve a spot three months ago. And speaking of which, better remember to block your work calendar for the parties your child's daycare throws every week in the middle of the day, which parents are "strongly encouraged" to attend. If your kids are old enough to walk and bike around themselves, well, you'd better be sure you accompany them every step of the way or you might get arrested — seriously.
Many moms in the comments could totally relate to Biggers-Stewart’s frustration.
"The 1st time we did Disney, I did nothing, and it was a nightmare. The 2nd time, I had spreadsheets & binder & it was F-ing magical for my family and satisfied me like I had planned a corporate summit," Booishlady wrote. "I was SWEATING BULLETS trying to get my kid into various summer camps the moment registration opened in JANUARY. And you're right, even basic activities have to be planned and purchased way in advance."
Anastasia agreed, writing "Having to meticulously plan summer camps in January or else there’s no childcare options available."
Another user wrote, "I saw something that said working moms now spend more time with their kids than SAHMs in the 70s." Unbelievably, this is true, despite the nearly impossible math.
"We decided early on that we weren’t going to overbook our kids with a bunch of extracurriculars. We prioritize family time, which is great, and yet I still feel so much external pressure to do more," Katie wrote.
There's a reason all parents feel like this in 2025. Giphy
At the conclusion of her video, Biggers-Stewart boiled the problem down to what parenting is like in 2025: Intense. “Everything is the most intense version that requires the most effort and participation,” she said. “That is why parents in 2025 are burnt the f**k out.”
This article originally appeared in March. It has been updated.
A lab technician tests bottles of water
Here are six facts from the video above by The Story of Stuff Project that I'll definitely remember next time I'm tempted to buy bottled water.
- YouTube www.youtube.com
A Business Insider column noted that two-thirds of the bottled water sold in the United States is in individual 16.9-ounce bottles, which comes out to roughly $7.50 per gallon. That's about 2,000 times higher than the cost of a gallon of tap water.
And in an article in 20 Something Finance, G.E. Miller investigated the cost of bottled versus tap water for himself. He found that he could fill 4,787 20-ounce bottles with tap water for only $2.10! So if he paid $1 for a bottled water, he'd be paying 2,279 times the cost of tap.
Fiji Water ran an ad campaign that was pretty disparaging about the city of Cleveland. Not a wise move. The city ordered a test of the snooty brand's water and found that Fiji Water contained levels of arsenic that weren't seen in the city's water supply.
How was that possible? Sarah Goodman of the New York Times explains:
" Bottled water manufacturers are not required to disclose as much information as municipal water utilities because of gaps in federal oversight authority. Bottom line: The Food and Drug Administration oversees bottled water, and U.S. EPA is in charge of tap water. FDA lacks the regulatory authority of EPA."
That sounded like it just had to be impossible, so we looked into it. Here's what our fact-checkers found:
"According to the video, ' People in the U.S. buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week.' National Geographic says for 2011, bottled water sales hit 9.1 billion gallons (roughly 34 billion liters).
A 'typical' water bottle is a half-liter, so that's about 68 billion bottles per year. Divided by 52 weeks would be a little over 1 billion bottles of water sold per week in the U.S. Because that's based on a smaller 'typical' bottle size, it seems reasonable that a half billion bottles a week could be accurate.
The Earth is about 131.5 million feet around, so yep, half a billion bottles of varying sizes strung end-to-end could circle the Earth five times."
Beverage companies have turned bottled water into a multibillion-dollar industry through a concept known as manufactured demand. Bottled water advertisements used a combination of scare tactics (Tap water bad!) and seduction (From the purest mountain streams EVER!) to reel us in.
Well, we now know their claims about the superior quality of bottled water are mostly bogus. And research shows that anywhere from a quarter to 45% of all bottled water comes from the exact same place as your tap water (which, to reiterate, is so cheap it's almost free).
It takes oil — lots of it — to make plastic bottles. According to the video, the energy in the amount of oil it takes to make the plastic water bottles sold in the U.S. in one year could fuel a million cars. That's not even counting the oil it takes to ship bottled water around the world.
And once we've guzzled our bottled water, up to 80% of the empty bottles end up in landfills or noxious-gas-producing incinerators. The rest is either recycled or shipped to countries like India where poor people without environmental and labor protections have to deal with it.
On top of all that, the process of manufacturing plastic bottles is polluting public water supplies, which makes it easier for bottled water companies to sell us their expensive product.
A child dies every minute from a waterborne disease. And for me, that's the core of what makes bottled water so evil.
The video wraps by comparing buying bottled water to smoking while pregnant. That may sound extreme, but after learning everything I just did about the bottled water industry, I can't disagree.
This article originally appeared 10 years ago.
