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Generation X prides itself on never being surprised, which has generally served us well. Keeping our expectations low and our cynicism-level high has allowed Gen X to remain agile throughout numerous economic and political upheavals. But what if the attitudes that protect us from lifes difficulties are also holding us back from our goals? Specifically, many in Gen X may find that the cynicism we have proudly used as armor throughout our lives may be getting in the way of retirement. Here are some of the most common Gen X limiting beliefs that might be holding you back from the retirement of your dreams. Dont get your hopes up Like many Gen X children, I can recall being taught early on not to get my hopes up. From applying to the Publishers Clearinghouse sweepstakes to trying out for the school play, my parents cautioned me to keep my expectations reasonablesince neither a giant check nor the lead part were likely outcomes. There was an excellent reason why my parents (along with everyone elses) repeated this phrase over and over: the world is full of disappointments and its painful to have sky-high hopes crushed by the weight of statistical reality. How it limits your retirement For the most part, my early education in appropriate hope height has given me an excellent sense of when something seems too good to be true, which has saved me a great deal of financial heartburn. But always keeping your expectations realistic may have also kept you from taking risks. After all, why try for something you arent likely to get? Gen Xers are known for emphasizing attainable goals, which may be practical, but does not necessarily create a satisfying career. In terms of retirement, if Gen Xers are focusing on attainable retirement contributions rather than stretching a little, they may set their retirement back by years. They could save more if they were aiming high instead of being pragmatic. Even worse, refusing to get your hopes up can also mean giving up. This often plays out in the level of Gen X apathy I see toward Social Security, since many members of my generation dont believe it will be there when they retire, and see no point in fighting for it. It may be unrealistic to imagine that youll be able to retire to the South of France with a personal assistant/pool boy named Hugo, but dreaming up such a fantasy retirement scenario is necessary for you to actually work toward making it happen. Without hoping for something impractical, you cant work toward it. Dont get a big head Parents in the 1970s and ’80s seemed inordinately worried about the scourge of big-headedness among their children. Gen X kids, upon doing anything praiseworthy, were often told that they had done a good job, but dont get a big head about it. Our parents regular admonitions not to make Tiffany and Jason feel bad by tooting our own horns in front of them has borne fruit in adulthood. Research by the marketing company Solsten has found that Gen X scores higher on empathy than younger generationsalthough it is perhaps unsurprising that Gen X women score 12 points higher than their male counterparts. (Anecdotally, girls were probably also more likely than boys to be told not to boast about their accomplishments). How it limits your retirement Keeping your major achievements to yourself may feel like humility or good manners, but it could harm your retirement prospects. After all, if youre not touting your successes, theres no guarantee that your efforts will be recognized. This is especially true for women in the workplace, who are often uncomfortable with self-promotion. The Harvard Division of Continuing Education reported in 2022 that managers cant quantify the effort a worker puts in or the value she brings if she doesnt talk about it. Unfortunately, trying to avoid sounding bigheaded can mean youre less likely to get raises and promotionswhich has a direct effect on how much money you can put aside for retirement. Your boss may appreciate your quiet competence, but a coworkers flashy self-promotion is more likely to garner the corner office and the big paycheck. It is possible to self-promote without breaking out in hives. One helpful strategy is to ask colleagues to talk up your accomplishments while you return the favor. Then it feels less like bragging and more like teamwork. Dont be a sellout In our youth, Generation X prized authenticity over anything we saw as trading values for money. As a generation, we rejected the corrupting influence of money. Even our pop culture, such as the film Reality Bites, explored the idea of what it meant to be true to an artistic vision without corporate or financial meddling. The refusal to sell out gave us a clear sense of our artistic and political valuesand it may explain the relative dearth of Gen X politicians. (Although thats just my personal theory). But it may also be keeping us from moving on to our next chapter. How it limits your retirement When you have made authenticity and being anti-sellout the cornerstone of your personality, planning for retirement becomes a nigh impossible task. No matter what investment decisions you make in your retirement portfolio, you will be supporting an unjust, corrupt system of sellouts. Even trying to invest in corporations that are making responsible decisions via ESG funds requires compromises and decisions that feel inauthentic. Fear of selling out can manifest in Gen X as analysis paralysis for retirement planning. You may know that you need to make decisions about asset allocation in your retirement accounts, but yo keep putting it off because none of the possible options feel goodbecause theyre all some form of selling out. To overcome this hamster wheel of indecision, accept the fact that you have to make the best choice out of bad options and aim to maximize your returns. Commit to sending the extra money your investments earn you to whatever charity, artist, or other recipient that feels most like a HOW YOU LIKE THEM APPLES? response to the corporate sellouts. Dont cut yourself on the double-edged sword Gen X is justifiably proud of how we navigate the world. Were pessimists with a sense of humor and were impossible to surprise. But the attitudes that have served us well throughout our lives may be getting in the way of our retirement plans, and that means its time to take a look at the beliefs that are limiting our growth. Though we have learned to make practical choices and keep our dreams realistic, not getting our hopes up may also curtail the greatness of our potential retirements. Its okay to dream big and hope for the best while still making realistic choices and fighting for whats ours. Though our parents taught us that bragging about ourselves is impolite and really uncomfortable, too much humility may be limiting our advancement, which will reduce our retirement prospects. Its possible to self-promote without dying a little inside, especially if you and a coworker agree to talk each other up. And although selling out still feels just as corrosive now as it did when the Rolling Stones made a Windows 95 commercial, a fear of being a sellout can keep you from making important decisions about your future. Its impossible to invest for retirement without making compromises, so its better to accept the lack of authenticity, aim for the best returns you can get, and make the most punk decisions you can with the extra money you earn.
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E-Commerce
Autumn doesnt boldly announce its presence but rather creeps in. Since schools are back in session in August and early September, many who consider these last few weeks to be the beginning of fall start consuming pumpkin-flavored treats, even in extreme heat. Astronomical season purists prefer to defer to the position of the sun. This Monday (September 22) marks the fall equinox, which is the official beginning of astronomical autumn. The day before, a partial solar eclipse will be visible to those in its path in the Southern Hemisphere. (The North got its turn in March.) Lets take a deeper look at what this all means. What is an equinox? The Earth revolves around the sun while simultaneously turning on its own axis at a tilt of about 23.5 degrees. These processes cause different parts of the world to get more sunlight than others, but what goes around comes back around eventually. The Northern Hemisphere experiences winter in December through most of March while the Southern Hemisphere takes its turn June to September. The term equinox is Latin in origin and is loosely translated to equal night. Biannually in March and September, the tilt and the orbit of the Earth line up. This causes day and night to be almost equal. Equinoxes also signal the changing of the seasons. In the Northern Hemisphere, this means summer to fall and winter to spring. What is a partial solar eclipse? Before you bust out your scarves and warmer clothes, the night sky is going to show off. Those located in parts of New Zealand, Antarctica, and some South Pacific islands are in for a treat. Sometimes on the Earths journey around the sun, the moon gets involved. It comes between the two for a while, just like a love triangle blocking the light of friendship. During a partial solar eclipse, as NASA points out, the entire sun is not obscuredjust parts of it are, making a cool visual. This time around, 86% of it will be covered, which is extra dramatic. Do not view this natural phenomenon in person without certified solar eclipse glasses. When is the partial solar eclipse taking place? If you find yourself in the Northern Hemisphere during this partial solar eclipse, never fear. The internet was made for moments such as this. The website TimeAndDate.com will live-stream the event from Dunedin, New Zealand. The full duration of the eclipse is from 1:29 to 5:53 p.m. ET, with the maximum moment occurring at 3:41 p.m. ET.
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E-Commerce
Its 2025. Weve got cars that can drive themselves, robots that can program themselves, and all sorts of other mind-bogglingly futuristic tech achievements (for better or, erm, maybe sometimes for worse). And yet, somehow, I still find myself painstakingly entering stuff into my calendarwhen I get a long email about upcoming events from my kids school, for instance, or I see a flyer about something out in the world that I want to be sure to remember. Todays Cool Tools discovery is a new and improved sliver of sorcery that swipes away all the effort from those sorts of situations and makes managing your calendar laughably easyno matter what sorts of events you encounter. It might even, dare I say, be more useful than those futuristic robots. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures! Event addingwithout the effort So, first things first: This tool is actually one weve talked about before. Its called Agenda Hero, and I wrote about it in these very same Cool Tools quarters about a year and a half ago, when it was first getting off the ground. In the time since then, though, its gotten even bettermost notably with a nifty new feature that just came into mix and cranks its real-world usefulness up an extra measure. Well get to that in a minute. But first, what Agenda Hero is all about is taking the hassle out of creatingand, if you want, also sharingcalendar events from unstructured information. Specifically: You can send Agenda Hero an image or a PDF with info about events or even paste over entire paragraphs of text, and in the blink of an eye, itll identify and extract all the relevant details and put em into proper calendar event format. From there, you can add any and all events its identified into your calendar (Google Calendar as well as Outlook, Apple, or practically any other platform) with a single click. And, if youre feeling especially saucy, you can create a shareable page with all the event info for anyone else to see and add into their calendar in a similarly simple way. All of this takes roughly a minute, maybe two, to do. And now, in addition to all of that, you can also give Agenda Hero plain-text commands to tweak your extracted events to your specificationsadding in a specific location, setting a certain length, putting a particular name or even emoji at the start of each title, or making the events recurring in any way imaginable, just for a few fast examples. So, for instance, I took a roughly 500-word email newsletter update from my kids school and plopped it over into the Agenda Hero website. It had all sorts of information, with important dates and events sprinkled in here and there. And it wouldve been a massive headache to try to find all the date-specific tidbits and add em into my calendar on my own. With one click, though, Agenda Hero did all that heavy lifting for meand, in literally a few seconds, gave me a series of ready-to-roll events with all the relevant info extracted from the email. Agenda Hero easily extracts and formats events from text, images, and PDFs. But the text didnt mention any specific places, which meant none of the events had assigned locations. So I just asked the site to add that in . . . The service now lets you ask for specific adjustments, like adding a location to every event it identifies. And, booma couple seconds later: Locations added, thanks to a quick text command on Agenda Hero’s results list. Then, I thought maybe itd be helpful to put the word SCHOOL at the start of all of these events, so Id know at a glance theyre about the kids and not my own personal schedule. One more request . . . You can even add text or emojis into a series of event titles, all with a simple plain-text command. And there we have it. Agenda Hero will process any number of events at once, in a matter of seconds. You get the idea. From there, all thats left is to click the Add all to Google button to have all of these events instantly beamed into my Google Calendar. And/or, if I want to share it with someone else, I can use the Shareable page buttonwhich creates a nifty little page like this that anyone can open and then interact with in a similar way. And remember: The same exact thing works if you upload a PDF or an image that has any manner of event info within it as well. Its a massive time-saver. In my experience, its also much easier and more effective than trying to do the same thing with Gemini or any other such chatbot. Those services can perform some of the same tasks around basic event extraction, but you run into a wall pretty quickly once you start trying to update events or modify em en masse like we did here. And theres no real option for easily sharing with otherswhich is a super-practical power that could definitely come in handy in the right sort of scenario. So there ya have it. Agenda Hero may not be the flashiest high-tech tool out there todaybut my goodness, it sure is one of the most useful. And, as usual, all youve gotta do is remember to use it. You can access Agenda Hero right in your web browser on any deviceor, if youd rather, grab the Android app, iOS app, and/or Chrome extension for easy event adding on any of those fronts. The service is free to use without restrictions for all of its core features, and you dont even have to create an account or sign in, either. The new chat-based event editing ability is free to try a handful of times if you do sign in and then requires a $30-a-year subscription if you want to keep using it. Agenda Hero doesnt do anything disconcerting with the limited amount of data it sees, as per its privacy policyand it doesnt share any user data for any manner of AI model training. Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
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E-Commerce
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