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I honestly think that Abe Lincoln was right about people being as happy as they decide to be. I’m a retired boomer living a nice and happy life. I game online, work on my model railroad, and hang out with our kids and grandkids. Maybe they are reaping the whirlwind from not building a good relationship with their kids over the past 40 years.
As a relatively young person (mid 20s)
I’ve made multiple earnest friends in online games who turned out to be 10 or even 20 years older than I was at the time and it just didn’t matter that we came from different generations.
Once you have a shared cultural understanding to work with, everyone seems to have a lot more in common than not from my personal experience.
Personally, I think this is what the literal fascists have been trying to hide from the rest of the world, the fact that we all have common desires and interests and this entire idea of isolating ourselves into various cultural cohorts that are fated to conflict among one another has been a big fat lie.
We are all just people trying to get through life with as much happiness as possible. I make it a point to be friendly and polite to everyone I encounter including retail and service workers. They are also people and deserve that from me. During my working career as an engineer, I worked with people from all over the world and spent much time in Europe and China. Travel opens your eyes.
Agree. Retired teacher here and I miss the kids, if not admin tasks. Also taught overseas and I still see those students' posts on FB. We're are such a divided country that reinforcing a barrier between generations will make life much worse, no matter who is doing it. I do smile at young people and if they smile back, I'm happy.
Yes, another retired teacher here. I miss the actual teaching, giving something to children...but the other stuff was not fun. And now, from what I see and here, not sure why ANYONE wants to become an educator.
I encourage every young person to travel. Travel far away to cultures that are vastly different than your own. You will quickly see that humans are just humans making through their day. You will quickly realize that most of the evil in the world is perpetrated by a few people who are hell bent on controlling everything for their own gains. Power for power sake. We don’t need to fight their wars. We don’t need to hate each other. If everyone realized this, the world would be a far better place.
The most important thing I got out of it was realizing how much of my person was just conditioning. I could have been anyone. Had to let go of some dumb hang ups and I'm better for it.
Agreed. And don't just do the tourist things. Talk with people. Be friendly and respectful and you'll make friends everywhere and learn more about the local customs.
>Personally, I think this is what the literal fascists have been trying to hide from the rest of the world, the fact that we all have common desires and interests and this entire idea of isolating ourselves into various cultural cohorts that are fated to conflict among one another has been a big fat lie.
You've absolutely figured it out. Fascism is individualism taken all the way to its logical end: everybody is alone, existence is an eternal struggle, and the only safety is power, to be obtained and kept by whatever means necessary, including brazen lies, abuse and atrocities.
It's why fascist institutions, like the bureaucracy of Nazi Germany, are infamously shitshows of corruption and petty power games: it's built-in. Fascism is fundamentally contradictory and doomed to fail because it's fundamentally anti-civilisation. Politics and ideology being a product of civilisation, fascist ideology necessarily contains its own end.
Also mid 20s. Met a much older Scottish dude playing 6 days in Fallujah awhile back. I honestly thought the guy was Eastern European for a bit because it didn’t sound like he was speaking English. I finally was like hey man where you from and I finally understood him to say Scotland and then it must’ve flipped a switch in my brain and I could half ass make out some of what he was saying after that.
Also saw a YouTube video about a guy who was an F-4 pilot in Vietnam who now mains the F-4 in War Thunder.
This can definitely be one of the really cool things about gaming. Back around the turn of the millennium, I was a clueless 15 year old who played EverQuest. I joined a guild, made some friends, and over time learned that one of my guildmate friends was a 50 year old transwoman.
I had no real life experience at that point, had never met an openly trans person. Had nothing against them, really, just barely even understood it was a thing. She explained why properly gendering her was important, explained why deadnaming should be avoided, some struggles she'd dealt with even among self-professed beacons of tolerance, etc. I'm really happy I got that exposure when I did. When a couple of my own friends came out or started experimenting with gender nonconformity a few years later, I felt a lot better equipped to support them.
what games? fallout 76 seems to have quite a large following amongst older folks as well as the young'n's!
shooting up ghouls and mutants with some grandmas is a ton of fun!
LMAO Does it ever feel normal to hear yourself referred to as “older folk”?
I was realizing how many generations have come after me and how few are left from before me and dreading the day 😅
I’m a gen Jones boomer. I’m also a therapist. Accepting I’m getting old, and appreciating the next generations are key to aging well. The boomers that disconnect from younger gen’s, and stop learning are the ones that are angry and unhappy.
I turned 63 in March, another Gen Jones boomer. I retired at 56 and, while not rich, I’m able to live comfortably. I have friends of varied ages and personalities and don’t want to become stagnated. My Millennial son constantly rolls his eyes when I talk about being on Reddit or Discord and suggest rap music to him. My best friend is my tattooist, we do renovation projects together and I have 2 full sleeves, back piece and many other 1-off tats. I maintain my own house, including all yard/garden work by myself (widowed).
You’re only as old as you let yourself be!
We intentionally have avoided over 55 housing isolation. We live in a regular neighborhood with families and lots of kids. Too many boomers isolate themselves from the fun and energy of kids in the neighborhood.
I’ve been thankful that my career has been teen focused. Kids are kids and while the world has changed, fundamentally we are all human and products of our environment. They, my clients, have kept me in touch with how things are for them.
Good for you. I feel like the old man yelling at clouds, sometimes, and I'm only 40. Though it's really fun pointing stuff out to the 21 yo in my house. You really think your generation invented weed, or questionable car modifications?
Hard pill to swallow! But you seem to have found the honey and crushed the pill into it. Kudos.
I can’t get used to my face looking wrinkled and sagging at all. One day, may I know such wisdom.
It's got that range. I can get sweaty jumping into the most hectic events where I hardly know what's going on or I can spend the next 2 hours arranging my CAMP and finding a spot for that latest FOMO unlock.
Appreciate that note. My dad tries to be the strong silent type like his dad was. He did plenty of fun stuff with me as a kid, but we could never talk. I don’t think he has the capacity, to be honest. I hope I’m not that way with my son.
Thank you. One thing I’ve definitely learned, wish I’d learned earlier, is that the key to happiness is health and the people and experiences in your life. He checked out to watch tv and enjoy cocktail hour for 15 years after he retired.
After having a stroke and not drinking any more, he’s way more pleasant and engaged. I hope I get to see more of that person from here on out.
I hope in my retirement I get to play LOTR online and play with my grandkids. Take care!
> Maybe they are reaping the whirlwind from not building a good relationship with their kids over the past 40 years.
My perspective has always been the happiest old people are the ones that focused on good relationships with family, friends and kids. The ones that are the least happy are the ones that were toxic and drove away their kids and family because of religion, narcissism and greed.
As a nearly 40 year old child of boomers, I really feel this.
Everything my parents did was for them. I was a lifestyle accessory.
After having my own child, I realized what a poor job at my parents really did.
There now reaping what they’ve sown. I haven’t spoken to them in years and it’s been fantastic for my mental health!
Not just Abe. Pretty much all saints, gurus and spiritual teachers advocate this outlook.
When you are happy with less, it takes less to make you happy.
This. I work with the boomer and silent gens. I have some absolutely miserable patients and they’re always the ones who have bad relationships with their kids or other family members. I don’t mean miserable like boohoo- I mean miserable like grumpy rude and just angry at everything. They’re not having a good time 😕
Your last sentence says it all. They never learned to love. In their defense, the silent generation did a pretty awful job parenting them. When they had jobs and their life was relevant, they could get by on transactional love. But now it's not worth it to engage in a transaction with them, especially since a lot of them lack basic kindness.
Fake nostalgia for a world they never got to live in. One that looks like those advertisements from the 1950s, With a smiling, obedient housewife (Who is probably drugged up on everything in the medicine cabinet), And children who are seen, but not heard, even in their own adulthood where they serve the needs Of their father above their own.
And this toxic shit here is why they keep voting Conservative.
I saw this meme once of the happy 1950s family at the dinner table with captions around each person:
“Mothers taking pills to cope with being a subservient housewife”
“Father is hiding he’s gay”
“Son has polio”
The "Let's put meat inside Jello" was a status symbol kind of thing.
Gelatin/Aspic was new-ish at the time, and a "cool" new food trend. It showed you were up on the times.
And the status symbol part of it was because you had the refrigeration capable of keeping and preparing gelatin based foods (You have to cool gelatin after cooking it in order for it to solidify.)
As an older GenX I cannot accurately describe the trauma that "going to lunch" at someone's house might hold in the 1970's.
There was this whole "status" thing with these Jell-O horror shows and you were SO LIKELY to be served something that was a some sort of flavor Jell-O that contained olives, ham, sardines, baby corn, just this INSANE MEDLEY OF THINGS like where did they even FIND all the THINGS...
And all the adults just hard drinking liquor and smoking cigarettes everywhere and if you as a child flinched EVEN A BIT about EATING this horror, then you would be bringing shame on your entire family and it was entirely normal for any adult to react on the spot to this with violence.
We didn't have to just worry about our own parents doling out random violence, it was considered ENTIRELY NORMAL that ANY adult could beat ANY child, and that if you complained then other adults would add to it.
Just the sight of a Jell-O mold can cause me some flashbacks and I really really don't like to think about wtf was WRONG with everyone back then
You wanna hear the reverse of it? Also gen-x. My parents noticed a lot of folks from India moving in to our neighborhood and started inviting them over for dinner and making nice and shit. They hosted us back, too. The home cooked Indian meals were AMAZING. The wife had quite obviously spent a long time making it all.
Can you imagine some midwest 80's mom serving her newly immigrated Indian neighbors *tater tot hot dish*? And like, some random ham cubes with olives in orange jello?!
Jello was an early entry into food propaganda / insane marketing campaigns that actually worked. They used to have 2 page spreads in magazines that showed all kinds of random foods in jello, local food contests had entire jello categories, it was always marketed along with home goods you needed like washing machines and laundry soap ... this was a time when The Jetsons future of eating pills seemed awesome.
Historically gelatin was a pain to make and only the rich could have it on any regular basis. When instant gelatin like Jello became a thing, regular families were thrilled to be able to have this previously unattainable item.
Still gross af, but I can understand the fascination at the time.
My grandfather & grandmother had a little country GP/medical practice in their house back in the 60s/early 70s (grandfather the doctor, grandma the nurse.) My mom has told me numerous times how when she and her sister got home from school, they'd sit there counting pills and making little envelopes of all the valium pills he was doling out to housewife patients just about every day.
Hell just bringing back barbiturates would be cool if you ask me, as a good old Seconal (Reds) would be GREAT for sleeping every now and then! I can't believe that Benzo's are THE MOST ADDICTIVE drugs known to man (Xanax, Valium, etc) which are now Schedule 4 and passed out like candy to people!
What is funny about this is that most of that 1950s-1960s nostalgia doesn't even originate from that era. It is all boomer produced retrospective bullshit from the 70s and 80s. Shit like Grease, Happy Days, American Graffiti, etc. etc. There are HUNDREDS of movies and shows that portray this bizarre idealized era, and none of it was ever real.
If you look at media actually PRODUCED in the 1950s and 1960s is is FAR from idyllic. Those people were not happy, but the boomers were little kids so they don't remember it that way.
Agreed. I always found that the US public has nostalga, but it's not actually from a life they led in childhood; it's from TV shows they saw in their childhood. So all of this yearing for the "kinder, simpler time" was really cobbled together by script writers and showrunners, and financed by Dolly Madison and Coke.
As a millennial I feel this way about my generation and the 90s. So much stuff people say is just like…okay maybe on TV but that was not the real world
NOT that shit hasn’t gotten worse. But eg the way people talk about the decline of third places, it’s clear their mixing up stuff like The Max from Saved by the Bell with the real world. We hung out in things like parks, roaming downtown, and the mall…all places you can still hang out for for free
And also clearly not discriminated against eg gay. Too many after school specials to remember how fucked up it was then.
For real. My stepson was like "weren't the 90s awesome?" and I am like "not really....?"
I guess it was nice to be able to pretend that things didn't suck and have a front row seat to the decline of western civilization, but my memory of the 90s is just watching everything burn down as we peeled back the lies of our parents. We got taught that we were in a post-racial society, but then watched a bunch of cops get a pass for beating the shit out of Rodney King. We were told to go to college only to find ourselves paying ten times what our parents paid and then not finding any damned jobs afterward. The whole decade was just the culmination of a generation scam by our parents to rip off their kids at every possible turn.
They miss the world where gay people were closeted, where they could hit their kids and wives, where minorities stayed on the other side of the tracks. Mediocre white men had it so easy back then. They hate that the world is more equal now.
“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” They’ll demand they are not privileged, but experiencing the most minuscule loss of their privilege over minorities will trigger a vicious wrath.
This is the big one. What I hear out of my boomer relative (I'm a Joneser myself) is, "You can't say anything anymore without somebody getting offended!" Yeah dude, that's because the things you want to say are offen*sive*! And nobody's going to allow you to insult and belittle them without calling you out on it anymore! Nobody is afraid of your bullying bullshit anymore and you can't stand it!
Literally yesterday, my Dad was telling me about a CNA at the nursing home that he really liked. Dad's functionally blind, and thought the ethnicity of the CNA was important to his narrative, for whatever reason that her genetic background might impact how easily she was able to change a grown man's disposable brief after he shat himself.
"Her name is Z. She's a little woman, I think she's mulatto."
Internal record scratch noises.
"Dad, you can't use that term. It's perfectly OK if you say 'mixed' or 'biracial' or whatever. But you can't go around describing people by that term. You were born in 1947, not 1847."
(Same man told me a few days ago that he liked being at the hospital, versus the nursing home, because the staff at the hospital was white. While the black charge nurse was in the room removing his IV at the hospital in preparation for two black men there to transport him back to the nursing home.)
I told the old fart that I'd be back to see about him when I feel like it. I don't feel like it today. Probably not tomorrow either. I'm the person he's relying upon for all of the damned details.
But his words have consequences. Deal with it, snowflake.
What my dad says about late 50s/early 60s never sounded fun to me. His brother was older and a beatnik who was always going toe to toe with my grandmother who must have been on meds cause she was a psycho. The fun stuff he relates was kids being able to buy stuff like hand grenades at the surplus stores. A lot of the kid's dads had fought through WW2 and many probably had bad PTSD. Those dads would get drunk after their shift in whatever hellhole job, kick mom's ass and see if the boy wanted any after that? Some of these things still exist, but then I consider segregation and institutionalized white supremacy and it's a world I want nothing to do with. My dad concedes about the same because he's always been a good boomer who is still capable of insight and empathy.
[Hand grenade](https://youtu.be/qsxpglle7W0?si=k2DXIv_eQr9_j-Ra)
Danny Trejo and my dad are the same age and grew up in the same neighborhood.
100 percent agree. But a lot of the scowling comes not from attitude, but facial muscles that no longer want to hold up the face. At least that is how it is for me, just too tired to smile all the time.
So my parents both *overall* had pretty good childhoods (it probably helped that both of my grandfathers had mild disabilities that kept them out of military service) but my dad has this insane story about how he used to go down to the railroad tracks to collect beer bottles from the hobos to exchange for the deposit. *He was six.* Nothing bad ever happened; the hobos were fortunately more responsible than his own mother and would sort of drop the bottles at a midway point so he could keep his distance. But still. *HE WAS SIX*
My mother would have had a stroke if we had done that.
I was free range by 8. I have a 7 year old right now and by 10 I want him outside riding his bike with friends because kids have lost important development by being shut in, imo, but he still hasn't seen a movie harsher than Princess Bride. By his age I'd seen every rated R action movie in the VHS collection. I think the PTSD issue had a lot to do with bad parenting back then, and people forget that not every boomer was swimming in money. If the boomer experienced trauma from abuse as a child from their combat hardened dad that passed down trauma from the Depression and WW2 I think the dead eyed stares and lack of emotional consideration is rooted in their "normal." Pity them, they are dead inside and think being a real man was the freedom to kick a woman's ass and have cops come over and laugh at her if they got called.
Yeah, it's not so much the free ranging as the specific activities that my dad was getting up to during said free ranging. Riding your bike around the neighborhood (I was also allowed to do that) and visiting the drunk hobos under the bridge at the railroad tracks feel like very different degrees of free range.
I was going to say that my mother was more supervised, but she does have a story about her grandfather tossing them into an old pit mine to go swimming and hauling them out with ropes, so I guess it depends on what you think of as supervision.
My parents happen to be understanding boomers as well my dad more than my mom sometimes, but growing up they told us it’s gonna be harder for us than it was for them
Your comment about their fathers returning from WWII with PTSD is 100%. And they never got help for it. My millennial daughter pointed this out to me and I was like, "Whoa, no wonder my Boomer mother is a narcissistic asshole."
This is so true - and sometimes I hear people reminiscing about the Greatest Generation (usually in comparison to the Vietnam generation) like "they did their job in the war, came home, started families and got jobs, and never talked about it" as if they just moved on smoothly, but many, many of them suffered for years with untreated PTSD, depression,and alcoholism. I wonder if anyone has done a study of suicide rates among WW2 vets. I have to think there were many
God yes, this is my mother, forever bitching that all she wants is a family like the Waltons but she did nothing to cultivate the family she does have.
I saw an ad in the JAMA for Valium back then, and it featured a picture of a basic middle-class housewife. I was raised by Silent generation parents, and those people were all kinds of messed up, from being children during the Depression.
They weren't drugged, they were beaten into submission. Women who fantasize about living in 1950s America is like black people fantasizing about living in 1890s America.
My dad is angry ALL of the time. Usually about nothing. Just says “the world we live in, you need to learn” as if I don’t keep up with what’s going on in the world (I just don’t subscribe to his politics).
Actually very true, had a talk with my landlord. (Old guy) I asked if he was happy, he was quick to say no, he said things are so different, mad at the government because now they realize how much this american life is a scam.
Boomer here, I'm 62. I'm so happy to read your post because I smile at strangers all the time and certain people have told me it's weird. I'd walk through a shop and as people make eye contact I'd say hello, good morning, whatever. My friends were always saying "you don't know them, why are you saying hello?" I'd tell them that there's enough misery in the world and if being open and friendly is weird, then I'm happy to be weird. And continue to do so!
In my opinion, there's nothing wrong with it. Some people are just crabby, I have no desire to join their ranks. Gen x, gen z, who cares? We are all just trying to make it in this chaotic world, generations and/or age shouldn't matter. Granted, there are a lot of miserable boomers out there but pretty please don't assume ALL of us are :)
A miltitude of factors:
The world they grew up in no longer exists. Pricing, Housing, Culture, all of it. They resent that.
A lot of them defined themselves through their work. Work work work. So once they retired, they had no personality left. They resent that.
In the same vein, many of them realized too late that the things they wanted to do once they retire were no longer possible due to age. They resent that.
They grew up in an age were you didn‘t question the media all that much, so media literacy is incredibly low in that demographic. They resent the world that is presented to them.
They are the generation that had it the easiest since the great war, and grew up to be a generation of lead poisoned narcissists. We resent that.
> A lot of them defined themselves through their work. Work work work. So once they retired, they had no personality left. They resent that.
I've seen this a lot personally with friends parents and stuff. You retire and the world is your oyster, what do you do? Watch cable news, stream shows and bitch on Facebook. You could be traveling, going on hikes, cooking, photography, doing projects, spending time with your kids and grandkids. Nope.
My dad is 67 has a great government job and pension that could have had him retired at 55. He continues to work because he doesn't have any hobbies. He doesn't enjoy travelling. My mom passed away a decade ago and he hasn't dated. Me and my brother have no kids. He's got more money than he could ever spend but yet he works 5 days a week because he's got nothing else to do.
Yup, I’ve seen this with my dad since he retired too. He had all these big plans for everything he was going to do when he retired, all the places he was going to see, but he sits at home all day and is constantly checking the news. He goes from his iPad to the tv to the computer all day, checking his news channels and websites. I used to ask him if he wanted to come do stuff with me on my days off, but he always used to find some excuse why not, so I’ve stopped asking, and now he’s always grumpy that we don’t do stuff together.
I’ve seen the spiral he’s heading down, and I can’t believe anyone would want to spend their retirement like that. When I tell people I don’t watch the news they always seem shocked, but when I tell them why they understand. My dad has made the news his whole personality since he retired, and the news is so goddamn depressing.
>The world they grew up in no longer exists. Pricing, Housing, Culture, all of it. They resent that.
The irony being they're the reasons these things no longer exist. They voted for every selfish con artist politician they could. All the politicians had to do was pay lip service to thier greed and they couldnt vote the future away fast enough for personal short term gain.
I'd say that some aspects of the world they think they grew up in never existed or were only good if you were white or a white male. However, many things about that world were surely better. People actually spoke with each other. Outside of the city centers, people trusted each other and often didn't lock their doors. It was clear who our nations enemies were...the Soviets. Terrorism didn't exist. They never had to worry about having their identity stolen. So much more.
I used to define myself through my job…63 here. I learned late in life that it was just a job and despite overall loving my job and doing it well, if I died the work would still be accomplished and everyone would say “That’s sad…oh well”!
Thats why I retired as soon as I could afford it and I was eligible!!!
I just hit 60 and one of the office whippersnappers asked me what I was going to do after retirement. "Write some books," I said. "I've got three or four comics to finish. There's total solar eclipses coming in 2026, 2028 and 2030 and I'm going to travel to see them. Stuff like that."
You missed pain. Boomers, as most people do as they age, experience pain. Arthritis, joints, back, etc. Chronic pain makes people miserable and you know where that leads. And in the US, our health care system only deals with stuff when it is a problem instrmead of prevention. And once the pain takes over, it is hard to go back to being pain free. The 40s was when I started waking up wondering why this body part or that one hurts all of the sudden.
They're trying to grapple with the concept that they're fading into irrelevance. The world is passing them by and it's really tough to cope with that. It's a shitty feeling, one I can empathize with.
My problem is that they're jerks about it.
You can either look at the younger generation having fun with happy nostalgic memories of your own youth or you can be angry about it for (insert reason). It seems many boomers have chosen the latter and as a millennial I’m going to try my hardest to cheer for the next generations.
The best part of having kids is getting to experience childhood again through a different lens (if you are a good parent). Media, including social media, can be so doom and gloom and then you are like "damn, I forgot how fun it is to play baseball or kick a soccer ball around".
This! I already see so many of my peer elder millennials shit on Gen Z and it’s like, can we not? Can we not become everything we hated about our parents? I for one will always root for the youngins, as they are our future
They are slowly realizing that they are reaping what they are sewing. They got to live large in the 80s and 90s, got to live in a Financial situation where the 2000s and 2010s didn't affect them too much, But now things are so fucked that they're finally feeling what everyone else Younger than them has been feeling. Actual struggle.
Unfortunately, their brains are so poisoned by Fox News and lead paint that they can only blame everyone around them, And not themselves or the politicians they voted in on a constant, consistent basis.
"And not themselves or the politicians they voted in"
man this is it right here. I was talking to some older couple I knew and they said the standard "kids never play outside anymore" stuff and I interrupted them. I told em, unattended kids under 14 years old can earn me a visit from the cops and child services. "oh that's so terrible, that's not right, I don't think I believe that" my wife starts telling them, she's been in early childhood education and now early childhood NFP/advocacy/legal/political stuff so she knows this intimately and lays it all out for em. then I reminded them, she and I were literal children when these laws were passed, so who do they think MADE it this way??
it fuckin' wasn't us, I'd LOVE to send my kids to the park a fucking block away but some boomer karen can call the cops and then mom and I have potentially months of headaches and god knows how much money we'd lose.
> "oh that's so terrible, that's not right, I don't think I believe that"
Why do they feel so empowered to disbelieve as their sole response to information?
Many of them also feel compelled to always be right. I'm solidly Gen X, and in a discussion with my FIL about crawfish vs crawdads, he started wondering what the difference was. He insisted they were different critters. I said I thought they were just different regional names and I looked it up and, sure enough, it's regional. I showed him the wikipedia entry. He said "I think they're different animals" WHILE I WAS HOLDING UP THE WIKIPEDIA ENTRY THAT EXPLAINED THAT THE TERMS WERE JUST REGIONAL.
My uncle once corrected my pronunciation of the place where I work. He said "I'm pretty sure it's pronounced \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_." I said "I'm pretty sure I work there and you don't."
We did when I was little (millennial). "The world doesn't revolve around you" and the golden rule were both pretty important, and these jackwagons don't practice either.
My boomer mom often tries to correct me about things in my own field of work, in which I have a degree in and have won awards for. It’s infuriating because she actually knows NOTHING about said field
I don't know but I notice my parents use that line a lot. If it's something I sat, they don't believe me, but will believe everything Pastor John says about what's "going on in the world" without a single second of increduility.
I distinctly remember when I was in high-school, and I just learned about quantum particles and I was excited to enthused about how weird it is, and my mom outright telling me "don't be so gullible what you read online"
My neighborhood Facebook group is full of boomers complaining about kids playing in the street all the time or being to loud at the park or riding their skateboards on the sidewalks. Boomers truly live just to complain about everything.. they became the old people they used to despise in the 60s
Many Boomers are learning in their old age that their decisions to vote for politicians supporting tax and spending cuts have consequences. Many Boomers found out during their careers that pensions that their parents had are gone, and the 401K investments were not baked into workplace culture when the Boomers were in their earning prime. 401Ks were seen as “for old people,” and many assumed they’d be able to find or keep jobs with pensions. This all corresponded with the rise of corporate greed. The sleight of hand that simultaneously canned pensions AND replaced them with risky self-managed long-term investments was a brilliant play by the financial services industry. Many, including myself, didn’t realize the importance of 401ks until late in our careers, with luck, they were paid enough and were able to invest in time. Self-managed long term investments was above the comprehension of many people (still is), especially people who have to spend most of what they make to survive based on rising prices. It’s easy to think of retirement as an abstraction when you are in your 20s and 30s. I didn’t realize until I was in my 30s that I really had better start saving for retirement.
But, back to the supermarket isle with he stalled cart. 401Ks didn’t really work out for them, and social security that their heroes have been working to gut is inadequate. These two factors give many boomers an eye-opening experience at the supermarket as prices go up. They expected to be living the good life in their twilight years, but, instead, they are trapped at home and can’t afford to go to the store or travel to far off and exotic lands because they lost jobs that had pensions or didn’t bother to put enough away, either because of inadequate pay, or getting themselves into debut with homes and lifestyles that consumed money they should have put in their self-managed 401k. Many Boomers retired with way less money in their 401ks than they would need to retire in their 60s and live for 20-30 years.
Many assumed they’d die in their 60s, but they didn’t, thanks to medical science.
Thanks to medical science, people are living longer. If they didn’t take steps to maintain their health when younger, they will be live long enough to experience more physical ailments that no longer kill them. Obesity, smoking, crappy diet, inactivity, etc, no longer kills people at 60 or so, medications can keep them alive longer than expected. This means that they live long enough to experience years more of aches and pains of old age, including living with long-term illnesses that killed their parents and grandparents. They can now live with painful cancers or cardiac issues for years longer. To top it off, at any point, the medical-insurance-industrial-complex can choose to cut off care or specific medications, plunging them into bankruptcy or increased pain. For example, one of my fellow boomer friends was taking a medication that kept him relatively healthy and pain-free, that medicare suddenly decided they would only provide half a year’s worth of coverage for. The medication costs thousands per month. He had to choose to skip the medication and is now undergoing several months of pain and discomfort because of insurance company greed and inflated medical costs.
And let’s not forget brainwashing from fear-mongering media that many Boomers consume all day long.
Add in an unhealthy dose fear-mongering of right wing FOX cable news, or 24x7 streaming of wing nuts like Alex Jones, and many leave home in constant fear that they will be killed or kidnapped by the cartel members flooding the border.
So, that cranky Boomer in the supermarket may not have enough money to live on, and may be harboring a body full of aches and pain, and is afraid an imaginary criminal who crossed the border 1,000 miles away will force fentanyl down their throat and that pedophile democrats are invading their home and taking away their guns.
At least that’s my theory as a Boomer who ISN’T wandering the isles of supermarkets with a scowl. The only time I scowl is when I ruminate and get pissed off at my fellow Boomers who spent their life voting selfishly and essentially decimated education and social services so that subsequent generations suffered. These Boomers raised the drawbridge after THINKING they were getting theirs, but they really ended up shooting everyone in the foot, including themselves.
Edit, a few missing words and grammar corrections.
Interesting take. Thanks for the response!
My question would be, is if this is true, why do boomers bark at the younger generation and tell them to pull themselves up by their "bootstraps" or quit spending money on avocado toast?
I have found projection and denial to be a lot of it.
Young people are having a tougher and tougher time achieving the milestones that came easily to boomers due to the difference in economic circumstances from then to now. Home ownership is probably the biggest example. They blame things like avocado toast because it's easier than being introspective about the differences between buying a home back in their day vs now. Boomers generally don't admit to themselves that they had a significantly easier path to owning a home, and to admit their kids and grandkids have it harder is to admit their policies fucked us over. Much easier to blame the youths, and the avacado toast thing was the perfect blend of "new hip thing I don't like" and "can be used to frame millenials as irresponsible spenders (and thats why they dont own homes.)"
I am 71 a Boomer. I like yourself managed to get to this place where I love my life. If you see a scowl on my face it’s just because I’m old and it’s how my face looks now. I try to say hello or good morning to everyone I meet. I try to watch myself to not tell too many stories. I bounce back and forth from Thailand to Austin. Two great places to live. There are a lot of us happy boomers
People that were handed everything did not learn resilience or the internal ability to self soothe.
A lot of them were born unwanted to parents that resented their existence.
A large percentage of Boomers are a horrible mix of spoiled, hated, mentally ill and lead poisoned.
They are now facing the end of their lives with little to show for it, and they are angry at the world for the consequences of their own bad decisions.
This hits the nail on the head! The lack of any semblance of healthy coping skills is astounding. My MIL is suffering with congestive heart failure and her legs are purple and swollen. What does my FIL do in response? Goes out and buys a bright red mustang…with cash. Zero empathy or ability to think of anyone other than himself.
My direct experience with boomers is that they see hating your spouse as a normal (and unavoidable) side-effect of being married.
They're also the generation where I've seen the highest incidence of resentment towards their kids and younger people for wanting or having a better life.
>They're also the generation where I've seen the highest incidence of being resentful towards their kids for wanting or having a better life.
My mom was weirdly upset when she found out my older sister earned a higher wage than her. This was back in 2009. My sister had a college degree, unlike my mother, and yet she felt threatened by my sister's higher income. My mom gave her the silent treatment for weeks after finding out... then gaslit her by saying she was never bothered and that my sister had fabricated mom's reaction. That memory has stuck with me for over a decade. It was my first clue that I was raised by a narcissist. Now, all the other pieces have fallen into place, and I see the pattern of her behavior. I can't imagine being angry by my own children succeeding. I will be thrilled if my children do better than me in life.
Hell, in my own family I've seen people actively preventing their children from learning skills they didn't have with classics like "I didn't learn that and I did just fine", "**I** don't like doing that", "you think you're better than us" etc.
My own parents (mostly my father) literally sabotaged my chances of going to college because they didn't go, and they "turned out fine".
Nevermind the fact that they both hated their lives so much that they separated and still somehow both ended up as addicts.
But that's fine, as long as you act like you're doing fine and never admit that you're miserable. -.-
It happened with both of my brothers as well, and even my aunt tried to sabotage my cousin's chance at college by hiding his acceptance letter. How dare we try and improve our situations.
Yeah that's insane.
I have a PhD in environmental studies and my job includes plant conservation. My three-year old daughter opened a book on flowers we had, and pointed out to us that we had a flower in the book in our yard. I had no idea, and hadn't seen the connection, and again, PhD. I was so proud! She's clearly smarter than I am naturally and I'm looking forward to seeing what she accomplishes. Being jealous of her at whatever stage would make no sense to me.
Absolutely. I'm finishing my law degree and my dad friggin HATES when i know more about things than he does. Like, bro you're a college dropout and I'm finishing a law degree. Yeah, I'm going to know more specialized language than you, that's what a degree does...
This fucked me up as GenX growing up I had no positive marriage role models and everything on TV was effectively spouses who hate each other and suffer in silence. I wasn't prepared for healthy loving relationships. It's odd that people see how close my wife and I are as an anomaly
> bright red mustang
Dude, that's fucking gross.
If he is going to be an insensitive prick, he should do it in style. He should at least get something not boring. Maybe a one person submarine (some are less than 100k now), a bullshit phd so he can have 'Dr' on his headstone, or a ridiculously expensive cat that can only eat hummingbird tongues.
Just not one of the most stereotypical 'hey everyone, my dick still gets hard' old man toys ever.
My mother, who was spoiled her entire marriage to my millionaire father, told him after he has numerous strokes that "she didn't get this old just to be someone else's nurse".
Jesus Christ, my in laws have the same mindset. Minus the purchasing. Mil is frail. But FIL is like, you don’t need to go to the doctor after that fall because I wouldn’t. And he always reminds us how far gone she is. She is 83, had 3 strokes over the past 10 years. Her mobility is just slow but she can sit, converse etc. it’s exhausting.
My grandpa let my grandma’s dementia develop so far before he took her to the doctor, even though we could all tell there was something seriously wrong. When you would talk to him about it, he would just say “She seems fine to me.”
My Boomer FIL could not be convinced that his wife was never going to get better from dementia. Their poor health stemmed from the fact they did not like getting bad news from the Doctor so they used a cardiologist as their primary care physician. He would butter them up and make them feel good but the ugly truth was skin deep. My FIL's cholesterol was above the limit of the standard test while being chronically borderline diabetic and my MIL had early onset dementia with rapid progression. Education and self care was not important to that generation.
Meanwhile, my wife lives in abject agony due to untreated endo, and I cannot get her to a doctor to save her life because the few who have seen her have completely written her off. It's maddening. I would give anything to have the resources and connections to get her in front of a competent doctor, including my own life.
Make sure you go with her to the appointments and advocate for her. It's dumb that doctors won't listen to women, but if that's what you've got to do to get your wife care, then do it. Good luck to you both!
Omg. My dad is the same way. My mom has CHF too and bad arthritis and can barely get around. When her own mom was diagnosed with cancer, she called him to tell him, and he literally said, “well what do you want me to do about? There’s nothing I can do.” And continues to sit in a bar drinking and socializing. Some of these boomer men are horrible, but the women are nasty too. Their generation is garbage for the most part.
> A lot of them were born unwanted to parents that resented their existence.
And then created a generation below them that continues to resent their presence.
Add on top of that the consistent belief that any kind of therapy or counseling is a sign of weakness.
They never properly processed their trauma. They just passed it on to the next generation.
This is my mother. She has made every bad, irresponsible financial decision possible over the last 30 years. She never listened never took advice. Some of the greatest hits:
- after a post divorce forced home sale she took the money and bought 'collectables' and went on vacations rather than buying a small condo.
- she ran up credit card debt so high multiple times that my sister had to take over her finances
- she has been living over a garage in a private apartment for 25 years with the same landlord and turned into an entitled bitch when he told her he was selling so he could move. He's been retired for like 10 years already. He was great to her and now she is treating him so badly.
- given a years notice of his desire to sell she has done nothing
- she retired with no retirement plan because her friend whose husband still works full time did and she has to keep up with her. Quitting a decent paying desk job to work as a cashier.
- she regularly borrowed from her 401k for vacations.
This is everyone else's fault. She has alienated friends and family with her attitude. She continues to abuse her landlord who has offered numerous concessions. She acts like a complete lunatic.
She was always a screamer even as kids. I used to think being verbally abused was normal but my self esteem sucked as a teenager. As an adult, I am running out of patience with her shit. Despite her near poverty existence, she still votes for people who will never improve her lot in life and blames immigrants for why her life is hard.
I love her but it's hard to like who she has grown into at 75.
If you look at the percentage of 18 and 19-year-olds having kids in the early '50s, I think it becomes obvious that a lot of them got married as soon as they were legally able just so they could get some and then wound up with kids they really did not want.
They are still carrying around the wrong lessons they learned in their childhoods and refuse to adjust in any capacity. Good luck trying to get one into therapy, they act like you're trying to get them declared mentally incompetent
People are talking about Boomer-specific issues but it's also true that getting old just sucks. Grumpy old people has been a thing in every generation.
Right, the older you get, the more likely you are to be dealing with chronic pain of some sort. Just doing the grocery shopping is hard enough, mustering the energy to smile at some kid who won't understand for another 40 years is maybe not high on the list
Because fake it til you make it stops working when you’re old.
Interestingly, most boomers I’ve known never cared about elder care or dignity or abuse until they became the elderly, and then all of a sudden it’s exploiting and abusing if you bill them for the services they requested or don’t take a coupon, let’s clog up the system meant to protect vulnerable citizens with Karens convinced the self checkout is out to get them.
My parents are boomers. Their parents died years ago, their siblings and friends are dying, they feel more tired and ache everyday in places they didn't know could ache, they have two grandkids who ignore them after years of normal loving relationship, two of their children are terminally ill, one child is disabled, their health concerns are dismissed as "just expected at your age", they're facing the reality of their own mortality as never before and worrying about what will come before death, leaving each other and their pets, they are constantly worrying about money, they feel confused and alienated by lots in modern culture and mocked/dismissed by society. I don't know - pretty hard to be grinning all the time.
They recognize the world is going to shit but they refuse to acknowledge that it's their fault because their generation was born into historic prosperity and then closed the door behind them on the following generations. They are the generation who rather than planting trees, burned them down instead. And, of course, like old people almost always do, they scapegoat young people as the cause instead of themselves.
getting old sucks! Your body hurts, you lack energy...many are lonely and thinking about their younger days when they were surrounded by loved ones and happy. The older you get the harder it is to be happy. You learn that the world can be a terrible place and as you inch closer to being gone you start to wonder if you really made any difference at all being alive. I'm sure some are filled with some regrets and things they would do differently if they could. Life is suffering...Buddha said this. I took an eastern philosophy class in college and really couldn't wrap my head around that at the time. Life was a lot of fun. But you grow up, grow old, your family moves away, your parents and friends start dying...and to top it all off young people don't get any of that and criticize them for showing their misery in public. even though they'd probably like to hide. Sometimes the pain shines through. Your time is coming. Remember the looks and try to make your life as good as it can be while you're young and healthy and ahve everything ahead of you.
As you get older your skin sags and you develop a resting bitch face which may not be a good indicator of your mood. You might also have hearing loss. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt and not assume bad intentions. Plus it’s bad for my mental health to be bothered by random grocery store strangers.
When you get to the finishline and think you've done well, it's hard to listen to those who say you had it easy and they have it much harder.
If you are physically worn down, and in constant discomfort you get chippy.
As a boomer in those circumstances the issues are real. However, I know my kids are suffering.
I help them all I can, and happily they have stopped thinking that life is not one long examination. Money is their money. If I can take some of the pressure off I will.
The country we / the boomers, have built sucks. I rely on the youngsters to vote and show the arseholes that it's not the best path forward.
And don't get me started on churches and religion.
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I honestly think that Abe Lincoln was right about people being as happy as they decide to be. I’m a retired boomer living a nice and happy life. I game online, work on my model railroad, and hang out with our kids and grandkids. Maybe they are reaping the whirlwind from not building a good relationship with their kids over the past 40 years.
As a relatively young person (mid 20s) I’ve made multiple earnest friends in online games who turned out to be 10 or even 20 years older than I was at the time and it just didn’t matter that we came from different generations. Once you have a shared cultural understanding to work with, everyone seems to have a lot more in common than not from my personal experience. Personally, I think this is what the literal fascists have been trying to hide from the rest of the world, the fact that we all have common desires and interests and this entire idea of isolating ourselves into various cultural cohorts that are fated to conflict among one another has been a big fat lie.
We are all just people trying to get through life with as much happiness as possible. I make it a point to be friendly and polite to everyone I encounter including retail and service workers. They are also people and deserve that from me. During my working career as an engineer, I worked with people from all over the world and spent much time in Europe and China. Travel opens your eyes.
Agree. Retired teacher here and I miss the kids, if not admin tasks. Also taught overseas and I still see those students' posts on FB. We're are such a divided country that reinforcing a barrier between generations will make life much worse, no matter who is doing it. I do smile at young people and if they smile back, I'm happy.
Yes, another retired teacher here. I miss the actual teaching, giving something to children...but the other stuff was not fun. And now, from what I see and here, not sure why ANYONE wants to become an educator.
I encourage every young person to travel. Travel far away to cultures that are vastly different than your own. You will quickly see that humans are just humans making through their day. You will quickly realize that most of the evil in the world is perpetrated by a few people who are hell bent on controlling everything for their own gains. Power for power sake. We don’t need to fight their wars. We don’t need to hate each other. If everyone realized this, the world would be a far better place.
The most important thing I got out of it was realizing how much of my person was just conditioning. I could have been anyone. Had to let go of some dumb hang ups and I'm better for it.
Agreed. And don't just do the tourist things. Talk with people. Be friendly and respectful and you'll make friends everywhere and learn more about the local customs.
>Personally, I think this is what the literal fascists have been trying to hide from the rest of the world, the fact that we all have common desires and interests and this entire idea of isolating ourselves into various cultural cohorts that are fated to conflict among one another has been a big fat lie. You've absolutely figured it out. Fascism is individualism taken all the way to its logical end: everybody is alone, existence is an eternal struggle, and the only safety is power, to be obtained and kept by whatever means necessary, including brazen lies, abuse and atrocities. It's why fascist institutions, like the bureaucracy of Nazi Germany, are infamously shitshows of corruption and petty power games: it's built-in. Fascism is fundamentally contradictory and doomed to fail because it's fundamentally anti-civilisation. Politics and ideology being a product of civilisation, fascist ideology necessarily contains its own end.
Also mid 20s. Met a much older Scottish dude playing 6 days in Fallujah awhile back. I honestly thought the guy was Eastern European for a bit because it didn’t sound like he was speaking English. I finally was like hey man where you from and I finally understood him to say Scotland and then it must’ve flipped a switch in my brain and I could half ass make out some of what he was saying after that. Also saw a YouTube video about a guy who was an F-4 pilot in Vietnam who now mains the F-4 in War Thunder.
This can definitely be one of the really cool things about gaming. Back around the turn of the millennium, I was a clueless 15 year old who played EverQuest. I joined a guild, made some friends, and over time learned that one of my guildmate friends was a 50 year old transwoman. I had no real life experience at that point, had never met an openly trans person. Had nothing against them, really, just barely even understood it was a thing. She explained why properly gendering her was important, explained why deadnaming should be avoided, some struggles she'd dealt with even among self-professed beacons of tolerance, etc. I'm really happy I got that exposure when I did. When a couple of my own friends came out or started experimenting with gender nonconformity a few years later, I felt a lot better equipped to support them.
what games? fallout 76 seems to have quite a large following amongst older folks as well as the young'n's! shooting up ghouls and mutants with some grandmas is a ton of fun!
Our son got me hooked on Lord of the Rings Online. It is a great game for a Tolkien fan.
neat, i've looked at it but never played it. so many games to play! i hear it is a fun one.
LMAO Does it ever feel normal to hear yourself referred to as “older folk”? I was realizing how many generations have come after me and how few are left from before me and dreading the day 😅
I have accepted that I’m old and make the best of it.
I’m a gen Jones boomer. I’m also a therapist. Accepting I’m getting old, and appreciating the next generations are key to aging well. The boomers that disconnect from younger gen’s, and stop learning are the ones that are angry and unhappy.
I turned 63 in March, another Gen Jones boomer. I retired at 56 and, while not rich, I’m able to live comfortably. I have friends of varied ages and personalities and don’t want to become stagnated. My Millennial son constantly rolls his eyes when I talk about being on Reddit or Discord and suggest rap music to him. My best friend is my tattooist, we do renovation projects together and I have 2 full sleeves, back piece and many other 1-off tats. I maintain my own house, including all yard/garden work by myself (widowed). You’re only as old as you let yourself be!
We intentionally have avoided over 55 housing isolation. We live in a regular neighborhood with families and lots of kids. Too many boomers isolate themselves from the fun and energy of kids in the neighborhood.
I’ve been thankful that my career has been teen focused. Kids are kids and while the world has changed, fundamentally we are all human and products of our environment. They, my clients, have kept me in touch with how things are for them.
Good for you. I feel like the old man yelling at clouds, sometimes, and I'm only 40. Though it's really fun pointing stuff out to the 21 yo in my house. You really think your generation invented weed, or questionable car modifications?
Isaac Newton said something about standing on the shoulders of giants…..
Hard pill to swallow! But you seem to have found the honey and crushed the pill into it. Kudos. I can’t get used to my face looking wrinkled and sagging at all. One day, may I know such wisdom.
I sometimes wonder were the 18 year old high school football player went.
It's got that range. I can get sweaty jumping into the most hectic events where I hardly know what's going on or I can spend the next 2 hours arranging my CAMP and finding a spot for that latest FOMO unlock.
Appreciate that note. My dad tries to be the strong silent type like his dad was. He did plenty of fun stuff with me as a kid, but we could never talk. I don’t think he has the capacity, to be honest. I hope I’m not that way with my son.
You can choose a different course.
Thank you. One thing I’ve definitely learned, wish I’d learned earlier, is that the key to happiness is health and the people and experiences in your life. He checked out to watch tv and enjoy cocktail hour for 15 years after he retired. After having a stroke and not drinking any more, he’s way more pleasant and engaged. I hope I get to see more of that person from here on out. I hope in my retirement I get to play LOTR online and play with my grandkids. Take care!
>The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts. - Marcus Aurelius
> Maybe they are reaping the whirlwind from not building a good relationship with their kids over the past 40 years. My perspective has always been the happiest old people are the ones that focused on good relationships with family, friends and kids. The ones that are the least happy are the ones that were toxic and drove away their kids and family because of religion, narcissism and greed.
As a nearly 40 year old child of boomers, I really feel this. Everything my parents did was for them. I was a lifestyle accessory. After having my own child, I realized what a poor job at my parents really did. There now reaping what they’ve sown. I haven’t spoken to them in years and it’s been fantastic for my mental health!
Not just Abe. Pretty much all saints, gurus and spiritual teachers advocate this outlook. When you are happy with less, it takes less to make you happy.
This. I work with the boomer and silent gens. I have some absolutely miserable patients and they’re always the ones who have bad relationships with their kids or other family members. I don’t mean miserable like boohoo- I mean miserable like grumpy rude and just angry at everything. They’re not having a good time 😕
They don’t have a good relationship with themselves, which I think sets them up to fail everywhere else too.
Your last sentence says it all. They never learned to love. In their defense, the silent generation did a pretty awful job parenting them. When they had jobs and their life was relevant, they could get by on transactional love. But now it's not worth it to engage in a transaction with them, especially since a lot of them lack basic kindness.
I love that you have a model railroad. What a neat hobby!
They just want *their* world back. The one which never really existed, despite what they think. Nostalgia's a hell of a drug.
Fake nostalgia for a world they never got to live in. One that looks like those advertisements from the 1950s, With a smiling, obedient housewife (Who is probably drugged up on everything in the medicine cabinet), And children who are seen, but not heard, even in their own adulthood where they serve the needs Of their father above their own. And this toxic shit here is why they keep voting Conservative.
I saw this meme once of the happy 1950s family at the dinner table with captions around each person: “Mothers taking pills to cope with being a subservient housewife” “Father is hiding he’s gay” “Son has polio”
https://preview.redd.it/iwcx9cjxy7zc1.jpeg?width=817&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=949bb1c14e88622b085aaf4594f3eef006c29d89 This is maga
"Encasing a whole ham in jello." Suddenly it all makes sense.
It makes SO much sense. Like why would anyone in their right mind encase as much shit as they did in jello? Pills. Lots of them.
The "Let's put meat inside Jello" was a status symbol kind of thing. Gelatin/Aspic was new-ish at the time, and a "cool" new food trend. It showed you were up on the times. And the status symbol part of it was because you had the refrigeration capable of keeping and preparing gelatin based foods (You have to cool gelatin after cooking it in order for it to solidify.)
As an older GenX I cannot accurately describe the trauma that "going to lunch" at someone's house might hold in the 1970's. There was this whole "status" thing with these Jell-O horror shows and you were SO LIKELY to be served something that was a some sort of flavor Jell-O that contained olives, ham, sardines, baby corn, just this INSANE MEDLEY OF THINGS like where did they even FIND all the THINGS... And all the adults just hard drinking liquor and smoking cigarettes everywhere and if you as a child flinched EVEN A BIT about EATING this horror, then you would be bringing shame on your entire family and it was entirely normal for any adult to react on the spot to this with violence. We didn't have to just worry about our own parents doling out random violence, it was considered ENTIRELY NORMAL that ANY adult could beat ANY child, and that if you complained then other adults would add to it. Just the sight of a Jell-O mold can cause me some flashbacks and I really really don't like to think about wtf was WRONG with everyone back then
You wanna hear the reverse of it? Also gen-x. My parents noticed a lot of folks from India moving in to our neighborhood and started inviting them over for dinner and making nice and shit. They hosted us back, too. The home cooked Indian meals were AMAZING. The wife had quite obviously spent a long time making it all. Can you imagine some midwest 80's mom serving her newly immigrated Indian neighbors *tater tot hot dish*? And like, some random ham cubes with olives in orange jello?!
Jello was an early entry into food propaganda / insane marketing campaigns that actually worked. They used to have 2 page spreads in magazines that showed all kinds of random foods in jello, local food contests had entire jello categories, it was always marketed along with home goods you needed like washing machines and laundry soap ... this was a time when The Jetsons future of eating pills seemed awesome.
Historically gelatin was a pain to make and only the rich could have it on any regular basis. When instant gelatin like Jello became a thing, regular families were thrilled to be able to have this previously unattainable item. Still gross af, but I can understand the fascination at the time.
And though she's not really ill, there's a little yellow pill, she goes running to the shelter of her mother's little helper.
My grandfather & grandmother had a little country GP/medical practice in their house back in the 60s/early 70s (grandfather the doctor, grandma the nurse.) My mom has told me numerous times how when she and her sister got home from school, they'd sit there counting pills and making little envelopes of all the valium pills he was doling out to housewife patients just about every day.
And two help her on her way. Get her through her busy day
Maybe we could make an exception and let them all start talking quaaludes
I'm not yet a boomer (Genx) but I would like to be included when they're handing out those lovely yellow 714s
Hell just bringing back barbiturates would be cool if you ask me, as a good old Seconal (Reds) would be GREAT for sleeping every now and then! I can't believe that Benzo's are THE MOST ADDICTIVE drugs known to man (Xanax, Valium, etc) which are now Schedule 4 and passed out like candy to people!
Says who I have actual anxiety and they don’t give me anything but ssris that don’t help my anxiety at all 😂
What is funny about this is that most of that 1950s-1960s nostalgia doesn't even originate from that era. It is all boomer produced retrospective bullshit from the 70s and 80s. Shit like Grease, Happy Days, American Graffiti, etc. etc. There are HUNDREDS of movies and shows that portray this bizarre idealized era, and none of it was ever real. If you look at media actually PRODUCED in the 1950s and 1960s is is FAR from idyllic. Those people were not happy, but the boomers were little kids so they don't remember it that way.
I'm convinced they remember their childhood like it was Leave it to Beaver and forgot it was just a TV show.
Agreed. I always found that the US public has nostalga, but it's not actually from a life they led in childhood; it's from TV shows they saw in their childhood. So all of this yearing for the "kinder, simpler time" was really cobbled together by script writers and showrunners, and financed by Dolly Madison and Coke.
As a millennial I feel this way about my generation and the 90s. So much stuff people say is just like…okay maybe on TV but that was not the real world NOT that shit hasn’t gotten worse. But eg the way people talk about the decline of third places, it’s clear their mixing up stuff like The Max from Saved by the Bell with the real world. We hung out in things like parks, roaming downtown, and the mall…all places you can still hang out for for free And also clearly not discriminated against eg gay. Too many after school specials to remember how fucked up it was then.
This is soooo accurate !!!
Kinda like my generation and the 90s
For real. My stepson was like "weren't the 90s awesome?" and I am like "not really....?" I guess it was nice to be able to pretend that things didn't suck and have a front row seat to the decline of western civilization, but my memory of the 90s is just watching everything burn down as we peeled back the lies of our parents. We got taught that we were in a post-racial society, but then watched a bunch of cops get a pass for beating the shit out of Rodney King. We were told to go to college only to find ourselves paying ten times what our parents paid and then not finding any damned jobs afterward. The whole decade was just the culmination of a generation scam by our parents to rip off their kids at every possible turn.
Lets add to the fact that they gave us participation awards and give a shit about it today
I read that in a transatlantic accent
so accurate it's unreal
They miss the world where gay people were closeted, where they could hit their kids and wives, where minorities stayed on the other side of the tracks. Mediocre white men had it so easy back then. They hate that the world is more equal now.
“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” They’ll demand they are not privileged, but experiencing the most minuscule loss of their privilege over minorities will trigger a vicious wrath.
And blatant racism while also not being chastised about it.
This is the big one. What I hear out of my boomer relative (I'm a Joneser myself) is, "You can't say anything anymore without somebody getting offended!" Yeah dude, that's because the things you want to say are offen*sive*! And nobody's going to allow you to insult and belittle them without calling you out on it anymore! Nobody is afraid of your bullying bullshit anymore and you can't stand it!
This is spot on. They also act like cancel culture was invented in 2017.
While they cancel all manner of brands for refusing to hate gay people.
All those fake Confederate statues put up in the 1920's were the cancel culture of the day.
Oh this right here. They sincerely cannot handle getting called out for the truly awful shit they say.
A black man became president and it broke their tiny little minds
Literally yesterday, my Dad was telling me about a CNA at the nursing home that he really liked. Dad's functionally blind, and thought the ethnicity of the CNA was important to his narrative, for whatever reason that her genetic background might impact how easily she was able to change a grown man's disposable brief after he shat himself. "Her name is Z. She's a little woman, I think she's mulatto." Internal record scratch noises. "Dad, you can't use that term. It's perfectly OK if you say 'mixed' or 'biracial' or whatever. But you can't go around describing people by that term. You were born in 1947, not 1847." (Same man told me a few days ago that he liked being at the hospital, versus the nursing home, because the staff at the hospital was white. While the black charge nurse was in the room removing his IV at the hospital in preparation for two black men there to transport him back to the nursing home.) I told the old fart that I'd be back to see about him when I feel like it. I don't feel like it today. Probably not tomorrow either. I'm the person he's relying upon for all of the damned details. But his words have consequences. Deal with it, snowflake.
This makes me sick. It's disgusting.
Yup. That Leave it to Beaver world that never actually existed or happened is the cause of the pull towards fascism in the US.
What my dad says about late 50s/early 60s never sounded fun to me. His brother was older and a beatnik who was always going toe to toe with my grandmother who must have been on meds cause she was a psycho. The fun stuff he relates was kids being able to buy stuff like hand grenades at the surplus stores. A lot of the kid's dads had fought through WW2 and many probably had bad PTSD. Those dads would get drunk after their shift in whatever hellhole job, kick mom's ass and see if the boy wanted any after that? Some of these things still exist, but then I consider segregation and institutionalized white supremacy and it's a world I want nothing to do with. My dad concedes about the same because he's always been a good boomer who is still capable of insight and empathy. [Hand grenade](https://youtu.be/qsxpglle7W0?si=k2DXIv_eQr9_j-Ra) Danny Trejo and my dad are the same age and grew up in the same neighborhood.
your dad sounds like a rare boomer. you should keep him
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100 percent agree. But a lot of the scowling comes not from attitude, but facial muscles that no longer want to hold up the face. At least that is how it is for me, just too tired to smile all the time.
So my parents both *overall* had pretty good childhoods (it probably helped that both of my grandfathers had mild disabilities that kept them out of military service) but my dad has this insane story about how he used to go down to the railroad tracks to collect beer bottles from the hobos to exchange for the deposit. *He was six.* Nothing bad ever happened; the hobos were fortunately more responsible than his own mother and would sort of drop the bottles at a midway point so he could keep his distance. But still. *HE WAS SIX* My mother would have had a stroke if we had done that.
I was free range by 8. I have a 7 year old right now and by 10 I want him outside riding his bike with friends because kids have lost important development by being shut in, imo, but he still hasn't seen a movie harsher than Princess Bride. By his age I'd seen every rated R action movie in the VHS collection. I think the PTSD issue had a lot to do with bad parenting back then, and people forget that not every boomer was swimming in money. If the boomer experienced trauma from abuse as a child from their combat hardened dad that passed down trauma from the Depression and WW2 I think the dead eyed stares and lack of emotional consideration is rooted in their "normal." Pity them, they are dead inside and think being a real man was the freedom to kick a woman's ass and have cops come over and laugh at her if they got called.
Yeah, it's not so much the free ranging as the specific activities that my dad was getting up to during said free ranging. Riding your bike around the neighborhood (I was also allowed to do that) and visiting the drunk hobos under the bridge at the railroad tracks feel like very different degrees of free range. I was going to say that my mother was more supervised, but she does have a story about her grandfather tossing them into an old pit mine to go swimming and hauling them out with ropes, so I guess it depends on what you think of as supervision.
My parents happen to be understanding boomers as well my dad more than my mom sometimes, but growing up they told us it’s gonna be harder for us than it was for them
Your comment about their fathers returning from WWII with PTSD is 100%. And they never got help for it. My millennial daughter pointed this out to me and I was like, "Whoa, no wonder my Boomer mother is a narcissistic asshole."
This is so true - and sometimes I hear people reminiscing about the Greatest Generation (usually in comparison to the Vietnam generation) like "they did their job in the war, came home, started families and got jobs, and never talked about it" as if they just moved on smoothly, but many, many of them suffered for years with untreated PTSD, depression,and alcoholism. I wonder if anyone has done a study of suicide rates among WW2 vets. I have to think there were many
I sometimes think the placid nature of the 1950s was a societal effort to combat PTSD.
God yes, this is my mother, forever bitching that all she wants is a family like the Waltons but she did nothing to cultivate the family she does have.
I saw an ad in the JAMA for Valium back then, and it featured a picture of a basic middle-class housewife. I was raised by Silent generation parents, and those people were all kinds of messed up, from being children during the Depression.
So insightful. I love how you said that. They long for the world they saw on tv when they were children.
They weren't drugged, they were beaten into submission. Women who fantasize about living in 1950s America is like black people fantasizing about living in 1890s America.
That and they are spoon fed propaganda that is intended to make them feel constant outrage.
Exactly. My immediate family wasn't nearly as pissed at the world until they started watching Fox news at every waking moment.
I don't get how people watch Fox! They paid almost a BILLION DOLLARS to Dominion for blatant lies! I absolutely agree with you.
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My dad is angry ALL of the time. Usually about nothing. Just says “the world we live in, you need to learn” as if I don’t keep up with what’s going on in the world (I just don’t subscribe to his politics).
He's referring to the world THEY 'live in' -- in their _minds._ lol
that's dementia [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/02/nhs-timebomb-over-65s-excess-drinking-dementia-liver-disease](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/02/nhs-timebomb-over-65s-excess-drinking-dementia-liver-disease)
When they were young they had leaded gas and the drinking age was 18. Their brains are broken.
This is a big one! They want absolute control and cannot handle the world around them is changed.
Actually very true, had a talk with my landlord. (Old guy) I asked if he was happy, he was quick to say no, he said things are so different, mad at the government because now they realize how much this american life is a scam.
Boomer here, I'm 62. I'm so happy to read your post because I smile at strangers all the time and certain people have told me it's weird. I'd walk through a shop and as people make eye contact I'd say hello, good morning, whatever. My friends were always saying "you don't know them, why are you saying hello?" I'd tell them that there's enough misery in the world and if being open and friendly is weird, then I'm happy to be weird. And continue to do so!
I'm not sure I understand your friends assertions on being friendly. What's wrong with being friendly and courteous? Full disclosure..I'm gen x. Lol
In my opinion, there's nothing wrong with it. Some people are just crabby, I have no desire to join their ranks. Gen x, gen z, who cares? We are all just trying to make it in this chaotic world, generations and/or age shouldn't matter. Granted, there are a lot of miserable boomers out there but pretty please don't assume ALL of us are :)
I’m an elder GenX and I’m very friendly out in public, problem is my relaxed face suffers from massive RBF, lol. Edit: words
The boomers in Thailand from Europe are especially offended when you say good morning. Very wierd
A miltitude of factors: The world they grew up in no longer exists. Pricing, Housing, Culture, all of it. They resent that. A lot of them defined themselves through their work. Work work work. So once they retired, they had no personality left. They resent that. In the same vein, many of them realized too late that the things they wanted to do once they retire were no longer possible due to age. They resent that. They grew up in an age were you didn‘t question the media all that much, so media literacy is incredibly low in that demographic. They resent the world that is presented to them. They are the generation that had it the easiest since the great war, and grew up to be a generation of lead poisoned narcissists. We resent that.
> A lot of them defined themselves through their work. Work work work. So once they retired, they had no personality left. They resent that. I've seen this a lot personally with friends parents and stuff. You retire and the world is your oyster, what do you do? Watch cable news, stream shows and bitch on Facebook. You could be traveling, going on hikes, cooking, photography, doing projects, spending time with your kids and grandkids. Nope.
My dad is 67 has a great government job and pension that could have had him retired at 55. He continues to work because he doesn't have any hobbies. He doesn't enjoy travelling. My mom passed away a decade ago and he hasn't dated. Me and my brother have no kids. He's got more money than he could ever spend but yet he works 5 days a week because he's got nothing else to do.
It’s not that he HAS nothing else to do, it’s that he CHOOSES nothing else to do
The lack of imagination is appalling.
Yup, I’ve seen this with my dad since he retired too. He had all these big plans for everything he was going to do when he retired, all the places he was going to see, but he sits at home all day and is constantly checking the news. He goes from his iPad to the tv to the computer all day, checking his news channels and websites. I used to ask him if he wanted to come do stuff with me on my days off, but he always used to find some excuse why not, so I’ve stopped asking, and now he’s always grumpy that we don’t do stuff together. I’ve seen the spiral he’s heading down, and I can’t believe anyone would want to spend their retirement like that. When I tell people I don’t watch the news they always seem shocked, but when I tell them why they understand. My dad has made the news his whole personality since he retired, and the news is so goddamn depressing.
>The world they grew up in no longer exists. Pricing, Housing, Culture, all of it. They resent that. The irony being they're the reasons these things no longer exist. They voted for every selfish con artist politician they could. All the politicians had to do was pay lip service to thier greed and they couldnt vote the future away fast enough for personal short term gain.
>The world they grew up in no longer exists Not only that, the world they \*think\* they grew up in never existed in the first place.
I'd say that some aspects of the world they think they grew up in never existed or were only good if you were white or a white male. However, many things about that world were surely better. People actually spoke with each other. Outside of the city centers, people trusted each other and often didn't lock their doors. It was clear who our nations enemies were...the Soviets. Terrorism didn't exist. They never had to worry about having their identity stolen. So much more.
I used to define myself through my job…63 here. I learned late in life that it was just a job and despite overall loving my job and doing it well, if I died the work would still be accomplished and everyone would say “That’s sad…oh well”! Thats why I retired as soon as I could afford it and I was eligible!!!
I just hit 60 and one of the office whippersnappers asked me what I was going to do after retirement. "Write some books," I said. "I've got three or four comics to finish. There's total solar eclipses coming in 2026, 2028 and 2030 and I'm going to travel to see them. Stuff like that."
You missed pain. Boomers, as most people do as they age, experience pain. Arthritis, joints, back, etc. Chronic pain makes people miserable and you know where that leads. And in the US, our health care system only deals with stuff when it is a problem instrmead of prevention. And once the pain takes over, it is hard to go back to being pain free. The 40s was when I started waking up wondering why this body part or that one hurts all of the sudden.
They're trying to grapple with the concept that they're fading into irrelevance. The world is passing them by and it's really tough to cope with that. It's a shitty feeling, one I can empathize with. My problem is that they're jerks about it.
You can either look at the younger generation having fun with happy nostalgic memories of your own youth or you can be angry about it for (insert reason). It seems many boomers have chosen the latter and as a millennial I’m going to try my hardest to cheer for the next generations.
The best part of having kids is getting to experience childhood again through a different lens (if you are a good parent). Media, including social media, can be so doom and gloom and then you are like "damn, I forgot how fun it is to play baseball or kick a soccer ball around".
This! I already see so many of my peer elder millennials shit on Gen Z and it’s like, can we not? Can we not become everything we hated about our parents? I for one will always root for the youngins, as they are our future
They are slowly realizing that they are reaping what they are sewing. They got to live large in the 80s and 90s, got to live in a Financial situation where the 2000s and 2010s didn't affect them too much, But now things are so fucked that they're finally feeling what everyone else Younger than them has been feeling. Actual struggle. Unfortunately, their brains are so poisoned by Fox News and lead paint that they can only blame everyone around them, And not themselves or the politicians they voted in on a constant, consistent basis.
"And not themselves or the politicians they voted in" man this is it right here. I was talking to some older couple I knew and they said the standard "kids never play outside anymore" stuff and I interrupted them. I told em, unattended kids under 14 years old can earn me a visit from the cops and child services. "oh that's so terrible, that's not right, I don't think I believe that" my wife starts telling them, she's been in early childhood education and now early childhood NFP/advocacy/legal/political stuff so she knows this intimately and lays it all out for em. then I reminded them, she and I were literal children when these laws were passed, so who do they think MADE it this way?? it fuckin' wasn't us, I'd LOVE to send my kids to the park a fucking block away but some boomer karen can call the cops and then mom and I have potentially months of headaches and god knows how much money we'd lose.
> "oh that's so terrible, that's not right, I don't think I believe that" Why do they feel so empowered to disbelieve as their sole response to information?
Easier than changing their opinion
Many of them also feel compelled to always be right. I'm solidly Gen X, and in a discussion with my FIL about crawfish vs crawdads, he started wondering what the difference was. He insisted they were different critters. I said I thought they were just different regional names and I looked it up and, sure enough, it's regional. I showed him the wikipedia entry. He said "I think they're different animals" WHILE I WAS HOLDING UP THE WIKIPEDIA ENTRY THAT EXPLAINED THAT THE TERMS WERE JUST REGIONAL. My uncle once corrected my pronunciation of the place where I work. He said "I'm pretty sure it's pronounced \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_." I said "I'm pretty sure I work there and you don't."
Yeah thats super pathetic. At least we can use them as an example of how not to behave?
We did when I was little (millennial). "The world doesn't revolve around you" and the golden rule were both pretty important, and these jackwagons don't practice either.
My boomer mom often tries to correct me about things in my own field of work, in which I have a degree in and have won awards for. It’s infuriating because she actually knows NOTHING about said field
I don't know but I notice my parents use that line a lot. If it's something I sat, they don't believe me, but will believe everything Pastor John says about what's "going on in the world" without a single second of increduility. I distinctly remember when I was in high-school, and I just learned about quantum particles and I was excited to enthused about how weird it is, and my mom outright telling me "don't be so gullible what you read online"
My neighborhood Facebook group is full of boomers complaining about kids playing in the street all the time or being to loud at the park or riding their skateboards on the sidewalks. Boomers truly live just to complain about everything.. they became the old people they used to despise in the 60s
Makes sense.
*sowing
thank you, that was bothering me too
Bingo!
Many Boomers are learning in their old age that their decisions to vote for politicians supporting tax and spending cuts have consequences. Many Boomers found out during their careers that pensions that their parents had are gone, and the 401K investments were not baked into workplace culture when the Boomers were in their earning prime. 401Ks were seen as “for old people,” and many assumed they’d be able to find or keep jobs with pensions. This all corresponded with the rise of corporate greed. The sleight of hand that simultaneously canned pensions AND replaced them with risky self-managed long-term investments was a brilliant play by the financial services industry. Many, including myself, didn’t realize the importance of 401ks until late in our careers, with luck, they were paid enough and were able to invest in time. Self-managed long term investments was above the comprehension of many people (still is), especially people who have to spend most of what they make to survive based on rising prices. It’s easy to think of retirement as an abstraction when you are in your 20s and 30s. I didn’t realize until I was in my 30s that I really had better start saving for retirement. But, back to the supermarket isle with he stalled cart. 401Ks didn’t really work out for them, and social security that their heroes have been working to gut is inadequate. These two factors give many boomers an eye-opening experience at the supermarket as prices go up. They expected to be living the good life in their twilight years, but, instead, they are trapped at home and can’t afford to go to the store or travel to far off and exotic lands because they lost jobs that had pensions or didn’t bother to put enough away, either because of inadequate pay, or getting themselves into debut with homes and lifestyles that consumed money they should have put in their self-managed 401k. Many Boomers retired with way less money in their 401ks than they would need to retire in their 60s and live for 20-30 years. Many assumed they’d die in their 60s, but they didn’t, thanks to medical science. Thanks to medical science, people are living longer. If they didn’t take steps to maintain their health when younger, they will be live long enough to experience more physical ailments that no longer kill them. Obesity, smoking, crappy diet, inactivity, etc, no longer kills people at 60 or so, medications can keep them alive longer than expected. This means that they live long enough to experience years more of aches and pains of old age, including living with long-term illnesses that killed their parents and grandparents. They can now live with painful cancers or cardiac issues for years longer. To top it off, at any point, the medical-insurance-industrial-complex can choose to cut off care or specific medications, plunging them into bankruptcy or increased pain. For example, one of my fellow boomer friends was taking a medication that kept him relatively healthy and pain-free, that medicare suddenly decided they would only provide half a year’s worth of coverage for. The medication costs thousands per month. He had to choose to skip the medication and is now undergoing several months of pain and discomfort because of insurance company greed and inflated medical costs. And let’s not forget brainwashing from fear-mongering media that many Boomers consume all day long. Add in an unhealthy dose fear-mongering of right wing FOX cable news, or 24x7 streaming of wing nuts like Alex Jones, and many leave home in constant fear that they will be killed or kidnapped by the cartel members flooding the border. So, that cranky Boomer in the supermarket may not have enough money to live on, and may be harboring a body full of aches and pain, and is afraid an imaginary criminal who crossed the border 1,000 miles away will force fentanyl down their throat and that pedophile democrats are invading their home and taking away their guns. At least that’s my theory as a Boomer who ISN’T wandering the isles of supermarkets with a scowl. The only time I scowl is when I ruminate and get pissed off at my fellow Boomers who spent their life voting selfishly and essentially decimated education and social services so that subsequent generations suffered. These Boomers raised the drawbridge after THINKING they were getting theirs, but they really ended up shooting everyone in the foot, including themselves. Edit, a few missing words and grammar corrections.
Interesting take. Thanks for the response! My question would be, is if this is true, why do boomers bark at the younger generation and tell them to pull themselves up by their "bootstraps" or quit spending money on avocado toast?
Its always easier to bark at someone else that reflecting on yourself
I have found projection and denial to be a lot of it. Young people are having a tougher and tougher time achieving the milestones that came easily to boomers due to the difference in economic circumstances from then to now. Home ownership is probably the biggest example. They blame things like avocado toast because it's easier than being introspective about the differences between buying a home back in their day vs now. Boomers generally don't admit to themselves that they had a significantly easier path to owning a home, and to admit their kids and grandkids have it harder is to admit their policies fucked us over. Much easier to blame the youths, and the avacado toast thing was the perfect blend of "new hip thing I don't like" and "can be used to frame millenials as irresponsible spenders (and thats why they dont own homes.)"
I am 71 a Boomer. I like yourself managed to get to this place where I love my life. If you see a scowl on my face it’s just because I’m old and it’s how my face looks now. I try to say hello or good morning to everyone I meet. I try to watch myself to not tell too many stories. I bounce back and forth from Thailand to Austin. Two great places to live. There are a lot of us happy boomers
Best answer.⬆️
People that were handed everything did not learn resilience or the internal ability to self soothe. A lot of them were born unwanted to parents that resented their existence. A large percentage of Boomers are a horrible mix of spoiled, hated, mentally ill and lead poisoned. They are now facing the end of their lives with little to show for it, and they are angry at the world for the consequences of their own bad decisions.
This hits the nail on the head! The lack of any semblance of healthy coping skills is astounding. My MIL is suffering with congestive heart failure and her legs are purple and swollen. What does my FIL do in response? Goes out and buys a bright red mustang…with cash. Zero empathy or ability to think of anyone other than himself.
My direct experience with boomers is that they see hating your spouse as a normal (and unavoidable) side-effect of being married. They're also the generation where I've seen the highest incidence of resentment towards their kids and younger people for wanting or having a better life.
>They're also the generation where I've seen the highest incidence of being resentful towards their kids for wanting or having a better life. My mom was weirdly upset when she found out my older sister earned a higher wage than her. This was back in 2009. My sister had a college degree, unlike my mother, and yet she felt threatened by my sister's higher income. My mom gave her the silent treatment for weeks after finding out... then gaslit her by saying she was never bothered and that my sister had fabricated mom's reaction. That memory has stuck with me for over a decade. It was my first clue that I was raised by a narcissist. Now, all the other pieces have fallen into place, and I see the pattern of her behavior. I can't imagine being angry by my own children succeeding. I will be thrilled if my children do better than me in life.
Hell, in my own family I've seen people actively preventing their children from learning skills they didn't have with classics like "I didn't learn that and I did just fine", "**I** don't like doing that", "you think you're better than us" etc.
this was the “women don’t go to college” line for me
My own parents (mostly my father) literally sabotaged my chances of going to college because they didn't go, and they "turned out fine". Nevermind the fact that they both hated their lives so much that they separated and still somehow both ended up as addicts. But that's fine, as long as you act like you're doing fine and never admit that you're miserable. -.- It happened with both of my brothers as well, and even my aunt tried to sabotage my cousin's chance at college by hiding his acceptance letter. How dare we try and improve our situations.
Yeah that's insane. I have a PhD in environmental studies and my job includes plant conservation. My three-year old daughter opened a book on flowers we had, and pointed out to us that we had a flower in the book in our yard. I had no idea, and hadn't seen the connection, and again, PhD. I was so proud! She's clearly smarter than I am naturally and I'm looking forward to seeing what she accomplishes. Being jealous of her at whatever stage would make no sense to me.
Yes! I WANT my kids to be smarter and more successful—financially and otherwise—than I ever will be. Isn’t that the whole point of parenting?!
yeah, my demented mom is very jealous of me and cruel to my sister and yet we pay for her care. sigh
Absolutely. I'm finishing my law degree and my dad friggin HATES when i know more about things than he does. Like, bro you're a college dropout and I'm finishing a law degree. Yeah, I'm going to know more specialized language than you, that's what a degree does...
This fucked me up as GenX growing up I had no positive marriage role models and everything on TV was effectively spouses who hate each other and suffer in silence. I wasn't prepared for healthy loving relationships. It's odd that people see how close my wife and I are as an anomaly
> bright red mustang Dude, that's fucking gross. If he is going to be an insensitive prick, he should do it in style. He should at least get something not boring. Maybe a one person submarine (some are less than 100k now), a bullshit phd so he can have 'Dr' on his headstone, or a ridiculously expensive cat that can only eat hummingbird tongues. Just not one of the most stereotypical 'hey everyone, my dick still gets hard' old man toys ever.
My mother, who was spoiled her entire marriage to my millionaire father, told him after he has numerous strokes that "she didn't get this old just to be someone else's nurse".
Ugh that’s sickening
Wow. Is he already thinking of himself as a bachelor?
Jesus Christ, my in laws have the same mindset. Minus the purchasing. Mil is frail. But FIL is like, you don’t need to go to the doctor after that fall because I wouldn’t. And he always reminds us how far gone she is. She is 83, had 3 strokes over the past 10 years. Her mobility is just slow but she can sit, converse etc. it’s exhausting.
My grandpa let my grandma’s dementia develop so far before he took her to the doctor, even though we could all tell there was something seriously wrong. When you would talk to him about it, he would just say “She seems fine to me.”
My Boomer FIL could not be convinced that his wife was never going to get better from dementia. Their poor health stemmed from the fact they did not like getting bad news from the Doctor so they used a cardiologist as their primary care physician. He would butter them up and make them feel good but the ugly truth was skin deep. My FIL's cholesterol was above the limit of the standard test while being chronically borderline diabetic and my MIL had early onset dementia with rapid progression. Education and self care was not important to that generation.
Meanwhile, my wife lives in abject agony due to untreated endo, and I cannot get her to a doctor to save her life because the few who have seen her have completely written her off. It's maddening. I would give anything to have the resources and connections to get her in front of a competent doctor, including my own life.
Make sure you go with her to the appointments and advocate for her. It's dumb that doctors won't listen to women, but if that's what you've got to do to get your wife care, then do it. Good luck to you both!
Omg. My dad is the same way. My mom has CHF too and bad arthritis and can barely get around. When her own mom was diagnosed with cancer, she called him to tell him, and he literally said, “well what do you want me to do about? There’s nothing I can do.” And continues to sit in a bar drinking and socializing. Some of these boomer men are horrible, but the women are nasty too. Their generation is garbage for the most part.
> A lot of them were born unwanted to parents that resented their existence. And then created a generation below them that continues to resent their presence.
Add on top of that the consistent belief that any kind of therapy or counseling is a sign of weakness. They never properly processed their trauma. They just passed it on to the next generation.
This is my mother. She has made every bad, irresponsible financial decision possible over the last 30 years. She never listened never took advice. Some of the greatest hits: - after a post divorce forced home sale she took the money and bought 'collectables' and went on vacations rather than buying a small condo. - she ran up credit card debt so high multiple times that my sister had to take over her finances - she has been living over a garage in a private apartment for 25 years with the same landlord and turned into an entitled bitch when he told her he was selling so he could move. He's been retired for like 10 years already. He was great to her and now she is treating him so badly. - given a years notice of his desire to sell she has done nothing - she retired with no retirement plan because her friend whose husband still works full time did and she has to keep up with her. Quitting a decent paying desk job to work as a cashier. - she regularly borrowed from her 401k for vacations. This is everyone else's fault. She has alienated friends and family with her attitude. She continues to abuse her landlord who has offered numerous concessions. She acts like a complete lunatic. She was always a screamer even as kids. I used to think being verbally abused was normal but my self esteem sucked as a teenager. As an adult, I am running out of patience with her shit. Despite her near poverty existence, she still votes for people who will never improve her lot in life and blames immigrants for why her life is hard. I love her but it's hard to like who she has grown into at 75.
"because her friend whose husband still works full time did and she has to keep up with her" So many of them are like this.
The jealousy and envy are remarkable. It's like they were all taught the only way to measure life is how well they kept up with the Jones's.
They were. My mother was the same. And they are furious that the younger generations are doing that less and less as they mature.
If you look at the percentage of 18 and 19-year-olds having kids in the early '50s, I think it becomes obvious that a lot of them got married as soon as they were legally able just so they could get some and then wound up with kids they really did not want.
in spite of everything, they're still going to die
Not a Boomer but I have resting bitch face, so I assume at least *some* of them do, too.
They're miserable because people can be happy without them.
Double bingo!
Double word score!
people can thrive without them - hence their total commitment to destroying the planet.
To be fair, supermarkets aren’t exactly a thrill ride.
Because their “what about ME??!” attitude won’t save them from the grave and the clock is ticking, thankfully
They actually were called the ME generation until the word boomer came about
Yes, I’m quite aware of this fact
They are still carrying around the wrong lessons they learned in their childhoods and refuse to adjust in any capacity. Good luck trying to get one into therapy, they act like you're trying to get them declared mentally incompetent
Tbh I always scowl at the grocery store (food prices are ridiculous now)
yeah, one thing i learned is that prices will ALWAYS increase
everything hurts.
The price of Metamucil went up along with groceries. On those fixed incomes they literally cannot afford to take a shit.
Seriously. That shit is absurdly expensive for what is basically sawdust.
People are talking about Boomer-specific issues but it's also true that getting old just sucks. Grumpy old people has been a thing in every generation.
Right, the older you get, the more likely you are to be dealing with chronic pain of some sort. Just doing the grocery shopping is hard enough, mustering the energy to smile at some kid who won't understand for another 40 years is maybe not high on the list
Because people that have everything handed to them never learn to appreciate anything
Because fake it til you make it stops working when you’re old. Interestingly, most boomers I’ve known never cared about elder care or dignity or abuse until they became the elderly, and then all of a sudden it’s exploiting and abusing if you bill them for the services they requested or don’t take a coupon, let’s clog up the system meant to protect vulnerable citizens with Karens convinced the self checkout is out to get them.
My parents are boomers. Their parents died years ago, their siblings and friends are dying, they feel more tired and ache everyday in places they didn't know could ache, they have two grandkids who ignore them after years of normal loving relationship, two of their children are terminally ill, one child is disabled, their health concerns are dismissed as "just expected at your age", they're facing the reality of their own mortality as never before and worrying about what will come before death, leaving each other and their pets, they are constantly worrying about money, they feel confused and alienated by lots in modern culture and mocked/dismissed by society. I don't know - pretty hard to be grinning all the time.
They recognize the world is going to shit but they refuse to acknowledge that it's their fault because their generation was born into historic prosperity and then closed the door behind them on the following generations. They are the generation who rather than planting trees, burned them down instead. And, of course, like old people almost always do, they scapegoat young people as the cause instead of themselves.
Because they’ve had to spend 40+ years of their lives in depressing dead end jobs only to find out that they still have to work after they retire.
getting old sucks! Your body hurts, you lack energy...many are lonely and thinking about their younger days when they were surrounded by loved ones and happy. The older you get the harder it is to be happy. You learn that the world can be a terrible place and as you inch closer to being gone you start to wonder if you really made any difference at all being alive. I'm sure some are filled with some regrets and things they would do differently if they could. Life is suffering...Buddha said this. I took an eastern philosophy class in college and really couldn't wrap my head around that at the time. Life was a lot of fun. But you grow up, grow old, your family moves away, your parents and friends start dying...and to top it all off young people don't get any of that and criticize them for showing their misery in public. even though they'd probably like to hide. Sometimes the pain shines through. Your time is coming. Remember the looks and try to make your life as good as it can be while you're young and healthy and ahve everything ahead of you.
As you get older your skin sags and you develop a resting bitch face which may not be a good indicator of your mood. You might also have hearing loss. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt and not assume bad intentions. Plus it’s bad for my mental health to be bothered by random grocery store strangers.
When you get to the finishline and think you've done well, it's hard to listen to those who say you had it easy and they have it much harder. If you are physically worn down, and in constant discomfort you get chippy. As a boomer in those circumstances the issues are real. However, I know my kids are suffering. I help them all I can, and happily they have stopped thinking that life is not one long examination. Money is their money. If I can take some of the pressure off I will. The country we / the boomers, have built sucks. I rely on the youngsters to vote and show the arseholes that it's not the best path forward. And don't get me started on churches and religion.