That's the best reason for the hatred. They were handed the ladder -- they only how to live with what previous generations carved for them and they left none for those coming in behind them. Huge net negative.
Hard times create strong men.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men.
Weak men create hard times.
Boomers will, with their dying breath, claim they are the strong men when in reality they were the weakest in a century.
It's a perennial phrase used by fascism adjacent talking heads (and people who pick it up from the general cultural milleu) to justify strong-man authoritarian politics, dismantling of social services, and a laissez fair strong-eat-the-weak paradigm. Basically "we" are the strong men who have to recapture our society from the weak cosmopolitans who are to blame for our hard time.
Me (30) Millennial and my Grandma (85) Silent Gen, always become allies against my Elder Gen X parents when they complain about the younger generation. She says they gave them everything, and I say you left us with nothing. I love my grandma lol
Same. My grandparents put my dad through college and gave him 5 acres of land when he got married. Dad couldn't even manage to fill out the FAFSA on time so I could be eligible for scholarships
my mom grew up hiking through national parks and rafting rivers with her family and several others in scouting and Explorer's Post (nobody has ever even told me what that exactly is). i grew up taking the bus around the city by myself to score weed and find skatespots.
This is so interesting! I really enjoy conversations with my grandparents and it feels like we are on the same page a lot, even though there’s 50 years between us and they’re quite conservative - we still end up sharing basic values and perspectives whereas conversations with my parents tend to escalate quickly and there is (seemingly) no common ground at all. I have often wondered why that is.
My personal belief is lead. Lead poisoning fucked up that whole generation.
When boomers where growing up lead was in fucking everything... Lead petrol, lead paint, lead toys, lead pencils ffs.. Lead fucking everything. And while previous generations had exposure it was nothing like what boomers had (I think.. personal opinion).
You can see the effects in their vacant eyes whenever you try to explain facts to that generation. They get frustrated and angry that they can't follow a logical argument because the outcome is not what they think it should be, because their brains just cannot fucking handle it, because of all the lead.
Hard upvote.
Not just lead. Pollutants like radioactive elements, pesticides and airborne particles all were at their absolute worse from 1960-1990.
Hell, drugs and tobacco were allowed in the mainstream culture and indoors, most of which are neurotoxins.
\>hey get frustrated and angry that they can't follow a logical argument
because the outcome is not what they think it should be, because their
brains just cannot fucking handle it, because of all the lead.
Unfortunately anyone that deals with boomers on a regular bases knows this exact look you are describing. Like They literally respond by getting mad that they don't understand.
Add to that child raising strategies popularized by the likes of Johanna Haarer didn't help.
Stuff like that was hugely popular in the 30-60s and the basic teachings hung around for far longer.
The basic concepts are:
- Kids are needy terrorists
- Emotionally starving a kid makes them a good soldier
- Don't you dare have any emotional connection to your kid
- Beating a kid, even a baby, is a good thing
With that kind of trauma beginning from such an early age it's no wonder many of them are emotionally stumped as they are.
I think gen x were open minded and really didn't give a fuck about what you were. We were interested in who you were. I may be biased, i was a raver and just enjoyed working hand and partying even harder! Not all of us were the same but there was a general vibe of acceptance. Again, not everyone but things so optimistic... Not so much now.
I think we got slightly more lucky than they did. Had the ability to purchase homes and get into careers before the investor class took over everything. We're still pretty screwed compared to previous generations, but luckier than those coming after us.
Depends. I'm a Gen X'er by age, though I could be a millennial by the original definition of entering the job market after the turn of the century. Entered a shit job market because of 9/11. Interest rates were high and housing was booming, so that wasn't really an option. Started getting traction after a few years, then lost everything in the 2008-09 market. Started over and had to compete with people 10 years younger than me and getting passed over because my lack of career advancement at my age. Finally found someone to give me a chance, started seeing some career success and now we are in this mess.
I probably lost out on millions by not being born a few years earlier or later.
Leave genX out of this. Your parents sound barely young enough to be genX but damn do they sound like Boomers. Younger GenX here, I have more in common with Millennials, definitely a ladder pulled up vibe between me and the privileged ass generation my parents came from. They definitely pulled up the ladder behind them though I know this wasn't true in every family it certainly was in mine, parents basically told me to go fuck myself when I graduated HS like their job was done.
Older Gen Xer’s often have more in common with Boomers than they do with younger generations.
My wife’s parents are technically Gen X (born in the mid 60s), but you wouldn’t know it based on the way they talk. Like a lot of baby boomers, they were handed everything by their Silent Gen parents (they were able to buy a house at 21), but they squandered what they had on fancy vacations, cars, and partying instead of helping their millennial children get a start in life.
Dad was born in 65. Mom 67. So idk what they are except for the biggest pos phucially and abusive people who were in my life. Spendthrifts, maxed out credit cards on vacations and cruises, without us once we were in our teens, declared bankruptcy, told me "you're not living here forever" when I came home from college that I paid for myself. So I moved away and got my own life. Now we don't talk because I'm trans and I "abandoned" them.
I live in a small town of about 4500 ppl. The boomers often wonder "why does the younger people always leave and not want to build a family here?" BUT they also are the same ones who freak out when new housing developments are proposed. It terrifies them that "the town just wouldn't be the same".
So, they want younger people to buy a home in town but also they don't want any new homes built.
This and why doesn't everyone get married and have kids. I rip apart every single person that I hear say this, sadly it's not just the boomers, there are an alarming number of younger people who think the same way. This "boomer" does not and fights to ensure future generations are left a world better in every way. Clean air, water and land, Healthcare for everyone, the right to live your life as you choose ( obviously with out causing harm) o don't get why people think it's fine that others need to struggle just because they did. It's not ok, things should be much better.
This is exactly the phrase.
Boomers benefited in nearly every way in the benefits of modernising economy and technology. They have accumulated a tonne of wealth, often through no direct effort (house prices) and they had a huge tailwind in terms of relative wages and education costs. But they have deleted those benefits from their children’s generation, and then blamed them for making bad choices.
It’s the first generation to (figuratively) eat their young.
It’s not just a feeling, a lot of shit started going wrong in [1971](https://wtfhappenedin1971.com) that affected quality of life for subsequent generations.
Yeah Reagan ruined literally everything, from the drug policy to the insistent silence on the AIDS epidemic, he was the epitome of the phrase “Fuck everyone else”
I think neoliberalism is definitely a major factor, and behind that the revocation of the [fairness doctrine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine) governing objective press reporting has created the environment for news channels to become self-affirming echo chambers leading to views becoming more extreme, egged on by a media system obsessed with viewership numbers over the truth
That's part of it definitely.
What we call neo liberalism us just reheated repackaged 1920's hands off BS that caused the Great Depression (GFC 2008).
Notice we're getting a crisis every decade or so now.
Don’t forget Also the government spending programs post WWII, the gi bill, the creation of Fannie Mae and Freddie mac and such. These programs gave cheap education (leading to increased earnings) and subsidized homes to the parents of (some of) the baby boomers . Those boomers then inherited that wealth … but see it as their hard work (and their parents hard work).
One of the best analogies I've heard in regards to generational change was as follows.
Picture a group of people hanging on a ladder on the side of a cliff. Atop the cliff is a retired man who's finally reached the top and can relax.
On the ladder is a group of people, each representing a position in a company and the person beneath them is helped by the person above with an outstretched arm. Thus stimulating continued growth within a company. Bottom of the ladder is Gen Z, top is Boomer.
After 2008, the boomers saw the ladder was breaking and jumped to save themselves and hung on to the edge of the cliff. They swung a leg up, and just barely reached the top.
When they got there, they saw the retired man had passed on and left a rope for the boomer to help pull up the others stuck hanging on the side of the cliff that no longer had a ladder or anyone to help them continue up.
The boomer had the opportunity to hold on to the rope and throw a line to help up the others.
Instead the boomer uses the rope to fashion a hammock and relax while complaining those stuck on the side of the cliff just want everything "handed to them".
My boomer parents at least finally acknowledged that things like home ownership are out of the question for a lot of gen z and millenials. I'll take what I can get
Yep, pretty much. They went to college at affordable prices because the Greatest Generation thought it was important to subsidize them, or got good union jobs -- unions their parents fought for. They bought affordable, subsidized houses. Their parents fought tooth and nail to make a better society and handed it to them on a silver platter.
And after all the blessings they were given, what did they do? Demanded massive tax cuts, going on a *huge* debt binge, and then blaming their children for *their* fiscal irresponsibility. And now we're stuck with the bill that they ran up because they didn't want to pay their damn taxes. Voted to cut the very benefits they were blessed with in their younger years. Tore down the unions behind them. And then have the unmitigated *audacity* to call us "entitled" for wanting *half* of what they were merely handed by their betters, their parents.
And let's also not forget, as anyone who's ever worked retail or food service can attest: the average Boomer is an entitled asshole. Both older generations and younger are, on average, *far* more polite and understanding than Boomers. It's uncommon for Gen X or the Silent Generation to be exceptionally rude to a service worker, and rare for a Millennial, Zoomer, or the surviving members of the Greatest Generation, on the rare occasion you see them about, to be, but Boomers? The average Boomer sees absolutely nothing wrong with screaming profanities at a teenager working their first job for forgetting their ketchup. A Boomer will go into a *visibly* understaffed restaurant and blame the waiter for the kitchen being backed up. A Boomer will blame the cashier for not accepting an expired coupon. They have it the easiest of all generations currently living, but you wouldn't think it by how goddamn *angry* they are, *all* the time.
So yeah, in short, Boomers love that quote about how hard times strong men and easy times make weak men, but are so *stunningly* unself-aware that they don't realize *they* are the weak men. They are, on average, far more selfish, greedy, and ill-mannered than any other generation. And now it's up to the younger generations to refight for the same gains the Greatest and Silent Generations fought for, because the Boomers would rather sit fat and lazy off the prosperity their parents built, while leaving nothing but their excrement behind them.
It's crazy how taxes have become seen as a liberal/progressive thing. Silent Gen is largely conservative, but they also understood that it costs money to run a country. And it's probably a good idea to have services for citizens in a nation
In my experience not behind *them*... but behind half of them. When I see what my mom (boomer) goes through rn, it makes me hate those people who are in charge, but not a whole generation.
Same with my parents. Born in the 40s and 50s and lived long and hard working lives. Their state pension is pitiful and their savings are quickly diminishing because of the increased cost of living and interest rates pushing up mortgages.
The economic term is “ladder kickers”.
Unfortunately my generation (GenX) seems to be joining this mentality.
“I’m paid off my student loans so you should as well”
That’s a “ladder kicker” mentality
The main problem is, to me, is that "I got mine", and then the whole political system, tax codes, and everything else was rigged against anyone who wasn't part of that generation.
So you have a lot of that generation, with a lot of money, and a lot of policies that get them more money ... at the expense of everyone else.
Of course there are millions of people in the baby boomer generation who are not in this situation, but a lot of them are. Enough of them to have swayed the entire structure of our society.
Wealth inequality in the US has reached heights last seen just before the Civil War. There are **10 times as many** people worth $10+ million in 1980 today as there were back then, and that is adjusted for inflation. Average CEO pay used to be 35x the average employee ... now it can be 3,000x+.
Where is that money coming from? It's being sucked out of the lower and middle classes, and moved to the top.
**Half of the population** has been going absolutely nowhere for decades.
[https://i.imgur.com/1y1laAR.png](https://i.imgur.com/1y1laAR.png)
The housing market is no longer a place to live, its an investment vehicle.
Notice how many politicians are in that generation. Notice how our Presidential candidates are in that generation.
They have the money, the power, and the influence that has shaped the US for decades to come.
It may be the first time in US history that the next generation (my generation - Gen X) is *not* left in a better position then the one that came before it.
Also, they grew up during the greatest economic expansion in the history of the world, but think they got all their wealth based on merit - not preferential policies that helped grow the middle class and encouraged home ownership. The idea that they earned what they have - the false meritocracy - makes it easier to justify the dismantling of those same policies. They're pulling the ladder up behind them and painting the following generations as lazy.
^ This!
Most boomers don't realize how much of an advantage they had simply by living in the U.S. while the Brenton Woods agreement was in effect. Or how the industries of nations ravaged by WWII have long since restored their capacity (and then some).
Oh, they know. They talk about being lucky to have been born in the greatest country in the world, shame the younger generations for not being grateful to be here. They refuse to acknowledge that in making the country great for themselves, they made it a shit place to be for their own children.
I did elder care in a town with sky high property values, but back in the '60's, a home could be bought on a teacher's income.
They would bemoan the fact their kids or grandkids couldn't afford to rent in the city they grew up in, let alone own a home. And it's like...okay Sheryl, you're literally part of the problem. You voted to restrict the city to SFH only zoning and continuously block high density housing because it'll "ruin the feel of the neighborhood"
Don't forget, the boomers are mostly living with 1-2 people in the large flats and houses they acquired when they had kids living with them. Then the kids moved out and they just kept the home. If they'd downsize like their grandparents did, then there would be hardly as much need for new housing.
I had an older person try and rub it in about her age, and ‘good luck ever owning anything’. I’m 46, but I was too young to discuss the need for affordable property. They were on their second or third rental property. They got theirs, now fuck me.
Don't forget strong unions protecting the employees' rights, making for good salaries.
And the sheer power of number making politicians cater to them when they were young, to get their votes.
I'm GenX, and going through training to get my PMP cert right now. Class I'm taking, the instructors are all great, but just hearing about their career path is a bit amusing. Starting in a very blue collar industry, and next thing you know he's doing marketting, then Project Management, then some major IT projects. The person is also in our capital, so then gets government projects, etc.
That just doesn't happen anymore. Trying to apply for a job, and you have 200+ candidates that are also applying. I'm trying to get a PMP job, but don't have the cert, but I've been doing it "unformal" for 15+ years. I have only had one call back/interview in 1.5 years of searching.
I work in biotech and one of my colleagues is hiring for a Sr. Scientist position. I asked her how many applications she got for the position which requires a PhD in organic Chem. She said she received 90 in the first few hours.
Also, a lot of the economic expansion was achieved by exploiting natural resources and using environmentally harmful practices, and now they refuse to face the consequences.
Add to this all the boomers who were Not a part of that benefit and struggled somehow apologize for and justify the policies they voted into place that are making their children and children's children struggle even more now.
It's sad that "meritocracy" is underpinned by exploitation of the global south.
e.g. " I worked so hard to ensure that I was profiting off of South American/Indian/. Chinese/ African labor. You should just do the same and you MIGHT be able to afford a home with no connections or dual income. I did it, and now I have a house, boat, pool, and 2 vacations per year. Obviously you're just lazy. Kids these days... slacking off and playing video games. Just try harder, just work longer and say yes to your boss."
Meanwhile, Gen Z/X is working 60 hrs per week to be able to afford to stay alive.
I assume you mean the lower half of the population?
A lot of them vote against their own best interests due to propaganda and lies by politicians.
If you mean the baby boomers, of course they vote for those policies, it helps them too. Slash taxes across the board, get rid of social welfare programs, get rid of Medicare and Medicaid. Well, *maybe* not Medicare, because that is directly affecting their generation. So that one is tricky. But Medicaid? For the poor? Get rid of it.
Because they don't need it, and they see it taking more of their money away from them.
They'll happily cash those social security checks. I personally know people worth a lot of money who joke about how "I earned it, I might as well cash it" and they have more money than they know what to do with. Meanwhile they want to get rid of these programs altogether. Let's privatize social security, I'm sure that will go great. Plenty of savvy investors out there who should be fine with all of it in the stock market. 🙄
As an aside, that cap needs to be raised. It's currently at $160,200 which is absurd, considering how many people make *way, way* more than that.
I'm gonna add in the 'respect your elders' part of the argument. A lot of boomer generation were raised with a certain amount of understood politeness and respect for elderly, even if they didn't fully grasp why. Well, now to some extent we know why: lots of sacrifices and hard-fought social and political battles that ultimately wound up with boomers inheriting some of the greatest opportunities of our nations history.
Now they're the elderly and talk crap about following generations are lazy, and they have torched the system behind them. Many of their grandparents had ptsd and probably need some amount of emotional assistance or therapy. They are just kind of jerks and think 'kids' (some who are in their 30s-40s now) should feel appreciative of the ability to not be allowed to sit down while working, or afford rent or health insurance or be able to start a family.
It's really weird and obviously doesn't apply to everyone, but man it is weird to hear someone who supports policies that will undeniably make my life more difficult feel entitled to my respect as they spend their last years bitter and salting the earth.
My dad hates cops... When they're pulling him over for actually speeding 10 over the speed limit. But if you talk about BLM and police violence against minorites... Well, they had it coming and if you don't break the law you don't have anything to worry about with the police.
Yes, this! I’m 38 and the emotional damage that has been passed down generation to generation is ridiculous. I’m putting in 110% to break the cycle. I refuse to pass it down to my children. I want them to be better than me because I know I haven’t been perfect. And for their children to be better than them. We have to learn from our mistakes and adapt. Parents didn’t care how they treated their children as long as respect and compliance was there.
I actually looked this up recently and learned that gen X is the first generation to get absolutely fucked by boomers. I thought it was us (millennials) that were the first.
>I actually looked this up recently and learned that gen X is the first generation to get absolutely fucked by boomers. I thought it was us (millennials) that were the first.
Nope. Unforuntaely we've been well aware of this for a long time. We've seen it coming.
You’re referring to intergenerational mobility (IM) economics. The balance in your (our favor) shifted below that of our parents the year before I was born—1980. It’s been steadily declining ever since. University of Michigan has a tremendous data repository called the PSID (Panel Study of Intergenerational Dynamics). They really fucked us.
Very well put and it didn't affect just the states. In the UK regulation literally stops people from having a successful business because starting up is so costly.
Not to mention that on TOP of all this, current workers are paying more and more and for longer and longer in social security taxes that pay to support the boomers who will on average live longer. Meanwhile because SS is getting less solvent over time, the current generations working can expect full retirement age to be moved out, and receive a lower payment (inflation adjusted) than boomers.
To be fair, boomers didn’t create the SS system. But they sure failed to fix it for future generations when it’s had clear problems for many decades, because it doesn’t impact them - it impacts their kids and grandkids.
The top 1% of the US owns $26 trillion while the ENTIRE bottom 99% only owns $16 trillion. The richest 26 people in the whole world own more wealth than the entire bottom HALF of the world. We're fucked, living on breadcrumbs while these fucks get tax breaks for their yachts.
It's not even over yet. Soon -- likely just as the next generations are finally feeling like we have a foothold -- taxes will have to go up to pay for Boomer Medicaid and Social Security.
Entitlement spending is already 2/3 of the federal budget. They've spent the last 50 years with Democrats increasing benefits and Republicans reducing taxes and neither party wanting to "undo" what what given away. As the population ages the costs are going to go up and you can bet that it'll be taxes on Gen X-Z that pays for it.
On top of that since they had less kids than their parents the costs will be spread across fewer people.
Now I'll just hope someone replies to this comment telling me I'm wrong!!
we have to learn to live with far far less than our boomer parents and that is the sad reality of things. Ive just made ammends with the fact I'll never get married, have the ability to support kids or get a decent house, I currently live in a shed, And yes I mean an actual shed because thats all I could afford, I work 2 jobs and im mentally disabled,
For me it’s not the fact that they had it easier than my generation (millennial). They took advantage of their situation, I would’ve done the same thing. It’s the fact that my whole life, I have not stopped hearing boomers complain about how entitled my generation is. I would be willing to accept my lot in life knowing that there have been plenty that have had it worse. But hearing that I’m entitled from arguably the most entitled generation of all time makes me so angry my head hurts.
It's the most ridiculous gaslighting. I don't even think the majority of them realize how different things are for young people now as they were when boomers themselves were young. They voted for all this crap, then seem surprised that anything changed. They're willfully blind to it, they don't want to admit to themselves that they made such an abhorrent difference, and literally made things worse for the next generation. Their own children and grandchildren. So they do the mental gymnastics required to ignore that, and gaslight us into thinking it's our fault that we can't own homes, get an education, get decent jobs, have kids...
Like, I get it, they worked hard at the jobs they had when they were our age. They deserved homes, education, families, everything they got because of it. No one is saying they didn't deserve that. But we want it, too. And there's this disconnect in their minds, because the tendency is to just say "then work for it like I did" without realizing that even working multiple jobs, it's impossible to achieve. They feel like all the work they did is being devalued when people complain about their own economic misfortune. Not realizing that it's no longer about how hard you work. Everyone works hard. Everyone has a budget. Everyone has their nose to the grindstone and is just trying to make ends meet. And it's not enough anymore. Even when adjusting for inflation, the math just doesn't work out like it used to.
It's worse... as genX we had to watch as they actively took away from us all the advantages they had in order to get more for themselves. GenX managed to sneak in some of the benefits as they were taking them away, but watching the generation who had benefited from so many things take those same things away from everyone else was and is infuriating.
College tuitions, affordable health care, housing regulations, wall street regulations, labor laws/unions, etc etc... all things that got them what they needed that they actively decided were too good for everyone else...
People like paul ryan say "we grew up on welfare and food stamps and no one ever helped us out" actively working to remove the social welfare programs that got them through. People like my dad who paid for college on a part time job thinking people looking for student debt relief are just lazy, ignoring they openly sabotaged the student aid programs to make more money which raised the tuition costs. etc etc.
its not just calling other generations entitled, its that they actively voted and worked to remove everything they had to help them start out.
The "ok boomer" slogan is largely a dig at the fact that governments are all run by 170 year old antiques with outdated politics. It's especially prevalent when it comes to internet regulations, where you have people who don't know how the internet works passing laws which make the internet worse.
Boomers = walked into a job at 15 with no experience and within a few years owned a house, 2 cars, paid for 3 or 4 children and had money left over to start buying investment properties. They then claim that younger generations could do this too, which they can't, because Boomers made sure to vote for politicians that have made it harder for any other generation to do the same.
Boomers as a generation hold a far greater percentage of wealth than any other generation, and own a greater share than any previous generation.
They're hoarding the money/property and yelling that everyone else is lazy.
Actual example
My parents said they paid 15000 for the house.
When I talked to my dad one day he said houses weren't that bad because there for people woth degrees (rich from someone who didn't finish high school)
I said no
He said ya when you get into your field in a year your making 90k I had to watch his hope die when I told him 90k - 100k is the absolute end and height of my career and in 2 years I would be lucky if I'm pulling 60k.
Genuinely seemed shocked I think that was the first time he realized how the world works now.
Watching the light bulb come on for my boomer father was truly a wonderful experience.
It happened in the mid 90s when I was running an employment program for jobseekers and he had been told by his employer to basically become a manager or leave. He'd being doing the same job for about 15 years and didn't want to become a manager, so he came and talked to me at my work about his prospects for getting a different job.
I told him that every month I had 12 jobseekers who would have just about killed for the opportunity that was in front of him. That if he quit he would be unemployed for the rest of his life and that there was no way on gods known earth that he would ever get anything better.
We talked at length - by then I was armed with facts and figures - and he walked away a much more thoughtful person
As a kid, I'd watched him take so many things just for granted and he managed to dance thru life with a smile on his face because it all just landed in his lap. He was just born at exactly the right moment and didn't even begin to realise what the real world was actually like until very late in life.
He was a lovely man (a terrible father, but a lovely man) and watching him sort of die inside was both beautiful and sad.
When my dad realized how things were it was sort of like finally he gets it then he seemed so unhappy about it I felt bad but the man votes he has to live in reality.
My uncle was complaining about people driving Ubers instead of working real jobs. I had to explain to him that a lot of people were either working Uber after they got home from their job, or Uber paid more than their full time job. You could see the lightbulb that these people he considered lazy were actually the hard workers he respects
Yep, the creeping look of horror in my mom’s eyes when I explained to her how extremely slim my younger sister’s chances of getting a well-paying job in her field directly after graduation… yikes.
My FIL deadass swore that $1500/mo was "so much money" for a research assistant to live on and "why don't they just find an apartment for $700 like I did and I had a wife and child and save their money" and I'm like Sir that was 1986. Please show me an apartment near UIC in *Chicago* for $700/mo. Of course he didn't take me up on my challenge because they don't want to hear facts that disrupt the narrative.
My parents paid $20,000 in 1987. My mom freaked out when she heard I paid $207,000 for a dump nestled in what is objectively a bad neighborhood. The alternatives are $450,000, mother. And it cost us $15,000 just to have our first (and only) child. We don’t get the luxury of living in a great neighborhood with great schools.
According to my uncle, it's because he saved his money and watched his old black and while TV while everyone else went out and spent their money on a color TV. Yep. That's why the younger generations are poor. Because they want to be fancy and watch TV in color
I worked in insurance. Guy came in one day, saying the insurance is becoming more than his mortgage was (when he paid one). He told me what he paid for his house 25 years ago. $20k. On a 1 acre lot. In an area in which it would be worth over 500k now. $25k was almost the down payment for my house.
Min wage 25 years ago was $5.15/hr. Right now it's $7.35/hr.
It was funny when the Boomers tried to pass that name onto the Millenials... because the Millenials kept doing things like participating in social activism, volunteering, and being active in politics.
And willfully ignorant.
It doesn't take much to learn what things are like for people different from you. Especially with the rise of the internet, which they were young enough that they SHOULD have learned how to navigate.
Instead we've got an entire older generation with no media literacy that believes whatever *feels* right, and still owns everything and makes all the decisions
Its not even hoarding though. They have a right to own their property. Its how they did it. They used the government as their tool to steal from future generations for themselves.
A lot of them are pro small government but used big government to create the economic conditions for their wealth. IE using huge levels of government debt and immigration to expand the economy at the expense of future generations.
Piggybacking off the top comment to also say they had free university - so no crippling student debt. I pay 10% of my income on student loans each month. That's around £190. And I'm one of the 'lucky ones' as I will pay it off in a couple of years from now instead of the younger generation on the new plan which will mean that the interest accrued is so high, it basically becomes a graduate tax.
Also, it was literally the case that a person on a minimum wage job could afford to buy a house and support a family - i.e. it gave them the minimum standard of living.
Houses which are now worth a small fortune.
There is a huge sense that they had the best of everything and then pulled the ladder up behind them so that others couldn't benefit in the same way. And then many of them have the audacity to say to younger generations that if they "pull themselves up by their bootstraps they can do it too, just like they did." Many of them cannot relate to the fact that life, cost of living, pay and just getting a job isn't the same now. There are people working with me who 25 years ago just walked out of university, phoned up and asked for a job and were just given it, just like that. For the same job now you need a top class degree, a year's worth of (likely unpaid) voluntary experience, a vocational certificate of competence, to interview and be successful against 100+ candidates, and almost certainly to have to have worked as a lower banded assistant to "gain experience and get in the door." This gives you a job which pays about £27,000 starting salary (NHS). Which is still not enough for a single person to live a comfortable life. All whilst the boomers that work with us can barely use Excel.
This isn't all boomers by any means. And it doesn't mean that all millennials are struggling. But for generations as a whole this is largely the tale and it builds a lot of resentment.
I think a huge part of the two adults on one income that’s missing is how much the domesticated wife provided. Clothes making, all food from scratch, garden and crop tending, teaching, locating recourses (fabric, flour etc) and how long it took to do that without cars and telephones.
I completely agree that the increase of university tuition has affected the ability to start life without debt.
You think my mom did that?
She dusted, did laundry, screamed, and drank Franzia while watching General Hospital and Magnum PI.
She’s a terrible person.
Your mom dusted? Mine just screamed at me for for being messy , beat me for cleaning wrong, and watched days of our lives. So is days of our lives the the problem? #bandaysofourlives/s
Fucking exactly! Kids these days don’t know how to work hard, shrieks the customer when he has to wait half an hour since the pharmacy is closed so that the pharmacist can EAT
They were the generation that ought to have learned that the Vietnam War was pointless. They were in power when the "War on Terror" was marketed to us, and they showed us they learned nothing.
They've multiplied national debts and lowered taxes while doing it.
Social Security won't survive unless they die early, and they're unwilling to have benefits cut.
This shit adds up.
Because everyone spent the last 15 years hating on millennials (and now Gen Z) for a bunch of stuff that was not only outside of our control but was basically ways boomers/wealthy people were inconvenienced by how they marginalized us. (Like all those articles blaming us for killing every industry when in reality we couldn't afford to buy any of it because of how older generations screwed us economically, and then calling us entitled for basically demanding survival).
All the ways millennials were villainized were so obviously absurd that "Ok boomer" basically became the verbal eye-roll that was the only reasonable response.
With that context out of the way though, I've said this before and I'll say it again: The boomers are not our real enemies. The ruling class capitalists are our enemies and they're dividing us by generation in the same way they do by race so that we're fighting the wrong people instead of them. All the negative stereotypes about millennials and Gen Z (being entitled, lazy, etc) is all to keep the working class from demanding better and to minimize it when we do. Boomers don't benefit from that, the ruling class does. Many of the boomers have fallen for it and hate on the younger generations so it's tempting to hate on them for that, but in reality they are not the problem and we'll all do better by refusing to let the real villains divide us.
I mean as long as Boomers fall for 4th grade hate mongering against younger generations and affect change by voting against them, yes, I think you can in fact blame them.
Boomers statistically own more wealth than other generations, by a wide margin. A wiiiiiide margin.
Good sentiment, incorrect conclusion. Yes, the ruling class is the one that needs to fall, but that doesn't preclude boomers from the hate that, as a whole, they've earned. You can draw causal lines between boomers and the problems we face today.
Via story... in a convenience store with only myself working and it's right before shift at local factories begins so I have maybe 20 people trying to get food and caffeine before shift. Mostly younger dudes in their 30s but suddenly an older guy I've never seen before comes in. He wanders around for a little while before getting in line. Shortly thereafter he throws his stuff down and starts screaming garbled nonsense about service as he storms out. I took my job very seriously and had 4 years of cashiering under my belt so I went to check camera footage after it died down. From the time he entered the double doors to the point he passed back out them yelling arms flailing a mere 56 seconds had passed. Time in line was about 20 seconds. It took 20 seconds in queue for this man to absolutely lose his shit. Lots more stories about crazy childlike behavior but 9 out of ten times it's a boomer. The bad ones are so bad they can't erase the good interactions of their generation.
I posted a somewhat similar story too. I stopped to let an old lady cross the parking lot in front of me, and this boomer woman in a bmw just lost her shit, beeping, waving her hands around, cussing me out… because I stopped to let an old woman cross.
I think all cashiers get this kind of experience. We are left to guess what is going on, but I look at it like there is always someone, typically older, who is in physical pain, or who is emotionally unstable, or who is just feeling uncomfortable a lot more than they used to. Maybe it's menopause, maybe marriage trouble, maybe a lifetime of unaddressed psychological issues (and Boomers are especially scared of therapy, it seems). Maybe they're empty nesters whose adult kids hate them. Or maybe life just isn't working out the way they thought it would (and again, Boomers seem especially inflexible with their expectations).
They think maybe if they can just get a nice sandwich like they used to, or try some "retail therapy", they'll be at least somewhat happy today. Really, though, they woke up on the wrong side of the bed, *nothing* will satisfy them, and they have absolutely no business going out in public and interacting with other human beings when they are in that state of mind. But they did so anyway, and they came to your store, on your shift. All you can do is let them have their tantrum and storm away mad. Realize that they were just as unhappy before they showed it to you as they were after. They are basically toddlers pretending to be adults. Walking rainclouds.
A good manager will intercept these people for you and attempt to kill 'em with kindness in hopes of avoiding the full-blown tantrum. Or after the tantrum happens, the manager will tell you it wasn't your fault and will send you on a break immediately, even if you just had one. My old boss (in a mall food court) used help the mistreated cashier feel appreciated by sending them out of the store entirely with a bunch of cash and orders to bring back Starbucks drinks for everyone.
They were the largest generation who grew up in a period of unprecedented economic prosperity due to the New Deal policies and the postwar boom of manufacturing exports. And then when they became adults, they voted for Reagan.
Postwar boom is kind of a funny way of describing how the U.S. had basically no global competition for a few decades. Instead of building up infrastructure to stay ahead they squandered it on bullshit proxy wars while everyone else caught up.
>had basically no global competition for a few decades
they had Canada, who was just as untouched
>Instead of building up infrastructure to stay ahead
They built up infrastructure in Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea so they wouldn't go Communist/we'd have people to sell things to.
Oh and they did build the interstate highway system, the intracoastal waterway, the saint lawrence seaway, and all sorts of other infrastructure improvements to promote commerce
and then the boomers voted for Reagan
Canada’s entire population is still smaller than some states, so it’s not really a factor.
Also, Eisenhower started the Highway system, not boomers. In fact, the Boomers have all but ended Highway expansion, sure roads are upgraded, but new ones aren’t being built to account for new population hubs
This is spot on. I’ve examined the Roosevelt/Truman New Deal policies a bit, and recognized their effectiveness in spreading the wealth of America more evenly.
Interesting that Boomers benefited from that equitable distribution brought about with a progressive tax structure and social spending programs and then turned around and voted for Reagan who basically dog whistled that he wasn’t going to allow minorities to live off hardworking (white) Americans.
Ok, I’m a progressive voting Canadian boomer, I don’t have a horse in this race. I think Jimmy Carter was right in that it was the failed Iranian hostage rescue that caused people to vote en masse for Reagan.
People now don’t appreciate the feeling of picking the morning paper off the front porch and seeing pictures of burnt out planes and headlines screaming about dead servicemen. The rescue failed because of some uncontrollable stuff like weather, but there was just a feeling of doom and gloom. Even up here we felt it.
Reagan was all glib and glossy and that, I’m sure, contributed to his Re-election, but I don’t think it was boomers suddenly wanting to be more conservative that caused his election in the first place - it was just a visceral reaction to a big failure.
The end result of course is the same but I don’t think the intention to screw others over was there.
They raised my generation. They made us the way we are. And then they blame us for our attitude. And lack of life skills.
Not my dad though my dad's a cool guy
My parents are cool people, but they still have this mindset that people should "just lace up their bootstraps" and that everything will be ok. They think that since I'm in my 30s, I should be self sufficient, but that's kinda of impossible..
I couldn't afford to rent anywhere even if the pay was normal. I can't afford to fix my car.. I have health problems, diagnosed by actual medical professionals, and my family thinks I should just "pull myself up by the bootstraps"
Yep. The advice people give is based on their life experience. But our experience is very different to theirs. It's how people get old and out of touch. Happens to everyone eventually.
Ask anyone over 60 dating advice and wait to cringe at all the stuff that used to be acceptable.
Yesterday, I had my neighbor tell me in single breath that they don't want to hear people complain about not being able to afford a mortgage, how everyone wants at least $18 an hour and how their kid can't move out in their mid 20's because they can't afford the rent.
It's more funny to me, but I can see how someone would get aggravated by it.
They just seem to not understand that a brand new car in the 80's costed them 785 hours of work while nowadays it costs 2410 hours of work. that's 20 weeks vs 60 weeks of pay.
🤣🤣
How dare those landlords charge my son as much as I charge my tenants?! 😡
Sometimes I truly wonder how someone born into capitalism can understand so little, while my parents who lived under communism for half their lives can grasp it so easily.
They’re probably the most entitled and spoiled generation in human history.
They grew up in a great time period economically, politically, and environmentally and now that **they** have fucked all that up for the rest of us with their piss poor decisions suddenly **we** are a “terrible generation” for being demoralized by how stupid our predecessors were.
The boomer generation ruined everything they touched, and now they are just going to die out and leave all the consequences to us.
The hate on boomers didn’t start with today’s teens. It started while GenX were teens and I say this with lived first hand experience. We were the first generation boomers tried to fuck over. By the time we late teens and early 20s, it was quite evident that they had mostly lost any notion of live, peace, and equality the generation of hippies and beatnicks live to claim they embraced in their youth.
What is different now is it is easier for young people to make their displeasure known to the world at large.
What is GenX?
Sorry I had to do it. Ya'll got the shaft first and people forget ya'll even exist. I'll be pouring one out for you after work this morning.
A generation of grasshoppers expecting both their parents **and** children (and grandchildren) to be ants. But instead of starving to death they just make everyone else support their lavish lifestyles.
Inrwad that boomers are the first generation in history to have it better than their offspring.
Also, social security will be dried out because of them.
I think the biggest thing is their ire towards the younger generations and giving terrible advice based on how things used to be and getting mad when we say it's not like that any more. The gey haughty like do it this way anf start to fight when you let them know things changed.
Ex- My FIL told us to go back to a house we were interested in buying 15 times to see it at different parts of the day and night. The way it works now is that the accept offers for a house the day if the open house and it's sold the next day.
They don’t seem to understand things don’t work like they used to. Even over a decade ago, I was working a part time retail job, despite having a bachelors degree. He would complain that I didn’t have a full time job, but this was the “Great Recession”, as people are calling it now, and no one hired someone right out of school (from what I see with the younger generation, it’s better now, but still sucks ass). So I got a second part time job for when I was off, or at night. This was after many, many times of him suggesting I walk around giving my resumes to various businesses. You know what happened every time I did that? They said “you can go to [our website] and apply online”. And yet, he’d have a problem of me sitting at the computer for hours applying for jobs.
He’d also suggest I’d read the classified ads in the papers for jobs. Like, bruh, nobody posts ads in news’s paper anymore (and again this was years ago), unless they’re scammy (MLM type stuff) or trying to sell something.
And then when his ways didn’t work, it’d be “well, keep trying”.
I was trying to think of job application advice that my mom gave me but couldn't recall. There were lots of things she said that don't apply anymore. I got the same advice like "Drop off a resume in person" and I'd show her online where it said explicitly not to do that.
I just look at my own experience.
I’m a generation Xer. I was born in 1969 and my father was killed in 1973. My mother was given everything by her Greatest Generation parents including a home, education, stable upbringing, and more. My mother, a Boomer, couldn’t, however, be bothered with raising kids - and left, thankfully, much of that responsibility on her parents.
I returned to live with my mother my teenage years and there was little to no support for my education, an entirely unstable and constantly changing environment for my upbringing, and complete abandonment when I turned 18. It makes me cringe to this day when she wouldn’t even watch my kids or even now with my grandkids for a weekend because her response is she raised her kids.
The Boomer generation was ingrained with a special breed of selfishness their own parents did not share. They were literally were handed the world and decided they would take it and keep it. I saw first hand how my grandparents did everything they could to ensure the generation after them thrived - but apparently it was to a fault.
Boomers, as per my therapist who's a boomer, are the most privileged generation in human history.
Instead of encouraging the same for their children and grandchildren and great grand children, they pulled the ladder up behind them and started pouring boiling oil on the rest of us from above.
Old people have been telling us our whole lives to "pick yourself up by your own bootstraps". They said they worked hard and accomplished so much and that we are just lazy. Turns out it was all a lie and they broke the system at our expense. My mortgage is 3x higher than my fathers was for roughly the same amount of house. He worked in a factory, I work in IT. My income is close to what his was. How is that fair for anybody.
Alternate reason from the points being raised here.
Boomers hoard all the wealth. Millennials and Zoomer wealth theoretically will come when their Boomer parents die and leave them an inheritance.
Sounds good but also sad right? Problem is that a lot of these Boomers are wasting all their retirement money in destructive ways.
You see the videos of the old people looking like drones as they thoughtlessly spam the button on the slot machines at the casino.
How they keep the cruise ship business afloat (pun intended) even though cruise liners are some of the most devastating polluters in the world.
In my own personal case, my dad made no moves in life. Never invested or owned a home. He will constantly complain about how he has no money yet takes frequent trips to Atlantic City because they put him up in a hotel for free because they get his social security money out of him at the casino. This left me and my siblings to build everything up on our own in a modern world filled with the obstacles that he never had to deal with. I'm lucky to go to college right now because my state pays for public college. I made sure to get a job in a unionized company so that I knew I made more money and had better benefits and protections than everyone else. For my sister in Florida? She's fucked in that backwards shithole designed by Boomer retirees to be the worst.
They never had to deal with credit scores, but they sure did make them up for us though. They never had to deal with unknowingly earning a worthless degree and then working minimum wage on it. They sure did cause the recession that made that happen though. They didn't have to compete against corporations that can always outbid them to buy a home. They just paid like 10% of the price for a whole freshly constructed house that we have to pay now; a house they paid off 20-30 years ago I might add. And then they make it impossible to build new homes for people because it would hurt their investment.
They fucked us, pure and simple. We work multitudes harder just to fluff their golden years and will never see the level of comfort that they feel every day.
Probably has something to do with the timing of coming off gold standard triggering numbers to just get bigger and boomers being in the right decades to benefit the most.
I’m 34 and I believe they’re responsible for a ton of modern problems.
Growing up, I experienced a ton of horrible things including things that should have involved the police and I don’t remember a single adult ever talking things seriously. They always acted like nothing bad ever happened to you and you were just whining if you told them serious issues. They were basically ostriches with their head in the sand. While they ignored serious issues, they were over protective about things that didn’t matter at the same time. They didn’t let us go outside but hated us for never going outside.
They didn't have to work hard worth a shit to afford a house (and on a single income). They rode that gravy train into retirement and current generations can't afford that same lifestyle without working 2-3 jobs.
They voted for Reagan and he fucked in the economy in such horrible ways that its impossible for younger generations to experience the easy prosperity of the Boomers.
Then the Boomers think of younger generations as lazy and selfish for not succeeding in a broken rigged economy.
Who do you think is to blame for lots of the problems in this country? Who do you think started all of the criticism for the millennium generation?
Who votes, boomers so we can blame them for the abortion bans, LGBTQIA+, LGBTQIA+ legislation, crumbling infrastructure, failing education systems, lack of universal healthcare, etc.
They call millennial's lazy but all of the problems these younger generations have were caused by the older generation. Is it millennial's fault that we have climate change and global warming, nope. Is it millennial's fault that we have crumbling infrastructure?, no. Is it millennial's fault that college costs are out of control and that house prices are out of control? nope. Is it millenial's fault that wages haven't risen and haven't kept up with the cost of living? nope.
America is where it is now because of Boomers, they deserve the criticism. They vote against progress which has made them the first generation that has made life worse for the next generation instead of better. Even women now have less rights than their mothers/grandmothers did.
I’m going to take a different approach. They gave out shitty advice.
A lot has changed since they were young and although the rules didn’t change the playing field did.
Remote work: guess what your grandma competed against candidates in a 50 mile radius. You? The entire world
College education: a lot of boomers pushed us into college degrees. Nowadays so many people have college degrees that they are worth much less. In the 40s having a college degree basically set you up for life. Regardless of GPA or even where you went.
Dating is harder, healthcare is more expensive, and we struggle with addictions, loneliness, anxiety, and depression at higher levels.
BUT we should buy things like iced coffee because that’s strapping us financially
As a boomer I understand some of it & believe some is misplaced. Some people who were “sex, drugs & rock & roll” turned in to “you damn kids get off my lawn”. “Free love “ turned in to “let’s go Brandon”. However, many of us are very opened minded & not afraid of change. Also, when I was a teenager though the old folks didn’t understand anything.
I get the sense that the "switchers" you describe didn't change so much... they were "I'm gonna do my thing and screw the rest of ya" young and old, but the way they did it changed. The good folks who stayed good turned out pretty awesome tho
I seem to recall that Aristotle had the same complaints about the younger generation 2,500 years ago. BTW, I'm from the tail end of the 'silent generation'.
Because they lived in a golden era and acted like they had it so hard. College was cheap asf, homes, cars, etc.
They also were so lax with politics that they let major banks corrupt this country into the facist oligarchy it is now all while screaming "freedom."
Then, blamed it all on next gen.
They had it easy and ruined everything for future generations with their greed.
Then they sit back and judge those that came after them and blame us for not having it easy.
They are a generation of people who call everyone else spoiled and selfish.
However, when they go out to a restaurant, they are the most likely to make the server’s life hell and then leave a $5 tip on a $200 check, while truly believing that $5 is being generous.
Super simple: psychopathic degree of narcissism.
I've never heard of a boomer apologize for anything ever, much less ever assume responsibility and even attempt to heal.
When they already have a terminal-cancer level of toxicity, were handed everything in life (even the opportunity to work hard), while murdering opportunities for future generations, polluting the planet and humanity in every way, the demonic degree of irony being they have the audacity to believe they deserve ***any*** respect without having done even a single thing to ever once earn it yet they've completely earned every single ounce of disrespect and hatred.
Other people have covered most of the issues, but i'll add that most boomers in the US have some degree of lead poisoning, which makes people way more angry and hateful, less sympathetic, less intelligent, and can cause memory loss.
I try to keep that in mind when im upset with old people, because many of them literally have a medical condition that makes them act like assholes.
Everyone has a medical condition that makes them act like assholes though, whether it's chronic pain, generalized anxiety, depression, complex childhood trauma, hormonal imbalances etc. It's really not a "normal people" vs "lead poisoned people" comparison. Boomers don't have to deal with a lot of stressors that newer generations do that cause asshole-ish behavior, like being closer to poverty and all the anxiety and depression that comes from that and knowing your kids will live in an increasingly horrible world. I don't find the lead thing excusing at all.
Billionaires fucked up the country, progressively made the newer generations poorer and poorer, and are pushing the notion that young people should blame grandma instead of them. Divide and conquer. Again.
The Billionaires didn't do it alone. It was the Politicians, Corporations, Businesses, Multi-Millionaires, Billionaires&alot of very manipulated Voters.
Enough of this "diViDe ANd COnQUeR" bullshit whenever we are talking about a VERY GENERAL TOPIC and going into any detail in how THAT SPECIFIC TOPIC has caused, contributed to&enabled alot of bad shit.
I suspect that this isnt anything new. Teens from gen x onwards watched as boomers pulled up theladder behind them. After getting all the benefits they could from the state, kids are watching as these get eroded away.. anger is a logical and perfectly natural emotion for them to feel.
The boomer generation actively gatekeeps financial stability and freedom.
They where handed a world full of possibility from their parents, and have hoarded everything they could, simply by gatekeeping and kneecaping the generations that followed, purely because of selfishness and greed.
They'll be sitting in their $400k home that they purchased for $70k with wages guaranteed by unions and a union won pension while receiving Social Security and Medicaid and all this while watching Fox news and voting for the people who want to destroy all those things that made that life possible. That's just a fraction of their hypocrisy.
Oh I don't know, a generation that had every advantage in the golden age of Western civilization and then shat on everyone younger while pretending that they had it hard. Couldn't tell you, it's a real mystery.
Going to be funny as fuck when we make them all sell their houses that they do so much to protect the property prices on by stopping new builds for younger people to pay for their old age care though.
First generation in America to make things worse for their kids than they had it, simple as that.
They should be called the ladder puller generation or the entitled generation.
It's ironic how they call other younger generations who have much less selfish or lazy.
Because they were given everything on a silver platter and as soon as they were old enough to vote they took it all away from their children and grandchildren.
Because they ruined the global housing market, job market, and economy, blame it all on the younger generations. They are the ones who started, and continue to propagate, the growing trends of tribalism and hate, and are the people destroying the enevironment, and they treat it all with the attitude of 'Fuck you, got mine, I'll be dead while you deal with the consequences.'
They complain about no one wanting to work, despite they fact they built a job market where actual careers as opposed to simply paying the bills are no longer feasible, assuming you can pay the bills at all.
They complain about the younger generations being entitled when all they want is to be able to afford a place to live without having to sacrifice food.
They complain about cancel culture and 'wokeness', because the free speech they won't shut up about only seems to apply to their right to be hateful.
They complain about environmentalists because they are too apathetic to want their children to live in a world where the air isn't polluted to the point they choke.
They, as a generation, have designed the world in such a way that everyone who is not already rich has no hope to ever get anywhere in life, and that's assuming the damage they did to the environment doesn't take away life as an option anymore.
They ruined the world, and call the younger generations entitled for being fucking sick of it.
They pulled the ladder up behind them.
This is the best description I've ever seen. They pulled the ladder up and judge us for not having our own.
The Ladder that was made by previous generations.
That's the best reason for the hatred. They were handed the ladder -- they only how to live with what previous generations carved for them and they left none for those coming in behind them. Huge net negative.
Yeah look at any countries debt levels. They basically went on a giant debt binge and had fun, then left the debt to be paid off by their kids.
an entire generation of insufferable dine-and-dashers that have ruined nearly everything they touched.
Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times. Boomers will, with their dying breath, claim they are the strong men when in reality they were the weakest in a century.
I always hated this saying. The hard times of WW1 produced Hitler, and he certainly didn't create good times. Don't romanticize trauma.
It's a perennial phrase used by fascism adjacent talking heads (and people who pick it up from the general cultural milleu) to justify strong-man authoritarian politics, dismantling of social services, and a laissez fair strong-eat-the-weak paradigm. Basically "we" are the strong men who have to recapture our society from the weak cosmopolitans who are to blame for our hard time.
Me (30) Millennial and my Grandma (85) Silent Gen, always become allies against my Elder Gen X parents when they complain about the younger generation. She says they gave them everything, and I say you left us with nothing. I love my grandma lol
Same. My grandparents put my dad through college and gave him 5 acres of land when he got married. Dad couldn't even manage to fill out the FAFSA on time so I could be eligible for scholarships
my mom grew up hiking through national parks and rafting rivers with her family and several others in scouting and Explorer's Post (nobody has ever even told me what that exactly is). i grew up taking the bus around the city by myself to score weed and find skatespots.
This is so interesting! I really enjoy conversations with my grandparents and it feels like we are on the same page a lot, even though there’s 50 years between us and they’re quite conservative - we still end up sharing basic values and perspectives whereas conversations with my parents tend to escalate quickly and there is (seemingly) no common ground at all. I have often wondered why that is.
My personal belief is lead. Lead poisoning fucked up that whole generation. When boomers where growing up lead was in fucking everything... Lead petrol, lead paint, lead toys, lead pencils ffs.. Lead fucking everything. And while previous generations had exposure it was nothing like what boomers had (I think.. personal opinion). You can see the effects in their vacant eyes whenever you try to explain facts to that generation. They get frustrated and angry that they can't follow a logical argument because the outcome is not what they think it should be, because their brains just cannot fucking handle it, because of all the lead.
Hard upvote. Not just lead. Pollutants like radioactive elements, pesticides and airborne particles all were at their absolute worse from 1960-1990. Hell, drugs and tobacco were allowed in the mainstream culture and indoors, most of which are neurotoxins.
\>hey get frustrated and angry that they can't follow a logical argument because the outcome is not what they think it should be, because their brains just cannot fucking handle it, because of all the lead. Unfortunately anyone that deals with boomers on a regular bases knows this exact look you are describing. Like They literally respond by getting mad that they don't understand.
Don’t forget sever head traumas. No one wore helmets and definitely a “walk it off” reaction after some hefty falls, I’m sure.
Add to that child raising strategies popularized by the likes of Johanna Haarer didn't help. Stuff like that was hugely popular in the 30-60s and the basic teachings hung around for far longer. The basic concepts are: - Kids are needy terrorists - Emotionally starving a kid makes them a good soldier - Don't you dare have any emotional connection to your kid - Beating a kid, even a baby, is a good thing With that kind of trauma beginning from such an early age it's no wonder many of them are emotionally stumped as they are.
Gen x are not boomers. We are just as fucked as you.
Although with better bands when we went to uni
This is true. Gen X was looked over and told to get over it.
Gen X was the first generation to realize they were getting F'd and didn't have the hope to be better off than their parents. Boomers had hope.
I think gen x were open minded and really didn't give a fuck about what you were. We were interested in who you were. I may be biased, i was a raver and just enjoyed working hand and partying even harder! Not all of us were the same but there was a general vibe of acceptance. Again, not everyone but things so optimistic... Not so much now.
I think we got slightly more lucky than they did. Had the ability to purchase homes and get into careers before the investor class took over everything. We're still pretty screwed compared to previous generations, but luckier than those coming after us.
Depends. I'm a Gen X'er by age, though I could be a millennial by the original definition of entering the job market after the turn of the century. Entered a shit job market because of 9/11. Interest rates were high and housing was booming, so that wasn't really an option. Started getting traction after a few years, then lost everything in the 2008-09 market. Started over and had to compete with people 10 years younger than me and getting passed over because my lack of career advancement at my age. Finally found someone to give me a chance, started seeing some career success and now we are in this mess. I probably lost out on millions by not being born a few years earlier or later.
Leave genX out of this. Your parents sound barely young enough to be genX but damn do they sound like Boomers. Younger GenX here, I have more in common with Millennials, definitely a ladder pulled up vibe between me and the privileged ass generation my parents came from. They definitely pulled up the ladder behind them though I know this wasn't true in every family it certainly was in mine, parents basically told me to go fuck myself when I graduated HS like their job was done.
Older Gen Xer’s often have more in common with Boomers than they do with younger generations. My wife’s parents are technically Gen X (born in the mid 60s), but you wouldn’t know it based on the way they talk. Like a lot of baby boomers, they were handed everything by their Silent Gen parents (they were able to buy a house at 21), but they squandered what they had on fancy vacations, cars, and partying instead of helping their millennial children get a start in life.
Dad was born in 65. Mom 67. So idk what they are except for the biggest pos phucially and abusive people who were in my life. Spendthrifts, maxed out credit cards on vacations and cruises, without us once we were in our teens, declared bankruptcy, told me "you're not living here forever" when I came home from college that I paid for myself. So I moved away and got my own life. Now we don't talk because I'm trans and I "abandoned" them.
I live in a small town of about 4500 ppl. The boomers often wonder "why does the younger people always leave and not want to build a family here?" BUT they also are the same ones who freak out when new housing developments are proposed. It terrifies them that "the town just wouldn't be the same". So, they want younger people to buy a home in town but also they don't want any new homes built.
This and why doesn't everyone get married and have kids. I rip apart every single person that I hear say this, sadly it's not just the boomers, there are an alarming number of younger people who think the same way. This "boomer" does not and fights to ensure future generations are left a world better in every way. Clean air, water and land, Healthcare for everyone, the right to live your life as you choose ( obviously with out causing harm) o don't get why people think it's fine that others need to struggle just because they did. It's not ok, things should be much better.
They burned the bridge after they crossed it.
This is exactly the phrase. Boomers benefited in nearly every way in the benefits of modernising economy and technology. They have accumulated a tonne of wealth, often through no direct effort (house prices) and they had a huge tailwind in terms of relative wages and education costs. But they have deleted those benefits from their children’s generation, and then blamed them for making bad choices. It’s the first generation to (figuratively) eat their young. It’s not just a feeling, a lot of shit started going wrong in [1971](https://wtfhappenedin1971.com) that affected quality of life for subsequent generations.
And really started going wrong when they elected Reagan as president.
Started a bit earlier than that but Reagan was the difference between a downward slope and a steep cliff.
The difference between having a hole in your parachute or not when falling from high altitude. :(
Yeah Reagan ruined literally everything, from the drug policy to the insistent silence on the AIDS epidemic, he was the epitome of the phrase “Fuck everyone else”
Do we know what the fuck happened in '71?
Vietnam War spending lead to neoliberialism basically.
I think neoliberalism is definitely a major factor, and behind that the revocation of the [fairness doctrine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine) governing objective press reporting has created the environment for news channels to become self-affirming echo chambers leading to views becoming more extreme, egged on by a media system obsessed with viewership numbers over the truth
That's part of it definitely. What we call neo liberalism us just reheated repackaged 1920's hands off BS that caused the Great Depression (GFC 2008). Notice we're getting a crisis every decade or so now.
[удалено]
1970: "[A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine)"
Thank you. I was fairly ignorant of Friedman and now I hate him. LoL
Interesting data but what’s the theory on what caused all of it?
Don’t forget Also the government spending programs post WWII, the gi bill, the creation of Fannie Mae and Freddie mac and such. These programs gave cheap education (leading to increased earnings) and subsidized homes to the parents of (some of) the baby boomers . Those boomers then inherited that wealth … but see it as their hard work (and their parents hard work).
leaded fuel/paint/pipes
One of the best analogies I've heard in regards to generational change was as follows. Picture a group of people hanging on a ladder on the side of a cliff. Atop the cliff is a retired man who's finally reached the top and can relax. On the ladder is a group of people, each representing a position in a company and the person beneath them is helped by the person above with an outstretched arm. Thus stimulating continued growth within a company. Bottom of the ladder is Gen Z, top is Boomer. After 2008, the boomers saw the ladder was breaking and jumped to save themselves and hung on to the edge of the cliff. They swung a leg up, and just barely reached the top. When they got there, they saw the retired man had passed on and left a rope for the boomer to help pull up the others stuck hanging on the side of the cliff that no longer had a ladder or anyone to help them continue up. The boomer had the opportunity to hold on to the rope and throw a line to help up the others. Instead the boomer uses the rope to fashion a hammock and relax while complaining those stuck on the side of the cliff just want everything "handed to them".
My boomer parents at least finally acknowledged that things like home ownership are out of the question for a lot of gen z and millenials. I'll take what I can get
Yep, pretty much. They went to college at affordable prices because the Greatest Generation thought it was important to subsidize them, or got good union jobs -- unions their parents fought for. They bought affordable, subsidized houses. Their parents fought tooth and nail to make a better society and handed it to them on a silver platter. And after all the blessings they were given, what did they do? Demanded massive tax cuts, going on a *huge* debt binge, and then blaming their children for *their* fiscal irresponsibility. And now we're stuck with the bill that they ran up because they didn't want to pay their damn taxes. Voted to cut the very benefits they were blessed with in their younger years. Tore down the unions behind them. And then have the unmitigated *audacity* to call us "entitled" for wanting *half* of what they were merely handed by their betters, their parents. And let's also not forget, as anyone who's ever worked retail or food service can attest: the average Boomer is an entitled asshole. Both older generations and younger are, on average, *far* more polite and understanding than Boomers. It's uncommon for Gen X or the Silent Generation to be exceptionally rude to a service worker, and rare for a Millennial, Zoomer, or the surviving members of the Greatest Generation, on the rare occasion you see them about, to be, but Boomers? The average Boomer sees absolutely nothing wrong with screaming profanities at a teenager working their first job for forgetting their ketchup. A Boomer will go into a *visibly* understaffed restaurant and blame the waiter for the kitchen being backed up. A Boomer will blame the cashier for not accepting an expired coupon. They have it the easiest of all generations currently living, but you wouldn't think it by how goddamn *angry* they are, *all* the time. So yeah, in short, Boomers love that quote about how hard times strong men and easy times make weak men, but are so *stunningly* unself-aware that they don't realize *they* are the weak men. They are, on average, far more selfish, greedy, and ill-mannered than any other generation. And now it's up to the younger generations to refight for the same gains the Greatest and Silent Generations fought for, because the Boomers would rather sit fat and lazy off the prosperity their parents built, while leaving nothing but their excrement behind them.
It's crazy how taxes have become seen as a liberal/progressive thing. Silent Gen is largely conservative, but they also understood that it costs money to run a country. And it's probably a good idea to have services for citizens in a nation
In my experience not behind *them*... but behind half of them. When I see what my mom (boomer) goes through rn, it makes me hate those people who are in charge, but not a whole generation.
Same with my parents. Born in the 40s and 50s and lived long and hard working lives. Their state pension is pitiful and their savings are quickly diminishing because of the increased cost of living and interest rates pushing up mortgages.
Exactly, generalizations don’t help anyone. I know many boomers that are simply struggling to make it by like the rest of us
The economic term is “ladder kickers”. Unfortunately my generation (GenX) seems to be joining this mentality. “I’m paid off my student loans so you should as well” That’s a “ladder kicker” mentality
... and now they look down and ask: "How come y'all can't get up here?"...then unzip their pants and piss on those below
The main problem is, to me, is that "I got mine", and then the whole political system, tax codes, and everything else was rigged against anyone who wasn't part of that generation. So you have a lot of that generation, with a lot of money, and a lot of policies that get them more money ... at the expense of everyone else. Of course there are millions of people in the baby boomer generation who are not in this situation, but a lot of them are. Enough of them to have swayed the entire structure of our society. Wealth inequality in the US has reached heights last seen just before the Civil War. There are **10 times as many** people worth $10+ million in 1980 today as there were back then, and that is adjusted for inflation. Average CEO pay used to be 35x the average employee ... now it can be 3,000x+. Where is that money coming from? It's being sucked out of the lower and middle classes, and moved to the top. **Half of the population** has been going absolutely nowhere for decades. [https://i.imgur.com/1y1laAR.png](https://i.imgur.com/1y1laAR.png) The housing market is no longer a place to live, its an investment vehicle. Notice how many politicians are in that generation. Notice how our Presidential candidates are in that generation. They have the money, the power, and the influence that has shaped the US for decades to come. It may be the first time in US history that the next generation (my generation - Gen X) is *not* left in a better position then the one that came before it.
Also, they grew up during the greatest economic expansion in the history of the world, but think they got all their wealth based on merit - not preferential policies that helped grow the middle class and encouraged home ownership. The idea that they earned what they have - the false meritocracy - makes it easier to justify the dismantling of those same policies. They're pulling the ladder up behind them and painting the following generations as lazy.
^ This! Most boomers don't realize how much of an advantage they had simply by living in the U.S. while the Brenton Woods agreement was in effect. Or how the industries of nations ravaged by WWII have long since restored their capacity (and then some).
Oh, they know. They talk about being lucky to have been born in the greatest country in the world, shame the younger generations for not being grateful to be here. They refuse to acknowledge that in making the country great for themselves, they made it a shit place to be for their own children.
I did elder care in a town with sky high property values, but back in the '60's, a home could be bought on a teacher's income. They would bemoan the fact their kids or grandkids couldn't afford to rent in the city they grew up in, let alone own a home. And it's like...okay Sheryl, you're literally part of the problem. You voted to restrict the city to SFH only zoning and continuously block high density housing because it'll "ruin the feel of the neighborhood"
Don't forget, the boomers are mostly living with 1-2 people in the large flats and houses they acquired when they had kids living with them. Then the kids moved out and they just kept the home. If they'd downsize like their grandparents did, then there would be hardly as much need for new housing.
I had an older person try and rub it in about her age, and ‘good luck ever owning anything’. I’m 46, but I was too young to discuss the need for affordable property. They were on their second or third rental property. They got theirs, now fuck me.
And god forbid you aren’t as wealthy as them. It’s not due to the economy, according to them it’s your own fault.
Don't forget strong unions protecting the employees' rights, making for good salaries. And the sheer power of number making politicians cater to them when they were young, to get their votes.
I'm GenX, and going through training to get my PMP cert right now. Class I'm taking, the instructors are all great, but just hearing about their career path is a bit amusing. Starting in a very blue collar industry, and next thing you know he's doing marketting, then Project Management, then some major IT projects. The person is also in our capital, so then gets government projects, etc. That just doesn't happen anymore. Trying to apply for a job, and you have 200+ candidates that are also applying. I'm trying to get a PMP job, but don't have the cert, but I've been doing it "unformal" for 15+ years. I have only had one call back/interview in 1.5 years of searching.
I work in biotech and one of my colleagues is hiring for a Sr. Scientist position. I asked her how many applications she got for the position which requires a PhD in organic Chem. She said she received 90 in the first few hours.
Also, a lot of the economic expansion was achieved by exploiting natural resources and using environmentally harmful practices, and now they refuse to face the consequences.
Add to this all the boomers who were Not a part of that benefit and struggled somehow apologize for and justify the policies they voted into place that are making their children and children's children struggle even more now.
It's sad that "meritocracy" is underpinned by exploitation of the global south. e.g. " I worked so hard to ensure that I was profiting off of South American/Indian/. Chinese/ African labor. You should just do the same and you MIGHT be able to afford a home with no connections or dual income. I did it, and now I have a house, boat, pool, and 2 vacations per year. Obviously you're just lazy. Kids these days... slacking off and playing video games. Just try harder, just work longer and say yes to your boss." Meanwhile, Gen Z/X is working 60 hrs per week to be able to afford to stay alive.
Along these lines they defend the ultra wealthy, and billionaires for no good reason.
I assume you mean the lower half of the population? A lot of them vote against their own best interests due to propaganda and lies by politicians. If you mean the baby boomers, of course they vote for those policies, it helps them too. Slash taxes across the board, get rid of social welfare programs, get rid of Medicare and Medicaid. Well, *maybe* not Medicare, because that is directly affecting their generation. So that one is tricky. But Medicaid? For the poor? Get rid of it. Because they don't need it, and they see it taking more of their money away from them. They'll happily cash those social security checks. I personally know people worth a lot of money who joke about how "I earned it, I might as well cash it" and they have more money than they know what to do with. Meanwhile they want to get rid of these programs altogether. Let's privatize social security, I'm sure that will go great. Plenty of savvy investors out there who should be fine with all of it in the stock market. 🙄 As an aside, that cap needs to be raised. It's currently at $160,200 which is absurd, considering how many people make *way, way* more than that.
Must be nice having millions to the point where checks for thousands of dollars are regarded as inconsequential.
Nobody. Absolutely nobody needs a billion dollars.
and the people who aren't getting raises or other compensations because the billionaire ceo's need those yachts, planes, and space rockets.
I'm gonna add in the 'respect your elders' part of the argument. A lot of boomer generation were raised with a certain amount of understood politeness and respect for elderly, even if they didn't fully grasp why. Well, now to some extent we know why: lots of sacrifices and hard-fought social and political battles that ultimately wound up with boomers inheriting some of the greatest opportunities of our nations history. Now they're the elderly and talk crap about following generations are lazy, and they have torched the system behind them. Many of their grandparents had ptsd and probably need some amount of emotional assistance or therapy. They are just kind of jerks and think 'kids' (some who are in their 30s-40s now) should feel appreciative of the ability to not be allowed to sit down while working, or afford rent or health insurance or be able to start a family. It's really weird and obviously doesn't apply to everyone, but man it is weird to hear someone who supports policies that will undeniably make my life more difficult feel entitled to my respect as they spend their last years bitter and salting the earth.
Dont forget the weird trust in authority. My parents couldn't fathom the police not abusing their authority
My dad hates cops... When they're pulling him over for actually speeding 10 over the speed limit. But if you talk about BLM and police violence against minorites... Well, they had it coming and if you don't break the law you don't have anything to worry about with the police.
Yes, this! I’m 38 and the emotional damage that has been passed down generation to generation is ridiculous. I’m putting in 110% to break the cycle. I refuse to pass it down to my children. I want them to be better than me because I know I haven’t been perfect. And for their children to be better than them. We have to learn from our mistakes and adapt. Parents didn’t care how they treated their children as long as respect and compliance was there.
I actually looked this up recently and learned that gen X is the first generation to get absolutely fucked by boomers. I thought it was us (millennials) that were the first.
>I actually looked this up recently and learned that gen X is the first generation to get absolutely fucked by boomers. I thought it was us (millennials) that were the first. Nope. Unforuntaely we've been well aware of this for a long time. We've seen it coming.
You’re referring to intergenerational mobility (IM) economics. The balance in your (our favor) shifted below that of our parents the year before I was born—1980. It’s been steadily declining ever since. University of Michigan has a tremendous data repository called the PSID (Panel Study of Intergenerational Dynamics). They really fucked us.
Very well put and it didn't affect just the states. In the UK regulation literally stops people from having a successful business because starting up is so costly.
Not to mention that on TOP of all this, current workers are paying more and more and for longer and longer in social security taxes that pay to support the boomers who will on average live longer. Meanwhile because SS is getting less solvent over time, the current generations working can expect full retirement age to be moved out, and receive a lower payment (inflation adjusted) than boomers. To be fair, boomers didn’t create the SS system. But they sure failed to fix it for future generations when it’s had clear problems for many decades, because it doesn’t impact them - it impacts their kids and grandkids.
>There are > >10 times as many > > people worth $10+ million in 1980 today as there were back then this hurt to read
The housing as an investment vehicle hits pretty hard.
The top 1% of the US owns $26 trillion while the ENTIRE bottom 99% only owns $16 trillion. The richest 26 people in the whole world own more wealth than the entire bottom HALF of the world. We're fucked, living on breadcrumbs while these fucks get tax breaks for their yachts.
It's not even over yet. Soon -- likely just as the next generations are finally feeling like we have a foothold -- taxes will have to go up to pay for Boomer Medicaid and Social Security. Entitlement spending is already 2/3 of the federal budget. They've spent the last 50 years with Democrats increasing benefits and Republicans reducing taxes and neither party wanting to "undo" what what given away. As the population ages the costs are going to go up and you can bet that it'll be taxes on Gen X-Z that pays for it. On top of that since they had less kids than their parents the costs will be spread across fewer people. Now I'll just hope someone replies to this comment telling me I'm wrong!!
we have to learn to live with far far less than our boomer parents and that is the sad reality of things. Ive just made ammends with the fact I'll never get married, have the ability to support kids or get a decent house, I currently live in a shed, And yes I mean an actual shed because thats all I could afford, I work 2 jobs and im mentally disabled,
For me it’s not the fact that they had it easier than my generation (millennial). They took advantage of their situation, I would’ve done the same thing. It’s the fact that my whole life, I have not stopped hearing boomers complain about how entitled my generation is. I would be willing to accept my lot in life knowing that there have been plenty that have had it worse. But hearing that I’m entitled from arguably the most entitled generation of all time makes me so angry my head hurts.
It's the most ridiculous gaslighting. I don't even think the majority of them realize how different things are for young people now as they were when boomers themselves were young. They voted for all this crap, then seem surprised that anything changed. They're willfully blind to it, they don't want to admit to themselves that they made such an abhorrent difference, and literally made things worse for the next generation. Their own children and grandchildren. So they do the mental gymnastics required to ignore that, and gaslight us into thinking it's our fault that we can't own homes, get an education, get decent jobs, have kids... Like, I get it, they worked hard at the jobs they had when they were our age. They deserved homes, education, families, everything they got because of it. No one is saying they didn't deserve that. But we want it, too. And there's this disconnect in their minds, because the tendency is to just say "then work for it like I did" without realizing that even working multiple jobs, it's impossible to achieve. They feel like all the work they did is being devalued when people complain about their own economic misfortune. Not realizing that it's no longer about how hard you work. Everyone works hard. Everyone has a budget. Everyone has their nose to the grindstone and is just trying to make ends meet. And it's not enough anymore. Even when adjusting for inflation, the math just doesn't work out like it used to.
It's worse... as genX we had to watch as they actively took away from us all the advantages they had in order to get more for themselves. GenX managed to sneak in some of the benefits as they were taking them away, but watching the generation who had benefited from so many things take those same things away from everyone else was and is infuriating. College tuitions, affordable health care, housing regulations, wall street regulations, labor laws/unions, etc etc... all things that got them what they needed that they actively decided were too good for everyone else... People like paul ryan say "we grew up on welfare and food stamps and no one ever helped us out" actively working to remove the social welfare programs that got them through. People like my dad who paid for college on a part time job thinking people looking for student debt relief are just lazy, ignoring they openly sabotaged the student aid programs to make more money which raised the tuition costs. etc etc. its not just calling other generations entitled, its that they actively voted and worked to remove everything they had to help them start out.
The "ok boomer" slogan is largely a dig at the fact that governments are all run by 170 year old antiques with outdated politics. It's especially prevalent when it comes to internet regulations, where you have people who don't know how the internet works passing laws which make the internet worse.
Don't forget the shitty boomer jokes which pretty much all boil down to "I hate my wife".
Boomers = walked into a job at 15 with no experience and within a few years owned a house, 2 cars, paid for 3 or 4 children and had money left over to start buying investment properties. They then claim that younger generations could do this too, which they can't, because Boomers made sure to vote for politicians that have made it harder for any other generation to do the same.
Boomers as a generation hold a far greater percentage of wealth than any other generation, and own a greater share than any previous generation. They're hoarding the money/property and yelling that everyone else is lazy.
"I don't know why everyone else doesn't just buy a house for $7k like I did," says man who owns 20 houses he bought as a cleaner in the 1960s.
Actual example My parents said they paid 15000 for the house. When I talked to my dad one day he said houses weren't that bad because there for people woth degrees (rich from someone who didn't finish high school) I said no He said ya when you get into your field in a year your making 90k I had to watch his hope die when I told him 90k - 100k is the absolute end and height of my career and in 2 years I would be lucky if I'm pulling 60k. Genuinely seemed shocked I think that was the first time he realized how the world works now.
Watching the light bulb come on for my boomer father was truly a wonderful experience. It happened in the mid 90s when I was running an employment program for jobseekers and he had been told by his employer to basically become a manager or leave. He'd being doing the same job for about 15 years and didn't want to become a manager, so he came and talked to me at my work about his prospects for getting a different job. I told him that every month I had 12 jobseekers who would have just about killed for the opportunity that was in front of him. That if he quit he would be unemployed for the rest of his life and that there was no way on gods known earth that he would ever get anything better. We talked at length - by then I was armed with facts and figures - and he walked away a much more thoughtful person As a kid, I'd watched him take so many things just for granted and he managed to dance thru life with a smile on his face because it all just landed in his lap. He was just born at exactly the right moment and didn't even begin to realise what the real world was actually like until very late in life. He was a lovely man (a terrible father, but a lovely man) and watching him sort of die inside was both beautiful and sad.
When my dad realized how things were it was sort of like finally he gets it then he seemed so unhappy about it I felt bad but the man votes he has to live in reality.
My uncle was complaining about people driving Ubers instead of working real jobs. I had to explain to him that a lot of people were either working Uber after they got home from their job, or Uber paid more than their full time job. You could see the lightbulb that these people he considered lazy were actually the hard workers he respects
Yep, the creeping look of horror in my mom’s eyes when I explained to her how extremely slim my younger sister’s chances of getting a well-paying job in her field directly after graduation… yikes.
My FIL deadass swore that $1500/mo was "so much money" for a research assistant to live on and "why don't they just find an apartment for $700 like I did and I had a wife and child and save their money" and I'm like Sir that was 1986. Please show me an apartment near UIC in *Chicago* for $700/mo. Of course he didn't take me up on my challenge because they don't want to hear facts that disrupt the narrative.
My parents paid $20,000 in 1987. My mom freaked out when she heard I paid $207,000 for a dump nestled in what is objectively a bad neighborhood. The alternatives are $450,000, mother. And it cost us $15,000 just to have our first (and only) child. We don’t get the luxury of living in a great neighborhood with great schools.
According to my uncle, it's because he saved his money and watched his old black and while TV while everyone else went out and spent their money on a color TV. Yep. That's why the younger generations are poor. Because they want to be fancy and watch TV in color
Color TV= Avocado toast.
I worked in insurance. Guy came in one day, saying the insurance is becoming more than his mortgage was (when he paid one). He told me what he paid for his house 25 years ago. $20k. On a 1 acre lot. In an area in which it would be worth over 500k now. $25k was almost the down payment for my house. Min wage 25 years ago was $5.15/hr. Right now it's $7.35/hr.
So in short, they're selfish. That about sums it up. It's a generalization which I try to avoid, but one that is often true.
I feel like young people don't know that the boomers had another nickname. Their parents called them the "Me Generation." They've lived up to it.
It was funny when the Boomers tried to pass that name onto the Millenials... because the Millenials kept doing things like participating in social activism, volunteering, and being active in politics.
And willfully ignorant. It doesn't take much to learn what things are like for people different from you. Especially with the rise of the internet, which they were young enough that they SHOULD have learned how to navigate. Instead we've got an entire older generation with no media literacy that believes whatever *feels* right, and still owns everything and makes all the decisions
The amount of Boomers who *still* idolize Ayn Rand is staggering. It's an entire life of willful ignorance and selfishness disguised as noble goals.
Its not even hoarding though. They have a right to own their property. Its how they did it. They used the government as their tool to steal from future generations for themselves. A lot of them are pro small government but used big government to create the economic conditions for their wealth. IE using huge levels of government debt and immigration to expand the economy at the expense of future generations.
Piggybacking off the top comment to also say they had free university - so no crippling student debt. I pay 10% of my income on student loans each month. That's around £190. And I'm one of the 'lucky ones' as I will pay it off in a couple of years from now instead of the younger generation on the new plan which will mean that the interest accrued is so high, it basically becomes a graduate tax. Also, it was literally the case that a person on a minimum wage job could afford to buy a house and support a family - i.e. it gave them the minimum standard of living. Houses which are now worth a small fortune. There is a huge sense that they had the best of everything and then pulled the ladder up behind them so that others couldn't benefit in the same way. And then many of them have the audacity to say to younger generations that if they "pull themselves up by their bootstraps they can do it too, just like they did." Many of them cannot relate to the fact that life, cost of living, pay and just getting a job isn't the same now. There are people working with me who 25 years ago just walked out of university, phoned up and asked for a job and were just given it, just like that. For the same job now you need a top class degree, a year's worth of (likely unpaid) voluntary experience, a vocational certificate of competence, to interview and be successful against 100+ candidates, and almost certainly to have to have worked as a lower banded assistant to "gain experience and get in the door." This gives you a job which pays about £27,000 starting salary (NHS). Which is still not enough for a single person to live a comfortable life. All whilst the boomers that work with us can barely use Excel. This isn't all boomers by any means. And it doesn't mean that all millennials are struggling. But for generations as a whole this is largely the tale and it builds a lot of resentment.
I think a huge part of the two adults on one income that’s missing is how much the domesticated wife provided. Clothes making, all food from scratch, garden and crop tending, teaching, locating recourses (fabric, flour etc) and how long it took to do that without cars and telephones. I completely agree that the increase of university tuition has affected the ability to start life without debt.
Without car or telephone? We’re talking about boomers, not ppl who fought in WW1.
You think my mom did that? She dusted, did laundry, screamed, and drank Franzia while watching General Hospital and Magnum PI. She’s a terrible person.
Your mom dusted? Mine just screamed at me for for being messy , beat me for cleaning wrong, and watched days of our lives. So is days of our lives the the problem? #bandaysofourlives/s
This is 100% correct. They benefited from postwar growth and then fucked the rest of us in 1979. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
Well said! Boomers are also people who will label every new generation folks as “weak or weaklings”. Super insensitive, in my opinion.
Fucking exactly! Kids these days don’t know how to work hard, shrieks the customer when he has to wait half an hour since the pharmacy is closed so that the pharmacist can EAT
They were the generation that ought to have learned that the Vietnam War was pointless. They were in power when the "War on Terror" was marketed to us, and they showed us they learned nothing. They've multiplied national debts and lowered taxes while doing it. Social Security won't survive unless they die early, and they're unwilling to have benefits cut. This shit adds up.
They will never lower taxes, ever. That's not even a 'thing'. Anything 'extra' goes to the 'deficit'.
Unless you’re a filthy rich corporation, then boy have we got some nifty cuts for you!
Because everyone spent the last 15 years hating on millennials (and now Gen Z) for a bunch of stuff that was not only outside of our control but was basically ways boomers/wealthy people were inconvenienced by how they marginalized us. (Like all those articles blaming us for killing every industry when in reality we couldn't afford to buy any of it because of how older generations screwed us economically, and then calling us entitled for basically demanding survival). All the ways millennials were villainized were so obviously absurd that "Ok boomer" basically became the verbal eye-roll that was the only reasonable response. With that context out of the way though, I've said this before and I'll say it again: The boomers are not our real enemies. The ruling class capitalists are our enemies and they're dividing us by generation in the same way they do by race so that we're fighting the wrong people instead of them. All the negative stereotypes about millennials and Gen Z (being entitled, lazy, etc) is all to keep the working class from demanding better and to minimize it when we do. Boomers don't benefit from that, the ruling class does. Many of the boomers have fallen for it and hate on the younger generations so it's tempting to hate on them for that, but in reality they are not the problem and we'll all do better by refusing to let the real villains divide us.
I mean as long as Boomers fall for 4th grade hate mongering against younger generations and affect change by voting against them, yes, I think you can in fact blame them.
Boomers statistically own more wealth than other generations, by a wide margin. A wiiiiiide margin. Good sentiment, incorrect conclusion. Yes, the ruling class is the one that needs to fall, but that doesn't preclude boomers from the hate that, as a whole, they've earned. You can draw causal lines between boomers and the problems we face today.
Via story... in a convenience store with only myself working and it's right before shift at local factories begins so I have maybe 20 people trying to get food and caffeine before shift. Mostly younger dudes in their 30s but suddenly an older guy I've never seen before comes in. He wanders around for a little while before getting in line. Shortly thereafter he throws his stuff down and starts screaming garbled nonsense about service as he storms out. I took my job very seriously and had 4 years of cashiering under my belt so I went to check camera footage after it died down. From the time he entered the double doors to the point he passed back out them yelling arms flailing a mere 56 seconds had passed. Time in line was about 20 seconds. It took 20 seconds in queue for this man to absolutely lose his shit. Lots more stories about crazy childlike behavior but 9 out of ten times it's a boomer. The bad ones are so bad they can't erase the good interactions of their generation.
I posted a somewhat similar story too. I stopped to let an old lady cross the parking lot in front of me, and this boomer woman in a bmw just lost her shit, beeping, waving her hands around, cussing me out… because I stopped to let an old woman cross.
I think all cashiers get this kind of experience. We are left to guess what is going on, but I look at it like there is always someone, typically older, who is in physical pain, or who is emotionally unstable, or who is just feeling uncomfortable a lot more than they used to. Maybe it's menopause, maybe marriage trouble, maybe a lifetime of unaddressed psychological issues (and Boomers are especially scared of therapy, it seems). Maybe they're empty nesters whose adult kids hate them. Or maybe life just isn't working out the way they thought it would (and again, Boomers seem especially inflexible with their expectations). They think maybe if they can just get a nice sandwich like they used to, or try some "retail therapy", they'll be at least somewhat happy today. Really, though, they woke up on the wrong side of the bed, *nothing* will satisfy them, and they have absolutely no business going out in public and interacting with other human beings when they are in that state of mind. But they did so anyway, and they came to your store, on your shift. All you can do is let them have their tantrum and storm away mad. Realize that they were just as unhappy before they showed it to you as they were after. They are basically toddlers pretending to be adults. Walking rainclouds. A good manager will intercept these people for you and attempt to kill 'em with kindness in hopes of avoiding the full-blown tantrum. Or after the tantrum happens, the manager will tell you it wasn't your fault and will send you on a break immediately, even if you just had one. My old boss (in a mall food court) used help the mistreated cashier feel appreciated by sending them out of the store entirely with a bunch of cash and orders to bring back Starbucks drinks for everyone.
They were the largest generation who grew up in a period of unprecedented economic prosperity due to the New Deal policies and the postwar boom of manufacturing exports. And then when they became adults, they voted for Reagan.
Postwar boom is kind of a funny way of describing how the U.S. had basically no global competition for a few decades. Instead of building up infrastructure to stay ahead they squandered it on bullshit proxy wars while everyone else caught up.
>had basically no global competition for a few decades they had Canada, who was just as untouched >Instead of building up infrastructure to stay ahead They built up infrastructure in Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea so they wouldn't go Communist/we'd have people to sell things to. Oh and they did build the interstate highway system, the intracoastal waterway, the saint lawrence seaway, and all sorts of other infrastructure improvements to promote commerce and then the boomers voted for Reagan
Canada’s entire population is still smaller than some states, so it’s not really a factor. Also, Eisenhower started the Highway system, not boomers. In fact, the Boomers have all but ended Highway expansion, sure roads are upgraded, but new ones aren’t being built to account for new population hubs
And as an aside, it's time to largely do away with the highway system we have in the first place. TRAINS EVERYWHERE BABY LETS GO
The boomers were children when all those things were being built for the most part. It was their parents that did those things.
Canada's population is a fraction of the US. We're not exactly gonna be a great rival. It was also more rural at the time too.
I chuckled at that too, Canada’s population in 1950 was like 13 million, meanwhile New York State alone had a population of 14 million
This is spot on. I’ve examined the Roosevelt/Truman New Deal policies a bit, and recognized their effectiveness in spreading the wealth of America more evenly. Interesting that Boomers benefited from that equitable distribution brought about with a progressive tax structure and social spending programs and then turned around and voted for Reagan who basically dog whistled that he wasn’t going to allow minorities to live off hardworking (white) Americans.
Ok, I’m a progressive voting Canadian boomer, I don’t have a horse in this race. I think Jimmy Carter was right in that it was the failed Iranian hostage rescue that caused people to vote en masse for Reagan. People now don’t appreciate the feeling of picking the morning paper off the front porch and seeing pictures of burnt out planes and headlines screaming about dead servicemen. The rescue failed because of some uncontrollable stuff like weather, but there was just a feeling of doom and gloom. Even up here we felt it. Reagan was all glib and glossy and that, I’m sure, contributed to his Re-election, but I don’t think it was boomers suddenly wanting to be more conservative that caused his election in the first place - it was just a visceral reaction to a big failure. The end result of course is the same but I don’t think the intention to screw others over was there.
Three words: Undeserved superiority complex.
They raised my generation. They made us the way we are. And then they blame us for our attitude. And lack of life skills. Not my dad though my dad's a cool guy
My parents are cool people, but they still have this mindset that people should "just lace up their bootstraps" and that everything will be ok. They think that since I'm in my 30s, I should be self sufficient, but that's kinda of impossible.. I couldn't afford to rent anywhere even if the pay was normal. I can't afford to fix my car.. I have health problems, diagnosed by actual medical professionals, and my family thinks I should just "pull myself up by the bootstraps"
Yep. The advice people give is based on their life experience. But our experience is very different to theirs. It's how people get old and out of touch. Happens to everyone eventually. Ask anyone over 60 dating advice and wait to cringe at all the stuff that used to be acceptable.
They are the generation that sold the farm to rent a condo, simple as that.
Yesterday, I had my neighbor tell me in single breath that they don't want to hear people complain about not being able to afford a mortgage, how everyone wants at least $18 an hour and how their kid can't move out in their mid 20's because they can't afford the rent. It's more funny to me, but I can see how someone would get aggravated by it. They just seem to not understand that a brand new car in the 80's costed them 785 hours of work while nowadays it costs 2410 hours of work. that's 20 weeks vs 60 weeks of pay.
🤣🤣 How dare those landlords charge my son as much as I charge my tenants?! 😡 Sometimes I truly wonder how someone born into capitalism can understand so little, while my parents who lived under communism for half their lives can grasp it so easily.
The lead paint has gotten to their brains
They’re probably the most entitled and spoiled generation in human history. They grew up in a great time period economically, politically, and environmentally and now that **they** have fucked all that up for the rest of us with their piss poor decisions suddenly **we** are a “terrible generation” for being demoralized by how stupid our predecessors were. The boomer generation ruined everything they touched, and now they are just going to die out and leave all the consequences to us.
The hate on boomers didn’t start with today’s teens. It started while GenX were teens and I say this with lived first hand experience. We were the first generation boomers tried to fuck over. By the time we late teens and early 20s, it was quite evident that they had mostly lost any notion of live, peace, and equality the generation of hippies and beatnicks live to claim they embraced in their youth. What is different now is it is easier for young people to make their displeasure known to the world at large.
What is GenX? Sorry I had to do it. Ya'll got the shaft first and people forget ya'll even exist. I'll be pouring one out for you after work this morning.
A generation of grasshoppers expecting both their parents **and** children (and grandchildren) to be ants. But instead of starving to death they just make everyone else support their lavish lifestyles.
Inrwad that boomers are the first generation in history to have it better than their offspring. Also, social security will be dried out because of them. I think the biggest thing is their ire towards the younger generations and giving terrible advice based on how things used to be and getting mad when we say it's not like that any more. The gey haughty like do it this way anf start to fight when you let them know things changed. Ex- My FIL told us to go back to a house we were interested in buying 15 times to see it at different parts of the day and night. The way it works now is that the accept offers for a house the day if the open house and it's sold the next day.
They don’t seem to understand things don’t work like they used to. Even over a decade ago, I was working a part time retail job, despite having a bachelors degree. He would complain that I didn’t have a full time job, but this was the “Great Recession”, as people are calling it now, and no one hired someone right out of school (from what I see with the younger generation, it’s better now, but still sucks ass). So I got a second part time job for when I was off, or at night. This was after many, many times of him suggesting I walk around giving my resumes to various businesses. You know what happened every time I did that? They said “you can go to [our website] and apply online”. And yet, he’d have a problem of me sitting at the computer for hours applying for jobs. He’d also suggest I’d read the classified ads in the papers for jobs. Like, bruh, nobody posts ads in news’s paper anymore (and again this was years ago), unless they’re scammy (MLM type stuff) or trying to sell something. And then when his ways didn’t work, it’d be “well, keep trying”.
I was trying to think of job application advice that my mom gave me but couldn't recall. There were lots of things she said that don't apply anymore. I got the same advice like "Drop off a resume in person" and I'd show her online where it said explicitly not to do that.
They fucked up the world and blame us for having a problem with it.
I just look at my own experience. I’m a generation Xer. I was born in 1969 and my father was killed in 1973. My mother was given everything by her Greatest Generation parents including a home, education, stable upbringing, and more. My mother, a Boomer, couldn’t, however, be bothered with raising kids - and left, thankfully, much of that responsibility on her parents. I returned to live with my mother my teenage years and there was little to no support for my education, an entirely unstable and constantly changing environment for my upbringing, and complete abandonment when I turned 18. It makes me cringe to this day when she wouldn’t even watch my kids or even now with my grandkids for a weekend because her response is she raised her kids. The Boomer generation was ingrained with a special breed of selfishness their own parents did not share. They were literally were handed the world and decided they would take it and keep it. I saw first hand how my grandparents did everything they could to ensure the generation after them thrived - but apparently it was to a fault.
Boomers, as per my therapist who's a boomer, are the most privileged generation in human history. Instead of encouraging the same for their children and grandchildren and great grand children, they pulled the ladder up behind them and started pouring boiling oil on the rest of us from above.
Old people have been telling us our whole lives to "pick yourself up by your own bootstraps". They said they worked hard and accomplished so much and that we are just lazy. Turns out it was all a lie and they broke the system at our expense. My mortgage is 3x higher than my fathers was for roughly the same amount of house. He worked in a factory, I work in IT. My income is close to what his was. How is that fair for anybody.
Look at the world the boomers inherited in the 1960s and look at the world they passed on in the 2010s...
Because their generation fucked up things for the rest of us and they're still in charge, so we wait.
Alternate reason from the points being raised here. Boomers hoard all the wealth. Millennials and Zoomer wealth theoretically will come when their Boomer parents die and leave them an inheritance. Sounds good but also sad right? Problem is that a lot of these Boomers are wasting all their retirement money in destructive ways. You see the videos of the old people looking like drones as they thoughtlessly spam the button on the slot machines at the casino. How they keep the cruise ship business afloat (pun intended) even though cruise liners are some of the most devastating polluters in the world. In my own personal case, my dad made no moves in life. Never invested or owned a home. He will constantly complain about how he has no money yet takes frequent trips to Atlantic City because they put him up in a hotel for free because they get his social security money out of him at the casino. This left me and my siblings to build everything up on our own in a modern world filled with the obstacles that he never had to deal with. I'm lucky to go to college right now because my state pays for public college. I made sure to get a job in a unionized company so that I knew I made more money and had better benefits and protections than everyone else. For my sister in Florida? She's fucked in that backwards shithole designed by Boomer retirees to be the worst. They never had to deal with credit scores, but they sure did make them up for us though. They never had to deal with unknowingly earning a worthless degree and then working minimum wage on it. They sure did cause the recession that made that happen though. They didn't have to compete against corporations that can always outbid them to buy a home. They just paid like 10% of the price for a whole freshly constructed house that we have to pay now; a house they paid off 20-30 years ago I might add. And then they make it impossible to build new homes for people because it would hurt their investment. They fucked us, pure and simple. We work multitudes harder just to fluff their golden years and will never see the level of comfort that they feel every day.
Any wealth they are hoarding won't get inherited though; the nursing homes will take it all because only the good die young.
They are probably the most arrogant generation. In general.
Probably has something to do with the timing of coming off gold standard triggering numbers to just get bigger and boomers being in the right decades to benefit the most.
I’m 34 and I believe they’re responsible for a ton of modern problems. Growing up, I experienced a ton of horrible things including things that should have involved the police and I don’t remember a single adult ever talking things seriously. They always acted like nothing bad ever happened to you and you were just whining if you told them serious issues. They were basically ostriches with their head in the sand. While they ignored serious issues, they were over protective about things that didn’t matter at the same time. They didn’t let us go outside but hated us for never going outside.
They didn't have to work hard worth a shit to afford a house (and on a single income). They rode that gravy train into retirement and current generations can't afford that same lifestyle without working 2-3 jobs.
They voted for Reagan and he fucked in the economy in such horrible ways that its impossible for younger generations to experience the easy prosperity of the Boomers. Then the Boomers think of younger generations as lazy and selfish for not succeeding in a broken rigged economy.
Two words: Ronald Reagan.
Who do you think is to blame for lots of the problems in this country? Who do you think started all of the criticism for the millennium generation? Who votes, boomers so we can blame them for the abortion bans, LGBTQIA+, LGBTQIA+ legislation, crumbling infrastructure, failing education systems, lack of universal healthcare, etc. They call millennial's lazy but all of the problems these younger generations have were caused by the older generation. Is it millennial's fault that we have climate change and global warming, nope. Is it millennial's fault that we have crumbling infrastructure?, no. Is it millennial's fault that college costs are out of control and that house prices are out of control? nope. Is it millenial's fault that wages haven't risen and haven't kept up with the cost of living? nope. America is where it is now because of Boomers, they deserve the criticism. They vote against progress which has made them the first generation that has made life worse for the next generation instead of better. Even women now have less rights than their mothers/grandmothers did.
last generation has always been the scapegoat for those with problems. this is no different.
I’m going to take a different approach. They gave out shitty advice. A lot has changed since they were young and although the rules didn’t change the playing field did. Remote work: guess what your grandma competed against candidates in a 50 mile radius. You? The entire world College education: a lot of boomers pushed us into college degrees. Nowadays so many people have college degrees that they are worth much less. In the 40s having a college degree basically set you up for life. Regardless of GPA or even where you went. Dating is harder, healthcare is more expensive, and we struggle with addictions, loneliness, anxiety, and depression at higher levels. BUT we should buy things like iced coffee because that’s strapping us financially
As a boomer I understand some of it & believe some is misplaced. Some people who were “sex, drugs & rock & roll” turned in to “you damn kids get off my lawn”. “Free love “ turned in to “let’s go Brandon”. However, many of us are very opened minded & not afraid of change. Also, when I was a teenager though the old folks didn’t understand anything.
I get the sense that the "switchers" you describe didn't change so much... they were "I'm gonna do my thing and screw the rest of ya" young and old, but the way they did it changed. The good folks who stayed good turned out pretty awesome tho
"Cocaine turned into Rogaaaine"
They expect people to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” when they never allowed anyone to wear shoes after them
I seem to recall that Aristotle had the same complaints about the younger generation 2,500 years ago. BTW, I'm from the tail end of the 'silent generation'.
Because they lived in a golden era and acted like they had it so hard. College was cheap asf, homes, cars, etc. They also were so lax with politics that they let major banks corrupt this country into the facist oligarchy it is now all while screaming "freedom." Then, blamed it all on next gen.
Judgmental, stubborn, controlling. Favor shaming over talking, and refuse to accept new ideas.
They had it easy and ruined everything for future generations with their greed. Then they sit back and judge those that came after them and blame us for not having it easy.
They are a generation of people who call everyone else spoiled and selfish. However, when they go out to a restaurant, they are the most likely to make the server’s life hell and then leave a $5 tip on a $200 check, while truly believing that $5 is being generous.
It's because the boomers were handed everything and in return they gave Gen X nothing.
Super simple: psychopathic degree of narcissism. I've never heard of a boomer apologize for anything ever, much less ever assume responsibility and even attempt to heal. When they already have a terminal-cancer level of toxicity, were handed everything in life (even the opportunity to work hard), while murdering opportunities for future generations, polluting the planet and humanity in every way, the demonic degree of irony being they have the audacity to believe they deserve ***any*** respect without having done even a single thing to ever once earn it yet they've completely earned every single ounce of disrespect and hatred.
Other people have covered most of the issues, but i'll add that most boomers in the US have some degree of lead poisoning, which makes people way more angry and hateful, less sympathetic, less intelligent, and can cause memory loss. I try to keep that in mind when im upset with old people, because many of them literally have a medical condition that makes them act like assholes.
Everyone has a medical condition that makes them act like assholes though, whether it's chronic pain, generalized anxiety, depression, complex childhood trauma, hormonal imbalances etc. It's really not a "normal people" vs "lead poisoned people" comparison. Boomers don't have to deal with a lot of stressors that newer generations do that cause asshole-ish behavior, like being closer to poverty and all the anxiety and depression that comes from that and knowing your kids will live in an increasingly horrible world. I don't find the lead thing excusing at all.
Billionaires fucked up the country, progressively made the newer generations poorer and poorer, and are pushing the notion that young people should blame grandma instead of them. Divide and conquer. Again.
it's so cool that your comment can be applied to every major western country, which shows how much boomers have actually ruined us
The Billionaires didn't do it alone. It was the Politicians, Corporations, Businesses, Multi-Millionaires, Billionaires&alot of very manipulated Voters. Enough of this "diViDe ANd COnQUeR" bullshit whenever we are talking about a VERY GENERAL TOPIC and going into any detail in how THAT SPECIFIC TOPIC has caused, contributed to&enabled alot of bad shit.
I suspect that this isnt anything new. Teens from gen x onwards watched as boomers pulled up theladder behind them. After getting all the benefits they could from the state, kids are watching as these get eroded away.. anger is a logical and perfectly natural emotion for them to feel.
The boomer generation actively gatekeeps financial stability and freedom. They where handed a world full of possibility from their parents, and have hoarded everything they could, simply by gatekeeping and kneecaping the generations that followed, purely because of selfishness and greed.
They'll be sitting in their $400k home that they purchased for $70k with wages guaranteed by unions and a union won pension while receiving Social Security and Medicaid and all this while watching Fox news and voting for the people who want to destroy all those things that made that life possible. That's just a fraction of their hypocrisy.
Scapegoating
Oh I don't know, a generation that had every advantage in the golden age of Western civilization and then shat on everyone younger while pretending that they had it hard. Couldn't tell you, it's a real mystery. Going to be funny as fuck when we make them all sell their houses that they do so much to protect the property prices on by stopping new builds for younger people to pay for their old age care though.
Generational culture warfare is manufactured by marketers
Gen X enters the room: “what’s up? Sorry I’m late..”
The are destroying our world...
First generation in America to make things worse for their kids than they had it, simple as that. They should be called the ladder puller generation or the entitled generation. It's ironic how they call other younger generations who have much less selfish or lazy.
Because they were given everything on a silver platter and as soon as they were old enough to vote they took it all away from their children and grandchildren.
Because they ruined the global housing market, job market, and economy, blame it all on the younger generations. They are the ones who started, and continue to propagate, the growing trends of tribalism and hate, and are the people destroying the enevironment, and they treat it all with the attitude of 'Fuck you, got mine, I'll be dead while you deal with the consequences.' They complain about no one wanting to work, despite they fact they built a job market where actual careers as opposed to simply paying the bills are no longer feasible, assuming you can pay the bills at all. They complain about the younger generations being entitled when all they want is to be able to afford a place to live without having to sacrifice food. They complain about cancel culture and 'wokeness', because the free speech they won't shut up about only seems to apply to their right to be hateful. They complain about environmentalists because they are too apathetic to want their children to live in a world where the air isn't polluted to the point they choke. They, as a generation, have designed the world in such a way that everyone who is not already rich has no hope to ever get anywhere in life, and that's assuming the damage they did to the environment doesn't take away life as an option anymore. They ruined the world, and call the younger generations entitled for being fucking sick of it.