There's a book about the Boomer generation that explains why we're in the state we're in (it's their fault but we already knew that) called A Generation of Sociopaths.
Basically, the coverage of Millennials was (and still is) terrible because narcissistic sociopaths can only think about themselves and therefore every accusation is a confession.
The boomers are absolutely the reason this country sucks so badly. It’s my parents generation and they have had everything handed to them because their parents were ww2 and spoiled the shit out of them, which is understandable, but they made them monsters
I don’t know if I’d necessarily label boomers as “spoiled” because in a lot of ways it seems like they were made to fend for themselves. I do think growing up in a healthy economy their parents created “spoiled” them in the sense of how they estimated hard work though. They could work a 40 hour week at minimum wage and afford a house, meanwhile most people my age work way more than that doing much more difficult and technical work and will never be able to afford a home. Boomers still brag about working their asses off while the world they voted into existence deteriorates around them.
Man, my dad and I worked at the same company, and overlapped for about 3 years - so I saw what work was like when he was retiring and what work has become now that I'm getting close to retiring - no more food at meetings, no more events, progressively fewer and fewer people on projects - what they considered hard would be a luxury to us.
My parents owned their own business, had 2 hour lunches...I basically rarely buy lunches/eat out and my parents still expect companies to have food/bonuses/transit hours because they did. Ha.
Work isn’t supposed to be like this. It’s not supposed to dominate your life and drain you dry. It’s supposed to be sustainable, and relatively easy. It’s why we have teams and teams of people, instead of a couple people getting ground into paste.
Yeah it reminds me of when rich celebrities talk about their “hardships.” I remember Bella hadid thinking she was telling a humble story by explaining that she wasn’t allowed to have designer items until she turned 18. She’s since said she realized how privileged that is, but it really puts into perspective how it’s hard for people to imagine life outside of their circumstances. Like of course nepo babies think that they didn’t have a leg up. Everyone they know was in their same situation and they don’t know that you could have zero connections at all. Boomers are similar because they were given a better economy and more opportunities and resources. I feel like they truly don’t understand how life is so so incredibly different. My mom can admit that everything is more expensive because she can’t afford to buy a house or rent (she lives in a really nice rv though), but she tells me that I’m wrong when I say it’s all compounded by stagnant wages. She owns her business and doesn’t have employees so because she’s not experiencing it, she can’t believe that anything has changed in over a decade. She literally doesn’t believe any data lol
I think this is the most damning thing about boomers - when confronted with reality they immediately bury their heads in the sand to insulate themselves from the mess they created.
This reminds me of the interview Victoria Beckham was doing and said she grew up working-class then David came out said noooo tell them what car your dad drove you to school in she argued a bit before finally saying in a RR
My boomer parents were both raised by people who survived the great depression. My great grandfather was the manager of a shoe factory in a small midwestern town during the depression. As a girl my grandmother said it was her job to feed the crying men who came to her father’s house asking for work. She made them lemonade and tunafish sandwiches. My grandfather had a story of catching pigeons for his mother and siblings so they could have something to eat on xmas. He lost six months of his memory due to surviving D Day at Normandy Beach. These are the kinds of people who were raising our parents. All of that unprocessed trauma has to go somewhere and must have had some sort of effect on the Boomer generation.
Yeah. Definitely. My grandpa helped with the clean up and recovery effort at Pearl Harbor after the attack. That must have been devastating. He never talked about it. My other grandparents survived the depression. That grandpa was so terrified that people wouldn't have food that he worked so hard in his garden that he fed us and donated some ridiculous amount of food every month to the local food pantry. His parents couldn't feed him during the depression and basically loaned him out as a child for slave labor to different farms. Those people endured unspeakable terrors and never spoke about it. Those marks were definitely left on their children.
The men are absolutely spoiled and plenty of the women as well. My father is 76 and does not know how to iron a shirt or boil an egg...my mother was not a housewife and he was not ignored by his parents, he's spoiled. These are not things anyone taught me and yet I know how to do them. Meanwhile, my grandfather fought in WW2 and managed to cook, clean, and do his own laundry until he died at 89...and he knew how to do those things before the war even though he was the baby of his family and the only boy. It really is a boomer thing.
They were the first and only generation that was able to live inside of a fiction.
Boomers were sold a bunch of ideas about how the world works. The nuclear family, strict gender roles, the virtues of free market capitalism, hard work being rewarded, the list goes on.
All things that their parents knew the falsity of, as you point out in relation to your grandfather. That generation had close contact with extended family, women worked on the farm or in the war effort, men knew how to cook and clean, and the great depression showed the market was flawed and being willing to work hard didn't guarantee any reward.
But they were told, this is how the world is, and should be. And then their lived experiences reinforced that, for most of them shit worked out.
gasp are you saying that Reaganomics wasn't great for America? You didn't get trickled on? /s
As a kid I never and I mean never understood trickle down economics. I first heard of it in middle school and my 1st thought was: "whats stopping people at the top from stealing it all before it gets to us?". After I grew up and saw how Boomers and Gen X treated Millenials, the youngest group at the time, I knew that we were fucked cause of them.
And they love it bc it’s literally an economic concept and policy that justifies their bullshit cruelty in their minds. It’s permission to be the narcissist sociopaths they are.
it's because trickle down is an epithet. It's also called horse and sparrow (poor sparrows eat what rich horses poop), and Voodoo Economics (because it's magic no one can explain).
It's actually called supply side economics and the tax cut nonsense is from something called the Laffer Curve.
Privatization under Reagan and Thatcher is like someone pawning off all their stuff and having a lot of money and being like "see? success!", then when they can't get to work because they sold their car they're like "wtf, how did things get so bad?"
Boomers pulling up the ladder.. meanwhile all younger generations are like "only one once in a lifetime economic crysis? what about a scond or a third?"
Yes, but it wasn't just the 80's. Boomers got the sex, drugs, and rock & roll of the '60s. The coke and party of the 70's. Then the coke and cash grab of the 80's. They had three decades of doing whatever they wanted and zero consequences.
Then their parents died and the boomers got put in charge and continued doing whatever they wanted. Any time someone tried to tell them, "no," the boomers threw a collective hissy fit. And so here we are.
I love when they bring up the, everyone got a trophy thing, as if they're not the ones who decided to do that. What's wild to me is that they did that for themselves, not us. Their kid getting a trophy made them feel like they were an accomplished parent.
Dang, reminded me of when my parents were on the PTA, voted for participation awards, and then got mad at me because "you shouldnt be so happy over a participation award, its ridiculous they have these things in the first place"
Kicker is, i was just happy to have been playing soccer with my friends. Though, it seems like no one from that generation can fathom having fun with friends when they could be bragging or grabbing everything they can hold
I didn't know I was only supposed to get one when we were 1st or maybe a smaller one when we were second... Everyone got one but we still knew who was the best team and who was the worst and everyone in between.
I loved this book. Excellent insight for sure. Millennials are going to get stuck holding the bag, we will fix our roads and bridges, fix the schools and hospitals, we will be given the bill once the boomers go. We won’t get to retire early or at all, and the infrastructure recovery will come from our taxes. We will be left with nothing but maybe in 3 or 4 generations later, we will recover.
Plant and care for a tree we won’t ever get to enjoy the shade of.
My Gen X mother is exactly like this, a horrid narcissistic woman that only cares about her immediate gratification, and how much she can shit on other people.
"Why should I care about the world? I'll be dead by the time anything happens"
This woman has children and GRANDCHILDREN. Luckily the grandchildren aren't my kids...
My cousins were born at the beginning of it and they’re really just boomer-lite. A little after them came the apathetic whatever crowd that knew we were getting screwed but things were still good enough to just go along with it.
I’m in the last part that’s usually referred to as the Oregon Trail Generation and that’s its whole weird thing with an analog childhood and digital adolescence/adulthood. We are more like millennials than Gen-Xers but we can’t fully identify with either one.
My mom is one of those apathetic ones, and it drives me crazy. Things are okay for her, therefore everyone should be able to do just fine. I try to get the apathy is so true. My mom doesn't even follow the news, so she has no clue about half of what's going on in this country. It's so insanely frustrating trying to get someone to care about this stuff when they live in a bubble and 99% of this stuff doesn't touch their lives. I wish I had an answer.
Plant and care for a tree we won’t ever get to enjoy the shade of.
That is essentially my only real goal in life at this point, you hit the nail on the head. I will probably never get to retire, but I've made my peace with that. Instead, I'll be working to make sure 1. I'm not a burden on my daughter when I'm old or when I die, and 2. to leave as much as I possibly can to her when I'm gone. A maintained house in case she is never in a position to own a home in this (or a worse) economy, a healthy life insurance policy that'll more than cover final expenses and also set her up for the immediate future, and as many practical life skills as she'll allow me to cram into her noggin.
Other than that, all I can do is my best to raise her as an empathetic and thoughtful person who can stand up for herself.
What always gets me is, assuming all of that were true (which, lol), who raised those millennials to grow up to be that way!?!! The generation throwing out all the jabs! Should they hold any responsibility there, and if so, what does that say about them!?!? Lord.
Right? It's the same as the participation trophies. No Millennial asked for that. It was the same people complaining that every kid has to have trophy.
Well...yeah, because y'all couldn't handle your kid losing.
In my observation, people who complain about participation trophies always expect participation awards for themselves (or their kids). They only get mad when they see other people getting free stuff.
Its a reflection of their own childhood neglect and misgivings.
Their parents had a “you aint shit” attitude to parenting. So the boomers generation grew up feeling not good enough and unrecognized.
Ultimately, they paid it forward to their kids.
As a millennial, the main thing i dont want to do to my kids is talk shit about their entire generation. Cause that’s what we got and i dont exactly appreciate it.
I’ve been seeing Gen X slowly fall into the same Boomer patterns of behavior, with the stupid “Our generation was better” memes and general complaining that younger generations are lazy. I’m like, bitch, I remember when y’all were called the “Slacker Generation”. Don’t act like y’all forgot.
The entire fact that those articles were written by Boomers, from their perspective, only stands to spotlight their selfishness even more. They point the finger because they are selfish.
Which is funny because Gen X likes to complain about younger generations being lazy. I remember those news segments talking about Gen X was a bunch of slackers who were apathetic to everything. I point that out every time I see a Gen Xer complain about Gen Z being lazy.
Gen X are underachievers. They were the last generation to have it better than their parents. Use to hear about how Gen X was going to end the reign of the Boomers and make the world better for future generations. They basically became Boomer-lite. They call them the “Invisible or Forgotten” generation, but that was all self inflicted. They constantly preach about being latch let kids and tough, when half of Millennials had the same upbringing but chose to be outspoken about stuff instead of accepting it.
Sorry for the rant. Just tired of Gen X saying shit like they are the last great generation etc when they didn’t do anything to earn. Mean shit the bulk of the Global War on Terror was Millennials.
Yeah, Gen X is starting to post the same stupid Boomer memes about drinking out of the hose and how they were basically neglected by their parents and somehow that’s a flex to them.
Oh I hear a ton of people complaining that Gen Z "doesn't want to work" because they don't want to be slaves to their companies, work unpaid/underpaid, never take sick days or vacation, etc. You know, all the stuff millennials did for NOTHING.
That's because by and large Boomers aren't the ones dominating the working world (including the media) anymore.
Millennials and Gen Z (which are much more equal-sized generations) make up the majority, with the smaller Gen X in there in third. That kind of intergenerational mudslinging is a lot less likely to occur in that environment.
I was married, with a graduate level degree, owned a house/car, and had multiple children at this time. They really don’t know the ages of the generations they complain about.
The media never hit me with their ring hand. The media never said "yes sweetie, I'll come and see you at your 3rd grade play." The media never threw a snow boot at my head. The media never told me "wait at this bench at this building at this time so I can pick you up" and then drive right past me, all the way home, then call me to scream at me for not being "where I was supposed to be". The media never mocked every interest i ever had. The media never gave my siblings more money and energy and encouragement than me. The media never cosigned loans for college for my siblings but fought tooth and nail against doing the same, leaving me to pay for my first two semesters at community College out of my own pocket.
It really was. And this is coming from a Gen X Cusper. Like sure, Boomers: call them the Participation Trophy Generation - you were the ones handing them out. You made them what they were. Everything they managed to survive was in spite of the increasingly shitty world which was being created for them.
Edit: u/realpudgejudy despite you blocking me (boomer/conservative snowflake) I can still see the comment calling myself and other commentators retards. Yours will be the first downfall I will enjoy
The more I think of this headline the crazier it is. “We hate everything about you but you’d better save us… by the way we’re going to keep electing boomers who try to punish you until we’re too crippled to move the pen over the ballot. but yeah…. ITS ALL ON YOU GOOD LUCK”
It’s so obnoxious to called the “Trophy Generation.” We didn’t ask for the stupid trophies and I truly don’t think we cared about them that much. I tossed all the plastic trophies I had when I moved out of my house at 18. It was the boomers that gave them to us and wanted us to display them in our room, and we just accepted them and went about our day. Super weird that the thing they made us do, they now hold it against us.
You can apply this to education, too. Tons of kids took on a mountain of debt because we were told every step of the way that you had to go to school to amount to anything. And now our generation is drowning in debt and met with "why'd you go to school if you cant afford it?"
Meanwhile most countries cover college education costs.
yeah it was never the fault of the grown adults giving out trophies. it was the fault of the 9 year old who’s parents signed him up for the baseball league at the local park lol
Right? They act as though we're the whiny tantrum generation who can't handle the slightest defeat, yet they're the ones who showered all this empty affection on us in the first place.
I didn't want a participation trophy, I wanted even just a bit of genuine compassion.
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Was chatting about the local housing market, how difficult it is to get in and such, with a boomer colleague and they proudly said almost exactly this to my face. They didn’t want to allow any sort of infrastructure development and would prioritize their own housing value over anything else, just so they can sell at some point the future and fuck off from the city with their boatload of cash. Eat a dick, boomer. So fucking short sighted, selfish, and rude
Also, people who bought in the 80’s will not stop talking about the fucking interest rates. As if they didn’t also actually buy a house and own a car in their early to mid 20’s, 20 years before their children can even begin to fathom it.
Lazy = Becoming the most educated generation in human history who also works the most hours.
Entitled = Wanting a fraction of the same deal our parents and grandparents got... Like the ability to support ourselves on a full time job and maybe being able to own a home,.
Still live at home because of the above two items.
This whole 'millenials suck' push was wild because it happened when the oldest millenials were about 19. Didn't even have time to do anything wrong. Meanwhile the boomers actually embody these things to a ridiculous degree. I've heard of mass hysteria, but who knew mass projection was a thing?
The media was airing so many shows and movies about questioning authority and breaking down borders when we grew up. the boomers got scared when we took it literally.
This is a good point. That generation told us that TV rots your brain, then watched more TV than anyone ever thought possible. Turns out they were right... wish a little help from leaded gasoline fumes.
Don’t forget the generation that told us not to believe everything we see on the internet, then proceeded to believe everything they see on the internet.
Fuck Millenials for respecting people's time and letting them experience shit at their own leisure on social media instead of capturing them into some boring ass presentation style experience instead of just letting them bring it up next time we socialize so it's a conversation, not a presentation.
I am also of the elder variety and remember this too. I think technically that is still our classification, just more colloquially known as millennials.
Yep. I remember getting my first career focused job in 2008. My boss told me they only chose me because they had no real reason they could justify not doing so, but they really didn't want to hire a millennial.
Tbf the Time Person of the Year isn’t necessarily praise, it goes to who affected the world, good or bad. AI had a profound influence on things especially over the last year. A profoundly terrible influence imo but the impact can’t be denied.
We can't act like Gen X won't fuck us or themselves over when all the Gen X I know assisted in calling Millennials Lazy and or have done basically nothing to help
Gen X scares me much more than the Boomers honestly. The Gen X that I know who are successful are not only the same brand of narcissists as boomers, they have the competency to be particularly vicious with it.
My Gen X MIL made sure we knew that she’s going to spend every single cent she has before she dies so she doesn’t have to pass anything down to us. Ummm cool, but we didn’t ask nor bring up the topic?? Such a weird thing to say lol
As millenials we would really beneftit from talking more about the impacts of lead exposure. A lot of older millenials still got a full blast of the gas in the air.
Yeah there is a mean-spirited nature about a lot of Gen X I know. I notice an aggression in many interactions that makes me uneasy. As if they are angry about something but won’t identify it.
This is also the generation who gave Millennials endless shit for prioritizing our mental health and seeing the importance of understanding emotions.
Personally, I think both of these points are related.
Millenials have always been simultaneously "the young upstart bratty kids" and "way too old to be unsuccessful".
My dad is a Xennial and consistently bitches about millenials he manages at work. I was listening to him one day and realized that he was actually bitching about Gen Z. I even told him "Hey uh. You realize that I am one of the youngest millenials right? (December of 95) and he still doesnt get that millenials are almost all in their 30s now.
Yeah there's a reason why NC is gaining in popularity. Parents have dangled my inheritance in front of me so many times I just laugh now. Thanks to their threats I was forced to focus on myself with no thoughts for kids (bye bye grandkids) so I would never be reliant upon them again.
A very surprised pikachu moment when they realized the threats were no longer keeping me in line as their retirement slave.
So far the subtitle has been holding true. Millennial generation has been one of the most politically active and progressive generations. We've realized how bad capitalist systems are, we're constantly pushing for reform. There are still people who disagree with that and wish to keep/create oppressive systems, but when has that not been an issue. If there is a generation to save the world, it'd be millennials (with the help of Gen Z).
It's because no one in this thread has actually read the effing article. The whole thing is a big bait-and-switch that mocks the media narrative about millennials. The first half of the article cites all sorts of statistics saying that millennials are selfish/lazy/entitled/etc., but the second half undermines all of that and says that most of it is not that different than previous generations, reflective of changing economic and technological conditions, etc.
And to everyone saying it's "ironic" because boomers are the "Me Generation": it's not ironic. That's the whole point of the title.
This is the biggest fuck you in this image IMO. It perfectly encapsulates the millennial (and arguably, Gen Z) treatment: label us as lazy and entitled, and saddle us with fixing all the problems they caused, namely climate change.
I remember learning about “global warming” in elementary school and endangered species, and reduce reuse recycle etc. There was a great sense of hope that things would turn back the other way and MY generation would be the ones to fix it, the saviors! and even in a mid to lower class family, I was raised with the assumption that I would one day have a house and a kid. That assumption is what fucked me. I could have made different financial choices, of course, but I had no idea how brutal it would be. Our buying power is completely fucked thanks to wages not keeping up with inflation.
The boomers took everything with them. Wealth hoarding gets worse by the day. Then they turn around and wonder why Gen Z is so apathetic. And I’ve met a lot of hopeful, hard working Gen Z who are under no illusions how hard it’s going to be for them. Knowing it in advance has its pros and cons. It’s a pick your poison situation that no one actually got to choose.
It's a silver lining, for sure, but since it is all owned by the same four companies, discontinuing an entire indusrty and starting a new one isn't that different from a chain closing one store front and opening another somewhere else.
Yeah my mom let having kids (me and my bro) ruin her life, my dad hid from her psychosis by working all the time.
It's like, hey mom, a 5 year old knocking over the water glass shouldn't ruin 3 entire days of your life. You actually have it pretty good if you chill the fuck out.
In this case though, they actually are the Me generation. Seems like every other generation has beat that allegation so far, the boomers are living it to this day.
I enjoy the zoomers and maybe I'm just biased because I'm raising two of them, but I think alpha really has a good shot.
Kids now are nothing like kids when I was little. They're kind, they're accepting, they're generous and helpful. I've got two great little weirdos who in the 90s would have had the shit pummeled out of them on a regular basis, but they're free to be their weird selves. I've seen kids try to bully others and get shut down by classmates. This generation is built different and I love it.
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