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The real issue with Boomers(and Spiritual Boomers) isn't that they're old and entitled, it's that they're old and refuse to acknowledged that the ground game has changed.
To use a less(hah!) contentious comparison, look at the flood of male divorcees/widowers getting back into the dating game after ten years of marriage only to find that things have become an utter shitshow.
If Boomer's general reaction to the state of, well, everything, was to basically say 'Yes, things have gotten really horrible' and just nod along in sympathy, they wouldn't get near as much vitriol thrown in thier general direction. Instead, the ones who end up being the loudest say 'You're just spoiled/entitled/lazy/we had it worse', and when people start bringing out the receipts, rather than acknowldging anything to zoomer's arguements, they double-down and go 'NUH-UH'.
My favorite example on twitter was one spiritual boomer bragging about how the home he and his brother grew up in was perfectly affordable at 250k, only for someone to do the work and discover that it was 100k just 8 years prior. ... Yeah.
So, we'll see how all that will work out in the end...
Median mortgage payment as a percentage of median income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1RDJB
FRED doesn't have data further back, but it's worse 1981-83
That's one of many reasons boomers aren't impressed by the whining. Yeah, things are in fact bad now (though there was a lot of the same whining pre-COVID when they were not). But they were worse in the 1980s, when many boomers were trying to get their life started.
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I feel like I have a vague memory of essays by boomers saying something like this, but I've so rarely run into it that I can't remember, and I've certainly never seen it among boomers IRL. Not that I hang out with a lot of those, so that doesn't mean too much.
But, eg this past week, I saw some kerfuffle on the social medias involving zoomers complaining about boomers not understanding how hard it is, and when I looked into it, it was because some boomer said zoomers ought not spend $28 ordering lunch and even generated a realistic cheap plan to make their own sandwiches, and zoomers scoffed that that was basically concentration camp food. Every interaction of this type that I look into seems to play out like that, where basic financial responsibility and the most minor of suggested sacrifices is made out to be some huge ordeal. Notably, I've never seen boomers implying that this would solve all zoomers' woes, merely that those are the types of things they should do first before declaring that making it in this economy is impossible.
I'm personally a privileged millennial, who was lucky enough not to suffer the pains of the 2008 crash that happened around the time I started working. So I don't have enough personal experience with such stuff to weigh in on. But I certainly have the experience of sacrificing location and comfort for price in rental, sometimes spending nearly 2 hours in commute each way for work, doing meal prep and budgeting my restaurant meals, not ordering food for months, not paying for any entertainment subscriptions, finding used or free furniture from Craigslist, things like that, in my 20s and even 30s. They're just not that much sacrifice, and certainly I think my qol with all the benefits of modern technology and policework is better than that of boomers when they were young adults.
I sense that zoomers were too grown up being fed fearmongering that these were the end times, and COVID plus AI gave them a one-two punch right as they were becoming adults. Like generations before them, they were sold a false bill of goods about college being the solution to all their career problems, and there's certainly blame that deserves to land on their parents' generations to some extent for all of that except maybe AI. And so they're somewhat understandably weary of being told advice. But jumping at shadows is still jumping at shadows, and devoting significant energy towards criticizing others instead of criticizing oneself tends not to be all that useful for getting oneself out of a hole, regardless of who dug that hole or put one in there.
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