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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   24633 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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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.

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.

I’ve yet to see a boomer that doesn’t think like a boomer - but I’m dumb and work retail and so meet people that are, what I would politely call more normal than some people may meet on this forum.

I’m not saying you’re rich and meet smarter and more elite thinking boomers, but I would say that if I were thinking of a fictional person on the motte.

I also agree with your take about how the youngins think about lunch, breakfast, etc.

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.

That's because Zoomers could afford it if they just cancel their pensions. They want zoomers to be poor while they live the lifestyle they deny to young people.

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.

Sounds like something the hole digger would say to avoid consequences for their actions.

Sounds like something the hole digger would say to avoid consequences for their actions.

I mean, if you want to go down that road, I'd just say that those in glass houses ought not throw stones. But that's really irrelevant. It doesn't matter what something "sounds like" in terms of who or what they would say. What matters is if it's true. I'm not sure how it's not obviously true that improving oneself to become better at climbing out of a hole is a far better use of one's energy when one is in a hole than bitching at the hole-digger. Obviously, one could do both, but also, the response to recommendations to do basic financial planning indicates a whole lot of not doing the former.

That's because Zoomers could afford it if they just cancel their pensions. They want zoomers to be poor while they live the lifestyle they deny to young people.

Tremendously few people at 25 have the lifestyle they grew up with. Which makes sense! Their parents have had 25-35 more years of work, saving, and building up a home than they have.

People ought to be raised by 25 year olds, so this doesn't make a lot of sense. I think years of experience is overpaid due to cognitive bias towards elders and against innate intelligence, so I also don't accept that 25 year olds ought to make much less than their parents did in their late 30s. Boomers talk past zoomers with the suffer and save mentality. No, they do not accept your Luke Skywalker working man's „hero's journey” pablum as an excuse for immiserating young people in the summer of their lives. There is nothing noble in being poor, and squirreling away money just to get some relief when society decides you are finally old enough to make a dignified wage.

I also don't accept that 25 year olds ought to make much less than their parents did in their late 30s.

Flipped around, that means people shouldn't be making more in their late 30s than they did at 25... aka whatever you make at 25, you're locked into an amount close to that forever, no hope of significant advancement or growth?

The average age premium should be <20% from 25 to 35 instead of ~100%. Standards of living should grow so that 25 year olds can expect to make as much as their parents at 35.

If they're 25, and having babies, they're probably living on a single income, which might well be half of what they'll eventually make, even without raises.

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.

I would be wary of taking these arguments on popular social media too seriously. All sides involved in them are incentivized by the attention economy and by their own emotions to present the maximalist, ridiculous versions of their positions and to treat the argument as a general rage-venting session instead of as an attempt to ascertain facts and jointly find solutions to problems. I think that offline, probably relatively rare is the zoomer who genuinely thinks that the idea making your own sandwich is some kind of horrific unreasonable oppression.

This is correct, but also, the context of this is specifically about how boomers are conspicuously ignorant of the way things have become harder for young adults now compared to when they were young adults, which appears to me entirely a social media attention economy rage-venting phenomenon.

My father had to scramble to find a defense job so they wouldn't send him to die in Southeast Asia. My experience wasn't as bad but I did graduate into a recession. Some millennials got screwed pretty hard entering the workforce during the GFC. There's certainly plenty of things that suck now, but the zoomers on X utterly reject the idea that anyone else ever had problems.

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.

Yeah, that crash basically set my career back... oh, 3 or 4 years. Even with a very good trajectory since (by any reasonable metric, that is, not by the start-up/FAANG/finance metrics), I'm still a little bitter over it, and look at where my career/life might have been (aka three more years of potential seniority/raises/promotions, and a few life opportunities). I can only imagine how I'd feel if I wasn't doing comfortably well right now.

And, of course, it could have been worse! Better to be jobless early in one's career, when parents and grandparents have a spare room, than mid career when you're the one paying for a mortgage and food.

The Twitter generational war, be it over sandwiches or houses and cars, has been dumber than usual this week, and that's saying something.

My thoughts as a mid-millennial who mostly missed the crash (not being able to score even any variety of job as a freshman in college was irritating, but otherwise it wasn't that bad) but fucked around and failed to launch throughout his 20s (I delivered food with a side of dispatching for 14 years LMAO, but since that gravy train ended have managed to use those experiences to switch to an office job in trucking that appears to have potential to make a real career out of.) are otherwise as follows:

Used cars really are irritatingly expensive at any price level right now relative to the late 2010s, but it's not Cash for Clunkers that caused it, but the loss of production during the Great Recession and Covid years (along with inflation) making either 15 year old beaters or lightly used cars more expensive. That said, even if it feels a touch overpriced compared to the $2K shitboxes of the 2010s (Back then, my pick for best pizza delivery bang for the buck was a Bush era Ford Focus.), one can get a 15-20 year old Corolla on Marketplace for $3500-$5000 depending on one's tolerance for ugly and it'll probably work fine. If not, it's a Corolla. Get on Youtube, buy some tools from Walmart/Harbor Freight, and fix it, or find a friend who can and will (Car guys tend to identify themselves by talking about them all the time.). Don't want to pay the Toyota tax/want something nicer? Get a Mazda 3. In my experience they're very reliable and have depreciated more heavily (Mine has 100K miles on it and the only non-maintenance thing I've had to do to it was replace the belt tensioner, a pain in the ass but the part was $30 on Rock Auto.).

Pack a lunch to work or spend $28 on Doordash? Who the hell eats lunch at work anyway? Unless my boss is paying for it I don't eat lunch at work; I'd rather work through it and leave early or play on my phone. If I had to eat out and pay for it, there's an Italian place downtown that does a two slice or two Chicago dog and drink special for $7.

All that said, my broad take is that things really are worse than they were in the mid/late 2010s. I spent that decade as a drunk slinging burritos and sushi in a college town and never had money problems in spite of an outrageous bar budget and my only real quality of life sacrifice was living in various shitty apartments with cheap/freecycled furniture and having to do laundry at a laundromat. I have a real salaried job now and make more money than I did back then (and without beating the shit out of my car) but I still feel broke (and objectively am; that career change was brutal) in a way that I didn’t/wasn’t in the 2010s. Job hunting in ‘24/’25 was a miserable, hopelessness inducing experience and I doubt I’d have gotten the job I have now without knowing my current boss from my time bartending.

As for the Boomers/Xers and quality of life, I think their real privilege/crime isn’t so much a money or standard of living thing, but fertility related. Boomers and Gen X were the last to spend their younger years in an America with a relatively normal age distribution instead of the rapidly aging gerontocracy we’re in now. From 1930 to 1980 the median age in the US increased from 26.5 to 30 years old. From 1980 to the present that number increased from 30 to 40 years old, mostly from 1990-present.

Used cars really are irritatingly expensive at any price level right now relative to the late 2010s

I remember even the late 2010s (so around 2016-2018) that the "gently used" car market was... worthless. If I wanted any kind of substantial discount over just buying new, I was looking at close to 100k miles or more.

I was car shopping back then and while I can't comment on the lightly used market the mid and low range were reasonable (I was at a food delivery company at the time, so that was the sort of shopping I did.) if you weren't looking for a truck or SUV. My goal was under 10 years old, 100k miles or less, and under $10K and there was a decent selection even accounting for my weird tastes (I wanted something not silver, white, or black, and it had to have a stick shift.). I was closing in on a Mazda 2, and early 2010s models were running for about $7500 at the time.

I actually blundered into a private party deal that I couldn't pass up, a loaded one year old Mazda 3 with 15K miles for $17K. It was retired lady's recently passed husband's car, a stick shift that she couldn't drive, had one minor scrape on the bumper, and the interior reeked of cigarettes but otherwise it was mint and I knew how to fix the cigarette smell so I offered her NADA "rough trade-in" and she took it. The bank had it valued at $21.5K, and on that note interest rates were lower then. I was able to put 20% down and finance the rest of it for 2% interest.

Funny enough, I never liked that car all that much (It's a perfectly nice car but doesn't feel particularly "fun" to drive. It's too SUV-like and the tall gearing makes it feel slow.) and sold it once but wound up getting it back (The guy I sold it to died and left it to me because he owed me a ton of money.). I will say that it's been perfectly reliable and if I was looking to recommend a compact car to someone who doesn't want to pay the Honda/Toyota tax I would go with a 2nd or 3rd Gen Mazda 3 without hesitation.

By contrast, the lightly used market for stuff I want now is mostly ridiculous. An 8-10 year old Civic Si with under 100K miles runs over $20K and even the cheapest Type-Rs are pushing $30K, with a lightly used example pushing $40K. Another issue for normies is that the mid-2010s had several "dud" cars that appear nice but have major problems that should be avoided and infest the "affordable" end of the used car market. I'm talking about Nissans with their CVTs, Ford Focuses with the Powershift automatic, Hyundai/Kia products with the Theta engines that blow up, GM SUVs with the Ecotec 4 cylinders, Fords with the 3.5 V6 that has the nightmare water pump, etc.

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