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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.
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.
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