Why Millennials Hate Boomers
Join Reason on YouTube Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern for a discussion on the divides between young and old Americans.
A recent poll found that 44 percent of millennials want to criminalize misgendering people, betraying a censorial attitude that has been building among some young people for years. Many millennials also feel left behind economically, especially compared to baby boomers.
Can millennials and boomers ever get along?
Join us on YouTube this Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, when Reason's Nick Gillespie, Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown, and psychologist Jean Twenge will discuss whether there's a new generation gap and, if so, whether it can ever be closed.
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Ageism is just as bad as racism.
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Age is the most important thing?
I've run headlong into Ageism. Never thought I would see it, but now that I am "old" it's everywhere. I want to change jobs due to bad employer, but no one will hire an engineer that will retire in five years. Too much resources in training and stuff. So go for the cheap college grad who can pass tests but doesn't have a day of real world experience in his life.
This happened to a friend of mine too. Got laid off, and never could find another job because he was too old. He ran his entire IT department, but was too old to be useful to anyone any more.
This is fucking nuts, and happening just as people are living longer. Most jobs are no longer based on exhaustive labor but instead on training, knowledge, and experience.
"I’ve run headlong into Ageism."
Yeah, I have, as well. Or, rather, I did. Luckily, I was fortunate enough to retire at 58, so I avoided the worst of it.
If I could retire I would. But a late start means not enough savings.
Yep. If you lose your job after 55, you're done. If you can be prepared for retirement by that age, do so, because you might not have a choice. If you can't afford to be prepared for early retirement, you're just fucked if you end up unemployed.
Been my experience as well. Retire or start a new business. One significant factor is the cost of employer paid health insurance. I hired a guy in his early 60s many years ago for my little business and my rate doubled. He had no serious health issues and was a great employee. But he was expensive. The good news is once you get on Medicare they won't insure you anyway.
Another issue is the often suggested scheme to continually raise the retirement age to "save" social security. This assumes that people can remain in a job or find another after they reach 55 or 60. That is not possible for many or most in the current employment market. Set yourself up to retire before you get there if at all possible. Age discrimination is almost impossible to prove.
Yup, have bumped into it more than once. In my 50’s back in the 2009 crash, and later in my 60s. I’m fortunate I work in an industry that needs old white guys and their institutional knowledge still (Print). It is evolving but not attracting the young generation fast enough. This will be my last job, and If it ends sooner than I choose I am ready too.
I’m a late boomer.
As a sidebar, I would not want to be anywhere near a ‘young’ office these days.
I’ve found found that millennials and younger steer the fuck clear of jobs that work shifts. Clocking in nights, weekends, holidays, etc seems to interfere with “me time”.
Interestingly, that was the only work I could get at that age. Now it seems to provide job security for some of us older working stiffs.
Sorry to hear that. I ran into similar discrimination but was able to retire by moving out of California.
Well, I'm actually semi-retired because I still enjoy doing doing software development. I only want to work part-time now and have been able to do so as a freelance developer. I made the change just before COVID hit, which was lucky timing.
Getting out of California (or other high cost of living areas) is key.
Why limit it to millennials? There is enough hatred towards boomers to go around.
My parents were both born during the war and managed to mature before the rot surfaced in academia. Those in Gen X who were raised by such folk or had older teachers throughout school were able to shake off the indoctrination by Boomers. The generation with Boomer parents, Boomer teachers, and Boomer politicians is not faring so well.
Sounds about right. I remember going up to a pinko at a Vietnam demonstration, probably around 1967, and asking him "When's the revolution?" His reply: "This is the revolution." He was right. Guys like him went into academia, journalism, the arts, and politics and the long march through the institutions was on.
That is a completely different generation than me. I'm technically a boomer - but Obama's age. I don't remember Vietnam or the 60's much at all. The Tet offensive was 1st grade for me. I've always thought the 60's generation was alien.
Which kind of makes sense since those generation labels are entirely a creation of advertisers who create a 'new generation' every 17 years so they can slot all 17-35 year olds into the same ad target demographic. After 17 years of being told they are all the same generation, they become the same generation advertisers molded them into.
I think true 'cultural' generations - and there is a commonality among peers but not imposed by advertisers - are more like 7-10 years.
I agree there really is another cultural divide halfway through each “generation” so the younger Boomers and the older Boomers are pretty different from each other as you noted. I also see major differences between Millenials born in the 80s (like myself) and those born in the 90s. People say Gen X were the last “feral children” but really it was the 80s Millenials.
I’d say you have to look at the generation someone was born in, as well the generation their parents were born in, and the combination of the two produces your “cultural” generation. The older Boomers had Greatest Generation parents, the younger ones has Silent Generation parents. Same with Millenials, older Millenials had Boomer parents, younger Millenials had Gen X parents.
"That is a completely different generation than me."
Actually, the "hippies" were a different part from the majority of those in that generation. I am old enough to remember the protests, TET, and all of it. I observed it from the sidelines. The "hippies," or whatever one wants to call them, were a small (though very loud) minority even among their peers. They had an significant influence on the style of the popular attire, and certain attitudes about sex, drugs, and some other things, but not all that much on politics. As Branford Marsalis noted in an interview: they all "grew up to be insurance brokers."
“I remember once being at a be-in or one of those things, and the Berkeley contingent – Jerry Rubin and those guys – got up on stage and started haranguing the crowd. All of a sudden it was like everybody who had ever harangued a crowd. It was every asshole who told people what to do. The words didn’t matter. It was that angry tone. It scared me; it made me sick to my stomach."
----
Why enter this closed society and make an effort to liberalize it when that’s never been its function? Why not just leave it and go somewhere else? Why not act out your fantasies, using the positive side of your nature rather than just struggling? Just turn your back on it and split – it’s easy enough to find a place where people will leave you alone.
- Jerry Garcia (both)
And it's further complicated between politico hippies and those that just wanted to do their own thing.
it’s easy enough to find a place where people will leave you alone.
Today that's virtually impossible.
+++
Yeah hippies were hardly a monolithic force. I came of age in the seventies. The Weather underground was cool for opposing the war but not many of us bought into killing cops and blowing people up over it. For the people I knew was about individual freedom. Some became insurance salesmen and some are still trying to get their band out of the garage. Have no idea who they might vote for. And I don't care as long as they're doing what they want to do and not fucking with other people.
++
Re the 1960's - whether culture or counterculture - that cultural divide/venom then has remained fixed for that entire generations life. The same venom between the same people 50 years later.
I don't know of any other generation that ossified its teenage conflicts so much and for so long. I don't even think the Civil War generation did that.
"The Tet offensive was 1st grade for me."
Am I the only regular poster under 50?
To be fair, that's under 50 in Canadien years. 🙂
I'm not a regular poster, but I've been lurking here since the aughts. I'm 34.
Nope.
No.
I’m considered Gen X by the PTB that decide the cohorts, but I decidedly fit more into the “Oregon Trail” segment of Millennials.
Xennial here
This. The idea of a "generation" of people who supposedly all think alike because they were born within a certain range of years is a baloney. There is a continual stream of new people coming online. And each of them is an individual.
It's not just advertisers. It is pundits who project their personal takes onto this or that "generation".
The idea of a “generation” of people who supposedly all think alike because they were born within a certain range of years is a baloney.
The fuck it is. That is culture. Everything has changed so fast since WW2 that people born 20 years apart have very little common frame of reference. Saying, "And each of them is an individual." is like saying the members of a band are individuals. Sure, it is true, but as a group they are all playing the same song.
Boomers couldn't live up to what their parents went through in WW2. My generation was never entered into a lottery to go to Vietnam. Millennials didn't grow with the specter of the Soviet Union and nuclear war. Nobody under 25 can fathom what it was like the week of 9/11.
PCs were hardly a thing when I graduated. Today's graduates all have the internet in their pocket. It makes for a huge difference in perspective.
“…, is a baloney.”
Ok boomer.
Why the Participation Trophy Generation Hates Everyone Who Refuses to Coddle Them
FIFY
TLDW: Boomers pillaged the economy and millennials are whiny nitwits?
This fits with my biases. 😀
The economy was pillaged before boomers cast their first vote. LBJ with his great society programs and war making skills exploded the rot.
There were enough of them, though, that they could have reversed the actions of The Worstest Generation, if they had cared.
what don't millennials hate?
Avocado toast, apparently.
Avocado toast is SO last year….
Lady dicks and censorship.
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I revel in their hatred, the spoiled brats.
If we’re spoiled it’s because of you, pops!
/s just in case it’s not clear
Why Millennials Hate Boomers
Because Boomers are leaving them $32 trillion in debt?
And the generations before the Boomers lied to them about social programs.
You mean Democrats, don’t you?
"Why Millennials Hate Boomers"
No one cares why.
Boomers made millennials with their Baby on Board signs, no-score T-ball , perpetual college prep-everything and helicopter parenting. Now they're shocked at what they created? I mean, it's great that a "majority" of boomers still believe in freedom of speech, while training their kids to hate it.
I wouldn't blame the Boomers for helicopter parenting. That's on Gen-Xers for starting and then perpetuating that shit after Amber Hagerman was killed.
Agree. That one is on Gen X. They are the first group of parents that stopped whacking their kids and used the 'time-out' process, which led to the latest group of parents who use phrases like 'your inside' and 'outside' voices and tell their kids their language is 'inappropriate.' Because I said so is no longer enough with these coddled kiddies.
To agree with defaultdotxbe's point that he rather immediately turned around and refuted to agree with your point:
"You'll get nothing and like it!" wasn't satirizing the inept birth and raising of Millennials a year before the first one was born. Papa Joe is in the middle of The Silent Generation while Hunter is in the middle of Gen X.
Tale end of Gen X and I've had both older and younger parents hear me say "Because I said so." to my kids and react as though I'd said "I'll box your ears." or "Don't make me take my belt off."
Slightly tangential, I had a co-worker who once said that if the world ends tomorrow, he's going back to his parents' place in suburban Ohio because it should buy him at least another 10 yrs. Plenty of evidence that, for several generations, the entire country doesn't culturally progress as a monolith, or even think it should. As if generational demonyms confined themselves to birthing/fertility cycles (or uterus-havers to reproduction in a manner akin to livestock) anyway.
the entire country doesn’t culturally progress as a monolith, or even think it should
Exactly. It is culture. There are local/regional/national layers. Even more noticeable is the rural/urban split. All of that has been magnified by technology. It used to take a lot longer for generational differences to become apparent. The time scale compressed with travel. It became shorter after trains, then cars, then commercial planes, then computers.
How much different were teenagers in China and the US in the 1950s? How much different are they today? The generational contrast in China is going to be even more dramatic.
Other than “baby on board” which was a passing fad in the 80s, everything you list is far more prevalent among Millenials raised by Gen Xers, not those raised by Boomers.
Although it does point to why (younger) Millenials hate Boomers, they refuse to coddle them the way their Gen X parents did.
Other than “baby on board” which was a passing fad in the 80s, everything you list is far more prevalent among Millenials raised by Gen Xers, not those raised by Boomers.
Your argument about intra-generational divides a few comments above would seem to suggest that the generational labels are suspicious to begin with. To extrapolate from such a dubious premise would seem to suggest that your subsequent assertion is even more suspect if not outright null/void.
You might play devil’s advocate or cede ‘for the sake of argument’ and say the Boomer label applies to those born ’46-’64 whether the individual members conform to the label or not, but then primary and/or adult birthers (i.e. 18-40ish yrs. old) would make Boomers the primary parents of Millennials.
The only way your conclusion isn’t between pretty blatant cherry-picking and utter nonsense is if you assume young teens as the most prolific birthers. Which isn’t true for any existing generation and is progressively less true (both in terms of age of first/last conception and in terms of total conceptions) as progressing through the generations.
So then lets take the generation labels out of it, and just throw in some more detail just to make it a little less conversational.
"Things like no-score T-ball , perpetual college prep-everything, and helicopter parenting is primarily a feature of the childhood of firstborn children born after ~1990 and their younger siblings, who were primarily raised by parents born after ~1965."
So then lets take the generation labels out of it, and just throw in some more detail just to make it a little less conversational.
OK, I was born after 1965, all my kids were born after 1990. Neither my kids nor a majority of their friends have ever played no-score t-ball, enrolled in anything resembling ‘perpetual college prep’, and none of us have even ridden in a helicopter. If only because all the endless t-ball, college prep, and helicoptering, spread out over all of our kids would bankrupt people making several times our income.
However, of their peers, there are a significant portion who played no-score t-ball (if they participated in organized sports at all), are/have been perpetually enrolled in Chinese Immersion classes, and whose mothers still make them wear masks and sanitize their hands after they handle anything that was in contact with a surface that could be conceptualized as not having been cleaned in the last 24 hours. Typically, they’re only children whose parents (mothers) can afford to waste time and money trying to immerse their kids in Chinese culture in America like trying to immerse a drop of baby oil in slick of water floating on a vat of crude oil.
Then there’s also a vast swath in between, whose parents (both of them) spend literally all weekend and 20% of their income running their kids between two separate travel sports leagues. In the off season, they’re running their kids to either (same) sports camps or music or other hobby lessons of the kids’ choosing. Frequently pressuring them in the music or other hobby as proxy for pressuring them in the sport. Being in between, they typically vascillate between the two extremes in that the first kid gets the most attention, but also the toughest lessons, while the younger 1-2 kids may not get much attention or lessons at all.
Most of the “friends” parents are closer to my age, most of the “peer” parents are older. Most of the ‘in between’ parents are, well…
… or when you said “just throw in some more detail” did you realy mean “Don’t actually throw in any more detail and just use ‘after ~1965’ as a 1:1 replacement label for the underlying category that I previously fundamentally rejected”?
Trump live updates: Trump lawyers meet with prosecutors, told to expect an indictment
Trump has said he is the target of a criminal investigation into the efforts to overturn his electoral defeat to Joe Biden.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/live-blog/trump-grand-jury-indictment-rcna96233
My hometown newspaper...
*ctrl-f trump 1/1*
Wow, only 1 today. Let's see what it is:
Trump wants to see Biden impeached, and other Republicans are quick to pile on
So, Trump and Republicans pounce on Biden impeachment. The press just can't help themselves, can they?
It is just for them to impeach Trump over Biden's corruption but beyond the pale to impeach Biden over Biden's corruption. Yeah, we're in clownworld and the insane clowns are in charge.
Political prosecution for the win!
“Political persecution” perhaps?
As a Gen-Xer, I hate them both.
Yes, but as a Gen-Xer, you hate yourself as well.
As a Gen-Xer, these are all true.
As a Gen-Xer, I can't really be bothered to care.
this.
"As a Gen-Xer, these are all true."
I am a boomer married to a Gen-Xer. She confirmed this. At least, when she bothers to care at all.
The mental state changes between universal loathing and universal apathy are a bitch.
"Institutionalized!"
True.
If you’re having Millennial problems I feel bad for you son,
I got 99 problems and misuse of the word bitch ain’t one.
Why is everyone hating on Billy Idol's old band?
GenX was fucking terrible. terrible.
I will drop this anecdote in the Gen X section.
Ten years ago I asked my kids where they would go to find their friends on a Friday night if they didn't have a phone on them. They just looked at me with a puzzled expression. Kids no longer "hang out" to be found.
Every generation when they get old has said the younger generation is going to hell in a handbasket and taking the world with them. And every child emerging into the adult world has struggled to figure out where they might fit in, getting angry at the old folks for the world they created. Prosperity has spoiled most of us at least a little, and attempts to “make life easier” for our children don’t work, cannot work, and only prevent them from toughening up to adult choices. This has been going on for at least the last thousand years, so there's no need to act surprised by it now.
"Every generation when they get old has said the younger generation is going to hell in a handbasket and taking the world with them."
As Socrates is famous for noting....
Yeah. I'm a young boomer l think and my son is a young millennial if I even understand this shit. I was angry at my parents for years until I realized that they were simply living in the world they found themselves in and doing the best they could. And they did pretty damn good for me. I imagine my son could point out my many failures if asked. But he's doing just fine and I'm pretty sure I've been forgiven.
"they were simply living in the world they found themselves in and doing the best they could."
This is what most people do.
If the 'Greatest' generation called the next generation millennial instead of boomer I would hate them too.
.
Well said.
How many transgender and intersex people live in the US? Anti-LGBTQ+ laws will impact millions
Huh...
"Gender is a spectrum and if your laws don't support that, they oppose it." sounds like an argument/policy sarcasmic or Tony would cook up.
Years ago at a libertarian meetup a young person suddenly broke down into tears and ranting about how all us "olds" had ruined everything for her. Pollution, climate change, overpopulation, banking crisis, housing costs, you name he she was in a tantrum over it.
She was not a Leftist. Did not want government to come in and fix things. But all her life she had been taught how much shit everything was. Eventually it seems into the soul and is believed. There are problems yes, but they are not existential problems.
And here we were in a libertarian meetup working to restrain the number one cause of these problems, big government. She thought we were the problem solely based on our age.
Again, she was not a Leftist, not a grownup Theta Grungeburg. But a bona-fide libertarian.
She was the product of government public schools, and government funded colleges, and government worshiping news media. She had been trained all her life to NOT see the good that was flourishing all around her.
What good? The Green Revolution! (Yeah, the Left hates that). A fully networked global culture! (Yeah, the Right hates that). Society is wealthier than ever before, more connected than every before, more free than ever before.
I get despondent too at times. But we are still living in the best decades in all of human history.
Wonder how they would have handled being subject to the draft.
That's the big dividing line between early and late Boomers. Those of us who grew up after the draft ended had a different experience.
This is true. The draft ended before I was old enough to know what it really meant.
By learning these lyrics
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True patriot-love in all thy sons command.
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A fully networked global culture! (Yeah, the Right hates that).
I, like many leftists don't mind a fully-networked global culture, as long as it's a culture I approve of.
Seen They Cloned Tyrone on Netflix? A pretty solid, genre-tight polemic about how much The Right hates a fully-networked global culture.
When the fully networked global culture forgets that their narrative about who hates what isn't actually owned by them.
That's how they git ya.
Again, she was
not a Leftist, not a grownup Theta Grungeburg. Buta bona-fide libertarian.You really shouldn't misgender libertarians like that.
The Green Revolution! (Yeah, the Left hates that).
What?
GMOs.
Ah, OK. Usually when I think of the Green Revolution I think of Greta Thunberg and the Just Stop Oil retards (decent band name).
Not actually GMOs as much as selectively bred strains and the worldwide spread of mechanized agriculture, of course.
And, personally, when I hear 'Green Revolution', Christopher Lloyd shouts "It's the Libyans!" in my head.
Yeah, brandy. Everything Is So Terrible And Unfair. That’s what they’ve been told.
No need to get so fucking wordy about it.
Well first of all, they're lazy, good for nothing tricksters...
Why
MillennialsKids HateBoomersTheir ParentsFixed.
Exactly. Even Ned Flanders hated his parents… lousy beatniks.
Glenn Greenwald on the Hunter Biden Dick Pic Plea deal.
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I dont trust anyone of any age who doesnt like Led Zeppelin
They lost me after Houses of the Holy.
Millennials were handed a poop basket by their parents and were told "We used up all the good stuff, now you are on your own. Good luck with the several global crises we made for you. Oh, and pay for our medicare."
Who wouldn't hate somebody for that.
Because that's not what happened.
For sound economic perspective go to https://honesteconomics.substack.com/
Twitter is imploding, says ENB.
they hate us because it's easier than getting busy to earn a fine living. i suggest apprenticing with a recent immigrant for a revelatory training. mostly they hate us because they're whiny pussies and whining is easy and they can do it from the comfort of their "device". sorry sadsacks
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