[hmschreck]

This is pretty much it. My generation has been called entitled, lazy, selfish, etc, for wanting the same things our parents were given, like a living wage, affordable college, or career stability. In what world is that friendly?

[Twirrim]

And the boomer generation were called entitled, lazy, selfish by their parent's generation too. Think about the attitudes of the war generation to the hippies, recreational drugs etc.

This shitting on the next generation thing has been going on for a long time.

There's solid evidence going back 150 years of older generations complaining about school kids being undisciplined, not respecting their teachers ("not like back when I was at school"), and some slightly more anecdotal evidence going back some 2000 years of the same.

We always find it hard to reconcile the negative aspects of our old behaviour with our current mindset, and it's way easier to just reduce in our minds the severity or scope of our actions. We learn from our mistakes, and try to make them seem as small as possible in our minds.

[MrMember]

>The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.

The above quote comes from ancient Greece.

[Twirrim]

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/

There's some doubts to the veracity of that quote, which is why I opted for anecdotal when it came to older evidence :)

[bcrosby95]

Our parents. Are you talking of Gen X? The boomer generation? In general, your statement seems to apply to Gen X. But not really the boomer generation - e.g. they didn't have affordable college like Gen X did. Gen X seems to have been at the crossroads of things shifting and kind of got the best of all worlds.

And for Millennials, some have it rough but some don't. College was cheap and affordable for some of them - certainly more affordable for them than the boomer generation. Keep in mind the generation spans to 1981. Some Millennials are almost 40 now.

Gen Z is in a whole other category of course. Lots of things going/have gone rapidly downhill. But boomers mostly aren't the parents of these people. It's Gen X/Millennials.

[mcv]

Yeah, I feel like a lot of the things Boomers and Millennials are blaming on each other, actually apply to Gen X (and I say this as a Gen-Xer myself). We got the best education deal before (admittedly Boomer-) politicians started to undermine education. We were the slacker generation. We're the generation that refused to grow up. We got jobs in the booming 1990s.

But sure, let Boomers and Millennials fight. We're happy to stay out of this (just know that I'm on your side, Millennials!)

[notacoward]

That's funny, I'm GenX and I have very different memories. I remember high inflation ("stagflation"), high unemployment ("misery index"), multiple recessions during the first half of my career. Sure, college seemed pretty affordable compared to nowadays, but not compared to those before.

Also, a lot of the anger at Boomers is not just because of how they had it (that's mostly the doing of their Silent/Greatest predecessors) but because of how they made it. Boomers have dominated politics since those student-activist hippies got into it, largely because of sheer numbers. Thirty or forty years, depending on exactly which ones you count. GenX is finally making a dent, but mostly at the state level. At the federal level it's still heavily Boomer-dominated, regurgitating the same policies that got us into this mess. Ditto Wall Street etc.

If Boomers had enjoyed good times and then made some effort to prolong or repeat them, #okboomer wouldn't be a thing. It is a thing because so many Boomers are using their political power to keep selling everyone else's future for the sake of their own comfy retirement.

[jhbadger]

The 1990s were only "booming" (in the US) towards the end of the decade. The early/middle part of the decade was a recession.

[mcv]

I guess I was still in university back then. I'm late Gen X. I imagine early Gen X has a very different story. (I bet the same is true for every generation.)

[Frondo]

I'm not sure that's true about the boomers having access to affordable college. I had an ex whose boomer grandfather lectured us endlessly about how he worked hard all summer long to save up for college -- which, for him, meant a 40 hour work week during the summer, to afford a year of university, with room and board -- and why couldn't anyone else do the same these days?

No matter how often we pointed out that college is, in general, vastly more expensive, and summer jobs comparably less well-paying, he'd just repeat himself. "I just don't get it, you go work for the parks department, you work all summer long, why isn't that enough? It's your iphones, your cell phone plans, etc." when, you know, yeah we're paying $20 a month for cheap cell phone plans and five-year-old iphones, but the reality is that working three months at, say, $15 an hour, nets you what, $5-6k? That might cover a year's tuition at a community college if you live at home, not a year living at a state-run four-year university.

[jhbadger]

No, GenX didn't get the "best of all worlds". If you were too young to remember the period, the famous documentary "Slacker" (1990), describes the period well. We had the same frustrations that Millennials and now GenZ have in terms of lack of opportunity.

[mieseratte]

In defense of "the Boomers," and believe me I have plenty of gripes about trends within that generation, we Millenials aren't exactly above reproach.

I can agree that it's not nearly as easy for us as it was for the past few generations, but it's not nearly as grim as most make it out to be. To put it bluntly, I see a lot of the same "me me me" mentality that the Boomers have been criticized for.

There's the idea that life is just handed to us, so long as we "do the right things." It's perfectly possible to own a home, raise a family, what have you. You just might not get to work the job you want, study the degree program you want, or live in the neighborhood you want.

There never was a "turnkey" existence.