Let’s get over the idea that it’s a generation war and not a class war. Thinking all boomers are rich and own houses is like thinking all gen z are lazy. Neither is true by a long shot, but this is what the oligarchs and corporations want us to think about each other so we get distracted and don’t notice that they are the ones buying up all the housing so we can’t and they can rent to us at whatever price they want. Let’s stick together against them instead.
edit to add: And BTW don’t forget the next gens are growing up in an even worse situation and will face the effects of living under an autocracy and the effects of unaddressed climate change, while you get old and boomers are gone. Who do you think they’re going to blame? You, that’s who, while those in power laugh at all of us.
Something else: even boomers who own houses can still be poor and struggle to make ends meet.
“Oh, why don’t you just sell your house then!” 'cause then they and their family have no place to live. “But you could rent!” Yeah, that will work for a while and then they’ll be poor again.
Let’s also stop using terms like Gen Z or Boomers altogether. They are often used by the media to make articles seem more interesting to certain target groups. But from a scientific point of view, they are about as meaningful as zodiac signs.
“Here’s why Cancers can’t keep their money together and why Scorpios nevertheless are constantly jealous of their standard of living.”
its not the 40 hour work week thats the issue.
Its how much productivity is demanded in that 40 hours. and the compensation for it.
and theres a LOT more productivity demanded from workers today, than there was in 1950.
Because all the technologies that were supposed to make life easier… didnt. They just increased the amount of things we can/have to do in a day.
People working today are doing more labor, producing more effort per hour than 70 years ago, but are being paid less in purchasing power for it… and if thats not a recipe for violent upheaval i dont know what is.
The amount of time that corporations feel entitled to is ridiculous. I’ve quit my last two positions because these billion dollar companies feel that they own you for every second when you’re on the clock. It feels exploitative and gives you the sense that you’re just some beast of burden. We’re humans, not machines to push production to the maximum. But all the higher-ups see is bottom line pushers.
What, are not grateful that they trickle down a tiny bit of money from what is left after the shareholders and CEO take their hard earned cut? Just because you did all the work and earned all of the money? How gready can you be? I mean they graciously let you be sick 6 days a year, and let you frolic for another 10. Don’t you realize how much effort they had to put in worrying that the small smidgen of their enormous wealth that they had inherited and invested in your company was not earning them greater wealth at a rate that was grossly unhealthy for the company or the economy?
Back before the clock was invented, agricultural workers had about 160 days of the year to themselves. (Admittedly, to do intensive chores.) Also, employers gave free breakfast and lunch, with a bit of beer. Workers might also do as low as 4 hours of work IIRC, depending on the day and season. Below is a video on the subject. Civilis also covers topics, such as the fall of the Roman republic…which feels awfully relevant, nowadays.
I love Historia Civilis. I wish he’d also discuss the Roman leaders that came after Gaius Julius Augustus. A lot of historians and books stop there after the fall of the Republic, but from what I understand a lot happened within the Roman empire since then. It would be nice to learn more about it all.
One of my absolute favorite subjects! Check out “The History of Rome” podcast by Mike Duncan (dont let the audio quality of the first few episodes dissuade you, it gets suddenly better very quickly). Mr Duncan goes deep on details and provides sources if you want to dig deeper. It’s a great listen that covers the mythical period all the way to the fall of the eastern empire.
Me and my fiancee both work full time to just barely survive each month with no savings because the CoL is so fucking high it’s unmaintainable. And if you reply with “just move”, first: I’m in the midwest, it’s not AS bad out here, and second: Moving is a privilege, it’s expensive, time consuming, and often times you end up in a worse spot than you were before
I’d love to know your version of “just barely” is you have two adults working full time in a 2 person household.
Maybe your mortgage is far higher then I’m imagining.
I live in an apartment, but it’s overpriced, and it’s just me. This world is designed to be a 2 person household.
So I have to imagine you’re living beyond your means. I’m living beyond my means too, but I also don’t have a decent wage either. So living at all is living beyond my means.
You should add up your whole house income, divide that number by 4, and THAT number should be what your mortgage shouldn’t be higher than.
I suspect your mortgage is probably much higher than that number.
Either that or we have different definitions of “just getting by”.
Lets use WA as an example. Average house costs 588k interest rate is about 7% now. So you’ll be paying $4300 per month. So man that’s rough but surely there are some cheaper that average units out there! If you want to be anywhere near where the majority of the jobs are even a lot drive away you are going to have a hard time getting below 450k or 3300 per month.
Well maybe you can rent cheaper right? 2BR 1.5 bath where again most of the jobs are can easily run you $2000-2500 which seems like a very nice savings however whereas your fixed rate mortgage is you know fixed your rent will probably exceed the payment on your mortgage within 10-12 years and since you have no equity you have no cushion to fall back on if you ever experience a downturn you could find yourself a bum on the street. Hell if you aren’t able to save anything you will definitely be heading for bum status when you get old enough that you can’t work. Holding on to being able to own something is an investment in not descending into desperate poverty later.
I think its weird how people don’t believe people can actually be struggling in America without also somehow being the source of their own problems. It’s like people like you have broken brains.
I think its weird how people don’t believe people can actually be struggling in America without also somehow being the source of their own problems. It’s like people like you have broken brains.
Decades of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” Republican propaganda will do that. So many Americans have been convinced that if you aren’t wealthy, you only have yourself to blame. And if you’re poor, you are inherently flawed as a human.
That formula hasn’t been valid for like, 20 years?
≥ Mortgage You lost me there, renting is much more expensive than paying a mortgage off
Depends where and how you live. My rent is $800 a month, but some mortgages are thousands of dollars.
Where the fuck do you live with $800 rent? Middle of Montana? Dead center of Death Valley? Gtfo.
Lakewood, a suburb of Cleveland. It’s overpriced as hell.
You pay $500 less than the average American for rent. I think you may be lacking the perspective necessary to engage productively with this topic.
My rent is $500 less than whatever metric you’re using, but our local ecconomy is also lowers than yours.
Average wage here is 10/hr for a factory job. I’ve heard some places like Seattle make $20/hr just working at starbucks.
And keep in mind my rent is basically 1 room.
$800 Rent is cheap in this economy
Yeah, but I’m not in your economy. Average wage around here is lkke $10/hr.
😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆
Moving is a privilege,
Poor people move all the time. It’s a fucking wild take to call moving a privilege. Though I do agree with the last bit about sometimes (or maybe even often) being in a worse position than before
Poor people move all the time.
Yes, that’s why all the inner city projects are devoid of people. They’ve all moved somewhere else because it’s so easy for them.
I read something in The Atlantic about how people used to move about every three years and that sounds insane to me.
And also, the phrase “I just read something thing in The Atlantic” makes me feel even older than my gout and shingles.
I have a feeling the poors don’t move to different cities/states that often.
Don’t worry. All that work you’re doing will pay off… your landlord’s fifth mortgage.
In my case I’m subleasing so I’m paying off my Landlords’ Landlord’s fifth mortgage
Exactly! Same boat, I am too poor to move! Due to missed payments on mortgage, credit cards, and medical bills, our credit score is abysmal. There is no way we can get a new mortgage or pass credit checks for an apartment. On top of that I don’t have the time or money to invest into the house so there are many things that need to be fixed, some of these absolutely need to before selling it so I also can’t just sell either. 3rd, you’re right. Wherever I do end up moving (if somehow we did get approved), it’s probably going to cost more due to higher interest rates, and it will most likely cost more. We are praying to make it a few more years until stupid daycare is done so we can finally make ends meet a little…
I never thought I would be in this bad of a situation in my life, but here I am and I just want to survive each day. Thinking about money every day for years now is tiring and stressful. They have a name for it, its called poverty brain.
I had a basic but nice first house, but I sold it to move for a new job. I even was lucky enough to still make a bit of a profit. But not enough, and now I’m stuck back with renting again, can’t really afford to buy a new house with interest rates, prices, inflation eroding my income in other areas, and poor availability. I think back to my parents buying their first house and how nice it was by comparison, for a fraction of the price even adjusted for inflation and it gives me a really unfortunate sense of perspective, much less hearing stories like yours or from friends I know who are in a bad situations. I’m not struggling, but prospects for improving things aren’t great either, and that seems to be the case for everyone I know.
You just need to put in some extra effort or get a side hustle like we did. /S elder millennial.
::strangles the shit out of them with their own bootstraps::
And yet Gen Z turned out for… Trump? He’ll surely help the economy and enable a new era of magically plentiful high paying, stable jobs.
Less than half of us voted. As a member of Gen Z who DID vote for Khamala its because the only good thing she does is not be Trump.
A good portion of our generations more liberal/left-leaning side just got done having the shit beaten out of them by cops before getting kicked out of school for protesting against the genocide in Gaza.
What makes you think any of these people want to turn around and vote for a law-and-order ex-DA who’s ignoring some of the worst atrocities of our times?
Everyone in this generation who isn’t jaded and disillusioned is a fascist or fascist sympathiser (same difference :p). No one has the energy to care let alone vote.
They probably won’t until establishment democrats keel over, and unfortunately it looks like medical science kept them alive and puttering until it was too late.
Boomers protested Vietnam. Millennials Iraq.
Kids want change. Sometimes that is for a good cause and sometimes it is about draining the swamp and hurting others.
But if you needed to be convinced that it was worth voting against a rapist fascist who hid nothing? You were never an ally.
Its not that they need convincing to vote against it, its that they needed to be convinced their vote would even fucking do anything.
Most of us are convinced that we’re dying in the climate wars before we hit middle age regardless of who we vote for, the rest where the dipshits that went out and voted for Trump.
“We did nothing and we’re out of ideas” is not the good argument you seem to think it is.
Oh sweety, its not that I don’t have ideas, its that most of them are rule breaking. :)
Oh sorry, “I have ideas but did nothing about them” is not the good argument you seem to think it is.
And a rapist openly running on project 2025 would not be any “fucking” different?
Would it make my life and the lives of millions of other Americans easier by not having a target painted on our backs for probably as long as our country stands? (We’ll probably never see another election again IMO) Yeah sure, that’s why I voted for Khamala.
That being said she wasn’t going to do anything to meaningfully stop the horrors of late stage capitalism. Either way I’m probably going to die by middle age in the climate wars.
Its just now that they’ll happen even sooner, and now I have to worry about being put in a camp because of my prescription to estrogen.
Ones certainly worse, but neither actually seemingly give me the possibility of living a full and happy life. Even if I do make it to old age I’ll be living in a dying world, clinging to whatever habitable sliver of earth I’d have the privilege of finding.
Honestly until we start being friendly and share cookies with the ghouls hiding behind the funds managed by Americas institutional investment firms which collectively own everything, I don’t think we’ll be solving anything.
Yeah sure, that’s why I voted for Khamala.
I’m starting to disbelieve you since you’ve misspelled her name twice and it was on signs everywhere.
Actually that level of ignorance is pretty on par for the average American voter.
Its just now that they’ll happen even sooner, and now I have to worry about being put in a camp because of my prescription to estrogen.
And that alone should have been reason enough for anyone who actually gave even the slightest of shits.
Growing up is realizing you aren’t going to win. But you can lessen harm.
Yeah except that for previous generations not “winning” wasn’t an inherent global existential threat.
Its hard to be motivated when you know either way you’re not getting the full life you where promised. Especially when the issue at hand is someone else’s problem. (From the perspective of my cis Gen Z counterparts.)
I’m not saying its the right way to operate, I’m saying its how lots of people do naturally. Its unfortunately human, and its taken advantage of by design.
Its easy to keep people preoccupied when they’re a weeks pay away from starvation.
Less than half of us voted. As a member of Gen Z who DID vote for Khamala its because the only good thing she does is not be Trump.
WHICH IS WHY YOU VOTE FOR SOMEONE.
God I hate that Americans have decided that you vote for the person you like rather than vote to stop the worst person.
You’re never going to get a pony, so do what you can or they’ll make you be a pony. And not in a happy way. In a “work in the mines all your life” way.
Oh well, too late now.
God I hate that Americans have decided that you vote for the person you like rather than vote to stop the worst person.
Turns out game theory [as described in this election] doesn’t describe how people (on aggregate) actually behave. It does describe how some people think people should behave (I may sometimes agree), but not how they actually do.
If I know you rationally follow game theory [as described], I’m going to offer you far less than anyone else because I know game theorists [as…] take any win, no matter how small. Ultimatum game? I offer everyone a 50-50 split, except game theorists, to whom I offer a penny. They’ll take it too.
Dems didn’t appeal to how people actually act, and so you all lost. Their supporters refused to acknowledge the reality of how groups behave, and so you all lost.
so you all lost
Are you claiming I am a Democrat? Can you present some evidence to that effect?
Are you claiming I am a millionaire? Can you present some evidence to that effect? If you’re gonna tilt at windmills this conversation is pointless.
So no, you can’t. You just accuse people of things whether they’re true or not. I’m not sure why you think it’s okay to lie.
I don’t know what to tell you, I’m not Burt Reynolds. You just accuse people of things whether they’re true or not. I’m not sure why you think it’s okay to lie.
I didn’t accuse you of being a democrat, you just inferred that I did and started calling me a liar. Would you like to get back on topic?
WHICH IS WHY YOU VOTE FOR SOMEONE.
They said to the person who voted blue. Im not telling you don’t vote, I’m telling you why most people my age who didn’t want Trump didn’t vote. I don’t know what more you want from me.
You’re never going to get a pony, so do what you can or they’ll make you be a pony. And not in a happy way. In a “work in the mines all your life” way.
Ending the horrors of late stage capitalism isn’t asking for a pony its the bare minimum to ensure the continued survival of our species.
I despise most of the boomers
I bought a lawnmower from someone online and went to pick it up. The lady was a turbo hoarder in her late 60’s she was smoking and smelled like a brewery. Her home was DISGUSTING. And i mean rat shit on the countertop. The only reason i was in her house was because there was so much shit around her house that the only way into her backyard was through the house. If you haven’t seen it, you can not understand how bizzare it was to carry a lawnmower through a hoarder house, when she had technically a big yard around.
I just wanted to get the fuck out of here when she said: a lot of people wanted the lawnmower, but she doesn’t sell it to anyone (she mant she didn’t sell it to immigrants). And: “no offence to you, but your generation is absolutely useless.” It was like some weird snl sketch
I’m going to guess that person’s TV has a Fox News logo burned into the bottom corner.
My parents holding fast with “well, it’s always been like that” made me realize how big this generational divide is.
There are good boomers who get it, yes. There are also some really dumb ones who have literally no clue what kind of world they helped create. Full stop.
And there are some Nazi gen z. We have to pull together the good ones from every generation and become helpers together. We can’t bitch about the ones that are shit, there are shit people in every generation, so it’s a waste of time and a distraction.
Yes, 100% this. There are plenty of boomers that got reamed by various elitist schemes, too. People right on the cusp of retirement only to have everything wiped out by something like an Enron or the real-estate bubble and they get to keep working another 10+ years…I think people have rose-colored glasses when it comes to the things boomers faced, too. It was not all sunshine and roses for everyone in that age bracket. It is lunacy to suggest that it was/is.
There may be some boomers doing nefarious things like Blackstone, driving up the cost of living for everyone, but I bet there are some very, very young people in schemes like that, too, making lots of money. Or individuals like fElon’s boyz - I don’t think the Dogebags are boomers. And fElon himself is Gen X…
Then there are headlines that I see like this that run counter to virtually everything you’d hear about Gen Y in recent years:
https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/your-money/millennials-financially-baby-boomers/
Lastly when the bullshit inter-generational warfare is whipped up, I remember this…
fElon
You call him like that every time. Please stop. It feels like Russian propaganda bot is talking. It’s bad and not funny to distort people’s names/surnames
If Elon can’t respect people’s names and allows deadnaming on Twitter, I think it’s only fair to not respect his name.
This is some whataboutism. If he did this, it doesn’t mean that it should be acceptable.
Respect is earned. And generally mutual. You don’t respect people, I won’t respect you. I see no reason to respect anything about that Nazi.
In this case *they just call them by their surname, as they do with strangers, and you’ll look like adequate person
Fuck that. This “high road” shit is what led us here in the first place. He dead names constantly. He’s a “big, stwong alpha,” he can take it.
Ever wonder how “work ethic” became a trait that defines the quality of an individual? You can probably guess. Religion. Which of course needed people to work hard so they could donate more money to them.
My dad worked two full time jobs for a while to help the family get ahead while we were little. I think spending time with his young children would have been time better spent for everyone. He did stop when we got to school age. And he did spend a lot of time with us. Was a scout master, tball coach, all that. So I know he probably would have rather been with us than working that extra job. But from a young age it was drilled into him that work came first.
Now with younger people less into religion. We see more and more who realize that working hard for someone else doesn’t need to be a defining characterist of a person’s quality.
I think they see the boomers doing nothing, but having everything, and the dream of having a house, two cars, and 2.5 kids was not something they were ever told they could have. They grew up with depressed millennials close enough in age to still be friends, who tell them “I’m fucked, so you don’t have a chance in hell!” And they’re right. With prices going up and wages stagnant or going down, they don’t ever get to save anything. And why should they? At the rate houses are climbing, that down payment keeps running away from them. And still, the only thing they will ever be able to pay for is a dump in a shitty part of town.
Until we bring back hope for the future, we will keep seeing people give fewer fucks.
Among all my friends, there are two clear common denominators between those who rent and those who own houses. The ones renting have office jobs and live in the capital, while the ones who own houses live in smaller cities or the countryside and work in manual labor.
I’m not saying correlation is causation, but it’s an interesting observation - and so far, it applies to 100% of my friends.
Or have office jobs and commute a bit longer.
People say I’m crazy for commuting 1,5 hours (one way). But I get to go home to my own property. Especially now with hybrid working still being a thing, I only go to the office once or twice a week.
I must agree with the people saying you’re crazy for having that long commute. That’s over a month spent getting to and from work every year. Time is the most valuable asset in the entire world. By working we’re trading time for money but for the time spent commuting you’re not even getting paid. I would seriously consider trying to find an alternative solution to this.
I worked 40 hours a week and could not afford a house so I got a second job, worked my ass off for 5 years, all the extra job money, and bought a 3 bedroom with a 2 stall garage on a half acre at an auction for $38k cash. I didn’t cry about having to work more, I called it an opportunity to be able to. I put another 30k into the house and used it as a stepping stone to get into a nicer place. Then I went back to one job. I did all this while being a single parent of a teen daughter.
Congrats?
The point being if you want something, you work for it, not condemn the economy and give up.
the real point is to be a good worker and let the billionaires reap the benefits
$38K LMAOOOOOOOO
Yeah try that again but this time for $300k, asshole
Maybe try not being such a whiny bitch and pay attention to what they are trying to tell you.
What year did you buy the house for 38k?
At a USDA property auction held by the county annually. Ya’ll trolls make me not want to post here either. Its already as bad as reddit and sometimes worse.
And you can’t even answer the question.
Could you be any more disingenuous?
$38K?? For half an acre, 3 bedrooms and a 2 stall garage?
At an auction. Meaning it was a house that was foreclosed on. Oftentimes, they go for very cheap, sight unseen, and you need cash in hand. Granted the laws for that differ per state.
Oftentimes, they go for very cheap, sight unseen
What could possibly go wrong? That’s definitely worth a massive financial risk.
Right, that’s the point I was making. I did know a guy that would buy them and flip them. It’s a numbers game at that point. Some will be sinkers, but most will make money. If you’re buying one to live in, that’s a heck of a risk.
Then your point sure as hell wasn’t clear because I think many people thought you were saying buying a house isn’t a big deal or a risk if you get it at an auction. Hence all the downvotes.
Please stop falling for efforts to divide the working class.
Amy such efforts should immediately be viewed as suspicious. The divide is not old vs young, or white vs black, or even rich vs poor. It is the capital class versus the labor class.
Boomers grew up in a very tiny slice of global history where the working class actually got improvements in their material conditions, so it is hard for them to understand the struggles of people before or after… but they are being ground down by capitalism the same as the rest of us.
Your comrades at work may not understand the importance of unions or collective action, but they are still your comrades. Your grandmother may not realize that all of her extra productivity went to make billionaires richer, but she is still your comrade.
or even rich vs poor. It is the capital class versus the labor class
Just another fancy way of saying rich vs poor. The difference is the poors don’t realize they are in a war.
There are plenty of people that don’t consider themselves poor or who most people would not consider poor who are still in the labor class. If you produce value more than extract value from ownership then you are labor class.
There are plenty of people that don’t consider themselves poor
That doesn’t make them right. That just makes them less poor than those that are dirt poor.
If you’re not floating around on a yacht then you’re comparatively poor. They can afford things these so called rich people you talk about could never afford.
All my coworkers voted R. It’s really, really hard to consider them allies in any sense.
It is genuinely difficult not to hate them for it. But you need to keep telling yourself that they’re victims to propaganda from media and their upbringing. It’s hard to overcome that.
There’s a quote from a Heinlein book where he talks about how Communists can only exist in places where there are real, not imagined, ills that are not being addressed, and I feel like something similar applies for Trumpists. Their lives have gone wrong somehow, likely driven by forces beyond their control, and they’ve been promised easy answers by a vile con game. I don’t appreciate that they got hoodwinked, but I can understand how it happened.
Watch out the propaganda of government and ruling class trying to divide the public and turn people against each others. Boomers are idiots but owning a house is peanuts compared to billionares expenses or the money being spent on military weapons.
I hate this idea that people need to work themselves to death to survive. We have such a surplus of resources today that people should barely have to work. I don’t know what it was that pulled the mask off this farce of a system we have, but it sure as shit isn’t worth it to bust my ass for 45 years so the CEO or FuCKYou Incorporated can get another bigger yacht.
I don’t know what it was that pulled the mask off this farce of a system we have
Greed
Sociopathic greed is the root; Covid 19 pulled the mask off when people collectively had a few months to exit the rat race and discover life apart from being constantly ground to dust for some shareholders’ profits.
Probably this, but it had been bubbling under the surface for a while.
Of course. American prosperity fell off a cliff around 1980, so the last 40 years or so have just been inertia and grinding the middle class into dust.
Which is roughly where we are now.
Not true! The 90s were great! We signed NAFTA and shipped all our manufacturing jobs overseas!
I don’t get you people. Presumably you’re also complaining about Trump tariffs?
You complain when the US signs free-trade agreements, and then you complain when the US closes its borders.
Make it make sense?
We have tons of excess. The problem is it’s hoarded by a small tyrannical group of psychopaths bent on increasing their wealth at the cost of everyone else.
I feel like these two comments really should be at the top.
‘Most WHITE boomers don’t know what it’s like to work 40+ hours a week and still not be able to afford a house’ FTFY
People have been working 40+ hours a week for CENTURIES with no hope of affording a house. The housing that non-whites have been able to secure is always tenuous, subject to the racist whims of the ruling class. They could be rezoned, subject to a new law that strips them of their property, or even what happens in Palestine the racist ruling class just bulldozes your house with no compensation.
This is definitely not about Gen Z vs Boomers, but the ruling class wants you to think it is so we don’t unite and make heads roll.
Stop making it about race. It’s about class, not race. You’re just race baiting
Oh fuck off. If it was truly about class why is in every single metric from wages, employment, health, education, and housing black and brown ppl currently are worse off then their white counter parts regardless of income and location. If it was only about class wouldnt it be the same across the board? And it’s ALWAYS been that way.
It’s almost like white ppl are pissed they’re being denied the dreams they actively keep everyone else from receiving and the rest of us are just suppose to forget about the very real problems specific to our races just to keep white ppl comfortable.
So why did the Super Bowl happen?
The teams that played at the Super Bowl are both predominantly black. Please point to either of the teams that stopped playing to protest the “white ruling class”.
Oh, that’s right, it didn’t happen. Crazy, what’s your perspective on that? No True Scotsman? Got a strawman you wanna piece together? Say more stuff about how white people are the problem, that should get you some upvotes.
Um, life was maybe easy-ish for some boomers. Plenty of them got reamed by the many boom/bust cycles. Boomers lived through stagflation, two oil embargoes, Vietnam, the 80s fad of downsizing/rightsizing, many losing farms in the 80s, the 90s rush to offshore and outsource everything, the deskilling of Americans and the export of most manufacturing, NAFTA reordering things, the rise of big box retailers and further deskilling, the disintegration of unions, the Wall Street crash of 1987, the dot-com bubble burst in early 00s, the real-estate crash in 2008, etc. Gen X and millennials suffered some of these later ones, too, or dealt with the fallout from their parents having these struggles.
The ageist shit is just a distraction. Generations are not really a thing; it’s more of a marketing strategy and also a way for the elites to further atomize Americans. Don’t fall for it.
It is more about how policies were set at the national level. Those policies have benefited them throughout their lifetimes. Boomers going to college. College is affordable. Boomers buying house make family. House good and affordable on one wage. Boomers working hard providing for wife and 2.5 kiddos. Jobs pay good and has pension. Family affordable one wage. Boomers retiring???
Not to mention their wholesale willingness, as a cohort, to pull up the ladders that they used to raise themselves, assuring that subsequent generations would have it much harder, and would likely fail to achieve the same cornerstone successes of prosperity.
At the same time, Boomers have a penchant for constantly gaslighting any opinion or statement that might pierce the insulating lies in whatever trumped up mockery they call an identity.
It’s why Boomers are always regaling the world with anecdotes of how hard they worked and how much they deserve their stations in life, when anyone with the ability to parse history can see that Baby Boomers objectively had the easiest, most rewarding slice of American prosperity in the history of the country. In the richest nation on Earth.
For sure. I found it impressive they learned nothing from Vietnam and went right ahead with Afghanistan and Iraq. I guess at least with the next war we’ll get Gaza Resort by Trump.
Are people under the impression everyone who had a 40 hour a week job had their own house?
In 1990 my mom stayed home and raised us. My dad worked a measly construction job and we lived in a two story, 5 bedroom house (which they lost after the 2008 collapse, I took it over and lost in 2012).
My mom was also able to borrow against that house over and over again for cars.
Around 1996 my dad got his CDLs and drove a coal truck.
We bought that house for 30k.
My aunt bought a huge colonial house with 8 bedrooms for roughly 60k in 1979-80. She never worked. Her husband was a coal miner.
When it burned down in 1996, she bought a beautiful brick home in a wonderful neighborhood for 100k. She sold that same house recently for 600k.
The difference is absurd.
A “measly construction job” is a good paying one. A person working at a McDonald’s for 40 hours a week at that time would not be able to afford an apartment let alone a house. When your aunt bought her house interest rates were in the teens, today they are 7% and that’s a record high. My parents bought a house in 1976 for $28,000 dad worked full time at a city job plus always had a second job or side hustle. Our family would strip copper to make ends meet. Mom cooked every meal, eating out was a rare treat. Never once did we even order pizza, Mom make it with powder dough. We didn’t have cable. Got by on two junker cars sometimes one.
Every generation has it’s challenges. This is the first to have a public circle jerk/pity party
Every generation has it’s challenges
And the younger ones have an objective, mathematically proven worse version of the challenges than the earlier ones did
Nobody claimed it was ever perfect, only that it’s worse now, which it is
Haha I love it when kids tell me what my life was like.
Back to my original point. No, not everyone who worked 40 hours a week could afford a house.
You can wrap yourself in self pity or you can be resourceful, your choice.
Mate, a smaller percentage of our generation has houses. Wrap ya head around that. No one’s arguing every other generation had a house, that would be idiotic.
So self pity it is
Yours.
Everyone? No. Far, far more people than now? Absolutely.
