I would suggest that what some people on this thread are perceiving as “Boomer bashing” is actually a very insightful critique: That Baby Boomers rode along a fairly progressive (in the economic, not political sense) wave* throughout their childhood/early adulthood and did very well for themselves with it, but once the Boomers moved into positions of political power those progressive policies were methodically undone, or kept in place but underresourced (which is effectively the same thing)—just in the educational context, consider cuts in funding of public higher education (and K–12 education, too!), and federal and state financial aid not keeping up with general inflation, let alone the rate of inflation in the educational sector.
Courtesy of the Silents, as @ucbalumnus points out.
As a result, the odds of someone in their 20s or younger right now ending up economically better off than their parents is lower than at any time in any living American’s lifetime.
So is “Ok Boomer” actually a criticism of every Boomer out there? No—but it’s certainly grounded in a (IMO) well-placed criticism of the actions of what politically and socially powerful Boomers have done.
Have you seen the latest AmEx commercial where the young lady receives her card in the mail and suddenly all her dreams of high-end travel, fancy restaurants, and expensive clothing come true? Interesting how they leave out the part of the fantasy where the bill arrives
We had credit cards but we didn’t use them for everything. Remember when you had to write out checks at the grocery store? And I remember a lot of other places not accepting CCs, either. We did NOT use them like we do today (I’m as guilty as anyone for overusing them now).
Frankly, one should use CCs for everything instead of check or cash. If only the infrastructure is set up that way, it would solve a lot of problems. Nothing wrong with CCs. It’s an amazing invention. Blaming CCs is like blaming cars for traffic accidents, blaming smart phones for social issues, blaming alcohol for drunk drivers, etc. I can go on. Most European countries don’t even use checks any more.
I believe the Boomers that are doing well, are those who were able to buy real estate and invest in the stock market (as a generalization), even through the tough times. If you weren’t able to do that, I think it is likely you were left out of the prosperity boom. There are still many people in that generation who are living in poverty. The loss of private sector unions and pensions hit Boomers very hard. Nowadays, people don’t expect a pension and often jump from job to job for better opportunities and pay. The earlier generations, you often worked for a company for decades and counted on that pension, accepting lower salaries than you could have gotten elsewhere.
I have hardly bought a plane ticket or hotel room in the past few years thanks to my CCs. I will agree though that I swipe without really looking to see the total much of the time, which can feel like not really spending the money.
I do my cost-of-item evaluation when I put an item in my cart or choose it from a menu.
As a transaction device, cards really are convenient (perhaps too convenient for overspenders). But the fees that merchants pay for card processing make them reluctant to want to accept them for very small or very large purchases, or where card processing costs cannot be built into the business pricing model. Only in a few cases is the existence of a card processing fee obvious to the payer (e.g. when paying for gasoline or paying taxes).
Less of a worry for many boomers as they get to the age of getting the entitlement of socialized medical insurance (that many oppose extending to everyone).
It’s interesting to me, the extent to which these generational dynamics echo racial dynamics.
You have one group that is provably disadvantaged compared to another. There are larger systemic and historical forces at work that have buoyed the prospects of one group at the expense of the other.
The disadvantaged group then gets stigmatized by the more advantaged group for being less successful and/or for appearing less ambitious when in fact they’re legitimately demoralized by a system they can see is rigged against them. When they protest the disadvantage they face, members of the advantaged group counter with examples of successful outliers, false equivalencies about the advantaged group’s hardships, and “'splaining” about what the disadvantaged group is doing wrong. The disadvantaged group is portrayed as having shared character flaws. They’re told that if they simply conformed with the values and behaviors of the advantaged group, they’d be rewarded just as richly as the advantaged group has been. Which is to say, they are gaslit and told that their experience is wrong.
When this elicits frustration and criticism from the disadvantaged group, the advantaged group responds with performative fragility and shock at the audacity and ingratitude. They equate the “punching up” to their own “punching down” as if there were no power differential. They bemoan how the disadvantaged group is ruining everything.
@conmama I already said that “ok boomer” was meant to be insulting. I’m honestly not particularly sorry if anyone feels attacked because, as a generation, millenials are attacked by headlines and media on a daily basis. We’re told we’re lazy, entitled, etc. We get mocked for eating tide pods (which like 3 people did and they’re all Gen Z), snorting condoms (I really have no idea where this stupid story came from), and killing everything from paper towel to the oil industry (and oh how I wish that were true). So turnabout seems like fair game.
But as I said later on, boomer isn’t directed to each and every specific person born between X and Y years. It’s to the generation as a whole who largely either encouraged or passively accepted what I said in my post.
Do I know there are outliers? Obviously. My father is a boomer and he was also a union president and still stands on picket lines for workers’ rights. For example.
Here’s another one that I didn’t think of before - largely because of the boomer generation, my generation has been at war nearly our entire lives. I was born during Desert Storm. I lost my sister’s fiance when I was in 7th grade. I’m now a phd student and Mr R’s best friend just went back to the ME for I believe his 6th deployment. And why? Well, our current president* finally said the quiet part out loud: oil.
Oh and there are also stats and studies to back up everything I’ve said, but I’m not putting in the energy to finding and posting them.
(I know I said I’d be done but when mentioned specifically I of course felt the need to respond.)
Sounds like a thin skin problem. If you aren’t the one eating tide pods, snorting condoms, and running up debt to maintain your lifestyle, you are not the one boomers are complaining about. If you aren’t throwing trash out your car window or giving tone-deaf lectures to young people about how easy it is to get a job by walking into a business and applying, you aren’t the ones the millenials are complaining about. If most of us realized how infrequently others think about us as individuals we’d spend less time getting offended.
Our generation had our share of problems. Past and subsequent generations had or have their share of problems. I can’t think of a time we weren’t involved in some kind of international conflict over most of the last century. But fewer people are living in abject poverty today, and many formerly incurable diseases have been wiped out or can be managed.
If you can accept your starting point and build from there with grace and hope you’ll have less time to bash others.
How did you get away with that? We also try to use CCs for everything but we have to write checks all the times for school activities and some stuff too.
Using ‘boomer’ as a put down does not deserve a response. Name calling is used by people who want to cut off discussion because they have no intelligent response.
Same here. The kid stuff kills me. I’ll bet 95% of my checks go to school organizations and scouts. I’m the treasurer for my youngest son’s Pack and deal with LOTS of checks. People want a record they paid things and if it isn’t something that has an online option for payment you’re stuck with cash or check.
Also a few places don’t take credit cards like where I buy my LP. I only buy it once a year and am not going to show up with a big pile of cash.
@MomofJandL, you make decent points, but there’s an important item (mentioned by @aquapt) that kills the equivalency: The power differential.
Outliers aside, Millennials (and Zoomers) are in a position of less power relative to Boomers. Therefore, there’s no real equivalence—being criticized by those with more power than you, in actual fact, different from being criticized by those with relatively less power.
I haven’t had an old-fashioned (which they are now!) checkbook for at least 6 years.