Welcome to how the rest of the world operates, Amerikkkans. God forbid you have to take care of your child after they turn 18. The idea of having a fully independent kid after they turn 18 only started after America hit the jackpot post wwii, where you could get a job with a firm handshake, and it’s an entirely unsustainable system.
I don’t think it’s unsustainable for parents to not have to support their children after 18 - Because we should have robust society wide support systems so no parents should be struggling to “support” their children of any age.
who do these boomers think is bringing them their treatos and wiping their asses as in home health aides?
other boomers?
no, their retirements and savings are going to be raided by for-profit elder care schemes and scams their children can't protect them from, because their own position is too precarious to chase after mom buying trump bucks or getting sucked into some kind of crooked conservatorship.
helping your children is literally helping yourself and maintaining a trusting relationship with your only advocate in this psycho country of grifters.
American elder care is terrifying. It's basically those old "the savages send their elderly off into the woods to be eaten by wolves" tropes, but real and the wolf is some finance capitalist running a elder care graveyard where they kill your parents and grandparents for profit.
One thing that stuck out to me as absolutely plausible in Tender is the Flesh was that one of the main reasons the protagonist kept his dad in an expensive home was so that when he died there would be a guaranteed cremation that he would personally witness, instead of his father's corpse being sold as cheap meat
“I’m convinced that this weakens our culture and our economy by continuing to coddle adult children and not send them from the proverbial nest to take on that responsibility.”
A very common take with suburban parents in the Anglosphere. I'm so glad I wasn't raised in that culture because I could never deal with that.
It’s almost fash adjacent especially “this weakens out culture”. Also the insanity of the dude saying “I got fleeced by my kids and it’s their fault.”
The value in the boomer home is entirely dependent on the future buyers (Millenials, Gen Z) slaving themselves to unrealistic mortgage terms, and their retirement funds are entirely driven by greater fool asset and company valuations. They created an entire financial system that creates nothing except set up overtly confusing ways to obscure the fact that it's just stealing from their children to pay for the unsustainable boomer lifestyle, and then they have the gall to complain about the negative effects but only in the context of how it effects them.
I think we're past the idea of selling to regular people. You'll just hold your family's wealth in residential housing until you pass it to your children or you get bought out by another, larger dynasty so your children will at least have some money as they join the renting class.
I am sympathetic to boomers struggling to afford to support their impoverished relatives
that's less sympathetic but it is also true that they did work all their lives and do deserve leisure in their old age. Old people are not the ones who screwed over the young as assuming they weren't a member of the political classes in America they like most people have lived their entire lives with no meaningful say over what policies are enacted so can't be held accountable for the results of the policies they didn't choose or supported based on having been given bad information
Boomers did not do this capitalists did
Zuckerberg himself is a massive percentage of total millennial wealth alone.
Zuckerberg is more than half of all Millennial wealth and savings. If you remove Zuck from the statistics, the average net worth of a millennial is around negative $40,000.
I feel Zuckerberg is a great example of why looking at wealth generationally is nonsense. Are you richer because Zuckerberg is close to your age
I am not claiming they had the same opportunities than us I am claiming that them having things better than us economically and us having things worse off is the result of factors completely out of the control of most people of either generation and therefore not responsible and therefore not to blame
The thing that you're leaving out is the very real factor that boomer-brained people and capitalist society don't share the view that no ones responsible or to blame. And their conclusion is that their children are to blame for the world they actively benefited from and helped create. Not all boomer-aged people are equal in this equation (or younger groups), but boomer-brained people think the way they do because they benefited from that world order, they believe in that world order, and they gleefully clapped and supported the ladder being kicked away so their children couldn't climb it. Boomers don't need defending
yeah I agree it is insufferable to have someone lecture you on success when they got their success due to relative luck.
It doesn't make sense to ascribe qualities like that to generational groups though as they aren't an institution that sets member policy they are a marketting demographic.
the news media finds the assholes in any demographic doesn't it. Millenials who are super into blockchain similarly get excessively platformed
it is pretty ridiculous to categorise wealth by generation as the children of these wealthy capitalists will inherit their money. Technically the young children of Prince William probably don't have many financial assets yet but it is ridiculous to not consider them wealthy.
boomers have limited say in reality and what tends to happen is the loudest and dumbest boomers get given artificial broadcast by news media owned by Rupert Murdoch in order to justify the thngs the government was going to do anyway because it makes friends of senators or ministers they went to harvard/cambridge with lots of money.
I am actually begging you to use class rather than generation as the basis for your analysis here. Boomers are not sharing that money evenly and have not worked together in a grand conspiracy to cause this result. This is the natural result of capitalism where wealth coaleses into few hands in larger volumes and productivity increases
also US boomers lived in a time where the economy was economically advantaged because every other major manufacturing economy had been severly set back by a major war that destroyed a lot of capital and infrastructure and took decades to recover from. America also insisted that the other allied powers of ww2 pay them exorbitant rates for their support in the war which further enriched America and impoverished its economic competition. It's called lend lease because they got the money back with interest. One of the major ladders that US boomers in particular had that no longer exists was Paris, Berlin, and London all effectively having been bombed to rubble
I do not believe boomers caused these internal contradictions to intensify over time. US boomers happened to be lucky in being born in the only country to make money off of WW2 (other than Switzerland). Them having been born during a period of relative prosperity due to factors beyond their control and then having those factors go away also for reasons beyond their control just makes them lucky relative to other generations and yes it is insufferable to have someone who was merely lucky lecture you about how they got their success due to being smart. This good luck on their part is not however the cause of the bad luck on our part.
no there were clearly several causes but you do seem to be angry at them and I do not believe it is just to be angry at someone for things beyond their control. It's false consciousness to blame the elderly who were less mistreated by the capitalists rather than the capitalists choosing to intensify the mistreatment.
Rather than boomers as a group deciding to force Amazon workers to have timed bathroom breaks it is specifically Jeff Bezos and the Amazon board of directors
I'm not angry I am just concerned about the common false consciousness that harms organising that it is in fact boomers and not capitalists to blame which your arguments are at the very least adjacent to
I said you seem angry I apologise if I misinterpreted your tone
You are angry at the wrong people and that is poisonous to solidarity it is legitimate anger at those people specifically but it is also important to recognise that those people are just a bunch of random assholes who cannot meaningfully be said to speak on behalf of anyone else
telling them their anger is invalid
I from here assumed you were referng to yourself as a part of them and thus did consider your feelings to be anger
I am tired and after this comment will disengage
someday those wealthy boomers will die leaving their wealth to their children thus making millenials the wealthiest generation and you and I won't be a penny richer for it
Also when you remove billionaire outliers from their statistics, boomers in their 30s were on average wealthier than millennials are when you do include billionaires in our stats.
Numbers courtesy of the US Census bureau.
- Show
I swear, you have the best memory for posts on this site.
Truly the desire to be Cassandradamus is the downfall of our posters.
Please enjoy the meme.
This exactly. This is not an article about or for people who are actually struggling. Its about comfortable suburban freaks who like you say want more cruises. I think anyone would sympathise with older people who want to help and are struggling, but that's not this guy
Totally agree. Yeah boomer is refering to the boomer-brained not the boomer-aged. Its annoying how even on this site people will jump in to defend boomers as if they've ever needed defending
I'm not really a fan of generational warfare. I have meet amazing boomers
Unfortunately, most of the survivors of the boomer generation are richer causing the
to be more likely to survive.Man, I never even made the connection that Fred Hampton was a boomer. I always just saw him as basically a brilliant kid who could have been out Lenin.
Im gonna focus on the "dont start with the numbers". Thats bullshit. The economic relationship is changing and trying to sell it as a social change only serves to fuck over the kid. Like most kids will have no insight into the state of their parents finances, whereas the parents will generally know how their kid is doing. If youre really struggling and need your kids help just show them the numbers.
Who could've imagined that the generation most shaped by anti-communism and the cold war would create countries that are very hard to live in?
I don't really think it makes sense to blame boomers for the state of the world as I do not believe the American government would listen to them if they demanded it be better which indeed many of them did.
Capitalists made the world like this and most boomers had no more control over things when they were younger than we do now
Well that's asking for something bad to happen and the US government is more willing to do bad than good things and it wasn't just them the lockdowns were costing a lot of important people a lot of money and it was really the private complaints of those very rich people that ended the lockdown the protestors were just a convenient excuse to look democratic and grassroots
How much money could these kids possibly save? Even if they had a job in a petit-bourgeois household, you're talking maybe 10K or something maybe? Also it reframes people being like "I can't afford to live on my own until at least 22" as "Gen Z wants to live at home until they're 22 or older now".
Man I got so fucked. My family just disintegrated when I turned 19 and my younger brother and me were just handed $700 for a security deposit on a slum while my mom eloped with her boyfriend to another state.
It's a legitimate miracle that the 2 of us were able to make it. Especially because everyone in the family saw us as "the lost causes" and basically removed losers who couldn't finish college (because we lost our home and father).
It took years before they'd even talk to us normally and not like we were a couple vagrant strangers.
Is kinda cathartic that now the two "alcoholic pillhead" brothers are doing better than their coddled Nazi children though.
I know a lot of boomers are probably gonna be really weird about this but i do honestly sympathise with them, because they are victims of modern economic policy as we are
Yep. Be told their whole life that this is the way to go, then watch it all crash down in their twilight years while being fed the most insane propaganda about why it's not the way it used to be can't be good for the brain.
died young.