Much like a lot of Gen X, some of the older Millennials in my life (particularly the white working professionals) are parroting the age old mantra of "I don't care about passing my skills on to the younger generations or helping those in need, no one ever helped me in my life.". My response is always "That's not a good thing!" because I never know what to say. Debate is not my strength.
My working class grandparents were never like this. They lived through the great depression and two wars and never wanted anyone to suffer as much as they did. I miss them and their kindness dearly. It's only from boomers and younger that I've seen this attitude. Capitalism is crushing our instincts as a social species. If we can't stand on the shoulders of giants... well then we will stop advancing as a species. We will stagnate and go extinct because the challenges we face now need all of us. It goes against everything that is human to be this alienated and antagonistic to one another. Particularly frightening is the hatred and contempt modern society has towards children.
This is not going to end well.
I appreciate all the people here, whether you're 20 or 60, for not becoming the thing that hurt you. We need people with a soul more than ever.
Boomerism really is catastrophic. I know not every baby boomer is like this, and I never want to see any normalization of deriding the elderly even because of this selfishness.
One big boomer ethos is ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ and unfortunately millennials ended up getting sabotaged because many boomers started identifying their own children as ‘the Joneses’.
Why pass down the skills? Millennials are competition for the good life! Why lower rent? The more young people that are basement dwellers, the better older people look by comparison. Why make jobs? Us boomers work for pleasure and it will make younger people look lazy by comparison if we simply never give them permission to work.
They only value what they do because of the satisfaction they get of younger people not being able to have it. I never want to hear leftism being described as the “politics of envy” ever again when capitalist sympathizers sabotaged the next generation because they were jealous of the one thing they had that boomers can’t ban, buy, or steal from the next generation: youth. Also, isn’t greed just a smug form of envy?