Shoutout to our parents for hitting an absolute timeline sweet-spot. Drop in right after a world war, have a bunch of weird sex before HIV, buy a house for like 20.000€, start a family, retire young and peace out right before the ocean kills us.
They should be called generation G for hitting that sweet spot.
What about Korea, Bay of Pigs, Vietnam and the fact that ptsd was treated with electrical shocks or drilling holes in your brain
Also constant threat of global nuclear annihilation
Apparently hurt people also disappoint people
I don’t blame old people, they lived the best of times, their lives were comfortable because they were in a boom. They had high hopes, had kids with a bright future in mind for them, but things change, some see it, others are oblivious to it.
it’s not “things change” all the current mess was created by them in the decades after the time period of the op tweet
It’s still fair to blame them. Old people blame young people for everything afterall.
I 100% blame them for pulling the ladder up behind them.
Would have been nice if younger folks had voted in their own interests.
Always someone else’s fault, never yours
Why should they vote? No one is actually representing them.
Wonder why that is
Two party system. One party is neoliberal ultracapitalists, the other is racist mysoginist neoliberal ultracapitalists.
Because they don’t vote…
If your demographic is (correctly) viewed as being made up of nonvoters, then politicians are never going to pander to you no matter how much you whine online.
it’s a hard truth so many fail to realize. small inconvenience to clam your views.
I’m at least relieved to not have lead poisoning, for my gay brother to be safely out, and for my interracial marriage to not be scorned by the community.
Honestly, at this point I’m just waiting for trump to bring back leaded gas.
Kind of shows that time is a circle
I see it more as a muddy hill. Only in the US some people have now shat upon that hill with the greasiest, nastiest shit so the slide is even worse on this length.
Yet.
What I like about this is that it doesn’t pretend boomers are uniquely evil, just the generation that got lucky.
Except that’s not really the full truth either. The generation got lucky AND systemically burned every thing down so that they were the only ones left with all the benefits that luck provided.
Any other people would have done that. Boomers are no different than anyone before or since. It is 100% Random Chance and anyone who disagrees is a liability.
Any other people would have done that.
What a load of bullshit. Major self-report my friend.
Before boomers, every subsequent generation was more well-off than the previous.
Speaking in absolutes not only makes you a sith, it makes you ignorant too.
It is important to understand why people are the way they are in order to prevent future repeats. In the case of Boomers, I don’t blame them 100% nor am I going to just chalk it up to just random chance.
If you look at the generation as a whole, the predominant qualities they have are entitlement, arrogance, narrow mindedness, and a deep lack of empathy. Those attributes are what lead them to do the things that they did with the benefits that the luck of their circumstances gave them. But where did those attributes come from? I believe again you have to blame the parents.
I believe that the root of the problems come from the Boomers’ parents. After the war, they were so happy to be alive and living in relative peace, that the popped out a bunch of kids and then showered them with all the benefits that the post-war prosperity brought while also not really paying that much attention to them (who has time to work and be fully involved in the lives of 5 kids?). What did that lead to? A generation that was spoiled and had no boundaries set, so they grew up to do a bunch of drugs, have a bunch of sex, and generally think that every thing is owed to them and everyone else is wrong because they are the best.
Boomers are spoiled children.
You’re so close to getting it lmao. It is indeed important to understand why people are the way they are, which is why anyone who misunderstands boomers—such as you—is a liability. Damn, y’all right wing dumbfucks are so close no matter how far.
I mean, sustainability would have raised all ships
The future looks less bleak when the goal is not to live the life of that generation. There is AI, there are mobile phones, there is solar power and many more things.
When things are expensive, it means that few resources are used. This is good for the environment.
The big difference is that communication is free. We can talk to almost anybody in the world. This is still a huge untapped potential. That generation had a good life, but ours can be better.
Communication is not free. Check your privilege.
Fuck LLMs and mainstream phones OSes
Stating the raw value of the house will only make naysayers throw inflation into your face.
The better way of saying that would be,
buy a detached SFH for only 4× annual minimum wage
Like, really drive it home how absolutely unaffordable homes are these days. In my corner of Canada, the median detached SFH is going for 28× minimum wage, and it’s 32× if it’s new construction. My own 1972 split level sold brand-new for only 4× the 1972 minimum wage.
You can throw the inflation right back at them. Boomers were born into the Bretton Woods system, started borrowing from us in the 1970s, and then kept voting for lower taxes on the wealthy.
Old people used to complain about inflation frequently because they experienced a stable dollar for decades… until the Nixon Shock.
Jesus in today money that’s 60k for a house. For a nice hours our parents bought
A quick way of estimating annual wage for a full-time position is to take hourly, double it, then move the decimal point to the right by three spots.
So for example, the BC minimum wage is $17.40. Double that is $34.80. Annually in a full-time job, that’s about $34,800 before taxes.
And 4× that is $139,200. Current median SFH prices for used homes sit at just under $1M in my podunk tourist town. All detached SFH, $1,200,000. New construction, $1,500,000.
I mean, really - who under 50 can actually afford those prices without intergenerational wealth to give them a leg up in life?
SFH should be outrageously expensive. They are an unsustainable model with huge externalities. They were artificially cheaper for previous generations due to the tax shell game they run on us all. They are a part of the reason the current generation is under water.
And it pisses me off that “externality” is STILL not in my spelling dict in 2025.
Also median detached sfh in the 70s was probably closer to 1200 sq ft. No builder is going to do anything less than a McMansion these days
My own home was 2,000ft² when built. In 1972. That was the Canadian average at the time, as most homes built by developers were made with the same 15 (or so) floor plans with slight variations.
You’re thinking of the 50s. Those homes were indeed around 1,200ft², and there is even a pair in my neighbourhood the next block over
Just shows you how low minimum wage is.
It’s not just low minimum wage, although BC’s is currently the third highest in Canada.
No, the problem is also “investors” that buy on spec only to sell at a much higher price just before completion, as well as “investors” that buy up 5, 10, 15 or even more homes for rental income. Both of these goose home values into the stratosphere and massively constrain the supply of homes that are affordable to those wanting to stop being renters.
Were it not for “investors”, homes would likely be half or even less than what they currently are.
Then rent is also twice as expensive as needed.
The supply has to increase. Since politicians won’t organize public housing, renters could organize it on their own.
“single family home” means more than “detached sfh”
I would still take my life over my mom’s. Things were not good for women back then.
Things can always backslide
Did she starve to death? Because that’s our current timeline
It’s getting comparable… women are being charged with murder for totally natural miscarriages. Imagine ending up in prison for decades for something you had absolutely no control over.
And women are also dying from preventable issues with pregnancy, because it is illegal for doctors to remove fetuses even when they are a direct threat to the mother’s life (ectopic) or even totally dead in the first place.
America is becoming exceedingly hostile to anyone not white, cis, and male.
Well she was around before birth control was legal or widely available, and before abortion was legal. Yeah I agree the US is getting more hostile but nobody at my work is asking me to get the coffee, or saying women can’t do the job. And raised 4 kids while doing a dissertation, widowed when the youngest was not even a teen yet.
I don’t think now is great but it’s better in a lot of ways.
There’s a lot of people who resent that things ever changed for women, and have spent every moment since trying to put things back to the way they were. I’ve worked for a lot of them. I’ve definitely been expected to get coffee, been told not to speak to male coworkers unless absolutely necessary, been told that I dressed too well and it was tempting male coworkers to sin, been told there was something mentally wrong with me because I didn’t “take care of myself” by wearing more makeup, been blamed for work conflicts I wasn’t involved in because I should’ve been the peacemaker. All in the last 10 years. But, yeah, I’m glad I can use birth control legally.
Holy crap! That is dreadful. I have not worked anywhere that backwards. “Not to speak to male coworkers?”. Did you work for the Mike Pence campaign or something? What did the other women in the workplace think?
I did get paid less than the guys I worked with in the early 1990s, literally because they were men. But not since. We have female VP of Finance, female Financial Controller, I’d say it’s 75/25 still in the top so not equal, but about half our operational managers are women, and I work in sports, that doesn’t seem a wildly progressive industry.
If it makes you feel any better it still feels pretty hostile to me as well.
I agree that things were bad back then but my point is things are about to become much much worse. We will all be looking back wishing we could go back in time. Our future is bleak and you’ll be lucky to not starve to death in the coming years.
America alone is going to be in immense economic pain starting some time within the next 3-9 months. Shipping into America from China is dropping off a cliff, with a nearly 40% all sources drop in port activity on the west coast at this time. Seattle alone has seen a 60+% drop in Chinese shipping.
2025 is going to be an absolute economic bloodbath for most any American citizen inside America.
And then bitch and moan when anything doesn’t go absolutely perfectly in their favor.
That’s grandparents now, this meme is old.
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1982/demo/p20-370.html
https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-1980
Boomers weren’t the ones who elected Reagan, they were at most 35 at the time.
That’s the president that started to fuck things up and it was just the same as usual, older people being more conservative, younger people not showing up to vote.
I will not stand for this Nixon erasure
Both your links gave me 404 errors
They were almost all able to vote in 1980 at 16- 34, and made up a large portion of the population then in 84 they were all able to vote and saw what actions he took the previous election and voted for him more…
Don’t know why the links don’t work 🤷
If you look at the actual numbers you realize that it’s the people that were older that voted in majority for Reagan and the % of registered electors and voters was higher for older populations.
How Groups Voted in 1980
1980 Group Carter Reagan Anderson TOTAL All Voters Pct. 41% 51% 8% SEX Men 51 38 55 7 Women 49 46 47 7 RACE White 88 36 56 8 African-American 10 83 14 3 Hispanic 2 56 37 7 AGE 18-21 6 45 44 11 22-29 17 44 44 11 30-44 31 38 55 7 45-59 23 39 55 6 60 & over 18 41 55 4 INCOME <$10,000 13 52 42 6 $10 -14,999 14 48 43 8 $15-24,999 30 39 54 7 $25-50,000 24 33 59 8 >$50,000 5 26 66 8 UNION HOUSEHOLD Yes 26 48 45 7 No 62 36 56 8 REGION East 32 44 48 8 Midwest 20 42 52 6 South 27 45 52 3 West 11 36 54 10 PARTY Democrat 43 67 27 6 Republican 28 11 85 4 Independent 23 31 56 13 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Liberal 17 60 28 1 Moderate 46 43 49 8 Conservative 28 23 73 4 Notes: Survey by CBS News and the New York Times. Sample of 15,201 voters as they left voting booths on Election Day, November 4, 1980. “Don’t know” and “other” responses not included.
And then in 1984 they voted for Reagan even more
Voting and Registration in the Election of November 1980
Within Data April 1982
Report Number: P20-370
- Table 1. Reported Voting and Registration, by Single Years of Age and Sex [<1.0 MB]
- !Table 2. Reported Voting and Registration, by Race, Spanish Origin, Sex, and Age, for the United States and Regions [<1.0 MB]
- Table 3. Reported Voting and Registration, by Race, Spanish Origin, and Metropolitan-Nonmetropolitan Residence, for the United States and Regions [<1.0 MB]
- Table 4. Reported Voting and Registration, by Race, Spanish Origin, and Age, for Divisions [<1.0 MB]
- Table 5. Reported Voting and Registration, by Race and Spanish Origin, for States [<1.0 MB]
- Table 6. Reported Voting and Registration, by Race and Spanish Origin, for 30 Selected Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas [<1.0 MB]
- Table 7. Reported Voting and Registration of Primary Family Householders, by Race, Spanish Origin, Age, Tenure, and Presence of Own Children Under 18 Years [<1.0 MB]
- Table 8. Reported Voting and Registration, by Race, Spanish Origin, Age, Sex, and Marital Status [<1.0 MB]
- Table 9. Reported Voting of Husbands and Wives in Primary Married-Couple Families, by Selected Characteristics [<1.0 MB]
- Table 10. Reported Voting and Registration, by Race, Spanish Origin, Age, Sex, and Years of School Completed [<1.0 MB]
- Table 11. Reported Voting and Registration, by Race, Spanish Origin, Sex, Age, Employment Status, and Class of Worker [<1.0 MB]
- Table 12. Reported Voting and Registration, by Race, Spanish Origin, Sex, and Major Occupation Group [<1.0 MB]
- Table 13. Reported Voting and Registration of Primary Family Members, by Race, Spanish Origin, Age, and Family Income [<1.0 MB]
- Table 14. Reported Voting and Registration of Primary Family Members, by Race, Spanish Origin, Age, Duration of Residence, and Tenure [<1.0 MB]
- Table 15. Reported Voting in 1980 and 1976 of Persons 22 Years Old and Over, by Race, Spanish Origin, Sex, and Age [<1.0 MB]
- Table 16. Reported Voting in 1980 and 1976 of Persons 22 Years Old and Over, by Race, Spanish Origin, Sex, and Years of School Completed [<1.0 MB]
- Table 17. Reported Reason for Not Voting, for Persons Who Reported Registering But Not Voting, by Race, Spanish Origin, Sex, and Age [<1.0 MB]
- Table 18. Reported Reason for Not Voting, for Persons Who Reported Registering But Not Voting, by Race, Spanish Origin, Sex, Employment Status, Class of Worker, and Major Occupation Group [<1.0 MB]
- Table 19. Reported Reason for Not Registering to Vote, by Race, Spanish Origin, Sex, and Age [<1.0 MB]
- Table 20. Reported Reason for Not Registering to Vote, by Race, Spanish Origin, Sex, Employment Status, Class of Worker, and Major Occupation Group [<1.0 MB]
- Table 21. Reported Voting for a Presidential Candidate and Method of Voting, by Race, Spanish Origin, Sex, and Age [<1.0 MB]
- Table 22. Reporting on Voting and Registration, by Race, Spanish Origin, Sex, and Type of Respondent [<1.0 MB]
Some people are taller, smarter or better looking than me. It’s not fair!!!
Is it wrong to highlight that society in the west has gotten worse.
Sure you can’t blame boomers for just being born at the right time, but you can certainly blame them from pulling up the ladder and voting against anything that will affect them.
Take near me in the UK, plenty of home owners protesting against adding more houses along the green belt as it might devalue their properties. Utterly selfish behaviour, yet there are some home owners in these areas that support more houses because they care about more people than just themselves.
If you think giving more people a better chance at life is a threat to your existence then you’re a shitty person.
Yes. He’s really saying that about the generation who was factually proven to have been mentally affected by leaded gasoline.
That’s it. You’re so smart. Go take your statins and nap.
Ok, boomer
Also flying to Vietnam for a government paid vacation when they were 18 years old.
A lot of boomers missed Vietnam as even in 1975 some boomers were only 11 years old
Those from the actual baby boom right after WW2 weren’t
Less than 4% of boomers served in Vietnam.
This kind of seems like a meaningless statistic without some more context (such as what % of US citizens were boomers, and what % of US citizens served in Vietnam). On its own, it doesn’t really say anything.
I think a more useful statistic would be the percent of people who served in Vietnam that were boomers.
It matters because if you are going to say that a defining factor of that generation is that they went to Vietnam when less than 1/25 people did it’s misleading. It’s like saying that a defining factor of millennials was being in nyc when the twin towers went down
Those would be gen X.
Baby boomers are 1946-1964 Gen X is 1965-1980 Gen Y is 1981-1996 Gen Z is 1997-2012 Gen alpha is 2013- present
It’s all made up horse shit to draw lines between us. People don’t neatly fit into a line or graph and it’s really lame people keep repeating this crap.
It’s not some complicated plot to drive conflict… it’s literally just a metric that has turned out to be somewhat useful as we can talk about what major life events different generations experienced at what approximate age.
For example most Gen Y was a teen when 9/11 happened and most Gen X was a teen when the challenger explosion happened and most boomers were a teen when we landed on the moon
Shhhh, the primary social media population wants to believe life was a breeze until they came along.
Life has always been a struggle, but it truly feels hopeless being 20 something given the current state of the world. There’s some days where I spend 80% of the day consumed by suicidal thoughts.
It was kind of a breeze in comparison to now, no? My dad bought his first house for $37,000 when the average salary was $15,000. I just bought a house and couldn’t find one within an hour for under $420,000… The average salary around here is apparently $55,000
Valid point that life was cheaper than it is now (and also a lot more expensive than when my parents were my age). But that whole time is weirdly misrepresented like it was a walk in the part, ignoring the massive social upheaval over race issues, women’s rights, the Vietnam War, pollution, Nixon and many other things. There was also the Cold War keeping us in constant fear of World War 3. My school had air raid practice FFS. Life wasn’t a party, it was just less expensive.
But is it also the average household salary? Most boomers were single income. Then in the late eighties early nineties people realized that you could get higher mortgages in a double income, and as a result houses got a lot more expensive. Also, interest rates have declined a lot since the eighties, which also allowed people to borrow more.
That just adds to my point? It doesn’t matter why it happened, housing is significantly more expensive compared to income. But since you brought it up, let’s do the math.
$15,000 average salary, single income, $37,000 house. That’s about 30 months salary.
$55,000 average salary, dual income ($110,000), $420,000 house. That’s 45 months salary. With both people working.
So…yeah, seems like “the basics” are a lot harder to achieve nowadays than they were in the 80s.
I really wouldn’t know if that last statement is true. We were only discussing housing, so not all of the basics. Also, like I said earlier, interest rates on mortgages were higher in the past. I would also consider this when comparing, because the interest can be more than total debt.
Interest rates peaked in '81 at 18% and yes that brings it closer to today’s % of income…but it plummeted within a few years.
And housing/mortgage stuff isn’t the only part in this equation - the bottom 90% of the country has been getting significantly less for their labor since Reagan. Money is hoarded and wages have not kept up with inflation
It’s also forgetting the Korean war, and several smaller wars in between (Panama, Honduras).
Vietnam was bad, but don’t forget so easily that we only just got out of the longest running war the US was ever been in, and it wasn’t Boomers or Gen X fighting in it. It spanned two generations. Now, because there US just can’t not be involved in a conflict, we’re casting about trying to find a good enemy; I think the next one will be with a developed country. We’ve realized that we don’t do so well with insurgencies, so maybe Russia or China. Or, maybe India and Pakistan will finish everything for us! They both have nukes, and China isn’t just going to sit there while they trade nukes across the border.
Anyway, it’s a little depressing that y’all have already written off the 800,000 veterans who fought in Afghanistan as being unworthy of notice.
If you want to nitpick in that area, US soldiers in the Middle East over the past 30 years have all been enlistees, average age around 30. The average age of US soldiers in Vietnam was 19, most of whom were drafted. No American high school students since 1973 have had to watch lottery balls on TV decide whether they get sent to war.
The Korean War “ended” in 1953 the oldest boomer would have been 7 year olds, about half of them were the right age for Vietnam but even with that only about 2.7m served in some capacity for the Vietnam war with a lot in non combat roles there were 76m baby boom era so less than 4%
Fair comment about the Korean war; I incorrectly mentally lump it together with the Vietnam war as part of the general “war on communism,” and it wasn’t the boomers.
There was no oil crisis, no cold war, no economic crash in the 80s, no housing shortage in the 80s, no rampant crime!
The 70/80s where glorious!
/Sssss
I definitely enjoyed myself, more in the 80s than the 70s (which seemed largely like the record industry still trying to milk money out of the 60s).
Well if you enjoyed the 80s soooo much then a) you where too young to grasp the problems facing your parents or b) you where too well off.
Just look at the cinema and listen to the music of my fine period.
Everything, every theme was: please dont kill us and can i have a room to call my own.
The politics where insane, mortgage rates of 10-15% where the norm, enormous economic shifts.
The 90s where fun but the eighties where, in my experience, very, very dark.
Ever listened to, I dunno, two tribes, war, dancing with tears in my eyes, Russians, etc.? Those first albums of u2? Really grasped what Terminator was about? Wall Street? Or the much lighter but still terribly fucked Trading Places?
It was all really dark stuff, my brother. Fun, but very dark.
I was a regular guy in my 20s/30s working as a computer programmer, living in a house with roommates and doing a lot of theatre. Amazingly there were more than your two possibilities, and I would hazard a guess that there are even more. LPT: simplistic binary thinking makes people boring.
Yep, regular guy in the 80s doing programming.
Thats even now not so regular, that was very special and very high paying back then.
So amazingly, you being in your 70s (80s where 40 years ago after all) now and still unable to really fathom, comprehend, how very very good you probably still have it compared to others is telling enough. And that was one of the two binary options i gave for the 80s: too young too comprehend, too rich to care. You clearly fell and probably still fall in the latter category.
Not a lot 70+ year olds on Lemmy btw.
That all, combined with the use of the lpt acronym makes me doubt your age. That, or i’m talking to a llm.
Binary is boring that is true. It also has a 50% chance of being right the first time.
We didn’t start the fire
