Really, ….. it's my fault they built a terrible system?

Exactly this, it's not even the fucked up economy state that scares me the most, it's the state of ecology that may make the place uninhabited in the pretty near future 😢

I actually know a Lot of boomers who feel just that way. My dad is one he thinks its their right to destroy the environment because they can't live forever.

Then you have the christian nuts who want to destroy it so that jesus will return.

But most boomers want take the money with them and leave nothing to future generations. Hell they do want to burn it all down and they destroy the American dream out of greed.

The me generation that only want them to have it all.

The author of this article is not nearly old enough to be a boomer though. This is outrage bait.

Most boomers and whatever came right after boomers don't even have decent retirements.. That's what's sorta funny about all this. I know quite a few 60s and 70s yr olds that legit don't have enough to sustain their lifestyles and still have to work. The system failed LONG before Millennials showed up.

Many of them went their whole lives "not trusting the stock market" just to literally have no retirement. Much of it was lack of education and access to the stock market when they could have been investing, but then at the same time it is a pretty stupid fucking system of retirement when without notice you can lose 40% of value because some bankers fucked around.

The system sucked for them that's why they still have to work, but instead of trying to fix it, they just complain that it's their kids fault.

As always it's your fault that you weren't born into a rich family. If you want to get rich you have to be rich, it's not hard. Some of the dumbest members of our society manage it all the time.

While I can agree about their failures, "don't save it's bad for the consumer economy" can go to hell.

Are you actually saying that saving instead of being in debt is a bad thing?

If they stuffed into bank accounts instead of real estate, stocks, and businesses, the played capitalism wrong.

Oops

I find it hard to wrap my head around the idea that spending more debt than every government before them every single time for decades is austerity. They spent more than all the money constantly. Some austerity would have actually helped but they didn't do that.

UGH! I can't figure out how to reply OR how to find communites/subs on this app!!!!!!

I totes agree wif yew, doe!!!!!

I absolutely agree! It’s not a competition, we are all living in the same world with the same problems.

Families are at the centre of any society. Families function best when they help each other out. Parents are meant to sacrifice to help their children, just as their adult children should sacrifice later in life to help them.

it is okay to help but at the same time it sucks you have to do that because life is so economically insecure now that adult children cannot survive without that help.

In my own situation, my partner has a 25-year-old son who has autism and cannot be financially independent. We finance his $2,200 apartment (which is standard cost in our expensive city) because on his own he'll never be able to do that . This will directly impact our own finances for the foreseeable future.

Nope this is Lemmy we hate kids here just like Reddit.

That’s exactly not how generations work. You are one generation and your offspring are the next.

According to Forbes? Of course is the fault of the impoverished they didn't take personal responsibility. Forbes is a magazine for persons with stock portfolios.

Ummm yes. Do better.

A lot of people are in denial about the effects of policies they support.

Just look at the cost of housing. There's a ton of NIMBY homeowners who are deep in denial that zoning huge swaths of cities to be exclusively mcmansions could possibly cause house prices to be artificially high.

No they'll just sit there continuing to pretend climate change isn't happening

A lot of them will recognize the problems, they just blame them on the wrong things.

Gen Z belong in the oven.

Times are though, gotta bring home the bread somehow. It's your duty to click on the article and rage share it so that the economy doesn't collapse..

Lead poisoning really did a number on that generation. While I'm also angry that they were complacent in what's happened, as I refuse to be, it's like blaming a severely handicapped kid.

Did you know we found out to stop including lead in gas in 1976 because school kids were getting dumber and less empathetic?

The thing to remember is that they had to rely on trusted authorities in the news or government back then. They didn’t have easy access to primary sources or alternate viewpoints that we have now. That’s why all they can do is pick an authority figure and put all their trust in them. They literally do not know any other way. To them “research” is finding a talking head they like or who looks “trustworthy” and then believing everything they say. It was an age of authority and now we’re moving into an age of transparency and they’re not happy about it. They expected that they would get their turn to be the trusted head of the family and now all their kids and grandkids barely want to talk to them.

Hmmmmm 10 years ? Probably not

It's cute, in a frustrating kind of way, that you think the system was either created that recently, or was ever meant to be anything but exploitative and oppressive and isn't working exactly as designed.

So… If the boomers didn’t give money to their children, what’d they do with it?

Retire earlier, see the world they couldn't see during the 50+ years they worked, enjoy what little of their lives they have left?

Permanently Deleted

Let's eat the rich. That'll pass the wealth around.

Same here! Well time at least... Finally I see a benefit to being completely undesirable! Lol

We have a lot to be mad at property owners for right now. Their lobbying and bullshittery is part of why so many people have to go back into the office and have so few protections against it. If we're not pointlessly wasting time commuting to the office their properties won't be worth as much! Won't somebody think of the poor landlords?? 😔😔

But then they might have to work... Oh the humanity.

Thing is, it's not the same "they". Those who profited off the working class and shut the door behind them are not the ones seeing their finances ravaged because their kids live in the basement.

The whole avocado thing really betrays a failure in the thinking of the people behind it. Some places some times avocados are absurdly expensive. Other places and times they are as cheap as any other random vegetable. To not realise that requires having no awareness at all of the importance of seasonal and ideally local produce. If you want to budget competently you need to pay attention to what is good value near you and when. Not understanding that time and location affects the price of fresh perishable foods makes you entirely unqualified to condescendingly tell people they are budgeting their food shopping poorly. All they know is that they spend $10 an avocado so therefore anyone else buying them must be irresponsibly spending just as much.

No. But we are all a combination of our biology plus our experiences. Bring born at the same time as someone means a significant portio of your experiences will be more similar than with someone born decades after you. The fact is that Zoomers went through a disruptive global pandemic either while still in education or leaving to start their careers. That experience will inform who each of those young people become. The way that this effects each individual Zoomer will vary but it will affect them and so it makes them a demographic of "people who's education or early work experiences were disrupted by a pandemic." Those people will on average be a little more similar to one another then people who didn't experience that. Generational identities are formed by all the millions of experiences, big and small, those people have in common with one another but not with other generations by merit of being born at a particular time. Just as Zoomers went through a pandemic at a crucial early point of their lives the Greatest Generation endured the great depression and world war 2 in the first half of their lives. There's absolutely no reasonable way to claim that living through world war 2 wouldn't inform your personality and behaviour on some level. And so, people from the Greatest Generation (who lived through World War 2) will, due to that experience and many others, will have things in common with one another that they do not share in common with Zoomers (who didn't live through World War 2.) Another huge example is that somewhere roughly alligned with the millennial generation we made the transition from people who grew up with constant easy access to the vast expanse of information and communication on the Internet and people who grew up before they'd ever heard of it. Those are hugely different experiences. They change the part of you that is due to your experiences. The other people who share those experiences will tend to have commonalities with you that people who didn't share those experiences don't have.

They actively took away the supports.

I'm 50 so not a boomer but I have no retirement savings. Zero. I do have adult children still living at home though.

Not to be that guy... But Americans have always been partially socialist. That's the reason child labor is not supposed to be a thing, your work week isn't 60 - 80 hours long without overtime, you have things like vacation days, sick leave, agencies in charge of stamping out food and drug adulteration, OSHA codes for safe workplaces, a public school system, public libraries, banking regulations... And a very long list beyond that.

Do you think any of these things are naturally occuring under a capitalist system? These were the fights you can map to specific socialist movements of the past.

But who am I kidding anybody who unironically starts complaining about Communists is so far up McCarthy's ass all they can smell is grave rot.

Permanently Deleted

Yep. Nick Hanauer's done activism including TED talks pointing how ethical capitalism has become impossible what with regulatory capture and stable longer-term business models failing to compete with exploitative short-term models... and that we proletariat aren't going to stand for our state of perpetual precarity for much longer.

^^^ How to say you don't know what communism is, or the history of it, without saying so

Can they drag a few others down with them?

Most boomer parents would kick their kids out at age 8 if they could. Children are like Christmas puppies to them.

In my opinion, the whole population growth excuse is always an excuse and leads to dangerous results. The growth in population in Western countries has completely decimated since WW2. At this moment, only Africa is thought to have a positive growth number in the coming years. The population has grown, but the needs of almost the entire world have drastically increased. Leading to enormous growth in wealth and also productivity. That productivity has not been translated into less work, and the population increase has not translated into less work. Both of those things have translated into more wealth and more wealth inequality. Blaming the housing crisis/ financial crisis on too many people will only lead to racism, while the system keeps sucking everyone dry and making very few rich. There is plenty to go around, and the population growth is a story of the last century. We will reach our cap this century with all its effects to it.

I hope no one takes this the wrong way, because I fully support equality for all races and sexes, but there's also double the workforce now. Women entering the workforce and eventually gaining near, or sometimes even superior footing, means that there are twice as many people competing for the same jobs. A larger candidate pool means companies can pay less and it's harder to get a job for the individual.

Permanently Deleted

Population means more labor and more consumption as well. For all of human history before thr industrial age, labor shortages were dire.

The problems that come with overpopulation are pollution and shortages of specific resources. No this is about unchecked capitalism focusing all the resources to a tiny elite class. Even more concentrated than the wealth in France, 1789.

So what you're saying is fifty percent of all life

You should maybe check the definition of the word secular.

Doesn't matter. We'll die before that age due to the earth becoming uninhabitable. -other adult children

And here we are, blaming other people for their problem as well, and mostly just the other regular Joe whose only fault is to be born earlier

At least you can help your kids. My older daughter is going through college on loans which I don't advocate but it is her choice. I can't even keep my cars running.

Doing the same thing with my older son now. We are paying cash for his college so he doesn't start out under a mound of debt like we did. It took over 10 years for us to dig out from under that load and start building assets.

You've identified a part, and symptom, of the system. What is behind it is capitalism.
Our education systems are designed to make us complacent worker drones incapable of critical thinking. Our higher education systems are sold as a necessity for anyone who wants a slightly less crappy life, and ensure anyone who doesn't already come from money who wants to go down that path starts their life in deep debt, making them desperate and easier to exploit.
These are all features of the system there to ensure its own existence.

It's a systemic problem they helped setup. The amount of public support they had while going through education and young adult life was wild. Unions were popular, housing was relatively cheap and affordable, same with education. Things didn't start blowing up til the 80s, 90s, 00s, when they were firmly of voting age and able to exert their numbers politically.

When did corporate and private tax policy change drasrically? The 80s. When did college costs start to increase? 1980 referencing a graph here.. When did housing start to increase (the first time)? In the 2000s, cause banks and the fed (led by boomers; all 5 of the largest financial institution crashes were headed by boomers; Lehman, Merrill, Citi, AIG, and Goldman Sachs), the fed was led By Greenspan prior to '06, but Bernanke afterwards (and he was the one who bailed those fuckers out, same with the GM and Chrysler with Bush, Boomer). Additionally, boomers are the generation most opposed to any climate change policy (along with Gen X, but that's a different conversation), referencing this article.

I do think it's a systemic issue. I just think boomers have played a large role in it's construction. Their parents before them had strong public works projects for infrastructure strong social safety nets, strong employee protections through growing unionization, lengthy fights for workers rights and de-segregation in many places. Boomers have wanted less of that and have actively worked to get rid of them.

The system wasn't built by no one, and changed pretty dramatically during a specific time frame.

While I definitely agree with you here, the systemic problem is in place due to an extreme overabundance of boomers sitting in Washington creating systematic problems and perpetuating existing ones. So, yes, not all boomers are culpable and blaming the whole generation is excessive, but perhaps this helps shed some light where the sentiment comes from.

Also, for most anyone after the boomer generation, retirement will be a complete financial impossibility so boomers inconveniencing their retirement for the sake of those who will never get to doesn't feel too out of line

Boomers are more to vote for conservative and liberals, more to vote, and a bigger part of the population. That's the truth of stats a'd demography. It's not all boomers, but as a generation, they failed their grand-children. And it comes to bite them now, which is the biggest surprise to me. I really thought they wouldn't see the collapse of the system or the global warming effects.

Permanently Deleted

Stop immigration as a mean of increasing population and keeping wages down.

Sure, it is immigration that is keeping the wages down... I have no idea which country you originate from, but immigration is probably necessary to keep your population balance in check. So they are not the reason that wages are down; that would be the few determining the wages and exploiting you and those immigrants together.

Permanently Deleted