We deserve blame for gladly accepting the Boomer mindset, and applying it to the tech industry once we came of age. Gen X honestly has been caught in the middle in a weirder way than we were, and because of how the timing of media development went, they never had a boom era that really applied to them in the same way. Many of them were raised in the economic downturn of the 70’s and the 80’s cultural and (dubiously calling this positive) economic boom and bust and 90’s boom and bust was either too early or too late for most of them. For Boomers it lined up perfectly with regular generational cycles to get kids that grew up in a similar culturally monolithic era.

Millennials have every bit the same sense of entitlement to cultural similarity, expecting everyone to know about and like the same 80’s and 90’s cartoons, movies, and video games - just like how the Boomers demand everyone just assume that the 60’s were the peak of human civilization - when Boomers were still kids or just graduating high school. This was facilitated by the Boomer themselves. We grew up scarfing their hubris and art and media and asking for seconds. We just did stuff that was stupid without thinking about it, or thinking through long-term repercussions, just like how Boomers put all our food in plastic. We didn’t learn that was bad and stop doing it. We just invented different BS scams to sell more crap made of plastic that is health snake oil. We pushed social media acceptance and use and abuse. Boomers and Millennials don’t do well with counter-culture until it becomes mainstream enough to be cool. Gen X especially and Y to some degree embrace it because the Boomer/Millennial cycles were out of sync for them age-wise. So the reaction to why do these people like this weird, brightly colored shit is to go the other direction.

The the Boomer hubris is to tell us for 20 years that we’re idiots for not owning a home by age 21, but messing up the housing market over and over again. And we just sort of brushed it off, like “oh, well, it’s fine, I’ll get around to it. Mom and Dad say it’ll be OK.” We didn’t think for ourselves until it was too late. We didn’t think. We didn’t protect harm to Gen Y. We didn’t see the lessons and learn from them because we were too jacked up on pixie sticks and Jolt cola to see what was happening.

There are some positive parallels - for example, we grew up at a time when computers were new and so many of us are comfortable using them and fixing things and getting under the hood metaphorically. Boomers grew up as cars became widely available and affordable as status symbols, which is why many of them spent their lives comfortable with changing the oil themselves or replacing the spark plugs. But it still just confirms the connection between the generations.

The older people I know who vote Democrat complain all the time about how expensive everything is these days and nobody can afford anything.

The bullshit “Nobody wants to work” narrative is absolutely pushed by conservatives.

There’s more to it. Including the pretty standard past fact that people usually become more conservative as they age ( though i see that shifting as I age)

This one is absolutely bullshit tied to the accrual of wealth. People don’t become more conservative as they get older, they become more conservative as they start to benefit more and more from the system, as was the norm up until about Gen X. People being worse off than their parents were at the same age absolutely has shifted the political leanings of generations (there’s also the fact that each successive generation leans more leftist than the previous due to simple exposure to people and ideas that are different from you, but that’s another topic).

I’m reminded of the wonderful video that the beautiful talking skull Shaun did about Harry Potter and JK Rowling a few years back. Specifically, the part about how you can watch her political stance change practically in real time as the books go on. The books start out raging against the machine, but as she began to gain wealth and benefit from that machine, it shifts towards supporting the machine until at the end Harry becomes a magic cop defending all the issues that were criticized in the early books and nothing fundamentally changes in society.

That’s why these people need distractions, culture wars , so they don’t realize it’s class warfare

Its really not hyperbolic at all.

In 1958 child laborers were paid $1 per hour, the minimum wage at the time. Assuming that child worked 40 hours in a week, they would have made a little over $2k in the year. Relative to the GDP of the united states at the time (about $480B) that would equate to making over $1M per year today. Therefore, everyone currently making less than $1M per year (pretty much everybody) has less buying power than the average 10 year old child laborer in 1958.

With this in mind, its easier to see how inflation doesnt tell the whole story. That $1 minimum wage might equate to $12 today, which is higher than the federal minimum wage and the state minimum in about 25 states. But even if the minimum wage were brought on par with that base metric (which again was considered the appropriate wage for literal children), a person making $12/hr would have absolutely no buying power relative to a minimum wage earner back then. To be precise, it would be less than 2.5% of it.

I’m a millennial. Bought my house in a rural location for $70k at 3% interest in 2018

Due to the out of control housing market, it’s now “worth” $150k

This market makes it impossible for younger generation to have a chance.

The economics of it have shifted over time. If you were born in 1968 you might have graduated university into Black Monday, and finished grad school in time for the dot.com meltdown. I did. Those are far from the boomer like conditions of the 1960s and 70s.

Yeah, so. Here’s the thing. I lived through a social security collapse in a country (not the US, obvs) with a youth boom. Trust me, having lots of bodies around did not help when the oligarchs horded all the wealth to escape hyperinflation and there was no work to go around.

It is of no use to have over half of the population in productive ages (19 - 45) if more than half of them are unemployed. And guess what, it didn’t help the elder either as they were the first casualties of a collapsed healthcare system. We had an abandoned elders crisis, along with several other crises, admittedly.

But I guess my point is, not even at a macroeconomic scale is having children any form of insurance. I know myself, as the cousin who have had to provide end of life care for more than one elder relative. Whom, I should point out, had way more children than my mom and dad, yet I was the only one with enough compassion left to care for distant relatives when their own children wouldn’t even shell out spare change to pay for food.