Plus, it's not like the climate will just snap back into place when the boomers are finally too old for their skeleton talons to cling to power. That shit is going to take generations of sacrifice to roll back, if it doesn't topple civilization first.
The whole ethos of the majority of baby boomers seems to have been to raze the forest they got to enjoy behind them (as opposed to planting trees whose shade they'd never sit in like most generations aspire to), and they seem to be having remarkable success in that.
It's not about a magic cure that'll fix everything over night.
It's about repairing decades of harm done by a generational mindset that valued wealth acquisition and material possession above every other facet of society. We won't fix that trauma in one, two, or three generations but it will get better and better with time and distance to boomerism.
The values of wealth accumulation and materialism are not at all limited to or even expressed mostly strongly by the Baby Boomer generation.
The line of thinking that capitalism dies with boomers or that Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, or whatever comes next will not fully embrace capitalism and will move towards socialism or some other non-competitive society seems pretty naive.
Humans are a competitive species. Most people want to win. I doubt this mindset dies with boomers.
The next most conservative generation is Gen X. All few dozen of us. Expect those with power to retain it with massive use of wealth to constrain the rules of democracy, rather than numbers of voters.
It will solve the problem of their voting habits. They have lead us down this insane path because they are a narcissistic generation. Things won't be perfect, but we might, just might, start turning things around. If we still can.
Because that's how it works, right? When your house is flooded because of a burst pipe, when you replace the pipe then your house is magically unflooded right? I mean of course no reasonable person thinks that, but that seems to be the understanding you're suggesting. Meanwhile you're trying to say that if we do repair the pipe and the house is still flooded, rightly acknowledging that the pipe is 100% the cause of the flood is somehow..... wrong?
The facts are that boomers fucked the world up, heavily, and did everything they could to hold onto power and rob the next generation (at least) of their deserved place in the driver's seat of society, and cleaning up the messes and lessons left over by the boomers will take generations to clean up. The fact that boomer built long-term systemic problem without simple solutions does not mean that the boomers are not entirely at fault or that we aren't entirely better off without them.
I dunno, I feel like if I lived through the Black Death and I was there when—at the end of the suffering, surrounded by death—the last plague rat died, I’d take it as a win…
And they're not done yet! It's also a shame they'll probably waste the money they've accumulated on the worst possible things and people on the way out (fueling the dumpster fire).
Crazy that you're the only person I've found in the thread that realizes this. Generational theory largely accepts that the concept of monolithic generations is reductive. Yes, people born in and around the same time can have shared cultural experiences, but the idea that those are what purely shape you ideologically or that you behave as a component of a monolith are ludicrous. And then there's subgenerations, microgenerations, etc. Just look at the sociological research of Karl Mannheim for a very complex discussion on the topic.
I agree that battle of generations is silly, but there is still shared experience and trait in each generation. I used to think that the stereotype on boomers are greedy because they grew up in relative wealth is stupid, because my parents grew up poor in a third world country and did not benefit from Western wealth. However, they emigrated and travelled across the world and earning more than they would have in our home country.
Eventually, I realised that not all boomers are greedy, but some are materialistic. My parents are willing to share but they still have scarcity and hoarding mindset; even refusing to throw 20 year old clothes that are tattered.
Western boomers benefited from post-war economic boom and peace. Non-Westerners did not (post-colonial states in the mid to late 20th century suffered from constant sociopolitical strife) but the economic mobility afforded the third world citizens to migrate and move up the social ladder thanks to globalisation. However, the globalisation has, unfortunately, become not beneficial to younger generations because of outsourcing of traditional jobs and automation. And, unfortunately, this is leading to nativism and xenophobia.
The problem isnt going to end with them. My right wing friends are completely indoctrinated by their boomer parents. And getting louder and louder about it.
Here’s to hoping. It’s exhausting. I can’t have a single conversation without them slyly trying to slip in some earworm or go off on a tirade unexpectedly because I inadvertently trigger them.
Just How stupid does one have to be to think all their woes exist with only one generation? There are far bigger monsters alive today in current younger generations (many in millennial) that are far more destructive to our lives and the earth. They’ve seen more $$$ than any boomer and will laugh at you while you live out of a garbage can.
And you’d still probably be posting stupid memes like this acting completely oblivious to the burning hell around you.
You're framing your indignation from a place of generality. No one thinks that boomers are the sole source of the World's woes. However, they are the largest generation and tend to dominate discussions surrounding housing and the economy. They also make up a huge portion of the elected officials in North America, and younger generations have had it much harder than boomers ever did. It's a lie that millennials and gen z have had more money than our parents and grandparents ever did. We don't have nearly the purchasing power people did in the 50s and 60s.
millenials and gen z have far more purchasing power than anyone in human history. The problem is that purchasing power for specific things, like housing, has not experienced the same general trend. But the average person can buy more, say, tvs than people even in the 90s could.
My mother is pre-Boomer (born soon after the U.S. entered the war) and has been incredibly progressive her entire life. She has never voted for a Republican. She marched for civil rights. She wanted me to know that women and men are equal and that color and religion and ethnicity should not make you dislike someone. She taught me about sex (appropriately) when I asked about it at 3 or 4 years old rather than shielding me from it. My brother and I both have (had in my case, but that's another story) gay best friends who were also best man at both of our weddings. She always welcomed them even though my brother and his friend became friends in the mid-1980s. I remember asking my mother what she would do if I was gay and she said she would love me no matter what I was. I don't specifically know her politics, but my dad, born even earlier (1931) was mostly the same way. He definitely had his prejudices- although he would deny it- and he was a lot more sexist than he thought he was, but he was also an outspoken socialist until the dementia got too bad for him to be outspoken about it. One of the last things I was able to tell him before he was too far gone to understand was that Bernie was running for president.
I have certainly had a lot of issues with Boomers and people older than them, but it is far from universal, but I am really proud of my parents for always being progressive.
Again, my father was a socialist. He wrote a his dissertation on Shaw and the socialist aspects of one of his plays. He was British and said he was never more proud of his homeland then when he helped it usher in the National Health Service with his vote. When I moved here to Terre Haute, Indiana, he made sure to get me to take him to the Eugene V. Debs museum because of how much he admired debs. How does that make him an 80s liberal? Do please explain.
It would be very surprising if the rate was steady. Boomers are ages 59 to 77 today. The ones who have died have been on the younger side, but it won't be long until most are within a standard deviation for average lifespan.
Also, there weren't the same number of boomers born every year. In fact, 1946 had a spike of them, and the rate started falling off each of the last seven years or so of the range. So we started with more older boomers than younger boomers.
As an interesting side note: I have heard multiple times that Gen X is the Trumpiest and most conservative leaning generation, even more than Boomers or Silver. I find it plausible. The silver generation has old progressive labor movement diehards, and boomers have hippies. But Gen X never really had a progressive culture movement. They came of age during Reagan and Clinton.
I love how many people are going on about how one generation isn't the cause of all our problems. I agree. Neither the post nor the website say anything good nor bad about any generation, just that it's -mildly interesting- that boomers just hit 1/3 dead.
That's how statistics work. You take a sample and abstract it to the population. If you required every one to be checked, then no numbers of any sort would be made up because that's too much work.
No other age cohort has been responsible for caring for the earth for the time they were adults and done such a horrific job. In the US, the cherry on top is also that this generation kicked everything their parents generation fought for into the dirt, including most of the social safety net, because of a bunch of dumb conservative rhetoric.
I think it is pretty fair as far as generalizations go, though of course it is a generalization. Boomers get all defensive with the “but you shouldn’t just blame a whole generation!” even though blaming millennials seems to be a major policy point for a lot of boomers… but they just don’t get it. The boomer generation will be remembered for literally thousands of years for being the generation that was adults in power when climate change was pushed into an unstoppable momentum, biodiversity catastrophically crashed, and the priceless gift of earth that has been handed down to every generation was dealt a massive amount of damage that will reverberate for again, literally thousands of years at the minimum.
Boomers think I am attacking them in an us vs. them mentality, it is unfortunately so much bigger than a petty fight between generations though. Boomers aren’t just another generation that will be largely forgotten a century or two from now, and it is a massive understatement to say the time they were stewards of the earth will not be remembered kindly by future generations.
They got more conservative as they got older. All those hippie kids who protested Vietnam and experimented with drugs and sex ended up voting for Reagan.
People seem to have this view that everyone in the '60s was a hippie but that's just not true. Time Magazine put the number around 300,000. In a country of 200 million, that's only 0.15% of the population. They were a counterculture not mainstream culture. The vast majority of kids did not become hippies, and many actively hated the hippies.
You have 4 people, 3 liberals and 1 conservative, graduating from high school at 18, 75% are liberal. When they are in their late 30s, one of the liberals dies, so 66% are liberals. Then at age 50 another liberal dies, so the group is 50% liberal. One year after retirement (65) the last liberal dies and now the entire cohort is conservative. Without looking at the size of the population, one would think that the group of 4 slowly became more conservative over time.
Death, not persuasion, causes the political leaning of the population to shift as they get older. It is the very concerns of those that are liberal which also lead to their earlier deaths. If you are less likely to die from something that can be fixed with politics, you are more likely to be conservative and not want to rock the boat.
It turns out that the media jumped all over things like Hippies and anti-war protests. In reality, the average person was just as conservative then as they were 10 - 20 years ago.
Why the fuck are you waiting on your opponents to die when it'll be too late? Just do what you want and then fight or kill them if they try to stop you.
And as others have also pointed out, the website isn't anything anti-boomer. It tracks each generation, and it's just mildly interesting that boomers just hit 1/3.
And as others have also pointed out, the website isn’t anything anti-boomer. It tracks each generation, and it’s just mildly interesting that boomers just hit 1/3.
How it's presented to us though in this Lemmy article does suggest that though.
On a tangent, I really hate how people who create Lemmy posts really bias the article they're posting about in the title of the Lemmy post, sometimes to the point where the title doesn't match the article they're posting, or speaks about the title in just one/two sentences of a long article.
The trend I find hilarious is when people come into these threads and start yelling at people about how wrong they are to generalize a generation, etc. Frankly, I can't imagine why people feel the need to defend others over this, it's weird--and I imagine that none of them complained when people complained about Millenials.
Yeah. We did. And we used the same argument. It’s stupid to generalize a generation. However, I can point out the mockery of “millennials” was lazy and juvenile as the prejudice was aimed at anyone younger than the speaker without care for the facts, and the antics by “millennials” that garnered derision were by far the minority. Whereas the boomers are by majority conservative and guilty of failing to understand modern living and the changing times. Because racism, conformity, and getting a good paying job out of high school were facts of life for most of them.
Sadly, my own parents had no understanding that the world had changed between 1975 and when I graduated in the 1990s. They really believed that everything was exactly the same and all I needed was to work really hard at a part time job for a while. In reality, it took me 20 years to get even an approximation of the middle class, but I don't really consider myself middle class.
I recently decided it's unfair to judge them for how well they're handling change, when they've gone through the most change in history. My parents grew up in the mud and died on the Internet.
Just looked it up on Wikipedia. He's not really a boomer, neither a Gen X. He's in that transitional few years between generations. In any case, you can make a good argument that he is a baby boomer, depending on where the cutoff dates are.
I kid, I kid, my parents are already dead, not everyone who was/is a boomer is horrid. But this generation has hung around power for too long, it's time to move on.
What kind of psycopath counts generation death as a good thing. All interesting humans dead and you take it as an achievement.
Stop crying on the past. Stop blaming past on generations. Start learning from past generation mistakes, and thank them for having you.
Because as a new generation we're going to make a lot of mistakes, who knows if more or less than the past generations. And we shouldn't be blamed in the future.
Blaming the past generations and not learning from them is a childish response. Start doing something productive and useful to society, blaming is not helping.
Stop having tantrums and grow up. And thank you have past generations otherwise you would have to create all we have now from scratch.
It's like saying "Newton dumb" because his work is old and it doesn't work correctly for all physical frames, not like Einstein his work is much better. Both are as good because they lived at different times with different technology, knowledge, society, etc.
This feels like explaining basic life knowledge to a 3 year old tbh.
So you think Doubling down somehow erases the problem. It totally doesn’t put you at their level, right? Or did you think everyone is just so dumb they can’t see your stupid thrown into the ring too?
No, they don't. They blamed the silent gen for ecological destruction, social inequality, and war. They also, like every generation back to australopithecus blamed their elders and thought the younger generation was spoiled & had shorter attention spans.
Don't foolishly attribute a universal human flaw to a single group of people.
Kiddies who can't think beyond the "us vs them" mentality but also think that all old people are bad, like that's not as insane a generalisation as saying "all people of X race/sexuality/whatever are bad". Human brains love trying to put everything in categories and labels, especially other humans.
Not many people actually believe this. It's more that statistically it's better for the country as more old people die. My boomer parents are progressive, but the generation by and large is holding us back. Of course the electoral college is part of the problem as well.
Speaking of how we categorize …Rememberer how a bunch of idiots tried to categorize Covid as if it was china to blame and relating it to diet of eating bats meanwhile there’s white dudes in North America chowing down on venison infested with prions pretending mad cow isn’t a thing. No one should be pointing fingers.
Musk, Zuckerberg, bezos, chesky won’t be negative consequences going anywhere with boomers dying. You can’t keep blaming them for what current generations are doing that is far worse.
It's more about the comments around this post. Idk what were the intentions when OP posted this. But the comments are pretty clear. Stuff like "Death to all boomers", " when boomers dead all good", etc.
But yeah you definitely seem a cool guy to hang with, calling retard to everybody that thinks different or doesn't agree with some ways of dealing with life.
Because as a new generation we’re going to make a lot of mistakes, who knows if more or less than the past generations.
musk, Zuckerberg, Chesky, bezos are but a few who aren’t even boomers and have done probably far more destruction to society with their attainment of wealth.
We’re gonna see this current generation posting this usVSthem bullshit explain all that away to the future generation when their kids look into their online memes like this one about how ‘they knew better than boomers enough to criticize’
“Tell me about how you stood by Greta thunberg and didn’t just sit on your ass posting drivel on your iPhone while you rented Airbnb and got half your things off of Amazon. Did you vote in trump? Tell me how did he become president again?”
Part of me thinks this generation posting this generation meme drek is a poor attempt to quickly burry this giant steaming pile of poo.
The only way we can start to have actual positive change is unfortunately to wait for them to die out. They have proven they refuse to make the world a better place and will go out as selfishly and as damaging as possible. What a harmful and entitled generation.
Strange to see people blaming their fellow citizens, when it was a certain beloved King that started off his reign by hugely cutting the tax-rate of corporations, leaving them with the 'trickle-down'.
Somehow rulers manage to keep the people divided by keeping them blaming each other rather the root-cause.
Keanu Reeves is born in 1964, which is generally considered the cut off point for boomers into gen X. Personally I don't think the cutoff is as hard as that, people just before 1964 can still be raised as gen X and people born just after 1964 can be full on boomers. I like to think of the cutoff as plus minus 2 years.
In my book Keanu Reeves is gen X and not a boomer.
So, basically the whole reason everyone hates boomers is just because of ronald reagan, right? Like, that's pretty much it? That seems like it would be the common denominator. Which is weird, because, while the older portion of that generation seems to have a maybe majority which voted for reagan, the last 2 years of that generation wasn't even allowed to vote in the first reagen election. The younger voters voted for carter, the middle of the generation was split, and then the older portion of the generation, which seems to make up a larger portion of the voters in said generation, voted for reagan, pretty standard stuff. The real weird thing is in the next election, where basically every age range voted for his re-election, which is strange and something I don't really understand. It even had a higher percentage of young voters, compared to the previous election. Did everyone just hate mondale or what's up with that?
Which is all to say, I dunno. As a zoomer, I'm kind of just waiting until all the millenials die, because they're now getting up into their 30's, and I want to stop hearing about radiohead and all these dumbass musical artists. and hearing all these napoleon dynamite references, and I think superbad references, wouldn't know haven't seen it. I dunno, me? I hate the millennials for uhhhh. microplastics. and mark zuckerberg. and also Ipad parenting. and uhhhhhhh. ooh, I have a good one. I hate millennials for blaming everyone in an age cohort for the faults of a system which we know to be very centralized in it's power, when in reality they should just be blaming that system and the environments that cultivated those attitudes, and they should realistically just be blaming all of the things they mean to actually blame instead of just blaming a bunch of random old people. That's what I hate specifically millennials as an age cohort for. That seems like an incredibly specific thing, and not something that you could maybe blow up to be a general human tendency, yup, that seems fair.
Hating on old people is some boomer shit bro, what do you think is gonna happen in 20 years when you're all 50 year old freaks, and I'm probably dead?
Ronald Reagan campaigned, like Trump, on hate and discrimination. Reagan SWEPT the electoral college on his first election and was voted in by every Boomer and every surviving member of the Golden and Silent generations. Reagan destroyed this country and we've never recovered from it.
In the end, Reagan was just the sign of bigger problems going on, and is a very good exemplar for that time period.
Also, the whole "I'm Gen Z and hate Millenial stuff" sounds as fake as you can possibly get.
Also, the whole “I’m Gen Z and hate Millennial stuff” sounds as fake as you can possibly get.
that's cause it was. I am a zoomer, but I just think millennials hating all the boomers just sounds like a bunch of people who hate their parents or grandparents or whatever. I don't actually give a shit about millennials. I do hate the constant pop culture references to a cultural collective which I was doomed to not be a part of, as I had been born after it had almost finished dissolving, but that's mostly just an annoying thing, and I don't really attribute that specifically to millennials but kind of a broader cultural fuckery.
I'm bitter because I'm a child of the 2010's and that decade was fucking rough for like, shit that was good. I was in my first year of middle school when fnaf came out. The transformers movies and twilight franchise were formative media for me, and not like, things that I was invested in as a youth culture. Which is maybe what I think was happening for millennials, I don't really know, that might be kind of an inbetween era of media, too young for millenials, too old for zoomers. The millennials had pokemon and digimon, I had like, sillybandz and those weird bracelets that everyone was like, this shit is a holographic bracelet that makes you stronger and even at the age of 10 or whatever I was like that shit is fake as fuck man.
I was just trying to make a point about how, eventually, we will all be old. Well, most of us, and by most of us I mean some of us, I dunno if like half of gen alpha is gonna make it to old age, at the rate we're headed.
Also side note but like, millennials were right at the very tail age range of reagan, right? so it's just sort of like, he was the president when all the millennials were just like toddlers and babies, basically. So I doubly kind of don't understand the hate, right, in terms of like. I get it historically, he was a bad president, dissolved all the mental asylums which everyone knows they sucked but then he didn't replace it with anything, dissolved all the social programs and whatever, and then you look at the police recruitment before and after him and it sucks omega hard yadda yadda. But that's all like, stuff that happened for millennials as very young kids. did the 90's and early 2000's suck that much, for all the millennials?
Because I'm assuming that this is kind of like firsthand motivation for everyone, and not just purely historical bitterness, since I see historical bitterness as kind of more disconnected, and dispassionate, capable of like, step back analysis, which maybe pins the blame on reagan as more of like, he was the slammer in pogs. like in pogs how you have the slammer that slams the pogs and then they flip. that's a millennial thing, right? I dunno, I just don't understand it. It's sort of like. I dunno, hating ronald mcdonald reagan and then kind of by extension the boomers is sort of like hating the wind, or something. I understand being bitter about it since all the job prospects are gone and everyone's just working minimum wage garbage labor and nobody has any long term future plans and rent prices are horrible and where I live at least all my friends can deal with that by legal weed, but it's sort of like, I dunno, blaming that on some old freaks is just sort of the same to me as blaming it on like. the old freaks that preceded them. blaming it on grug for inventing fire, which certainly, a lot of people will do.
Hey maybe a bit close minded view there? I'm a millenial and I cheer for gen z (extinction rebellion, FFF) all the time. You have all the right to hate those who don't see the multitude of extreme problems they left for you. I'm antinatalist, vegan and try to reduce, reuse, recycle. Degrowth all the way. Use my bike where I can. My car is barely moving now and I need to get rid of it. I listen to a lot of music from gen z artists. Since I've gone vegan my whole body is energized to the max and I'll fight the cleptocracy on social networks where I can. I detest Zucks recent endeavours as a bull fharmer. Hang in there. We got your backs.
I wasn't really directing anything at you, I was just sort of like, hating the world and shit, and specifically hating that subset of people that hate the boomers for boomering, because I see it as kind of just like. whining and bitching, kind of. like an unproductive thing. and then on social media, it tends to turn from potentially being like a therapeutic thing, right, where everyone is able to vent about how much things suck, and maybe come to a conclusion collectively about how to change it. and it changes from that into a kind of combination of a toxic echo chamber, where things get ramped up and everyone's attention gets captured and directed towards some absolute nonsense, and also simultaneously you get some blowhard boomer who comes in and is like "what you say fuck me for fuck you guys" and then it turns into a pissing match where everyone tries to roast each other. I dunno I should probably not be posting when I'm hypercaffinated because it just ends up being me venting paragraphs at nobody in particular and doing the same shit I'm bitching at other people for doing.
I'm also like, shit man, I'm not sure you should have my generation's backs. they're just a bunch of dudes, I dunno. I've seen less victims of lead poisoning and horrible corporate propaganda for sure, compared to old people, they are more willing to be like. real and not horrible irony poisoned goblins, ironically. but I've also just seen a lot of chumps who are into like, basically white supremacist memes. I dunno the actual split on that though, it's kind of hard to tell, I have some paragraph about that I could chunk up again for you.
It's also fucking weird how I'm legally capable of drinking alcohol, right, but then some of my generation is apparently in like elementary school watching skibidi toilet and getting fucked up because the internet sucks now but the internet is also basically their parents since their parents are probably both at work full time and teachers are not on top of it. I'm like, those are just the kids bro, that's gen alpha, "the culture" that doesn't exist anymore is also just moving too fast for anyone to keep up with, the changes are too rapid, and you can't really keep track of them with generational cohorts anymore, shit doesn't work.
That's not what half-life means. Half-life comes from radioactive decay and is the time for half the atoms in a sample to decay. After half the atoms have decayed it takes another half-life for half the remaining atoms (a quarter of the original sample) to decay. There's some fancy maths you can do to convert a sample size of 85 million with a half-life of 75 years into the time it takes for the last atom to decay but at an estimation of about 27 half-lives that's 2025 years.
Maybe that's the real problem with boomers: their multi-thousand year lifespan!!
Many have spent decades wishing they were part of the boomers generation and its many benefits, BUT maybe the last laugh is that 1/3 of them are already dead while the lesser endowed generations that came after, especially Millennials and Gen Z are facing a future where aging and health issues may be a thing of the past.
That is entirely possible, along with complete planet destruction but we have been worrying about the end since the beginning. I am more on the tech is going to solve a lot of issues in the coming decade headspace, but the transition to that place, may be very bumpy. Hard to say. Big change is coming though and all I know is I rather be alive to see it, especially longevity and thus I am glad I am not nearly end of life right now.