I know tension between generations is nothing new, but my god, it feels like the beef between boomers and pretty much every other gen is taking things to a whole new level. Often, the points I see raised against boomers are totally valid, and I agree with the criticisms. Other times, a boomer might swoop in with a take I hadn’t thought of before. And then there are the moments where I wonder if it’s all just internet propaganda designed to keep us at odds with each other (not me dipping a toe into conspiracy theories like a GD BOOMER). But one thing I do know is that people can’t help but offer their opinion on which generation has had the harder road.
They further distilled this thought by saying, “Boomers literally had the easiest life out of every generation that came after it. They got out of the house at 18. They got work by walking into stores and asking for a job. They got jobs in the field in which they got their college degree. They didn’t deal with dating apps. Like, I don’t understand why they are always so angry and act like they had the hardest life out of every generation alive today when they had it the easiest.”
As you might expect, people from every generation had a lot to say in response to this question, eliciting many different points of view on the topic. I’m curious which, if any, you agree with. Here’s what everyone had to say:
1.
“Ah, yes, the draft, unemployment, and 20% mortgages, truly easy times to live through. Sure, they had good times too, but this illusion that they lived in an era of sunshine and rainbows is obviously false. Every generation deals with shit, sometimes for decades straight.”
2.
“Yes, boomers had to deal with high mortgage rates, but you forget that these mortgages were for houses that cost double your yearly salary, unlike today, where homes can cost up to 10 times your yearly salary.”
—u/polishsuszi
3.
“As someone born in 1991, I’m glad I was born when I was and not in the boomer era. When I hear stories from my grandparents, they contain just as many tales of sacrifice and challenges as the younger generations; they were just different. I hear tales of them as children having to do manual labor in the fields, only having meat on occasion, and not having small pleasures like candy or entertainment. They received corporal punishment not just from parents, but also from their teachers. I’ll grant that it was likely easier to get a job, but the options of jobs you could get were way more limited. There weren’t all these fancy business, marketing, or creative career paths. If you asked the average young person today if they would rather pick this ‘easier’ life for the sake of a cheaper house, I would be surprised if they would.”
—u/PhilNEvo
4.
“In the UK, our boomers grew up with rationing, widespread slum housing, playing in bomb sites, shit pay, and various other socioeconomic issues. In fact, homeownership (one of the things commonly pointed out as being something they had easier) didn’t start to become widespread until the ’70s, and even then inflation was well into double digits and credit was less freely available.”
5.
“The lack of self-awareness required to lecture the younger generations about Vietnam is stunning. Millennials lived the first 20 years of their lives during the Iraq war, and our participation in that war quadrupled that of the boomers in Vietnam. You guys had it easy, and that’s what every history book will say about you, despite your protesting. You rigged Social Security to pay the least amount into it and receive the highest benefit. You destroyed the pension system with lavish pensions for yourselves, then cut or eliminated them as you retired. You destroyed the US healthcare system. You destroyed the US housing market. You destroyed the US economy. You were handed a country in unbridled prosperity and destroyed it.”
6.
“This question just shows how out-of-touch and self-absorbed Gen Z is. So let’s go down a list, because you know, boomers had it so easy. Want to talk to a friend? Walk to their house since most people didn’t have phones. Need to go to school? No school bus or having mom drive you to the front door. Want to look stuff up? No internet, so go to the public library. Got one foot of snow last night? Get out the shovel, because there was no such thing as a snowblower. Cellphones were non-existent. Want to go somewhere? Get out the map because there’s no GPS. And the list goes on. But yeah, Gen Z, who has all these conveniences, thinks that they are the ones who have it harder.”
7.
“They fucked up their health by abusing drugs. Particularly, they fucked up their minds, and now they believe in every single bit of bullshit they’re told on television. Boomers are the perfect toxic byproduct of consumerism.”
—u/ZioRalf
8.
“Boomers think they worked harder than the younger generations do, but I’ve worked on farms and in manufacturing, 10 hours a day, five days a week, for months. Y’all have this dead-set idea of Gen Z in your head, but as a 23-year-old woman who shares my generation’s concerns and has also worked wild overtime in manufacturing, your dead-set idea is false. My friends work their asses off, and we’re still struggling. We were told that hard work would let us thrive, but that’s looking less and less realistic as time goes on. On top of the fact that our government is actively working against us, and we’re heading towards a technocratic oligarchy. Many of us are going to keep working hard to be in the best position we can be in this hell, but I can’t blame the people who want to throw in the towel.”
9.
“I’m 73, but I’m not an angry boomer. I didn’t have an easy life either. I grew up with Ozzie and Harriet views towards women, and came of age when feminism hit. I witnessed a lot of prejudice and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. I saw friends get drafted to Vietnam and had a few die there, while others came home so different that we didn’t recognize them. I lived through the nightmare of Watergate. I graduated from college with honors, but couldn’t get a job in my field due to the recession and the flood of boomers entering the job market. I think we grew up in interesting times, but every generation has things to deal with that affect them for a long time.”
10.
“If you were Black during that time, you didn’t have it so good. People need to say white people had it good during this time.”
—u/Kahin56
“White men specifically.”
—u/awayoutwest
11.
“Intergenerational bickering, like what’s happening here, only serves to distract from and thereby uphold the power imbalances and wealth disparities that are actually responsible for those struggles.”
12.
“You younger generations have no priorities about how to spend money. You’d rather drink Starbucks and pay $5-$6 for a cup of coffee instead of going to the local convenience store and paying $1.25-$2 at most. You collect your comic books, you play your video games— every minute you focus on these things is a minute lost finding a better job, but you won’t give any of that up. You just want to blame boomers for everything that’s wrong with your generation. Your generation has helped this world go to hell in a handbasket. Boohoo, do the math, a $5 Venti five days a week adds up.”
“5x5x52 = $1,300/year.
$1,300×30 = $39,000.
The average house price in the US today = $420,000.
That’s not even a 20% down payment.”
13.
“Boomer here. Yeah, I get angry, but I just don’t give a shit anymore. I’ll say what’s on my mind without worrying about offending others. So there’s that. But I wasn’t handed a damn thing. I worked my ass off for everything. My parents were farm workers. Yeah, I got grants instead of high-interest college loans. But I worked for everything I have. I wasn’t handed shit. Hard work can overcome a lot of obstacles. Greed has turned this country into shit. We have lost our way.”
“Getting grants from the government is literally being handed an advantage.”
—u/OndhiCeleste
14.
“I’m 76. Jobs out of high school or college were hard to find because there were so many of us. If you didn’t perform, you were fired because there were six others waiting in line for your job. This rude awakening forced me to develop a hard work ethic, which I maintained throughout my whole career. Kids today can easily find work because the demand exceeds the supply, so they haven’t learned to work hard and do a good job for their employers.”
“Please check the unemployment rate of college graduates. I don’t think you’ve looked at the stats in the last 50 years.”
15.
“As an aging boomer and student of history, one of my greatest points of pride is that I have developed a keen sense of empathy and compassion. Everyone struggles, no one makes it alone, and we need to share whatever resources we have to keep the game going.”
16.
“They did grow up with a lot of turmoil. My father-in-law was left in the care of a distant family member after his mom died of cancer that is treatable today, while his dad remarried and started a new family. I feel like he never fully formed as a person.”
17.
“Not many, if anyone, brings this up, but the ‘choice’ was not available to many, many mothers during those years, if at all. There were quite a few unplanned/unwanted pregnancies around that time. I, for one, was unwanted, tossed around, and given to my dad and his new wife. It was not a good experience. Maybe 30% of my friends grew up feeling unloved/unseen, often in hostile environments. When you’re actually wanted and loved, that’s a game-changer. At least that’s what I think.”
—u/realitysams
18.
“My dad used to complain incessantly about how his life was so hard, all while he had the American dream handed to him on a silver platter with nothing but a high school diploma. I’m at the absolute top of my industry and earn more than two-thirds of Americans, and I’ll still never have a fraction of what he had by 35 in my whole life.”
19.
“I’m a boomer. I’m not angry, and I enjoy getting to know the young’uns. There was happiness in my childhood, but I also had a mom who abused all of us kids. It drove my brother to struggle with alcoholism to cope with his trauma. He died young because of it. It was a tragedy. It’s hard to know or judge others’ lives, even if it may seem great from your POV. All I want is to get along with others. Conflict and fighting really hurt my soul. I saw a lot of it growing up. Despite that, I chose not to continue that cycle. We’re all different, but despite being boomers or Gen X, or whatever, we’re all human.”
20.
“The boomers’ whole identity depends on their right to be upset. It’s what feeds the entitlement. It’s how they can keep themselves blind to what’s happening around them. They don’t have to show empathy if they’re in a constant state of rage. It’s what they learned from their own bad parents.”
21.
“I’m at the very beginning of Gen X, and I went out and got a job when I was 14, got out of high school, and worked my way through college to afford it. Didn’t even use my college education to move up in other fields, just because I was a hard worker and not dumb. It’s clearly gotten harder for people every year that I can remember. Boomers are generally nice to most of us Gen X’ers, but they’re pretty hard on the younger generations. I think they see you as lazy, and in all my time in hiring people, no one whines like a millennial. But boomers also don’t understand how much harder it is to get work, to buy a house or a car, or to deal with our system of credit and capitalism than it was when they were young.”
—u/Rohbiwan
22.
“My sister just got a house recently in Illinois for $98,000. It has a laundry list of problems, but it is still standing, so there’s that. She had a lot of help from multiple families to even get this fixer-upper. She works at one of, if not the most, profitable, businesses in town. My grandparents bought a two-story, three-bedroom house with a yard outside of NYC. They worked in factories and sweatshops and bought a house with those wages. I know for a fact that NO factory or delivery job today could afford that.”
23.
“Boomers have outsourced their thinking to Facebook memes and Fox News. They’re blissfully unaware that minimum wage when they were young was the equivalent of making $66 an hour today.”
24.
“It wasn’t the ‘easiest,’ just more fun. Boomers remember hope in the air. They’re pissed that everything’s turned to shit.”
25.
“Here is the real answer. Once most people acquire wealth, they want to keep/protect it. It’s a uniform trait across people. Wealth literally changes people’s behavior. People hate to admit it as well, but they’re influenced by the shit they see on television and in the media. It’s not just the news people or podcasters, it’s the movies and shows they watch, too. It all makes the world seem more dangerous than it actually is. All of this combined leads to suspicion and fear of others. People act more aggressively towards strangers that they see as outsiders or a threat to resources/opportunity.”
26.
“My grandparents are boomers, and while their mid-adult lives were significantly easier than Gen Z or millennials, their childhoods and early adult lives were much harder. For example, my maternal grandpa grew up poor in rural Louisiana, shared a bed with two other people, and joined the military to escape from his childhood home. My other three grandparents had similar experiences growing up in poverty.”
27.
“I think the ‘angry boomers’ claim is, for the most part, inaccurate. If there were no internet looking to make ragebait for engagement, the phrase wouldn’t exist.”
28.
And finally, “It’s interesting to see how a post making a generalization about one generation leads to comments from that generation making generalizations about those generations. Makes you think.”
—u/Poppyganda
Who is in the right here, if anyone? Tell me what you think and why in the comments, or use the anonymous form below. Your response may be featured in an upcoming BuzzFeed article!
Note: Responses have been edited for length/clarity.
