Boomers have complained about how millennials are weak and whiny, but yet they can't handle hearing "OK Boomer". What losers.
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‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations
121–130 of 134 posts
Re: ‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our parents. Are you talking of Gen X? The boomer generation? In general, your statement seems to apply to Gen X. But not really the boomer generation - e.g. they didn't have affordable college like Gen X did. Gen X seems to have been at the crossroads of things shifting and kind of got the best of all worlds. And for Millennials, some have it rough but some don't. College was cheap and affordable for some of them -…
Yeah, I feel like a lot of the things Boomers and Millennials are blaming on each other, actually apply to Gen X (and I say this as a Gen-Xer myself). We got the best education deal before (admittedly Boomer-) politicians started to undermine education. We were the slacker generation. We're the generation that refused to grow up. We got jobs in the booming 1990s. But sure, let Boomers and Millennials fight. We're hap…
That's funny, I'm GenX and I have very different memories. I remember high inflation ("stagflation"), high unemployment ("misery index"), multiple recessions during the first half of my career. Sure, college seemed pretty affordable compared to nowadays, but not compared to those before.
Also, a lot of the anger at Boomers is not just because of how they had it (that's mostly the doing of their Silent/Greatest predecessors) but because of how they made it. Boomers have dominated politics since those student-activist hippies got into it, largely because of sheer numbers. Thirty or forty years, depending on exactly which ones you count. GenX is finally making a dent, but mostly at the state level. At the federal level it's still heavily Boomer-dominated, regurgitating the same policies that got us into this mess. Ditto Wall Street etc.
If Boomers had enjoyed good times and then made some effort to prolong or repeat them, #okboomer wouldn't be a thing. It is a thing because so many Boomers are using their political power to keep selling everyone else's future for the sake of their own comfy retirement.
Re: ‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't tell what point you're making, but when my brother left his job at Google our grandmother asked what that was going to do to his pension. As if companies paying pensions was still a thing. These people grew up when a factory job could support a family of four, and companies hired people with no experience and then paid actual benefits. Boomers benefited from very generous circumstances. To suggest they earned t…
My parents, I guess who were boomers, suffered from crushing debt, divorce, poverty, unstable work. Factory work killed two of my Grandfathers, COPD and asbestosis. But go on, tell us how Google ruined your Brother's future.
Would you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? There are much better ways to honor your grandfathers.
Re: ‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations
#124This is silly. The only party here marking the end of "friendly generational relations" is the NY Times itself. Drawing lines through society is the cheapest and easiest way to look wise without making any meaningful comment.
Actually this phrase started around October 15th on TikTok. The phrase’s use in related videos grew rapidly and had not existed before. It’s real sentiment. The fault with this article is that it focuses on merchandise. Edit: here’s the first video I saw it trend in comments: http://vm.tiktok.com/553g7w/
I thought that it was a line from "Battlestar Galactia".
Re: ‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mmm there's that word again, "given."
I don’t think the boomer generation “earned” cheaper college. That was given to them either by circumstance or by the previous generations. Similarly, post-war prosperity wasn’t something they had earned or worked for. The contention is that the world left by boomers has less opportunity than what the one provided to them. It’s not entirely true (if you’re black in America, the civil rights movement sure changes a lo…
>I don’t think the boomer generation “earned” cheaper college.
Exactly. Later generations simply inherited expensive college after the devastation of Nixon.
If Nixon wasn't stopped, they would have continued until all Americans had been returned to lower opportunity levels equivalent to many minorities before Civil Rights, other than those whose significant capitalist privileges had already been well established before the early 1970's.
EDIT: more rapidly returned to lower opportunity levels
Edit: It's still too easy to underestimate Nixon Youth.
Re: ‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it would be more appropriate to say "not robbed by their employers."
Funny, my pre-baby boomer dad had his pension raided by the leadership of his employer. Employers abusing employees is a tale as old as time.
Indeed. The labor movement in the early 20th century claimed a significant number of advantages for workers, and employers have been steadily chipping away at them ever since. The effect of this has been cumulative, with each generation both never seeing the benefits that were taken from their parents and having new ones taken from them personally. Pensions are long gone, unions are on life support, insurance is a debacle (though somewhat unrelated), wages have stagnated resulting in inflation-driven pay cuts, and the latest trend is to eschew employees altogether and treat everybody as an independent contractor (thus eliminating virtually all benefits).
Re: ‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the boomer generation were called entitled, lazy, selfish by their parent's generation too. Think about the attitudes of the war generation to the hippies, recreational drugs etc. This shitting on the next generation thing has been going on for a long time. There's solid evidence going back 150 years of older generations complaining about school kids being undisciplined, not respecting their teachers ("not like b…
>The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. The above quote comes from ancient Greece.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/
There's some doubts to the veracity of that quote, which is why I opted for anecdotal when it came to older evidence :)
Re: ‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations
#128The idea that climate change and financial inequality concerns are generational divided is ludicrous. To me this framing reeks as just another divisional front the promoters of identity politics, who btw are also not generational divided, would like to inflict on us all. P.S. I'm not Gen Z by a long shot and deeply concerned about climate change and financial inequality.
> The idea that ... financial inequality concerns are generational divided is ludicrous. Are facts "ludicrous" to you? Older people naturally tend to be wealthier through decades of debt retirement, salary increases, compounded investment returns, and so on. There was already a visible divide between the Me Generation (what "Baby Boomers" were once called and IMO still should be) and my own GenX. It seems the divide…
I was talking about being concerned about financial inequality not being generational divided.
And financial inequality does transcend generations, kids from poorer parents on average stay poorer themselves, while kids from rich parents tend on average to to turn out richer, rather than divide them.
What is even worse is that the rising of economic inequality in the US, will also reflect itself in an even further decline of economic mobility as those two have been shown to be correlated [1].
Don't get caught up in these divisional doctrines. Some stand to benefit from fueling these narratives, and it is not going to be any of the people being pushed into the fires of identity wars.
Re: ‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The idea that ... financial inequality concerns are generational divided is ludicrous. Are facts "ludicrous" to you? Older people naturally tend to be wealthier through decades of debt retirement, salary increases, compounded investment returns, and so on. There was already a visible divide between the Me Generation (what "Baby Boomers" were once called and IMO still should be) and my own GenX. It seems the divide…
I was talking about being concerned about financial inequality not being generational divided. And financial inequality does transcend generations, kids from poorer parents on average stay poorer themselves, while kids from rich parents tend on average to to turn out richer, rather than divide them. What is even worse is that the rising of economic inequality in the US, will also reflect itself in an even further dec…
> kids from poorer parents on average stay poorer themselves
It's possible for that to be true and for there to be differences between generations. They're not mutually exclusive.
> Some stand to benefit from fueling these narratives
...and some stand to benefit from suppressing them. Attribution of motive - to unspecified people, even - is a non argument.
Re: ‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
No they are not. They have statistically differently skewed preferences, but that is a completely different thing. Divided would mean that e.g. Millennials with few exceptions vote Democrat while Boomers with few exceptions vote Republican. You know their age, you know their vote with few exceptions. The reality is that if you would 'accuse' a Boomer of having voted Republican you would be wrong 56% of the time, and…
You're just redefining "divide" to mean something more substantial than I am. Do you think this is so insignificant that it doesn't even warrant a conversation?
Then how should I interpret your 'Generations are ideologically divided'?
If it is merely the expression of slight shifts in political leanings correlated with age, we'd have to look whether this is a new thing or something that has always been the case [1].
The reason I point out in my response to you that the presumptions which you will find even in this tread, that there is a conflict between the generations that expresses itself as a principle component in voting behavior and justifies division and vilification of the 'opposite' age cohort, is blatantly false and a manufactured framework intent on dividing people and gaining economically and politically from that conflict rather than uniting and looking for solutions.