TIL: American Boomers are The Most Selfish Parents on the Planet
TIL: American Boomers are The Most Selfish Parents on the Planet
medium.com
Study Reveals American Boomers are The Most Selfish Parents on the Planet
Comments
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And hoarding billionaires ruin everything for everyone. Class warfare, not generation.
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You'll note they always use "average"(mean) rather than median savings/assets to mask that it's really a small portion of boomers that are living the easy life. Still better off as a whole than later gens but to your point, no warfare but class warfare. I read a recent book , "work, retire, repeat" looking at the life crisis that has been built with insecurity and poverty driving most people, regardless of age to work too much and work until they die. Your point is the best one; billionaires and their lobbyists and owned politicians are the real problem.
There are many boomers with nothing, who did not have or get a pension, who didn't or couldn't accumulate wealth through housing, who may not have gone to college because (and the article leaves this out) they didn't even need a degree to move up. The book mentioned above calls out that only 8% of people working past 62 are doing it because they really want to be and have a job they enjoy. Many are still working for healthcare, to service debt, concerns of future unknown/instability/inflation, social security being threatened, and also it notes they many keep working because they have kids or other dependents they see struggling in a tougher world and want to help/ensure they aren't another burden.
I'm not a boomer or discounting the relative advantages they had, but it's the concentration of wealth to the owner class/.5% that are by far the issue not an age group.
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The statistics these days should be split. One for the top 10% and one for the bottom 90%.
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I have to agree.
And actually, the pattern they talk about in the article happens in every generation, anyways. People's values seem to change as they get older. But I think they don't really change.
I think if you look into the issue, you'll find that a lot of people don't really have political beliefs. They just have selfishness and greed.
When they're young and poor, it manifests as left leaning because they want the government to give them money, and after they've accumulated whatever money they can, it manifests as right leaning because they still want the government to give them money.
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It’s not even generational. People with little money want money, people with more money want to keep it. There’s dirt poor boomers and greedy yuppies.
As other have said, it’s about socioeconomic classes, not age. Age is the distraction.
In fact, when a problem is presented as a us-vs-them dichotomy, it’s almost sure it’s oversimplified, and probably dishonest.
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I blame the billionaires, but I despise the bootlickers who somehow think the billionaires got there fair, and square through hard work and that we're all just jealous. It's infuriating. I don't hate successful people in the slightest. But multi-billionaires are parasites.
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Baby Boomers had another name. For a time, they were also called the Me Generation.
They were the first generation to prioritize "self-realization" and "self-fulfillment" over any kind of social good.-
Capitalism turned them from members of society into individual consumers
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I blame suburbanization more for that.
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Dr. Spock fucked the world
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For everybody not from the USA: Due to the war, the US baby boom kicked off earlier and stopped sooner. So if you are talking about "boomers" in Europe, you are talking about different groups than boomer in the USA.
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Hence the article giving actual age demographics when it comes to the real details. Generational names are just a shorthand and they're never perfectly accurate. But age demographics don't have that problem.
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To be fair, I read a while ago that the, "Great Wealth Transfer," was going to fizzle because of medical costs. Medicare doesn't cover long term care, so a lot of the wealth that Boomers would have left behind is getting eaten by the medical industry.
Still, they gutted the social safety nets for short-term stock market gains, so fuck boomers.
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Just maybe might have something to do with the hitherto unseen mass phenomenon of adult children going no contact with, ghosting their parents.
Whole lot of narcissistic abuse on one side, whole lotta CPTSD on the other.
https://theweek.com/culture-life/no-contact-family-estrangement
https://justinthenickofcrime.substack.com/p/no-contact-why-millennials-gen-z
https://slate.com/life/2024/08/no-contact-parents-meaning-family-estrangement.html
Whole lotta Boomers can't figure out that they aren't entitled to their children's attention, love, or respect, that their kids are... conscious, sentient, independent human beings... after they spent their whole narcissistic lives negging their kids and inventing new problems for them, new standards to meet, more messes to clean up, whenever they feel 'unappreciated'.
Oh well, they can enjoy the housing crash they caused by fancying themselves as prudent investors, and then they can enjoy their golden years in an underfunded and understaffed elder care home.
It didn't have to be this way, but too many of 'em never listened to a damn thing anyone else said that made them feel insecure or unclever for even a moment.
(Most of the housing market run up, most of the purchased properties, both 08 era and now... actually were done by 'small landlords', self styled real estate investors. Yep, corpos did a lot too, but not the majority. Also, now the median homebuyer age is 61, the median first time homebuyer has gone up from 28 in 1980, to 38 now in 2025... the boomers literally, objectively are the primary responsible party for making housing unaffordable for everyone else. But hey, fuck them kids, eh?)
(... and thats all before going into generational voting patterns, and how by continuing to try to ride along with a system rigged in their favor, they have also literally doomed the planet and biosphere. Just a real bang up job.)
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This describes my boomer parents with scary accuracy. So fucking true.
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End of life care will vacuum up all of the money from every generation now.
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Especially the boomers. The generations since them will prepare for this in some way. The boomers will just have all their wealth gobbled up by service companies.
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The generations since them will prepare for this in some way.
Ahah, yeah, by legalizing suicide booths / EoL euthanasia, and then just actually doing soylent green.
Maybe not directly as food itself, but, decaying biomatter is good for compost, and we are gonna need a lot more composted topsoil in the next decades, as the climate collapses further.
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You should see how the boomers treated their parents and the infirm. Just lock them up in a home and forget them.
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My parents have everything. My grandparents were fairly wealthy and passed on. We have inherited nothing from them, it all went to my parents and we saw nothing of it. They have a nice new freestanding pool in their backyard and a fire pit, though. Oh and new cars. I was buying a home recently and had to take a down payment as a retirement loan. Not a cent from them to help.
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Sounds like they've failed as parents, then.
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I remember being 23 and asking my mom if she’d add me to one of her credit cards to help me with credit. I didn’t want access, just so that it would help my credit history. She refused by telling me that it was my responsibility.
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I'm pretty grateful my dad isn't a typical boomer, despite being a Baby Boomer.
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I'm currently reading Bowling Alone. And this is pretty much the gist of the story. We will need a good generational shift to rebuild a society that looks to improve things for the next generation.
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Selfish people in general, not just parents
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no shit - they ruined it for all of us
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Canadian parents were not much better, unfortunately.
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the Canadian way, trying to be just slightly less shitty than the US
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The billionaires want the generations to fight. Divide and conquer.
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I think this is true maybe not in the USA/West, but in my country for sure, most of the boomers I know, even though they have more and own more, are highly miserable in their personal life.
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Raised by them. Fuck em. Hope they rot.
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The article is about the UK. What's with the headline?
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The first couple of paragraphs are about the UK, but then it says
Across the Atlantic, the pattern repeats. Average IRA balances for Boomers (ages 60–78) hover around $271,105, compared to just $111,524 for Gen X (ages 44–59).
Looking at the article, they don't actually say, "in America." They only say "across the Atlantic." Seems a bit unclear to me, so I understand how you missed it. But most of the article is about America.
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Can confirm selfish pieces of subhuman trash. No contact and happy. They can all rot.
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So…. Born yesterday?
I don't fault the boomers for spending "their" money.
I very much do fault them for, at every single step, insisting on legislature and behavior that makes the world actively a worse place from a climate and human rights perspective.
Keep your own money. A lot of kids would benefit from "earning their own way" and the fallacious bootstraps. But don't pull the ladder up behind you and piss on those below you.
Boomers didn't steal their kids money. They stole their future.
Yeah this right here. The attitude is what pisses me off the most.
I'm going to take all the sacrifices my parents made to help ensure I have a successful life.
I'm going to have no problem getting a great job with, or without education.
I'm going to get into the housing market on a basic salary no problem.
I'm going to bring kids into this world, and make sure they earn their own way.
I'm going to shame them into leaving home as early as possible, make them rent for most of their life and wonder why they don't buy a house so they can make money on their investments.
Oh, by the way, i'll make a ton more money on other peoples kids paying my second, third investment properties mortgage off with their rent.
Then i'll live a glorious retirement, fully aware that my kids retirement is probably not going to happen ever.
They were called the "Me generation" when they were young.
They somehow successfully rebranded. Boomer might be a slur now but it wasn't always.
I feel like The Me Generation was a better name anyway, selfish pricks.
I will also note that the way that generation made that money was part of the problem. They didn't conjure that money from thin air - there were always going to be consequences for the systems created where that money was made.