Hey Gen Z, first time being gaslit by boomers? Heh, yyeeeaaaahhhhhhh…they do that. Now imagine having them as your parent, and you’re 5, and you have to just live with their bullshit.
~Sincerely, Gen X and the older millenials.
However, I’m old enough to remember watching the boomers getting gaslit by the “Greatest Generation”.
But yeah, as an Xer, it seems like we got the short straw. The boomers sucked all the air out of the room for so very long, that if the (mostly boomer- and Greatest Generation- led) media stopped giving them all the attention for a moment, it was to only label us the “slacker generation”.
By the time the boomer narcissism’s grip was loosened, the focus was mostly on to Gen Y, and if we are being honest here, due to their numbers, the media narcissism around Gen Y reminds me very much of the boomers, with Gen Z quickly catching up.
I suspect that’s very much due to a numbers game - if advertising dollars figure they can center a particular group enough, they can scoop up all those $$$ by selling a certain age range a story about themselves…
As shitty as my parents were, I’m suddenly grateful that they were pre-boomer. Still had to deal with stuff like listening to their bigotry, but having a dad that grew up during the Depression, and his own dad was out of work for much of it, meant that he never gave me shit for not being as successful as him.
Let’s get over the idea that it’s a generation war and not a class war. Thinking all boomers are rich and own houses is like thinking all gen z are lazy. Neither is true by a long shot, but this is what the oligarchs and corporations want us to think about each other so we get distracted and don’t notice that they are the ones buying up all the housing so we can’t and they can rent to us at whatever price they want. Let’s stick together against them instead.
edit to add: And BTW don’t forget the next gens are growing up in an even worse situation and will face the effects of living under an autocracy and the effects of unaddressed climate change, while you get old and boomers are gone. Who do you think they’re going to blame? You, that’s who, while those in power laugh at all of us.
Damn. Well said.
I personally am capable of working any boomer in their prime into exhausting while I’m still pushing for hours more. The whole “millenials are lazy” is corporate bullshit designed to make parents think their kids are just lazy and not being ripped off by the system they demand exists.
Pull a 16hr shift working network engineering during an outage, then come back to work in 8hrs for another full day on a Monday, then when the boomer stops having their mental break down they can apologize in person to every millennial they talked shit about.
Oh, and because you’re an engineer, NO OVERTIME! YOU SALARY BITCH! THOSE HOURS ARE INCLUDED!
Ok that’s fine I’ll just be leaving that much earlier on friday
Hey throw millenials in this too please.
And GenX. I bet a lot of them feel it too unless dementia has already set in.
its not the 40 hour work week thats the issue.
Its how much productivity is demanded in that 40 hours. and the compensation for it.
and theres a LOT more productivity demanded from workers today, than there was in 1950.
Because all the technologies that were supposed to make life easier… didnt. They just increased the amount of things we can/have to do in a day.
People working today are doing more labor, producing more effort per hour than 70 years ago, but are being paid less in purchasing power for it… and if thats not a recipe for violent upheaval i dont know what is.
The amount of time that corporations feel entitled to is ridiculous. I’ve quit my last two positions because these billion dollar companies feel that they own you for every second when you’re on the clock. It feels exploitative and gives you the sense that you’re just some beast of burden. We’re humans, not machines to push production to the maximum. But all the higher-ups see is bottom line pushers.
What, are not grateful that they trickle down a tiny bit of money from what is left after the shareholders and CEO take their hard earned cut? Just because you did all the work and earned all of the money? How gready can you be? I mean they graciously let you be sick 6 days a year, and let you frolic for another 10. Don’t you realize how much effort they had to put in worrying that the small smidgen of their enormous wealth that they had inherited and invested in your company was not earning them greater wealth at a rate that was grossly unhealthy for the company or the economy?
It’s fun when it is extended beyond work hours, too. Email/IMs/texts/Teams/Slack/whateverelsethefuck from people round the clock and on the weekend. Calls when on vacation. People asking if you could cancel your vacation just before going on one planned months in advance because of some contrived milestone. Stuff like that.
Oh, and I’m Gen-X - this kind of thing has been around since I started work, but it does seem like it’s increasing as a “norm”. People doing performative shit in public, and now others assuming this is expected - like how many commits you are doing FOR FREE on Github, or fake internet points on Stack Overflow, as an example. I honestly feel sorry for people that fall for this, thinking it’s a way to break into a job, or that they must do this to maintain one.
Though I do think that Covid did a modicum of a reset on some of the grindset nonsense. Of course, I think all the really big tech companies colluded with one another to then start doing massive layoffs to make sure that everyone still knew who was calling the tune (even if it made no sense to cut staff). Lots of managers have a real xitter envy - they’d love to cut their company to the very bone and run the place like absolute tyrants like they see fElon doing. Thing is, it is obviously a stupid way to run a business - xitter is just a Nazi bar with questionable business fundamentals at this point. But it doesn’t stop useless copycat monkeys in the C-suite from thinking he’s great.
I hate this idea that people need to work themselves to death to survive. We have such a surplus of resources today that people should barely have to work. I don’t know what it was that pulled the mask off this farce of a system we have, but it sure as shit isn’t worth it to bust my ass for 45 years so the CEO of FuCKYou Incorporated can get another bigger yacht.
I don’t know what it was that pulled the mask off this farce of a system we have
Greed
Sociopathic greed is the root; Covid 19 pulled the mask off when people collectively had a few months to exit the rat race and discover life apart from being constantly ground to dust for some shareholders’ profits.
Probably this, but it had been bubbling under the surface for a while.
Of course. American prosperity fell off a cliff around 1980, so the last 40 years or so have just been inertia and grinding the middle class into dust.
Which is roughly where we are now.
Not true! The 90s were great! We signed NAFTA and shipped all our manufacturing jobs overseas!
*Cue Josh Lyman parading through West Wing gloating about globalization
And yet Gen Z turned out for… Trump? He’ll surely help the economy and enable a new era of magically plentiful high paying, stable jobs.
Re-title this article as “Lazy, Tired Workers Are Mad At Youthful Workers Like Lazy, Tired Workers 60 Years Ago Were Mad At Them 60 Years Ago”.
Another “Don’t mind the billionaires getting richer and fight each other for the scraps instead” article.
Ever wonder how “work ethic” became a trait that defines the quality of an individual? You can probably guess. Religion. Which of course needed people to work hard so they could donate more money to them.
My dad worked two full time jobs for a while to help the family get ahead while we were little. I think spending time with his young children would have been time better spent for everyone. He did stop when we got to school age. And he did spend a lot of time with us. Was a scout master, tball coach, all that. So I know he probably would have rather been with us than working that extra job. But from a young age it was drilled into him that work came first.
Now with younger people less into religion. We see more and more who realize that working hard for someone else doesn’t need to be a defining characterist of a person’s quality.
Maybe his motivation wasn’t so much “work ethic” as it was “taking responsibility to care for one’s family”, since he did stop the extra job when he could and spent time with you. He sounds like a great dad!
I mean part of it was good financial sense. Money saved early has longer to grow. But I don’t think they “needed” the money that bad. Two full time jobs is nuts. And there were plenty more instances where he clearly communicated that work ethic was equal to a persons value. But yeah, he was a good Dad.
Let’s talk about suburbs. These generations left the city because they couldn’t afford it. Now suddenly living 5 mins from work is expected but then the an entry level job can’t afford it and it’s a generational difference? Can you afford to buy a house within 45 mins to your work? Hell ya where I live but you don’t have immediate access to all city amenities.
I despise most of the boomers
I was talking to a boomer here in Canada. When I asked him why he stayed in the same company for 30 years he said, hey they kept giving me promotions and increasing my salary from the first year. As well as having a work pension plan. Just with a bachelor’s and no beginning experience.
MFs be asking masters and years of experience from new grades.
Don’t forget their not giving raises either or that great of benefits either. Real stellar time
Not all of us were beneficiaries of the largess. Most black people and a lot of single mothers, anyone who wasn’t able to finish college or secure a union job … we were all left out of that. It gets real tiring being accused of the ills of a small demographic when we are down here suffering right along with you. AND being blamed for it.
Are people under the impression everyone who had a 40 hour a week job had their own house?
In 1990 my mom stayed home and raised us. My dad worked a measly construction job and we lived in a two story, 5 bedroom house (which they lost after the 2008 collapse, I took it over and lost in 2012).
My mom was also able to borrow against that house over and over again for cars.
Around 1996 my dad got his CDLs and drove a coal truck.
We bought that house for 30k.
My aunt bought a huge colonial house with 8 bedrooms for roughly 60k in 1979-80. She never worked. Her husband was a coal miner.
When it burned down in 1996, she bought a beautiful brick home in a wonderful neighborhood for 100k. She sold that same house recently for 600k.
The difference is absurd.
100%
My mom worked at Sizzlers in the early 90s when she and her husband, a no-degree “engineer” were able to buy a 4 bedroom house with a huge yard and 2 car garage in the DC suburbs (MD side), with two cars. A few years later, they upgraded to an even bigger house in an even nicer part of the county.
Objectively poor people had houses that they owned, in places people wanted to live. None of that has been possible for at least a decade or more. Millennials are now in our 40s and have more education and experience than Boomers ever did, yet the ROI and QOL differentials are staggering.
Don’t let Boomers gaslight you; they collectively played this game on the easiest mode.
A “measly construction job” is a good paying one. A person working at a McDonald’s for 40 hours a week at that time would not be able to afford an apartment let alone a house. When your aunt bought her house interest rates were in the teens, today they are 7% and that’s a record high. My parents bought a house in 1976 for $28,000 dad worked full time at a city job plus always had a second job or side hustle. Our family would strip copper to make ends meet. Mom cooked every meal, eating out was a rare treat. Never once did we even order pizza, Mom make it with powder dough. We didn’t have cable. Got by on two junker cars sometimes one.
Every generation has it’s challenges. This is the first to have a public circle jerk/pity party
My dad’s construction job was working for my mom’s brother for next to minimum wage. Not that it matters.
A minimun wage construction job? Someone is lying to you. Dad was probably working the glory hole at kwik-e-mart. No bank is going to give a house loan to someone making minimum wage.
Well, they did.
As a matter of fact they gave my parents multiple loans until it exceeded the value of the house so badly that we couldn’t keep up with it.
They did this so many times for so many people in my neighborhood that the place is now nearly rubble because of it. Oh, and that kind of irresponsible lending led to the 2008 collapse.
Everyone? No. Far, far more people than now? Absolutely.
Um, life was maybe easy-ish for some boomers. Plenty of them got reamed by the many boom/bust cycles. Boomers lived through stagflation, two oil embargoes, Vietnam, the 80s fad of downsizing/rightsizing, many losing farms in the 80s, the 90s rush to offshore and outsource everything, the deskilling of Americans and the export of most manufacturing, NAFTA reordering things, the rise of big box retailers and further deskilling, the disintegration of unions, the Wall Street crash of 1987, the dot-com bubble burst in early 00s, the real-estate crash in 2008, etc. Gen X and millennials suffered some of these later ones, too, or dealt with the fallout from their parents having these struggles.
The ageist shit is just a distraction. Generations are not really a thing; it’s more of a marketing strategy and also a way for the elites to further atomize Americans. Don’t fall for it.
It is more about how policies were set at the national level. Those policies have benefited them throughout their lifetimes. Boomers going to college. College is affordable. Boomers buying house make family. House good and affordable on one wage. Boomers working hard providing for wife and 2.5 kiddos. Jobs pay good and has pension. Family affordable one wage. Boomers retiring???
Not to mention their wholesale willingness, as a cohort, to pull up the ladders that they used to raise themselves, assuring that subsequent generations would have it much harder, and would likely fail to achieve the same cornerstone successes of prosperity.
At the same time, Boomers have a penchant for constantly gaslighting any opinion or statement that might pierce the insulating lies in whatever trumped up mockery they call an identity.
It’s why Boomers are always regaling the world with anecdotes of how hard they worked and how much they deserve their stations in life, when anyone with the ability to parse history can see that Baby Boomers objectively had the easiest, most rewarding slice of American prosperity in the history of the country. In the richest nation on Earth.
For sure. I found it impressive they learned nothing from Vietnam and went right ahead with Afghanistan and Iraq. I guess at least with the next war we’ll get Gaza Resort by Trump.
Yeah anyone is capable of taking their situation for granted.
