6 ms·

This is pretty much it. My generation has been called entitled, lazy, selfish, etc, for wanting the same things our parents were given, like a living wage, aff

This is pretty much it. My generation has been called entitled, lazy, selfish, etc, for wanting the same things our parents were given, like a living wage, affordable college, or career stability. In what world is that friendly?

creaturemachine 7y ago
Mmm there's that word again, "given."
- rco8786 7y ago
  Perhaps just replace it with “had access to”. Or perhaps just focus on the spirit of the statement and not pedantries over word choice.
- na85 7y ago
  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 the postwar economic boom is laughably misguided.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - creaturemachine 7y ago
    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.
    - na85 7y ago
      >But go on, tell us how Google ruined your Brother's future. I didn't write or imply this in any way. My point is that many boomers conveniently gloss over the fact that they benefited immensely from the economic climate of yesteryear, and the common refrain of millennials needing to just tug harder on their bootstraps isn't received well because of it.
    - dang 7y ago
      Would you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? There are much better ways to honor your grandfathers. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- excalibur 7y ago
  Yes, it would be more appropriate to say "not robbed by their employers."
  - falcolas 7y ago
    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.
    - excalibur 7y ago
      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).
- cmiles74 7y ago
  The boomers also have a pretty strong sense of entitlement. Some would argue that millennial are entitled to feel "entitled".
  - mieseratte 7y ago
    > Some would argue that millennial are entitled to feel "entitled". Some of us would argue that is a garbage mentality at the root of the problem. I would sooner wish to emulate the "Greatest Generation" than the Boomers.
- tyre 7y ago
  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 lot for the better), but that’s the argument.
  - fuzzfactor 7y ago
    >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.
bcrosby95 7y ago
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 - certainly more affordable for them than the boomer generation. Keep in mind the generation spans to 1981. Some Millennials are almost 40 now. Gen Z is in a whole other category of course. Lots of things going/have gone rapidly downhill. But boomers mostly aren't the parents of these people. It's Gen X/Millennials.
- mcv 7y ago
  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 happy to stay out of this (just know that I'm on your side, Millennials!)
  - jhbadger 7y ago
    The 1990s were only "booming" (in the US) towards the end of the decade. The early/middle part of the decade was a recession.
    - mcv 7y ago
      I guess I was still in university back then. I'm late Gen X. I imagine early Gen X has a very different story. (I bet the same is true for every generation.)
  - notacoward 7y ago
    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.
mieseratte 7y ago
In defense of "the Boomers," and believe me I have plenty of gripes about trends within that generation, we Millenials aren't exactly above reproach. I can agree that it's not nearly as easy for us as it was for the past few generations, but it's not nearly as grim as most make it out to be. To put it bluntly, I see a lot of the same "me me me" mentality that the Boomers have been criticized for. There's the idea that life is just handed to us, so long as we "do the right things." It's perfectly possible to own a home, raise a family, what have you. You just might not get to work the job you want, study the degree program you want, or live in the neighborhood you want. There never was a "turnkey" existence.
Twirrim 7y ago
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 back when I was at school"), and some slightly more anecdotal evidence going back some 2000 years of the same. We always find it hard to reconcile the negative aspects of our old behaviour with our current mindset, and it's way easier to just reduce in our minds the severity or scope of our actions. We learn from our mistakes, and try to make them seem as small as possible in our minds.
- MrMember 7y ago
  >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.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Twirrim 7y ago
    https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/ 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 :)

creaturemachine 7y ago

Mmm there's that word again, "given."

rco8786 7y ago
Perhaps just replace it with “had access to”. Or perhaps just focus on the spirit of the statement and not pedantries over word choice.
na85 7y ago
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 the postwar economic boom is laughably misguided.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- creaturemachine 7y ago
  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.
  - na85 7y ago
    >But go on, tell us how Google ruined your Brother's future. I didn't write or imply this in any way. My point is that many boomers conveniently gloss over the fact that they benefited immensely from the economic climate of yesteryear, and the common refrain of millennials needing to just tug harder on their bootstraps isn't received well because of it.
  - dang 7y ago
    Would you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? There are much better ways to honor your grandfathers. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
excalibur 7y ago
Yes, it would be more appropriate to say "not robbed by their employers."
- falcolas 7y ago
  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.
  - excalibur 7y ago
    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).
cmiles74 7y ago
The boomers also have a pretty strong sense of entitlement. Some would argue that millennial are entitled to feel "entitled".
- mieseratte 7y ago
  > Some would argue that millennial are entitled to feel "entitled". Some of us would argue that is a garbage mentality at the root of the problem. I would sooner wish to emulate the "Greatest Generation" than the Boomers.
tyre 7y ago
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 lot for the better), but that’s the argument.
- fuzzfactor 7y ago
  >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.

bcrosby95 7y ago

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 - certainly more affordable for them than the boomer generation. Keep in mind the generation spans to 1981. Some Millennials are almost 40 now. Gen Z is in a whole other category of course. Lots of things going/have gone rapidly downhill. But boomers mostly aren't the parents of these people. It's Gen X/Millennials.

mcv 7y ago
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 happy to stay out of this (just know that I'm on your side, Millennials!)
- jhbadger 7y ago
  The 1990s were only "booming" (in the US) towards the end of the decade. The early/middle part of the decade was a recession.
  - mcv 7y ago
    I guess I was still in university back then. I'm late Gen X. I imagine early Gen X has a very different story. (I bet the same is true for every generation.)
- notacoward 7y ago
  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.

mieseratte 7y ago

In defense of "the Boomers," and believe me I have plenty of gripes about trends within that generation, we Millenials aren't exactly above reproach. I can agree that it's not nearly as easy for us as it was for the past few generations, but it's not nearly as grim as most make it out to be. To put it bluntly, I see a lot of the same "me me me" mentality that the Boomers have been criticized for. There's the idea that life is just handed to us, so long as we "do the right things." It's perfectly possible to own a home, raise a family, what have you. You just might not get to work the job you want, study the degree program you want, or live in the neighborhood you want. There never was a "turnkey" existence.

Twirrim 7y ago

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 back when I was at school"), and some slightly more anecdotal evidence going back some 2000 years of the same. We always find it hard to reconcile the negative aspects of our old behaviour with our current mindset, and it's way easier to just reduce in our minds the severity or scope of our actions. We learn from our mistakes, and try to make them seem as small as possible in our minds.

MrMember 7y ago
>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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Twirrim 7y ago
  https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/ 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 :)