There’s lots of merit to blaming a big part of this mess on boomers.  It certainly doesn’t help that the mentality is one of do as I say not as I do and the false pretense that boomers somehow were harder workers than millennials.

Boomers will likely reap what they’ve sown and think they’re the victims.

How so? Please expound.

I'm wildly successful and (barely, thank God) not a millenial.

These people got fucked.  Hard.  It's plainly right there in the numbers, the history of the housing, education, and labor markets, and the policies responsible.

The rage directed at the boomers isn't simply because of what happened and how, it's because it's combined together with ignorance of what happened and a shitty attitude about it.

I mean… you’re leaving a lot out of your statements, whether intentionally or out of ignorance.


Sure. People have indeed, monster, whatever - work from home is big due to Covid.  So you can find jobs, apply for jobs, work jobs all from home.  Which, however comes at a huge cost.

Easiest time to start a business? Maybe paperwork wise. However we live in the most regulated society on earth. Taxes, OSHA, every three letter agency out to ruin you.  None of them with published rule sets. See: ATF.

Finding new customers? Also not straight forward. And I’ll have a case study published about me by the Harvard business school later on this year. About marketing to new customers in Covid.  Ironically, at least in B2B - marketing has changed significantly post Covid.

You’re also forgetting the toxicity that goes along with venture capitalists when they get involved in your business.

So no, it’s not easy or straight forward.

Let’s not even bring up how fucked up the supply chain has been for the last 16 months or more. And, at whim governments that can randomly close your business down.


Business today, is certainly more challenging than 20 years ago. And arguably more challenging than 50 years ago.  


103 years ago, my family pooled $700 together and got a loan from a gentleman from Curtis Bay MD.  

They started selling coal oil. No paperwork. No osha.  No EPA.  


Today, combined, we’re multi-billion dollar companies.

Wrong.  The Millennials were the first generation to run voter percentages over the Boomers and Gen X never compromised even 10% of the vote. Now with Covid, I guarantee millennials are the majority percentage of voters.

By and large (although not all) policymakers are either voted in or appointed by those who are.  

There is no single individual (Boomer or Gen Xer) that set this snowball rolling downhill.

Right, while boomers dominate elected offices, just like they had for 20 years.

The only electoral shennanigans you can reasonably pin on millenials is getting Jugears into office - although these days it's hard to convince people they couldn't have simply cheated him in.   But don't forget that Trump followed that.

.....and the Millennials and Zs overwhelmingly voted for DEMOCRATS.

The fact that someone gave an honest answer to a poll doesn’t necessarily mean they are whiners.  Realistically there are things I would like to have that I will never be able to afford.  That’s not whining, just a statement of fact.

A lot of people here are reading way too much into people’s answers to a vaguely worded poll question, presented without adequate context.  Remember, public opinion polls are designed to support the agenda of the people funding the polls.  They are meant to manipulate you, and judging by the responses here the people who bought this poll are getting what they paid for.

<—- Millennial who took his engineering degree and military experience to rural Kansas and carved out a nice life.

I'll agree that for most white collar jobs, a phone is a necessity.  Unless you are working online, internet at home might not be since you can still access your email on your phone.

If you work from home, then yeah, you have to have internet.

That said, the phone doesn't have to be the latest flagship phone from Apple or Samsung.

I usually buy 2 generations back, factory refurbished phones for half or better what they cost when they were released, and use them for 3 years.  If I bought the newest flagship phones every time they came out, it would cost me thousands more.

I can't flaunt my phones, but that's not important to me.  They just have to work good, and buying the best phone a manufacturer made 2 years ago still gets you a hell of a nice phone, and lots of phone cases in the clearance aisle for cheap.

You shouldn’t talk out your ass.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/04/03/millennials-approach-baby-boomers-as-largest-generation-in-u-s-electorate/
https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/democracy-and-society/elections/presidential-voting-rate/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=ND-StatsData&gclid=Cj0KCQiA3fiPBhCCARIsAFQ8QzUv9cJ-7Yle87MTzdUiRvbdaVBMvcmU-Is7uBxPS4jKidbLzJW_9L8aAjWbEALw_wcB

Boomers invented the reverse mortgage because their motto is "you can't take it with you".  Even though their generation got to split the proceeds of their parent's home sale with their siblings.

You can get a cheap assed cell phone with internet access pretty cheaply, no ones saying a cell phone / internet might not be important, just saying a $1000+ new phone every 6 months is a waste, as is 1000 other bullshit items, and behaviors many that didn’t exist 20 years ago.

If your buying the newest iPhone as soon as it comes out, go out drinking multiple nights a week and most weekends, movies each week, out to eat most meals, new car every 2 years, multiple vacations, big vacations, a half dozen streaming services, sat tv, etc..

Each of those things cost money, that lost money COULD have quickly added up to a down payment on a house, made the difference between making a house payment or falling short making it, invested and used to buy a house 20 years later, finance a retirement, etc.  

Fuckers keep supporting socialism and they'll be right.

I am technically a millennial but just barely.

I've had a house for like 14 years now. Student loan all paid off.

I think one of the biggest problems is the destruction of the nuclear family and reluctance to get married.

Having a spouse that pulls their own weight has been one of the best financial helps to me as a relatively low wage earner. That and quiting drinking.

Granted i can manage the mortgage and bills on my own but throw some weekend nights at the bars and eating out in top of that and you get a out nothing for retirement.
Shitty roomates and girlfriends helped a but along the way but reliably having someone to pay half the bills lets me save like half my income and then some because we don't go out as much.

I can't really imagine being one of these tards with a 200k loan for underwater basket weaving.

Go to trucking school make bank with virtually no debt live below your means and marry someone with some work ethic and you can do just fine.

The biggest purchase you'll make is a home, and homes have never been more expensive in relation to median household incomes.

If you owned a home before our current bubble and you've watched your equity moon over the last few years, you're either feeling pretty good or indifferent about home prices.

If you don't own a home and you've watch home prices massively outpace wage growth, you're feeling defeated and wondering if you'll ever be able to get ahead.

If you disagree, you're just out of touch with reality.


Attached File

Isn't the fact a phone is something to flaunt now notable? Some soon to be replaced, cheap enough to sell millions and millions, piece of toss away crap is something to flaunt? You would have gotten a decent amount back if you were buying and selling flagships every release. Wouldn't be paying the full msrp every time.

On that front, literally every boomer family member I can think of - and I have a big friggin' family - had their school paid for, their first cars paid for, etc.    Virtually all of them inherited a chunk from their parents that was carefully arranged to be passed on.

One of them co-signed on a student loan, for one of their kids.   That's it.    About 80% of them aren't planning to leave anything for their kids and several have expressed their intent to plan expenditures so that going broke coincides with kicking the bucket.

Get a job, there's millions of them out there available

Lazy parasites

THOSE DAMN *shuffles papers around and checks notes* MILLENIALS AND THEIR NEW LOVE OF SOCIALISM THAT NO ONE ELSE IN THE US EVER HAD IN THE PAST!!!!!!

Now you listen here bucko, we demand they money we paid in to social security!

We can never do aptitude tests here because the results would cause an uproar of racism accusations.

Such safety nets have ruined as many as it’s helped. People tend to make better decisions, work harder etc  when there is no safety net.

Easy to separate the Grasshoppers from the Ants in this thread.

That was one of the major drivers of turning 4 years degrees into mandatory credentials for jobs that don't really need them.




What we're really arguing about is the locusts.

Those damn Zoomers just need to pull up their gender fluid non-binary coveralls, walk right down to the TVA or CCC office, look that site manager right in the eye and with a firm handshake tell them they're ready to work for the next 40 years at the expense of their health, happiness, friends, and family. They'll really appreciate the gold iphone they get upon retirement.

Fellow Gen X'r and feel the same way

Born in 72 and grew up in the best decade 1980's

This is way more relatable than I'd like it to be.

Again, the silent generation and the greatest generation voted him in.

Not having read 9 pages of replies. I’m currently working with a 19 year old kid. He has less than one year on the job. He’s paid 38$/hour and 130$ per diem as a welder helper    This is why I don’t care what millennials or anybody bitching about not getting by    Yes he works with his hands, in the heat and cold outside and is on the road.  After a while of good decisions he will be set up well to take on life.

The greatest generation understandably came home and had had enough, but fucked up pretty good with the boomers.

The silents did much better with Gen X.




I'd say 8/10 of successful zoomers and millenial acquaintances opted out of what is now mostly a college scam, even the STEM guys.   The zoomers are doing much better on that front because the smart ones paid attention to what happened to the millenials.   Many of the millenials that dodged a degree did so accidentally and found themselves much better off.

This is among people with drive, brains, and the ability to learn - the idiots are hosed either way.

I wouldn't tell anyone to go into a career that tech is working furiously to automate.

You don't think governments would LOVE to replace all the Canadian truckers with AI computers?  Some 20 year old kid starting a career in trucking will have to find something else to do long before they are ready to retire.

Yup, its not impossible to succeed but its definitely much harder when the effects of inflation, skyrocketing housing & medical costs, stagnant wages for years are considered. It isn't the same environment that the boomers had in the 1990s to prosper in.

Does he have to sexually satisfy the journeymen to earn that wage? That's more than most journeymen get in the unions around here.

I don't finance phones.  And I use them up so they have little resale value.  I have a drawer full of phones I used until they no longer hold a charge or their processors were too slow to run the latest version of Android.

I wish that more people were able to see that fact for what it is.

You're also absolutely correct that most of the "degree required" jobs out there probably ought not even require a high school diploma, much less a college degree. Hell, I can't tell you how pissed I am that I had to pay for two more years of law school to be "qualified" to do the job I was doing for the last 4.5 years (prosecution) when I was just as capable of doing it in the form of an unpaid internship after having completed my 1L year with a bit of OJT and some supervision here and there by licensed attorneys (hooray for Michigan's exceedingly liberal "student practice" rules...). Frankly, given the knowledge I already had going into law school, I'd have been just as capable of the work without stepping foot in a law school classroom with just about the same amount of OJT and supervision.

I still think that one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated against the American youth was creating a situation where massive amounts of debt were not dischargeable through bankruptcy which incentivized the most predatory of lending schemes... the modern student loan. It's debt that can easily eclipse that of a mortgage of a decent house (well, I guess now it's more like the note on a nice pickup truck... Thank you inflation) and the value of the "good" obtained (education) is entirely prospective. If it doesn't work out for you, you can't trade it away or sell it like a tangible good, you're stuck with it because it has no transferable or intrinsic value. All of the risk lies with the borrower and none of it lies with the lender... which is insane. You can't find this dynamic anywhere else, and because of it, teenagers are able to accrue an almost limitless amount of debt relying upon the promises of their parents and teachers that this debt means a better life for them in the future... all with no practical way out if those promises of a better future turn out to be a load of horse shit.

$100,000 for a degree in Gender Studies? Sign right here... No matter what the degree, the bank winds up getting theirs because there's no risk to the financial institution. The debts aren't dischargeable, and tons of these loans are federally subsidized.

Honestly, students should be forced to sit through the "exit counseling" that comes with federal student loans long before they sign on the dotted line to take their first college class. I vividly remember going through the exit counseling at the end of my three years in law school and having the algorithm tell me that with my debts I should look for a job that paid a minimum of $400,000/year (no, I'm not kidding). And this was attending a public law school with some substantial academic scholarships, not some top-14 private law school (and my out of state tuition was still lower than the tuition I'd have paid in-state in Michigan!). Start frontloading that information, and we might see a turnaround in the number of kids going to college or grad school.

If I was 18 right now and starting out, I’d prob join the military, get a FREE education, training and experience, travel the world, then go to trade school or college cheaply.  Becoming a plumber or electrician would be very appealing for example.

Starting out with no education debt and lots of skills / experience is invaluable.

Problem is, most people would laugh if that were suggested as their option, going military to earn a education is a sacrifice that is beyond them, he’ll most of those insane $100k bullshit degrees were due to the “ college experience “ where kids expected to party for 4 years and racked up huge debt in the process.

Sacrifice….  when the fact is building a successful life is nothing BUT sacrifice for the first 20 years. The first 20 years SUCKS, your Working shit shifts, doing low man jobs, working overtime, working holidays, weekends, birthdays, taking cheap vacations or taking no vacation / skipping your vacation to save money etc.

Expecting to step out of school and expecting to have your parents lifestyle it took them 30 years to build / afford, and  have the same big house, nice cars, 4 weeks vacation, never do shit jobs etc is delusional.

You are two generations behind

Lol, Gen X was told repeatedly that Social Security would be bankrupt long before we were retirement aged…

One things that's actually come back around, especially on the zoomers and later millenials is the alignment of the service economy with the GIG economy. Which if you aren't saddled by a lot of debt you can get by pretty well depending on your skills. And I don't mean just being an uber driver or something.

Yep.  I want to make sure not to do the reverse mortgage thing.  My wife wants to sell our rental house to pay off our home mortgage right now.  It's very low interest.  She keeps getting advice from people with mediocre wealth.  I told her that we need to keep the rental because everyone telling us to keep it are the wealthier people we know.

It makes money for us every month.  And the more passive income, the better.

I want to set up some kind of trust so that if I die first, she can't reverse mortgage or sell the houses.  I want my kids to get something.  

I don't know what my dad's plans are, but I would not be surprised to get nothing.

That's very impressive, because all the estimates I see say that would pay $16 an hour

Attached File


Attached File

Got a friend pulling similar as a pipe fitter here. They trained him and he still bitches, but I told him to stick with it.

Perhaps.  I know I'd be divorced if I had a reliable fall back position.  But I might be happier overall.

I'll circle back up to something I pointed out up-thread;

My entire Boomer extended family had their parents carefully arrange to pass on a chunk of wealth, usually also after paying for their college and first vehicles.    Only one of them in turn helped *one* of their kids, a bit.    One side of the family they also contested wills and straight up stole everything that was to be left from their parents to the grandkids, in addition to taking what was earmarked for them.

This is not at all uncommon.

Likely averaged out with rural pay.  When I was living in NY the union guys in the city averaged double what the rural guys made in the tri-state area. It was explained as cost of living differential.

True.. only fans seems to be a top job for many these days.

Your position would be more convincing if you could argue with hard numbers rather than "feelings" and (inevitably biased) think tank studies.

The "struggling" millennials I've talked to simply don't like working.  It's a fact that there are plenty of unfilled well-paying jobs, lenders are still offering mortgages, auto dealers are still selling cars, and hospitals still deliver babies.  Young couples just need to be willing to work enough to pay the bills, like every generation before them, in order to achieve the American Dream.

I was thinking EXACTLY what Oakley posted before I read it and I'm not a boomer.

Yup. I understand, I stay married for years when I REALLY wanted out, purely because Iv have been homeless if I divorced. Zero safety net for me. I did it anyway years later, and was homeless for a month, then only ate via people donating food to me for another 3 months as rent and divorce bills took my entire income with nothing left for food.


Issue with such safety nets is  Many people turn safety nets into hammocks, and enablers allow them to lay in them indefinitely.