Entitled millennials?

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^ Gotta say, I agree that it isn't the same thing.

For years, each generation did better than the one before. I got to meet some of my great grandparents, and they damn well had it better off than their parents. My grandparents did better than their parents. Then my parents, you bet they did better than their parents. I don't know if my age range is doing better than our parents. I know I'm not doing better than mine, but I don't know the data on that one. From my own perspective, my peers are not fairing as well as their parents. Now millennials? They have it way harder than my generation has had it. And it isn't for lack of trying on their end.

From my perspective, yeah, my parents gave me crap like the old folks gave them crap back in their day. It happens. I'll give you all that, that is reality. People will do that. But at the end of the day, we could work and live adult lives even when we were being given crap. I managed to buy my first house at 19. Yeah, I had a spouse and wasn't doing it solo, but we did it. And we did it working basic jobs. I had a full-time retail job and the spouse worked full-time at a pizza joint. You can't do that now. You can't afford a car on that salary now, let alone a house. To go and say it's the same is missing some very important points and taking away from the reality that these people who are struggling got handed a horrible deal that they didn't bring onto themselves. It's not just old folks fussing at kids nowadays. It's people refusing to see the reality that younger adults are living.

Back in 2017 I started this thread "Is It All The Baby Boomers Fault?"

As I wrote at the time



The bolded parts are relevant to the economic emphasis of this thread.

In hindsight, I still think most of what I wrote back then still stands up. The big miss on my part was not saying a thing about Generation Z.

As an American born in 1952, I can see parallels between my generation and Millennials. People my age entered adulthood in the early 1970s which was for the US was a time of "malaise" and "stagflation", when Jimmy Carter wore a sweater on TV and told Americans they basically had to do with less. So most people in their 20s waited a long time before getting a chance to build any sort of wealth.

Millennials had a similar experience with the Great Recession occurring while most of them were also in their 20s and they have faced a similar challenge.

The biggest difference I can see is that the widespread anti-materialism promoted in 1960s culture (some of which was quite fake but the more gullible of us took it to heart) encouraged some of us to accept our reduced expectations as a chance to live the simpler life epitomized by the Hippie movement, or at least its popular perception. Forming a commune and living on vegetables you raised yourself and getting high for entertainment was more of an aspiration than a sad fate. In contrast, Millennials have no such mythology to make them feel better about their predicament.

I must also stress that when making statements about Boomers, you have to remember that a person born in 1952 is considered a Boomer, but so is somebody born in 1962, and the latter has had a very different experience. They entered adulthood at the start of the Reagan Revolution, and no matter how you feel about Reagan's politics, this was a fantastic era in which to build wealth. Older Boomers like myself went through some lean times before experiencing that. I wouldn't be surprised if the Late Boomers are responsible for all this Boomer Wealth everyone complains about.

Don't forget Boomers are getting old and have already started croaking in large numbers. A lot of Boomer real estate is going to come available. Some of it may even be inherited by Millennial children. Better late than never I suppose.

the situation of boomers in the 70s and millenials now is similar in that there's economic crisis - and entirely opposite as to why.
After ww2, wages were high, union membership was high, lots of strikes, closed economies. the high wages led to inflation, and the crisis of the 70s is a revolt of capitalists because wages and inflation outran their returns, and their money had nowhere to go to become more money - so why invest?

the answer was neoliberal globalisation - dreamt up by some Austrian a**holes after ww1. And that's my polite take on Hsyek and Schumpeter. The idea was to push wages of local workers down to the level of the poorest workers in the world.
And that's where we are now. Union membership is low, Wages are low - they were supplemented with credits until 2008, so people didn't reallt feel poor.
The money our Central Banks printed and made cheaply available in an effort to raise wages and, through inflation, get rid of everyone's debt, failed miserably, bevause capitalists figured: how about we don't pay higher wages and don't invest, but buy back our own stock and pay ourselves high dividends- and how about we buy up property, because everyone will have to pay us rent.

it's been a generation long war of capital against labour, and capital won.
The thing I dislike about millennials - my generation - and myself -is that we should be fighting labour fights like its 1915.
except, in 1915, your job couldn't easily be outsourced, because global supply chains were in their infancy.

I seriously do not know how this can be fixed without bloodshed. I mean, working class action has always been a very violent affair, as recent as the 70s rich people in the West would rather have unions shot at by hired gangsters than raise wages.... there will be a new Mao, sometime, but in the meantime, the disenfranchised working class will keep voting obscene outsiders into power, until there's another Hitler.

Another Boomer here.  The previous generation lectured me on how hard work leads to success; but they never told me how hard it was going to be.  Working three jobs to put myself through college to earn a STEM degree sure seemed a helluva a lot harder than working some cushy union job for 2x or 3x minimum wage while drunk.

Oh yeah, I was the loser with his nose in a book for four years while they were buying houses, getting married, and having kids ... kids who nowadays are whining because all of the "good" union jobs have gone overseas because their parents kept striking for higher and higher wages and eventually struck themselves out of the job market entirely.

There used to be lots of jokes going around about how people with HASS degrees wound up working in fast-food restaurants; but now it seems that those Millennials whose parents worked union jobs are competing for those same fast-food counter jobs.

And somehow, this is all my fault; and only because I stayed in school while their parents did not.

I used to think that millenial meant people born in the year 2000. Then I find out it refers to people born in the 80s? The 80s wasn't the boundry between the millenia, 2000 was.

I know your struggle is your identity, but even you had a very easy ride. For example:



Working to put yourself through college isn't actually possible any more, it's become a wistful Boomer meme. Unless you mean working for 25 years, saving up and attending in your 40s. Tuition and housing costs have exploded, while wages have not.



I don't know how much their unionised parents had to do with it, but that would have been you metaphorically applying to McDonalds with your STEM degree in hand, had you been born 30 years later than you were. Your degree and your toils, real or imagined, would not have saved you from it.

Even the ones that do get proper graduate jobs that actually require degrees find themselves struggling to get anything close to the standard of living enjoyed by the most listless of Boomers.



Not All Boomers Are Like That etc. If you don't want to be the hated Boomer, the least you need to do is acknowledge the obvious, statistical truth that younger generations have it much harder than you did and that you, collectively, left the world worse than you found it. You can't choose the economic conditions you are born into, but you might at least acknowledge them, rather than blame the victims or their parents. Most Boomers can't do that, because they are the Peter Pan generation, the Eternal Teenagers, squeezing themselves into jeans and attending Rolling Stones concerts at 60+, and of late doing little in the world except create localised STD epidemics in nursing homes. Soulless, selfish and solipsistic to the extreme. It's the main reason I hate them, rather than the obvious economic disparity that drives so much anti-Boomer sentiment.

The inconvenient truth is that all this "generational conflict" is really the fault of Generation X. From the get-go, they have thrown shade at Boomers, spewing cynicism and resentment of the world they were born into, nevertheless they became by far the most powerful generation in history as I have always suspected and this confirms my suspicions:

From Silent Gen to Gen Z - which U.S. generation has the most cultural power and influence?

Yet they attract none of opprobrium aimed at Boomers, Millennials, and Gen-Z. I wouldn't be surprised if they have used all this cultural power to manipulate Millennials into hating Boomers, and vice versa.

The fact is, that by rejecting the "countercultural" values attributed to Boomers, Generation X embraced ambition, greed, and the quest for the Almighty Dollar from the start, totally bypassing the idealistic phase every generation is supposed to go through before colliding with cold reality. Madonna's "Material Girl" was always their true generational anthem.

It's time somebody called them out!

I agree that Millennials have fewer opportunities than earlier generations, and it's almost impossible for them to buy homes or survive as independent single adults. I don't know much about economy but I see what it's like for my kids and their friends. The inflated cost of tuition, transportation, food, rent and real estate is far out of line with the best income they might hope to generate, and taxation takes the rest.

I'm a Gen X. My parents were born in the 1930's and my grandparents in the 1910's. I don't think they had it easy either. My dad and both grandparents built their own homes, made their own clothes, made all their own meals (no restaurants), and learned to stretch home economy to the max. My dad even built car engines as a child.



Both of my grandmothers worked, and my mother worked from age 14 to age 70, never missing a day for illness except when she suffered a stroke.

I don't see Millennials out building their own houses or making their own clothes, but I don't think that's the problem. Something is fundamentally wrong with the economy which won't even allow young couples on minimum wage to feed themselves and keep a small flat. I thought minimum wage was designed to be the minimum a person can earn to survive in this world? Somehow it isn't enough even when two people combine their earnings.

I think it's really sad, and doesn't give me much hope for the future.

* I just realised I don't think I know any Baby Boomers? How could that be? *

As a generation x member, I think it is funny that we are even mentioned/blamed in this issue. Unfortunately we are known as the “forgotten generation”, as there was very few of us compared to the generations before and after us. We had to learn to be independent at an early age (latchkey kids), adaptable to advancing technology and to be creative. It was common for my generation growing up to use our imagination and to seek careers that use it.

The older generations thought of us as slackers and thought we would never amount to anything. That was especially true during the mid-1990s to early 2000s. The generation right after us said we were stupid to our faces and said we had no taste in anything. We have been overlooked for a very long time in our abilities. Funny how times have changed. Now, we are looked at as the greener grass on the other side of the fence that some want.

If you want what we got, earn it by learning to becoming adaptable and creative like we did. If you think it was easy, stop dreaming now. I had to spend many years of my life at universities and colleges just to get the doctorate degree that I needed to be unemployed for a full year during The Great Recession. I will still be paying on student loans until the day I die. It is not as glamorous of a life as it seems.

Isabella's photo of her dad building cars inspired me to post this photo of my cousin in Canada, riding a motorcycle (his mother and my mother were first cousins). Despite my being in the same "generation" as he, he was actually born roughly 15 years before I. He spent most of his life in a part of Canada known for having a major Loyalist element to its history, although he did not grow up there and I wouldn't know if any of his ancestors were Loyalists. His sister-in-law did use to subscribe to a Loyalist newsletter (possibly she still does, as she is still alive and kicking last I heard).



I'll confess that the relevance of this is somewhat questionable.

If by entitled you mean in a political context to be where liberties erode the bonds of the collective whole, culminating in socio-cultural narcissism, it is possible. I was reading that baby boomers failed to learn the civic community engagement of their parents. This meant they had failed to learn the lessons of maintaining the overall fabric of democracy by cultivating and nurturing civic bonds that manifest in politically participation in one's community. As a result, each successive generation overall has been more detached from community. Thus it is possible that this sense of entitlement is born out of a libertarian society that is premised around the individual rather than the social collective.

Are the younger generations finding it harder, or are they making it harder on themselves?

It is not my fault that the younger generations are having a tough time.  I taught my kids that no job was too demeaning as long as it was legal.  One is now working in the Philippines as both a full-time home builder and a part-time movie producer, one is now working in Chicago as a software engineer and game designer, and one is now working in Michigan as a respiratory therapist.  None of them relies on hand-outs, none of them has ever gone to prison, and none of them is addicted to drugs.

Members of the younger generation who cannot find work likely set themselves up for failure -- slacking off in school, getting married and/or having children too soon, and getting in trouble with The Law.

The whole idea that an older generation is at fault to the choices younger generations make is a crock of bushlit.  The idea that a loser's own parents are somehow to blame is not.

...or getting sick or being born in the class or growing up in the wrong neighbourhood. Got any other ways to blame the victim Fnord?

How can people who shoot themselves in the foot -- figuratively or literally -- claim to be victims?

Where’s Gen-Y situated in all of this?