Jeremiah

Boomers should be weighed and measured by the youth culture of the late 60s to mid-80s, less so.

So Woodstock is fairly theirs, but so is the inward individualist turn of the 1970s.

End quote.

Scott writes, I appreciate this clarification.

Camoteau writes, quote, This is also a vibes thing.

It certainly turned malignant, but most of the millennial contempt I see for boomers at least started out as simple frustration over boomers not recognising that they had lived in a period where it was relatively easy to accumulate wealth in the form of property and pensions and stable jobs.

Essentially, it's a form of envy, and envy is always the worst when people, the people that you envy, act like everything they've achieved is a result of a normal process as opposed to a confluence of timing and opportunity.

The stereotypical boomer under this model is your parent who tells you they don't understand why you're still living in a crummy little apartment, not realizing that a mortgage where you live costs four times what you pay in rent."

Scott writes, I kind of want to disagree with this by reiterating the graph showing that millennials are richer than boomers at the same age, but I'm not sure that works.

My memories of these sorts of conversations are that even when I'm doing well relative to older people, their advice still grates.

Like, yes, I eventually got a great job and I'm very happy, but no, it was not correct to ask why I didn't have a job yet at time X, or to ask why I hadn't solved this problem yet by walking into an office in a nice suit, giving someone a firm handshake and depositing my resume on their desk.

Mackenzie writes, quote, There is one aspect of the boomer generation vis-à-vis institutional power that I don't see touched upon in this essay that I see as another force driving anti-boomer sentiment.

It's that boomers, as a cohort, have remained in leadership roles for an exceptionally long time in Congress, as executives, etc., whereas other generations were faster to transition leadership to others.

This boomers versus millennials framing is explained very well in this email exchange between Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg.

I recommend the whole email exchange, but I'll heavily quote this reply from Thiel.

Quote,

and that for a whole variety of reasons, this generational transition has been delayed as the boomers have maintained an iron grip on many US institutions.

When the handover finally happens in the 2020s, it will therefore happen more suddenly and perhaps more dramatically than people expect, or that such generational transitions have happened in the past.

And that's why it's especially important for us to think about these issues and try to get ahead of them.

The commenter continues, One example of such an iron grip from my colleague Eric Weinstein.