During a recent business trip I made a most curious observation. I stayed at a typical business hotel, meaning that you get functional, clean rooms, and a perfectly serviceable breakfast buffet. As is common, before entering the breakfast area, the service staff asks for your room number to check whether your stay includes breakfast. If not, they turn you away, asking you to buy a voucher at reception, for instance.
During one morning, two boomers who gave me strong early-lifer vibes were in front of me in the queue. They feigned surprise that their stay did not include breakfast and thanked the service staff member for the reminder to buy a voucher — but to make sure that the breakfast was up to their standards, they wanted to have a look at the buffet first, which they were granted. They then looked around, pacing themselves, and once they thought they were out of sight, they casually took a plate and piled up the food.
You may think that some entitled boomers scamming a hotel out of some food is not a big deal. However, this kind of freeloading mentality undermines societal cohesion. This is the so-called freeloader problem. Individually, those boomer scammers get a free breakfast, but they burden other guests with the costs as the food has to be paid for by someone. In the end, prices will have to be adjusted, and if too many people behave like those two parasites, then it is likely that hotels will need to hire security, which also costs money.
The fact that those people were boomers, in an environment where the guests as well as the staff were on average probably around half their age, was also most fitting because this kind of behavior is a perfect reflection of the problem of the boomer in society. You know about boomers telling you about how easy it is to get a job: just go to the business district, enter a building you like the look of, go to the reception desk and ask to speak to a manager. Then you look him in the eye as you shake his hand firmly and tell them that you are looking for work. It was really that fucking easy back in the days.
What I find aggravating when dealing with boomers is that many of them exhibit a level of solipsism that rivals TikTok thots. The boomer tells the 30-year-old guy that when he was his age, he had his house paid off and fathered four children already, so why are you slacking off so much? I know boomers who were able to retire in their early 50s, with a fully maxed out government pension, and a company pension on top. This was possible in Germany a few decades ago. The rationale was that those employees started to cost too much money and were not suited for managerial or elite specialist work, so companies and the government split the costs of their retirement. Today, you will not only get a much lower government pension, you will also get enormous penalties for retiring early, and if you are no longer of use to your employer they just kick you out.
The best encapsulation of how out of touch with reality boomers are is not the firm-handshake nonsense but housing prices. Housing used to be really fucking cheap. I know of some boomer who told me what he paid for the plot he built his land on, and the house. Mortgages for more than ten years seemed almost unheard off. Land was apparently easy to get, too. Well, in the decades since then, land has gotten so scarce that its price far outpaced inflation. In this particular region, you now pay over 1,000 times as much as in the 1970s. This is surely an outlier, but today the situation is that you can only afford buying or building a house if you are very well off whereas back then even people with comparatively modest means managed to build a house.
Of course, those boomers are also the people whose life you finance in the typical socialist European country. I pay sky-high taxes and social security so that boomers (and foreign-born doctors and engineers) have a good life, but my chances of meaningfully climbing the socioeconomic ladder are comparatively limited. I can consider myself happy if I manage to get to where my father was at 30 when I am 60, but chances are that we will see major economic and societal upheaval until then so the deck is stacked against me and others in my generation. They don’t see this, and they just feel entitled to all the effectively free money and economic opportunities they had gotten — and this may even mean that they don’t even shrug when they weasel their way into the breakfast area at your hotel and eat without paying.
Boomers screwing over the younger generation is one of the most important topics in the world.
A big problem is housing of course. You already mentioned how boomers could easily afford a house. They also have a massive advantage in renting. Boomer couples or singles of have double as big apartments in the city than a family of 4, while paying less than half of the rent.
The other big problem is pensions. Boomers get a massive pension that allows them to even save money, while the young generation pays massive taxes and will see no pension whatsoever.
Currently traveling got super expensive with outrageous flight and hotel prices. I am wondering who can afford this travel? Well it wouldn’t surprise me the boomers who retire now are just traveling around the world like billionaires. Of course because of that normal families can’t afford vacation anymore
Incidentally, I looked into this issue the other day as well. The official explanation is that there is both increased demand, due to the lifting of scamdemic-related restrictions, and reduced supply as some airlines face staff shortages, some of which may be vaxx-related. Therefore, there are fewer planes in the sky. Of course, this does not change the fact that prices are this high also due to some people being able to pay them. The boomers in my example are also useful for the purpose of illustration: in those hotels, you virtually never see families as they are normally more centrally located and also more expensive. As the cost of such stays lowers the taxable earnings of a company, this does not really affect business travel that much. On the other hand, if you are a boomer who is awash with cash you do not really need to care about increased prices.
“They also have a massive advantage in renting. Boomer couples or singles of have double as big apartments in the city than a family of 4, while paying less than half of the rent.”
You’re taking rent control as a given?
The ones they are renting from are NOT Boomers, why?
And the worst part about this is how casually and confidently the boomers say this crap. They lecture with zero self-awareness and even 0.000000% doubt that they might be wrong, or that things today might be different than in “their day”.
Coincidentally, I actually wanted a comment to expand on my previous discussion about “telling men to man up and stop being loser”. I was going to expand on how I even got started thinking about where this stuff is coming from. It actually came from me being frustrated with boomers going on podcasts and interviews and talking how “easy” it is to get women, “just don’t be a complete loser and bum, and you’ll get a woman in 2 seconds”. Basically, they do the same thing in terms of dating, as they do with houses. They’re going off of how the market was then, in THEIR century.
In fact, I’ve often fantasized being in the same podcast with some of these fossils and going. Just to confirm, the last time you went out on a date, this is was in the last CENTURY? Am I correct? Am I also correct that this was not only before tinder was invented, not even the internet or cellphones were in use when you last had a date. Correct?
I brought up Schwarzenegger’s biography a few times, and with how out of touch this guy is. Towards the end, he shares an anecdote about “lazy youth”: In his role of governor of California, he gave a lecture at USC. One student told him that his tuition got hiked twice in a short amount of time, and that this puts financial stress on him. Schwarzenegger’s response was to ask him about his course load. The student says that its a few hours a day, so, in Schwarzenegger’s mind, the guy just needs to take on a job to make ends meet, like he did back in his days. Of course, not only is the course load most likely spread across the day, making it difficult to hold down a steady job while studying, it is also the case that tuition was essentially a non-issue in the 1960s or 1970s in the US. You could make enough money to cover tuition and living expenses if you worked during the summer, based on what I read.
This reminds me of the hoeflation meme, which states that men today have to put in approximately 10x the effort for like women that are 10x worse in quality than what their grandmothers were in their prime.
That’s literally my favorite meme of all time.
If I’m not mistaken then I believe the meme originated from this 4chan post: https://files.catbox.moe/gsuu6x.jpeg
Boomers are responsible for you being a dating loser despite that fact that neither you nor your date are boomers, correct?
And what does Tinder have to do with this?
Lol, wrong blog to pull that tactic on. Everyone on here is easily in the top 10% of lays (“dates” in boomer speak).
Before Tinder was invented women only could choose from the men in their immediate social circles. The average cutie had access to between 0 to 1 high-tier men. Now she has access to literally thousands, at the swipe a finger.
Women’s expectations upregulate based on the high-end of what’s available to them. Back in your century if all she had access to were average guys, then her criteria of what’s “good enough” were very close to the average. Today average women find average men “icky and disgusting”. Again, it’s just biology based on the relative scale of what’s available.
We’re not that young here either, but not so old that we’d have stopped “dating” before the internet came on. So unlike you, we started dating in the pre-tinder era, and some of us in the pre-social-media era. The changes happened before our eyes.
Boomer life:
– Grow up in an ethnically homogeneous neighborhood.
– Go to college; tuition is laughably low.
– Summer internships pay for tuition, room, board, car, and entertainment.
– Never write a CV. Just walk into an office building downtown and ask to speak to the manager.
– Marry a virginal woman who is slim, does not have tattoos, and knows how to cook and clean.
– Buy a house at 25. Get a five-year mortgage.
– Turn 30, have three kids, the house paid off, and coast into retirement.
– Learn about this new thing called the Internet, finally go online twenty years later, and give young people advice on how to get ahead in life.
I’m curious where this discrepancy between purchasing power of boomers and later generations is coming from. Wages have kept pace with inflation, at least according to official stats.
Are you sure that wages have kept pace with inflation? I would argue that if they had, then housing and college tuition would be a lot more affordable. Of course, inflation metrics are heavily manipulated so this may be the root of the problem.
Good point. Inflation metrics and resulting real wages depend on basket of goods used for calculation. I did a quick check, median household income increased 2.5x since 1987, while US National Home Price Index went up 4.6 times.
For comparison, cost of construction materials increased 2-2.5x. I would argue that wages have kept up with inflation as far as mass-produced goods are concerned, but housing is a much larger drain on finances than before. Funnily enough, if construction materials cost the same, inflation-adjusted, that means the main culprit are restrictive zoning laws. But those can be avoided, especially if you can work remotely, which is why your bleak outlook on financial stability somewhat surprised me.
The CPI is a bogus measure. There is also the “hedonics” factor, which takes into account that you get a higher quality of products nowadays, at least temporarily. As far as I know, this metric does not consider inbuilt obsolescence. Thus, it is irrelevant that you can no longer afford a house because now you can watch porn on a smartphone and get a better experience than your boomer granddad when jerking off in the bathroom at work. The fact that you need to replace your phone every few years is also irrelevant.
In the country I live, houses are very expensive. Basically, a few boomers around here want to sell their old houses at inflated values so that they can live their remaining years to the fullest. The boomers never stop wanting to screw you. Also, while I currently have the convenience of working remotely, there is no guarantee that this will last indefinitely long. Thus, even if I could easily afford a house, I would be hesitant to buy one. On top, there is the problem that housing for “doctors and engineers” gets put up all over the country, and this includes even remote villages. In the small village I live in, there are a few multi-family tenements for “refugees”. This includes Ukrainian families. Those are also the ones with the fanciest cars around, but that is a different topic.
Energy and health care costs have also heavily outpaced increased wages. All of the important things.
” Wages have kept pace with inflation, at least according to official stats.”
Official stats are of course garbage. But here are some:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/50-years-of-us-wages-in-one-chart/
Alright, according to this article, real wages were the same in 1973 an 2019. Now, please tell me how this is supposed to make any sense when you look at real housing prices or the cost of higher education. In 1973 you could finance your college education, and then some, with a summer job.
Exactly, Aaron. We already made this fucking point. It’s not that candy bars are unaffordable. It’s the ESSENTIALS that are unaffordable.
It important to note the era that boomers grew up in and came of age. Middle classes are not the historic norm. Even today the vast majority of the world does not have any. Look at the WWII generation. Grew up in poverty, then the Depression hit, then the war. After the war ended things got really great for three decades.
It’s like an anomaly . A flash in the pan. Almost an accident in history. And the greatest beneficiaries were the boomers, who assumed this is the way it always was and will forever be. Things have been receding now for almost 50 years, but the boomers went untouched. I can see how a spoiled generation could have a hard time grasping the economic realities of the day, but they need some perspective. They are indeed the most entitled generation in history.
That the middle class is a historical anomaly is a very good point. It is shrinking all over the world. In a recent interview with the economist Michael Hudson he states that there is no middle class at all. It is just the 99% vs the 1%, which I also consider a valid perspective. Even if you are solidly in the middle class, your lifestyle is much closer to the poor than the rich. Also, I find it most peculiar that today’s middle class and upper middle class quality of life is perhaps at the level some in the lower to middle class could have fifty years ago, if not below that. Again, think of the boomers who were able to easily afford a house on one salary and with a normal job.
Think about the boomers you know. So many fucking imbeciles. The generations that followed them are much more educated and skilled. Yet, can’t afford to own a home. While the boomers are sitting on gold mines.
In a lot of countries it’s not only the boomers who could easily afford housing prices.
When you look at a lot of countries, there was usually a period when housing prices went through the roof. The generation that followed that period is screwed.
For example, In Germany prices exploded in the 2010s (until now). If you worked in the 90s and bought a house in the beginning of the 2000s you were good. This technically includes non-boomers as you could have been born in 1970, started working in 1995 and then bought a house before 2010. However, all the generations who only entered the labor market in the 2000s were screwed as they were not able to accumulate enough capital to afford a house. And the generation now is even more screwed because they have to pay massive rents and won’t be able to save anything.
Of course something else happened in the 2010s which could explain why housing prices went berserk.
LOL. This always comes to mind when I think of boomers:
https://youtu.be/slvGKU7HF6M
Bastards couldn’t even appreciate it. Had to create a “counter culture.” Spoiled fucks.
Actually Happy Days is just one example of 1970s entertainment that harkened back to the 1950s. As if the industry was like, “Oops. Sorry for that whole 1960s thing. I mean, we were on drugs.”
“Boomer” is defined as people born from 1946 to 1964. So the characters on Happy Days were pre-Boomers.
For us “boomers” are not just people born in those years but also anyone who has internalized the boomer mindset, i.e. the whole firm-handshake-and-eye-contact shtick. For instance, my father is still wondering why I did not build a house at 25. The problem with “boomers” is that they do not realize that the world has changed. Worse, the world has changed for the worse due to their own, incredibly short-sighted actions.
It was the era they grew up in. And, like I said, rebelled against for some inexplicable reason.
When I was a kid a Hershey bar was 5 cents. A Mounds bar was 10 cents, but went up to 12 cents before my age got to two digits. This is inflation, not Boomer Privilege.
Surely the low-IQ Gen Xer on the door could have told the scammers to go buy the voucher and that they could get a refund if they gave over the voucher but returned promptly for it after they looked at the buffet if they didn’t want it? Part of running a business well is not making yourself an easy victim.
And why are we supposed to assume that this scam is a particularly Boomer thing, again?
Do you know what the word “parable” means?