I was at a party one time. Right before covid, so not super recently, but more recent than 20-30 years ago. Older guy was complaining about young people complaining about housing costs. “Just buy a cheap house in %suburb! You could get one for $200,000,” he said.

I was like “uhhh I’ll call that bluff. I’m in the market right now. I’ve been preapproved for $300,000 and I can’t find a house around here. If you can find me a house in %suburb for $200,000, I’ll pay you a $10,000 finders fee.”

This dude spent the next two hours of the party not talking to anyone, locked in on his phone, looking at real estate listings. Then he finally apologized to me and was like “wow, I really didn’t know it was so bad.”

It almost happens weekly to me for aome reason. I'm a house technician in my forties, but i look really young. Eapecially older people often think i'm 20 something. I often work in their homes, fixing and renovating. I'm not much into Smalltalk, so i usually don't start conversations, but at some point they go: man, young people or young people like you just don't want to work anymore. Anf i go: yeah? Crazy. And then they tell me that they were a woodworker and their wife wotked a service job three times a week to afford this home and 3 kids when they were 23. They continue to tell stories that their grandchildren or whoever only work to 5pm, or whenever their shift is over and fon't care about the company they work for. They kinda never seem to be self aware enough to realise that their grandchildren or whoever they talk about are also around that age and often have way better jobs then they had and can't afford children, don't even think about owning a house because it's so far out of the scope. Anf it has nothing to do with them being lazy.

Yep. The excuse was "but we earned far less back then too!" and then you have to show them what their income actually was scaled to 2026 inflation. And then they shut up for a bit. Until they bring it up again.

My mother and stepdad were Silent Gen, but they were chalk full of pithy folk whizdum such as this. Mostly involving the virtues of being a doormat at work.

Mom paid $5700 for the house in 1972. After they were both dead, we found out my stepdad had been a hoarder and ruined the place. We still got 600K.

No shit. I hear things like: "Only immigrants still want to work." at my summer job. Yes, I DON'T WANT TO HAVE A JOB WHICH DESTROYS MY BODY MY WHOLE LIFE AND WILL BE AUTOMATED THE SECOND IT CAN BE.

My father, pretty fresh out of Viet Nam and only a couple years in the Chicago Fire Department was able to get a mortgage for a cute house on the outskirts of town.

Unfortunately for me, now that it is time to pry my aging mom from the property it has been largely unimproved and we'll be lucky to get 300k for it. That's still twice what they paid for it, ultimately.

I could have taken it over like my dad did his mother's house, but there's no way I'm rotting out where I grew up. I like culture too much.

Edit: It was probably 50k when they signed the mortgage, but ended up paying for it 3+times. She's lived there almost 50 years and still doesn't own it.

My mother who is in her mid 70s says shit like this, but she is very divorced from reality at this point. My right leaning in laws probably say things like this, but I try to speak to them as little as possible so I don't hear the regurgitated Fox News that comes out of their mouths.

Boomers and Gen X on a regular basis yea

Not the house part directly but I got the work part repeatedly after graduation from my own family (who are renting). It was constant verbal harassment about laziness and 'not wanting to work' under threats of being kicked out onto the street. Stopped only after a job agency they picked had every partnered employer reject me and my degree for 6 months straight. The only reason given was a paradoxical "overqualified and under-experienced" which is to say the boomer retoric of "degrees = jobs" was fatally backwards in an era where employers only offered minimum wage for the job responsibilities of 3 people.

Took 4 years after university to land my first job and only as a contract labor hire on an assembly line in late 2019... FML. Spent the past 5 years of underpaid work forcing my way back into software QA just in time for the era of slop... FML part 2. I now make decent money and live with my partner but to my parents it's like those 4 years of victim blaming never happened and my success is magically attributable to their 'support'.

TLDR: It is absolutely a real mindset still driving boomer cognitive dissonance with reality.

Yes. Twice within the last 3 years at least.

An acquaintance of a friend of mine owns their own business and was saying that they voted for Trump and weren't worried that so many of their hard-working employees had quit our been deported because

"Nobody wants to work anymore. My employees work hard because they don't have a choice, but now that I don't have enough eventually I'll have to hire white people and they'll learn how to work hard because they'll have to. Trump's plan is working."

Or something very similar to that.

Literally had my step dad say something to this effect recently, yeah.

All. the. time. From family and from friends of the family

No. My parents had 8% interest for their loan and the rate was something like 80% of their income. This was 1990 already though.

Yeah

My parents

Admittedly, they did put in a bit of work to get where they are, but they happily ignore the fact that they were born into a position of relative privilege and that the world is a very different place

Even while they moan about how different things are now...

The thing that angers me the most is that I said to my mom "I'm never going to have a retirement....."

I'm 42, no house, no retirement savings, no 401k, and no way to save for those things. Some weeks I don't have enough money to buy food.

My moms response was "Oh you'll be fine! I struggled when I was in my 20s, with both of your sisters, and I turned out ok!"

Yes, it's true that for about 5 years my mom had it as hard, maybe harder than I do. The difference is, then she met my dad, moved in with him, her money problems disappeared. She then got a better job, with retirement options, and a 401k, and benefits.

Then she bought her own house in the 90s. The seller wasn't sure if he wanted to sell to her as a single woman. So she said "you can either sell to me, or sell to someone else. The price is the same either way. You may as well just sell now, rather than waiting for the next buyer."

THATS the speech that got her the house.

Today, you'd get laughed at.

My biggest problem with boomers isn't their selfish nature, or the fact that they've had an easy life. My biggest problem is that they refuse to admit that times have changed. I CAN'T live life the way boomers did. I'd LOVE to wear a suit, walk into a business, demand to see the manager before I even fill out an application and talk myself into a job. I'd LOVE to do that......but thats not how it works anymore! Now you fill an application out online, submit it to an AI crawler that steals your data, be in competition with 500 other applicants, and most of the time never hear back.

I asked my brother in law 10 years ago if he could get me a job at his fortune 500 company. He works there, he's not the owner, but I was asking him to put in a good word, get my application even looked at.

He's my age, and this was said right in front of my mom. He said "I couldn't do that. That would be nepotism". I said "Yeah. I'm fine with nepotism if it means I canpay my bills."

And my mom asked if I wanted her to storm the corporate offices of Progressive Insurance, and hunt down the CEO for an interview.

So I just said yes. Not because I think it would work, but because I knew she'd fail spectacularly. Maybe even get arrested on a light charge. Then maybe she'd realize how times change.

But she just said "I can't always fight your battles for you. This is something YOU need to do."

God dammit.

You mean 10.75%?

Hell, the house my dad got when he was a train driver with a wife that didn’t work and with 2 kids is a house I can’t buy as a senior software developer with 3 cats.

My dad bought a house when he was mid 30s and the solo bread winner for the house a couple of years after I was born. I loved that neighbourhood. It wasn't anything too special. The houses there are 50s-90s builds, 2-3 bedrooms, maybe 2 bathrooms (our second bathroom in that house was almost an outhouse in the basement -- concrete floor, exposed pipes, door that looked like it belonged on a shed, etc. My dad and a friend built a back deck which was really nice. There is a park nearby. There's access to a nice bike path. It's not on a through-route at all, so the only cars entering the neighbourhood are residents or guests. It's not near shopping, not near public transit, not really near any schools. It was just a quiet, modest, neighbourhood.

I'm significantly older, don't have any kids to support, have been saving for ages, had better, and higher paying jobs (inflation adjusted) than him. I can't really afford any house in that neighbourhood. The only people buying there now are multi-millionaires, but they're moving in next to families who have been there for 30ish years and know enough not to give up a good thing.

It just seems to me that a rule of thumb with housing is that in general you should be able to afford to buy in the neighbourhood where you grew up. I know sometimes that isn't possible. Cities get denser, areas become highly sought after, etc. But, if the neighbourhood really is basically the same, and you earn what your parents did (or better), you should be able to stay nearby.

The problem is all that will do is freeze the housing market. If the prices have dropped through the floor, people just don't sell (unless they are forced to)

Nah, a fuck ton of people have CPTSD from persistent and consistent narcissistic abuse from their Boomer parents and those who think and act like them.

Its why 1/4 to 1/3 of millennials and gen z have gone no contact with at least one of their parents.

This is a legitimate phenomenon of the Boomer generation being disproportionately absurdly selfish and abusive.

If you're a millennial and your grandparents are still alive, pretty good chance they're no where near as fundamentally shitty and horrible as your parents are... significantly less people going no contact with the grandparents.

There can be no solidarity with an abuser.

I understand the sentiment, but the main boomer in my life still thinks I'm lazy despite working 12-14 hours a day 7 days a week.

I found out the other day they also badmouth me and my partner for not having kids. They also think we don't own a house yet solely because we're irresponsible.

They also voted for Trump three times and currently believe the economy is thriving better under him than it would have otherwise. They have insane levels of American exceptionalism.

I have nothing in common with them and I will also go practice unplugging a lamp.

The problem is definitely both. While the old coots that talk like the guy in the comic might not have directly ripped off everyone (except many have on more personal levels), their ignorance and entrenched positions make it far more difficult to fight the billionaires when there is a massive group of people who are totally unwilling to even admit there is a problem to address.

We're not fighting them because they're rich, we're fighting the boomer class because they keep giving the billionaires power because they think we're lazy and billionaires worked hard for their money