On why the Boomers suck

Every time this comes up, it just makes me think of that Christopher Buckley book about the Boomers and Millenials and the main character's idea to fix social security by offering tax breaks to those who would voluntarily commit suicide at the age of 55.

Yeah, they screwed us over pretty good.

I've spoken with boomers I reapect about this topic before and I do have some sympathy for them. Boomers were raised to believe hard work was enough to get ahead and that climate change wasnt a big deal (due in part to the oil companies burying key evidence). Also, boomers did a lot right from helping to push forward civil and women's rights, ending the draft, and driving some of the greatest tech revolution the world has ever known.

Not saying they don't deserve criticism and their treatment of millennials is even worse than how they treated Xers. But as with all generations they've done both good and bad and it's way too easy to paint an entire generation for the sins of an elite few - the boomer politicians and CEOs who convinced average boomers to work against their best interests.

My boomer mother will rant about millennials to me(I'm a millennial). "Why are they buying such expensive houses!?!" Well can you find a reasonable house in Portland for them to buy instead? "No, because they are all paying too much for houses!"

It's this vicious cycle of the boomers blaming millennials for situations the millennials are forced into due to the boomers. I remember in a marketing course in college(mid-2000's) that boomers see themselves as giving the most to charity per capita while in reality they give the least per capita of any age group(I don't have the study to cite unfortunately).

There is the boomer/millennial job joke floating around that I really like and relate to:
Boomer manager: You can have unlimited soda and crazy art on the walls!
Millennial: I would like fair compensation for my education and experience.
Boomer manager: Nope, you get bean bag chairs!

Is that really their fault? Or a side-effect of the continually accelerating rate of societal and technological progress?

I mean, it's not like someone born in the 50's and raising kids in the 80s could have reasonably predicted the finer points of modern life.

To whit, I fully expect that our generation is going to do an equally crap job of preparing our kids to be adults in the 2040s and 2050s, because we have no fricking clue what life is going to be like that far out in the future.

I dare you to tell him...

Yeah, they're the same.

Gen Y was essentially a lame generation name placeholder. Literally the only reason they were called Gen Y was because they followed Gen X.

Once people realized that Gen Y'ers would start to come of age around 2000 everyone started to adopt the name Millennials.

Yes, it's really their fault. It has nothing to do with the finer points of modern life, and everything to do with teaching your kids to be respectful of others, how to learn, that the world owes them nothing, and that life is a lot more complicated than they think. The Boomers as a generation lack humility and a sense of their own limitations. The Boomers believe they solved all their problems, when in reality they built their Great Society by mortgaging their children's future. Now those structures are falling apart and the bill is starting to come due - and the Boomers are retiring, arrogant and unrepentant, blaming the current generations for failures they set in motion.

The Millenials know it, too. That's why they are so distrustful of the societal structures the Boomers built - they know those structures are designed to benefit the Boomers at their expense. They, like the Gen Xers, know they are never going to get Social Security but will be forced to pay for it, and to pay it out to multiple Boomers who are richer than they are. They know they will never be able to afford good health care, while at the same time they are providing it to the Boomers.

I hadn't had chance to respond last night but Aetius pretty much said what I was going to say.

Just to clarify - I was never calling millennials whimps, nor do I think a marathon finishing medal is a "participation medal." I'm talking more of the awards they hand out to the last place team just for showing up - which is something I see a lot as a parent of a young kid.

Finally, I had a chance to finish the Atlantic piece that Paleocon posted in the OP. That was a terrifying look at what's coming down the pike. I'm willing to still defend individual boomers but as a whole you're right. Future generations really are F'ed.

Yes. My grandparents can burn for what they did.

I have a lot of trouble with this trope (or any that characterizes behavior by measures as broad as decadal birth cohorts). It seems to me to be summing up an entire period of history, it's struggles and successes and failures, based on a particular point in time, and then blaming everyone older than a certain age for how things turned out.

And yet, many of them - even most of them depending on how you look at it - worked hard to make positive changes. But they are lumped in with the folks who drove nations in less useful directions.

It's too simple. Oh, were there problems in the 30's through 50's? That's because everyone in that era was a Nazi, or failed to fight them hard enough. Successes? Must be because that was the Greatest Generation. 50's through 70's failures? All Commies or spineless Liberals. Successes? Well, that's down to the brave big government technocrats who ushered in a new era of technology. 80's through today? Depends on your politics, doesn't it?

It's a pernicious generalization that ignores the fact that we, today, all generations, have to work together to make changes successfully. And the fact that that has not yet happened reflects poorly on *all* generations, not just Boomers.

Missing the point.