Gen Z are over having their work ethic questioned: ‘Most boomers don’t know what it’s like to work 40+ hours a week and still not be able to afford a house’
Gen Z are over having their work ethic questioned: ‘Most boomers don’t know what it’s like to work 40+ hours a week and still not be able to afford a house’
One Gen Zer went viral for explaining how much easier life was for boomers.
Please stop falling for efforts to divide the working class.
Amy such efforts should immediately be viewed as suspicious. The divide is not old vs young, or white vs black, or even rich vs poor. It is the capital class versus the labor class.
Boomers grew up in a very tiny slice of global history where the working class actually got improvements in their material conditions, so it is hard for them to understand the struggles of people before or after... but they are being ground down by capitalism the same as the rest of us.
Your comrades at work may not understand the importance of unions or collective action, but they are still your comrades. Your grandmother may not realize that all of her extra productivity went to make billionaires richer, but she is still your comrade.
or even rich vs poor. It is the capital class versus the labor class
Just another fancy way of saying rich vs poor. The difference is the poors don’t realize they are in a war.
My grandparents aren't comrades. They're dead.
Watch out the propaganda of government and ruling class trying to divide the public and turn people against each others. Boomers are idiots but owning a house is peanuts compared to billionares expenses or the money being spent on military weapons.
I despise most of the boomers
I bought a lawnmower from someone online and went to pick it up. The lady was a turbo hoarder in her late 60's she was smoking and smelled like a brewery. Her home was DISGUSTING. And i mean rat shit on the countertop. The only reason i was in her house was because there was so much shit around her house that the only way into her backyard was through the house. If you haven't seen it, you can not understand how bizzare it was to carry a lawnmower through a hoarder house, when she had technically a big yard around.
I just wanted to get the fuck out of here when she said: a lot of people wanted the lawnmower, but she doesn't sell it to anyone (she mant she didn't sell it to immigrants). And: "no offence to you, but your generation is absolutely useless." It was like some weird snl sketch
I'm going to guess that person's TV has a Fox News logo burned into the bottom corner.
I probably would have just not bought that specific lawnmower and kept using my shitty one.
Among all my friends, there are two clear common denominators between those who rent and those who own houses. The ones renting have office jobs and live in the capital, while the ones who own houses live in smaller cities or the countryside and work in manual labor.
I’m not saying correlation is causation, but it’s an interesting observation - and so far, it applies to 100% of my friends.
Or have office jobs and commute a bit longer.
People say I'm crazy for commuting 1,5 hours (one way). But I get to go home to my own property. Especially now with hybrid working still being a thing, I only go to the office once or twice a week.
I must agree with the people saying you're crazy for having that long commute. That's over a month spent getting to and from work every year. Time is the most valuable asset in the entire world. By working we're trading time for money but for the time spent commuting you're not even getting paid. I would seriously consider trying to find an alternative solution to this.
Well that should be easy to fix. Just have a world war with a general draft and all for about 5 years. Then another one soon after in an arbitrary place. That sort of thing really brings people together, and also kills many of them, all contributing to a healthy housing market!
Me and my fiancee both work full time to just barely survive each month with no savings because the CoL is so fucking high it's unmaintainable. And if you reply with "just move", first: I'm in the midwest, it's not AS bad out here, and second: Moving is a privilege, it's expensive, time consuming, and often times you end up in a worse spot than you were before
Exactly! Same boat, I am too poor to move! Due to missed payments on mortgage, credit cards, and medical bills, our credit score is abysmal. There is no way we can get a new mortgage or pass credit checks for an apartment. On top of that I don't have the time or money to invest into the house so there are many things that need to be fixed, some of these absolutely need to before selling it so I also can't just sell either. 3rd, you're right. Wherever I do end up moving (if somehow we did get approved), it's probably going to cost more due to higher interest rates, and it will most likely cost more. We are praying to make it a few more years until stupid daycare is done so we can finally make ends meet a little...
I never thought I would be in this bad of a situation in my life, but here I am and I just want to survive each day. Thinking about money every day for years now is tiring and stressful. They have a name for it, its called poverty brain.
I had a basic but nice first house, but I sold it to move for a new job. I even was lucky enough to still make a bit of a profit. But not enough, and now I'm stuck back with renting again, can't really afford to buy a new house with interest rates, prices, inflation eroding my income in other areas, and poor availability. I think back to my parents buying their first house and how nice it was by comparison, for a fraction of the price even adjusted for inflation and it gives me a really unfortunate sense of perspective, much less hearing stories like yours or from friends I know who are in a bad situations. I'm not struggling, but prospects for improving things aren't great either, and that seems to be the case for everyone I know.
You just need to put in some extra effort or get a side hustle like we did. /S elder millennial.
::strangles the shit out of them with their own bootstraps::
I can install some pull handles on your bootstraps for a small monthly subscription fee. No, you won’t own them.
I'd love to know your version of "just barely" is you have two adults working full time in a 2 person household.
Maybe your mortgage is far higher then I'm imagining.
I live in an apartment, but it's overpriced, and it's just me. This world is designed to be a 2 person household.
So I have to imagine you're living beyond your means. I'm living beyond my means too, but I also don't have a decent wage either. So living at all is living beyond my means.
You should add up your whole house income, divide that number by 4, and THAT number should be what your mortgage shouldn't be higher than.
I suspect your mortgage is probably much higher than that number.
Either that or we have different definitions of "just getting by".
You are lucky. Do not assume everyone else is as lucky as you.
Lets use WA as an example. Average house costs 588k interest rate is about 7% now. So you'll be paying $4300 per month. So man that's rough but surely there are some cheaper that average units out there! If you want to be anywhere near where the majority of the jobs are even a lot drive away you are going to have a hard time getting below 450k or 3300 per month.
Well maybe you can rent cheaper right? 2BR 1.5 bath where again most of the jobs are can easily run you $2000-2500 which seems like a very nice savings however whereas your fixed rate mortgage is you know fixed your rent will probably exceed the payment on your mortgage within 10-12 years and since you have no equity you have no cushion to fall back on if you ever experience a downturn you could find yourself a bum on the street. Hell if you aren't able to save anything you will definitely be heading for bum status when you get old enough that you can't work. Holding on to being able to own something is an investment in not descending into desperate poverty later.
I think its weird how people don't believe people can actually be struggling in America without also somehow being the source of their own problems. It's like people like you have broken brains.
😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆
Moving is a privilege,
Poor people move all the time. It's a fucking wild take to call moving a privilege. Though I do agree with the last bit about sometimes (or maybe even often) being in a worse position than before
Poor people move all the time.
Yes, that's why all the inner city projects are devoid of people. They've all moved somewhere else because it's so easy for them.
Look at this guy he knows all the poor people.
I have a feeling the poors don't move to different cities/states that often.
My parents holding fast with "well, it's always been like that" made me realize how big this generational divide is.
There are good boomers who get it, yes. There are also some really dumb ones who have literally no clue what kind of world they helped create. Full stop.
And there are some Nazi gen z. We have to pull together the good ones from every generation and become helpers together. We can't bitch about the ones that are shit, there are shit people in every generation, so it's a waste of time and a distraction.
Yes, 100% this. There are plenty of boomers that got reamed by various elitist schemes, too. People right on the cusp of retirement only to have everything wiped out by something like an Enron or the real-estate bubble and they get to keep working another 10+ years...I think people have rose-colored glasses when it comes to the things boomers faced, too. It was not all sunshine and roses for everyone in that age bracket. It is lunacy to suggest that it was/is.
There may be some boomers doing nefarious things like Blackstone, driving up the cost of living for everyone, but I bet there are some very, very young people in schemes like that, too, making lots of money. Or individuals like fElon's boyz - I don't think the Dogebags are boomers. And fElon himself is Gen X....
Then there are headlines that I see like this that run counter to virtually everything you'd hear about Gen Y in recent years:
https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/your-money/millennials-financially-baby-boomers/
Lastly when the bullshit inter-generational warfare is whipped up, I remember this...
Hey Gen Z, first time being gaslit by boomers? Heh, yyeeeaaaahhhhhhh.......they do that. Now imagine having them as your parent, and you're 5, and you have to just live with their bullshit.
~Sincerely, Gen X and the older millenials.
As shitty as my parents were, I'm suddenly grateful that they were pre-boomer. Still had to deal with stuff like listening to their bigotry, but having a dad that grew up during the Depression, and his own dad was out of work for much of it, meant that he never gave me shit for not being as successful as him.
However, I'm old enough to remember watching the boomers getting gaslit by the "Greatest Generation".
But yeah, as an Xer, it seems like we got the short straw. The boomers sucked all the air out of the room for so very long, that if the (mostly boomer- and Greatest Generation- led) media stopped giving them all the attention for a moment, it was to only label us the "slacker generation".
By the time the boomer narcissism's grip was loosened, the focus was mostly on to Gen Y, and if we are being honest here, due to their numbers, the media narcissism around Gen Y reminds me very much of the boomers, with Gen Z quickly catching up.
I suspect that's very much due to a numbers game - if advertising dollars figure they can center a particular group enough, they can scoop up all those $$$ by selling a certain age range a story about themselves...
"it'll all make sense when you're an adult"
well. i'm an adult now. some would even say old or middle aged. it still doesn't make sense
my parents were silent generation.
I hate this idea that people need to work themselves to death to survive. We have such a surplus of resources today that people should barely have to work. I don't know what it was that pulled the mask off this farce of a system we have, but it sure as shit isn't worth it to bust my ass for 45 years so the CEO of FuCKYou Incorporated can get another bigger yacht.
I don't know what it was that pulled the mask off this farce of a system we have
Greed
We have tons of excess. The problem is it's hoarded by a small tyrannical group of psychopaths bent on increasing their wealth at the cost of everyone else.
I feel like these two comments really should be at the top.
Okay but... where's the news?
I personally am capable of working any boomer in their prime into exhausting while I'm still pushing for hours more. The whole "millenials are lazy" is corporate bullshit designed to make parents think their kids are just lazy and not being ripped off by the system they demand exists.
Pull a 16hr shift working network engineering during an outage, then come back to work in 8hrs for another full day on a Monday, then when the boomer stops having their mental break down they can apologize in person to every millennial they talked shit about.
Many in GenX does, though.
https://www.redfin.com/news/homeownership-rate-by-generation-2023/
I mean not really that far of from boomers.
And yet Gen Z turned out for... Trump? He'll surely help the economy and enable a new era of magically plentiful high paying, stable jobs.
Less than half of us voted. As a member of Gen Z who DID vote for Khamala its because the only good thing she does is not be Trump.
A good portion of our generations more liberal/left-leaning side just got done having the shit beaten out of them by cops before getting kicked out of school for protesting against the genocide in Gaza.
What makes you think any of these people want to turn around and vote for a law-and-order ex-DA who's ignoring some of the worst atrocities of our times?
Everyone in this generation who isn't jaded and disillusioned is a fascist or fascist sympathiser (same difference :p). No one has the energy to care let alone vote.
They probably won't until establishment democrats keel over, and unfortunately it looks like medical science kept them alive and puttering until it was too late.
Less than half of us voted.
Ah yes. The “I didn’t vote” excuse so I can absolve myself from why this country is turning to shit.
If you didn’t vote YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.
If you didn’t vote you effectively voted for Trump. If you didn’t vote you already accept Trump as the result. If you didn’t vote you’re a fucking moron who deserves all the pain this admin brings.
Less than half of us voted. As a member of Gen Z who DID vote for Khamala its because the only good thing she does is not be Trump.
WHICH IS WHY YOU VOTE FOR SOMEONE.
God I hate that Americans have decided that you vote for the person you like rather than vote to stop the worst person.
You're never going to get a pony, so do what you can or they'll make you be a pony. And not in a happy way. In a "work in the mines all your life" way.
Oh well, too late now.
I think she got so many votes because she wasn't Trump. And thats it. She was so frustrating as a candidate who was "super Law and Order DA from liberal land, California. She's the best of both worlds!"
Christ she was so bad at being charismatic. I liked her when she made fun of Trump so hard he refused to ever debate her again. But then she tried to play both sides and toured with Liz Cheney. It's like, the entire message of her failed campaign will look at all the answers but the right one: she wasn't an active evil fascist. She just supported fascism her whole life and learned to make concessions to sound more progressive. Gen Z will learn to hate the DNC.
Maybe the boomers need to stop working and die, so the better paying jobs and wealth can come to the younger generations.
I think you're going to get your wish. They're not paying for all kind of social funding (low income housing for the elderly, for example). Yay?
It's a shame that my sarcastic comment might have to be taken seriously in 2025, depending on what ORAGNE does.
Most boomers don’t know what it’s like to work 40+ hours a week. Their parents made the system better, and they assume they didn’t fuck it up.
I'd say that they don't remember. They probably did when they first started out. Their first starting out phase was much shorter though.
I used to work in a consulting firm for import/export driven businesses. Almost every single client was a Boomer who inherited the business from their parents, knew fuckall about business, and spent their time mainlining Fox News and lamenting the laziness of their workers and their general dissatisfaction with trends in America.
The uniform dearth of awareness and irony of their entire existence was astounding. Most, if not all, would be otherwise unemployable personalities, in any other scenario.
Um, life was maybe easy-ish for some boomers. Plenty of them got reamed by the many boom/bust cycles. Boomers lived through stagflation, two oil embargoes, Vietnam, the 80s fad of downsizing/rightsizing, many losing farms in the 80s, the 90s rush to offshore and outsource everything, the deskilling of Americans and the export of most manufacturing, NAFTA reordering things, the rise of big box retailers and further deskilling, the disintegration of unions, the Wall Street crash of 1987, the dot-com bubble burst in early 00s, the real-estate crash in 2008, etc. Gen X and millennials suffered some of these later ones, too, or dealt with the fallout from their parents having these struggles.
The ageist shit is just a distraction. Generations are not really a thing; it's more of a marketing strategy and also a way for the elites to further atomize Americans. Don't fall for it.
It is more about how policies were set at the national level. Those policies have benefited them throughout their lifetimes. Boomers going to college. College is affordable. Boomers buying house make family. House good and affordable on one wage. Boomers working hard providing for wife and 2.5 kiddos. Jobs pay good and has pension. Family affordable one wage. Boomers retiring???
Not to mention their wholesale willingness, as a cohort, to pull up the ladders that they used to raise themselves, assuring that subsequent generations would have it much harder, and would likely fail to achieve the same cornerstone successes of prosperity.
At the same time, Boomers have a penchant for constantly gaslighting any opinion or statement that might pierce the insulating lies in whatever trumped up mockery they call an identity.
It's why Boomers are always regaling the world with anecdotes of how hard they worked and how much they deserve their stations in life, when anyone with the ability to parse history can see that Baby Boomers objectively had the easiest, most rewarding slice of American prosperity in the history of the country. In the richest nation on Earth.
Yeah anyone is capable of taking their situation for granted.
Are people under the impression everyone who had a 40 hour a week job had their own house?
Everyone? No. Far, far more people than now? Absolutely.
In 1990 my mom stayed home and raised us. My dad worked a measly construction job and we lived in a two story, 5 bedroom house (which they lost after the 2008 collapse, I took it over and lost in 2012).
My mom was also able to borrow against that house over and over again for cars.
Around 1996 my dad got his CDLs and drove a coal truck.
We bought that house for 30k.
My aunt bought a huge colonial house with 8 bedrooms for roughly 60k in 1979-80. She never worked. Her husband was a coal miner.
When it burned down in 1996, she bought a beautiful brick home in a wonderful neighborhood for 100k. She sold that same house recently for 600k.
The difference is absurd.
100%
My mom worked at Sizzlers in the early 90s and her husband, a no-degree "engineer" were able to buy a 4 bedroom house with a huge yard and 2 car garage in the DC suburbs (MD side), with two cars. A few years later, they upgraded to an even bigger house in an even nicer part of the county.
Objectively poor people had houses that they owned, in places people wanted to live. None of that has been possible for at least a decade or more. Millennials are now in our 40s and have more education and experience than Boomers ever did, yet the ROI and QOL differentials are staggering.
Don't let Boomers gaslight you; they collectively played this game on the easiest mode.
A "measly construction job" is a good paying one. A person working at a McDonald's for 40 hours a week at that time would not be able to afford an apartment let alone a house. When your aunt bought her house interest rates were in the teens, today they are 7% and that's a record high. My parents bought a house in 1976 for $28,000 dad worked full time at a city job plus always had a second job or side hustle. Our family would strip copper to make ends meet. Mom cooked every meal, eating out was a rare treat. Never once did we even order pizza, Mom make it with powder dough. We didn't have cable. Got by on two junker cars sometimes one.
Every generation has it's challenges. This is the first to have a public circle jerk/pity party
I worked 40 hours a week and could not afford a house so I got a second job, worked my ass off for 5 years, all the extra job money, and bought a 3 bedroom with a 2 stall garage on a half acre at an auction for $38k cash. I didn't cry about having to work more, I called it an opportunity to be able to. I put another 30k into the house and used it as a stepping stone to get into a nicer place. Then I went back to one job. I did all this while being a single parent of a teen daughter.
$38K LMAOOOOOOOO
Yeah try that again but this time for $300k, asshole
and bought a 3 bedroom with a 2 stall garage on a half acre at an auction for $38k cash.
aha hahahahahhahahahahhahahahahhahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahha
The whole scenario you described is the problem. You shouldn't need to do that to yourself. The whole argument is the boomer generation was able to mostly have one parent working, supporting a family of 4, and owning a home COMFORTABLY. That is virtually nonexistent for current generations. Rising housing costs have far exceeded wage growth for decades now.
How's your relationship with your daughter now?
How did she feel about you choosing to work instead of spending that time with her?
Right? I have put my child first in everything I do since the day I was born and I know for a fact that she would be much less happy if we were richer but I was gone all the time.
As it is, she has a dad who stayed at home to raise her for the first two years of her life and a dad who also was able to stay at home and put her through online school because she was severely bullied for being queer and autistic to the point that the whole school was against her- but I have always been available to her and always had her back and I know she appreciates it even as a surly teenager.
And right now, we're living in a crappy and small apartment and she is fine with it because I picked it in a location I knew she would enjoy and she gets to go out and have adventures on her own and will always have a dad she can come back to if there are any problems.
Fuck these "I worked 80 hours a week for my family and that's why they're in a 5-bedroom McMansion today" people. You are working for yourself. Spend less time working and more time with your kids.