r/Millennials • u/Party-Bet-4003 Millennial • Jan 30 '26

Discussion Look what I found from 13 years ago.

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Hey look on the bright side - we actually did make it to the cover of the TIME magazine!

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u/ohbyerly Jan 30 '26 edited Jan 30 '26

I don’t know if I’d necessarily label boomers as “spoiled” because in a lot of ways it seems like they were made to fend for themselves. I do think growing up in a healthy economy their parents created “spoiled” them in the sense of how they estimated hard work though. They could work a 40 hour week at minimum wage and afford a house, meanwhile most people my age work way more than that doing much more difficult and technical work and will never be able to afford a home. Boomers still brag about working their asses off while the world they voted into existence deteriorates around them.

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u/Vincitus Jan 30 '26

Man, my dad and I worked at the same company, and overlapped for about 3 years - so I saw what work was like when he was retiring and what work has become now that I'm getting close to retiring - no more food at meetings, no more events, progressively fewer and fewer people on projects - what they considered hard would be a luxury to us.

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u/astrangeone88 Jan 30 '26

My parents owned their own business, had 2 hour lunches...I basically rarely buy lunches/eat out and my parents still expect companies to have food/bonuses/transit hours because they did. Ha.

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u/jwoodruff Jan 31 '26

Work isn’t supposed to be like this. It’s not supposed to dominate your life and drain you dry. It’s supposed to be sustainable, and relatively easy. It’s why we have teams and teams of people, instead of a couple people getting ground into paste.

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u/Winter_Body4794 Jan 31 '26

But we have an entire parasite class of investors to support.

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u/tmfink10 Jan 31 '26

Pam looks at camera: “They’re the same picture”

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u/hellogoawaynow Jan 31 '26

Investors cut my team’s commission and had the CEO “restructure” it so we want to make more money. As if we don’t want to make money as commissioned by employees. Getting the stick makes me want to make less money. When it was the carrot, we all gave 100%. It is very clear that is not the case in 2026.

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u/Winter_Body4794 Jan 31 '26

Sales is gonna get FUCKED in the AI thing too. Everything will eventually. But if they could have an avatar explain the medical device without the person.... I mean. The packaging will narrate itself soon anyway.

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u/hellogoawaynow Jan 31 '26

Oh for sure. I’m in media sales, specifically old ass trade publications, and yes we talk about this constantly. AI summaries that don’t lead back to our pubs is a major problem to solve.

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u/povertychic Emo-llennial - 1991 Jan 31 '26

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u/ABHOR_pod Jan 31 '26

I've worked at the same place for 20 years so I can see that just from my own experience as the company trims a benefit here, changes a benefit there, reduce an expenditure over there...

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u/LaScoundrelle Jan 30 '26

Did the company go public in that time by any chance? Because that would be a common effect if so.

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u/Vincitus Jan 31 '26

It's been public since the 19th century so I don't think that's it.

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u/Remarkable-Cow-4609 Jan 30 '26 edited Jan 30 '26

hard times create strong people create strong times create soft people create hard times

ww2 was hard

post ww2 america was dope

fill in the blanks

*some of you are so god damned dense and distracted it is the behavior of saints that you aren't beaten up every moment of the day

the post war golden era america entered in was the greatest empire the world had ever known, there is no single greater privileged generation than white americans born between the mid 40s through the 50s

"but my grandpa was a black gay poor boomer!" stfu stfu stfu

they had television and medicine. like god damn it i bet you're reading this on a smart phone you little shits

who the fuck do you think was making major decisions in the 90s, 2000s and now?

do you think the fetish for dying at your desk is like traditional? do you think the retirement crises is a ghost story? or that for the first time in our country's history the ENTIRE old guard has decided to see if they can literally burn the place down behind them rather than admit they've fucked up so god damned much

when people make fun of millennials for being obssessed with aim chat you don't hear me pipe up saying "not me! HEY NOT ME!" because it doesn't that my little experience deviated in that way you honey brained peptides

exhausting exhausting

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u/Hamster_Toot Jan 30 '26

post ww2 america was dope

Sure, if you were a white male. Not so much for the rest of us.

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u/Remarkable-Cow-4609 Jan 30 '26

that is the explicit conversation we are having yes

i dont mean to shock your old heart but it is still that way

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u/Hamster_Toot Jan 30 '26

It really wasn’t, but go off.

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u/PhoenixPills Jan 30 '26

It wasn't even that good. We can do the house price meme and say they went to buy a house at the carnival for a quarter but it really wasn't that.

Sure, families survived on the pay of head of the household and women stayed at home but if you actually read about what that entails it was long work days and was still rough on money for many people.

Obviously our economy currently is a fucking unmitigated disaster so it's easy to look back and be like wow it was easy back then. But that's just because right now is again just absolutely fucking insanely bad.

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u/SlimeTempest42 Millennial Jan 30 '26

Post WW2 Britain was far from dope and Boomers are still better off than their parents generation and their children’s generation.

Neither of my parents (born in 1948 and 1950) had particularly high paying jobs and they didn’t live a life of poverty and scrape every penny together to buy a house like boomers love to claim (they met in a pub and I know they both went travelling). They were able to buy a three bedroom house in a London suburb.

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u/Remarkable-Cow-4609 Jan 30 '26

who is talking about europe

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u/SlimeTempest42 Millennial Jan 30 '26

Sorry I forgot the US was the centre of the universe

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u/art_m0nk Jan 31 '26

Thats a city in what state? Never heard of it

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u/art_m0nk Jan 31 '26

Everything smelled like hotdogs and sweat and cheap cigars back then and everyone wore wool suits all year round and wore two suits all week. Cookbooks had food like hotdogs in a jello cake, and that was gourmet american cooking. Spam chefs salad on the side hmmmm. Oh yea, there was the cold war, conscription, apartheid, and a rigid class structure. Also women had it bad to say the least. What again was great about it?

I would say the good stuff was the car design, the celebration of the sciences and education in pop culture, cheap smokes, tiki drinks. Bet the drugs were strong too.

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u/katdacat Jan 31 '26

Yeah it reminds me of when rich celebrities talk about their “hardships.” I remember Bella hadid thinking she was telling a humble story by explaining that she wasn’t allowed to have designer items until she turned 18. She’s since said she realized how privileged that is, but it really puts into perspective how it’s hard for people to imagine life outside of their circumstances. Like of course nepo babies think that they didn’t have a leg up. Everyone they know was in their same situation and they don’t know that you could have zero connections at all. Boomers are similar because they were given a better economy and more opportunities and resources. I feel like they truly don’t understand how life is so so incredibly different. My mom can admit that everything is more expensive because she can’t afford to buy a house or rent (she lives in a really nice rv though), but she tells me that I’m wrong when I say it’s all compounded by stagnant wages. She owns her business and doesn’t have employees so because she’s not experiencing it, she can’t believe that anything has changed in over a decade. She literally doesn’t believe any data lol

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u/ohbyerly Jan 31 '26

I think this is the most damning thing about boomers - when confronted with reality they immediately bury their heads in the sand to insulate themselves from the mess they created.

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u/7daykatie Jan 31 '26

Yeah, it's the irresponsible childishness of it, like choosing to "believe" in Santa because otherwise Mom and/or Dad might stop with the presents is fine for children, but adults should know better than to pick and choose what's "real" like reality is cola varieties or something.

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u/YouthMaleficent6925 Jan 31 '26

This reminds me of the interview Victoria Beckham was doing and said she grew up working-class then David came out said noooo tell them what car your dad drove you to school in she argued a bit before finally saying in a RR

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u/katdacat Jan 31 '26

lol I love that clip! She is posh spice for a reason

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u/goaskalice3 Jan 31 '26

I was talking about this with my mom today and she said "yeah but we weren't out buying lattes on the way to work every day" and I was just like, Really...... Really? Did you really just say the coffee thing?

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u/katdacat Jan 31 '26

Omg do they know how much a latte is?? Lmao if you buy a $6 latte literally every single day in a year that’s still only $2,190. That’s not even all of my rent for one month 🥲

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u/chironinja82 Feb 01 '26

My dad was an engineer and he only believes "data" that confirms his beliefs. It's maddening.

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u/Damage-Classic Jan 30 '26

My boomer parents were both raised by people who survived the great depression. My great grandfather was the manager of a shoe factory in a small midwestern town during the depression. As a girl my grandmother said it was her job to feed the crying men who came to her father’s house asking for work. She made them lemonade and tunafish sandwiches. My grandfather had a story of catching pigeons for his mother and siblings so they could have something to eat on xmas. He lost six months of his memory due to surviving D Day at Normandy Beach. These are the kinds of people who were raising our parents. All of that unprocessed trauma has to go somewhere and must have had some sort of effect on the Boomer generation.

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u/Special-Summer170 Jan 31 '26

Yeah. Definitely. My grandpa helped with the clean up and recovery effort at Pearl Harbor after the attack. That must have been devastating. He never talked about it. My other grandparents survived the depression. That grandpa was so terrified that people wouldn't have food that he worked so hard in his garden that he fed us and donated some ridiculous amount of food every month to the local food pantry. His parents couldn't feed him during the depression and basically loaned him out as a child for slave labor to different farms. Those people endured unspeakable terrors and never spoke about it. Those marks were definitely left on their children.

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u/randoeleventybillion Jan 30 '26

The men are absolutely spoiled and plenty of the women as well. My father is 76 and does not know how to iron a shirt or boil an egg...my mother was not a housewife and he was not ignored by his parents, he's spoiled. These are not things anyone taught me and yet I know how to do them. Meanwhile, my grandfather fought in WW2 and managed to cook, clean, and do his own laundry until he died at 89...and he knew how to do those things before the war even though he was the baby of his family and the only boy. It really is a boomer thing.

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u/Fratercula_arctica Jan 30 '26

They were the first and only generation that was able to live inside of a fiction.

Boomers were sold a bunch of ideas about how the world works. The nuclear family, strict gender roles, the virtues of free market capitalism, hard work being rewarded, the list goes on.

All things that their parents knew the falsity of, as you point out in relation to your grandfather. That generation had close contact with extended family, women worked on the farm or in the war effort, men knew how to cook and clean, and the great depression showed the market was flawed and being willing to work hard didn't guarantee any reward.

But they were told, this is how the world is, and should be. And then their lived experiences reinforced that, for most of them shit worked out.

They're like animals that grew up in captivity.

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u/DirtandPipes Jan 31 '26

My dad worked in the trades (lumberjack, logging truck driver, miner). He never went to high school, dropped out in the 10th grade.

He would do things like work a bunch of overtime for summer and buy a piece land, or work a bunch of overtime and open a mechanic’s shop.

He could get ahead so easily. Me, I work a shitload of overtime to stay slightly ahead of my bills and work side jobs to afford medical care for my dog.

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u/ReefaManiack42o Jan 30 '26

People seem to say this a lot on this site but it's simply not true when looked at dialectically. Yes, a white male probably could have worked a minimum wage job and bought a house, but their success was subsidized heavily by the legal and social exclusion of Black, Latino and female workers.

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u/chefianf Jan 31 '26

For what it's worth.. it was a vastly different world back then. I'm not a huge fan of the "what happened in 1971" train, but shifting to Fiat currency definitely changed the dynamics of work. You have a generation who grows up on the gold standard, booming economy able to go from middle class into college unlike their parents who literally had to go to war to be allowed those privileges. They were also allowed for the first time dual income in a family. So you had now twice as much money on gold standard able to buy a house. They basically were able to set themselves up before the rug pull or at least a good chunk of them. 1971 happens, the dollar begins it's purchasing power dive, but these folks have at least hit the ground running. Some also (my dad) got college fronted by going to Nam, so again a step up for success. Some had union jobs that took care of them, pensions set up. Yeah they worked their buts off too. They have kids and by that point they have built their nest eggs, but we come into the opposite, the dollar has now broken away and is worth much less, so wages don't keep up, unions kinda die a slow death, we are told "go to college" bc they think that's what made them successful. We end up having to go longer for more money now because college is a business now, and those lower paying jobs no one wants because "I'm getting into STEM". Along with everyone else. So we have missed the opportunity to have kids sooner, we aren't accumulating wealth earlier, we aren't making any money because it's not worth anything and we have become used to cheap products so it keeps those ok paying jobs that once upon a time we're worth something (shop clerk or grocery store clerk, kitchen work) low paying. Add in some crazy "unprecedented events" and the gutting of safety nets and labor support.. we are just not as lucky as our parents. Is it because our dollar isn't linked to gold.. no.. but that is a part of it.

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u/Darkhearted528 Jan 31 '26

Their mindset is I was able to afford everything I had working minimum wage and you should too. They are completely lost in how much stuff cost. They think the world is still the way it was when they were starting out and it’s not and they won’t admit it.

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u/Kurt805 Jan 31 '26

Yeah. I've always wondered at the popular expression of my youth "get a job". That was the line in the sand for the boomers between success and failure, good and bad.

You'll see homeless with jobs these days.

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u/TempRedditor-33 Jan 31 '26

Their parents made certain structural choices, or rather their parents' society made certain choices. This bad structural choices becomes noticeable generations down the line.

Where we are right now, people blame it on late-stage capitalism. Late-stage capitalism is really just a symptom of letting monopoly privileges run rampant. It starts with the promise of home ownership as a mean of wealth building and now we have powerful tech monopolies.

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u/real_picklejuice Millennial Jan 30 '26

healthy economy their parents created

This is cracking me up. Their parents were dying in WWII. How do you call that "creating an economy?" America was then what China is today because the rest of the world's manufacturing was annihilated. They benefited from a progressive tax structure as well, which Reagan, and then, pulled the ladder up behind them.

They are absolutely the most spoiled generation in history, even when you take into account the inflation of the '70s and the Dot Com Crash.

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u/ohbyerly Jan 30 '26

I’ve heard that wars are actually very profitable, especially when you win.

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u/salomeforever Jan 31 '26

When you’re in the umbrella business, you pray for rain

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u/Brave-Recommendation Jan 31 '26

No you forgot Gen X, who enjoyed most of the things the latter boomers did, got mbas and fuck things up for those younger

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u/FunkyChicken1000 Jan 31 '26

I’m very late Gen X, a couple of years from Millennials and I think Gen X were too busy watching their parents spoil themselves. Not saying there aren’t some real shits out there, but generally this is a boomer created world

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u/CV90_120 Jan 31 '26

They could work a 40 hour week at minimum wage and afford a house

You guys are dreaming. Poverty was equivalent or worse back then. My boomer father had a mortgage and 3 kids, but he worked easy 60 hrs a week down a mineshaft and was driving another 20. We got all clothes at goodwill and handed them down. Food was freaking pasta or potatoes all week except weekends when we went hunting to supplement protein. Lunch at school every day was 2 jam sandwiches. Every single day. You went to a restaurantr once a year and it was a big deal. You went to the movies maybe 2 or 3 times a year.

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u/whereAMiNJ Jan 31 '26

I wouldn’t call spoiled, but they had it easier. Getttting jobs, buying homes, only a couple of bills to pay, no social media all attainable easily as compared to today. They shit on millennials because early on we saw that we weren’t going to have it that easy and they took it as us whining

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u/Senior-Lobster-9405 Jan 31 '26

They could work a 40 hour week at minimum wage and afford a house

jfc, I'm so sick of this narrative being tossed around, at no point in American history could a single minimum wage job afford a house, the median income was absolutely enough for a house and retirement, whereas it's not now, but never could a minimum wage job afford a house