This shitting on the next generation thing has been going on for a long time.

There's solid evidence going back 150 years of older generations complaining about school kids being undisciplined, not respecting their teachers ("not like back when I was at school"), and some slightly more anecdotal evidence going back some 2000 years of the same.

We always find it hard to reconcile the negative aspects of our old behaviour with our current mindset, and it's way easier to just reduce in our minds the severity or scope of our actions. We learn from our mistakes, and try to make them seem as small as possible in our minds.

The above quote comes from ancient Greece.

There's some doubts to the veracity of that quote, which is why I opted for anecdotal when it came to older evidence :)

And for Millennials, some have it rough but some don't. College was cheap and affordable for some of them - certainly more affordable for them than the boomer generation. Keep in mind the generation spans to 1981. Some Millennials are almost 40 now.

Gen Z is in a whole other category of course. Lots of things going/have gone rapidly downhill. But boomers mostly aren't the parents of these people. It's Gen X/Millennials.

But sure, let Boomers and Millennials fight. We're happy to stay out of this (just know that I'm on your side, Millennials!)

Also, a lot of the anger at Boomers is not just because of how they had it (that's mostly the doing of their Silent/Greatest predecessors) but because of how they made it. Boomers have dominated politics since those student-activist hippies got into it, largely because of sheer numbers. Thirty or forty years, depending on exactly which ones you count. GenX is finally making a dent, but mostly at the state level. At the federal level it's still heavily Boomer-dominated, regurgitating the same policies that got us into this mess. Ditto Wall Street etc.

If Boomers had enjoyed good times and then made some effort to prolong or repeat them, #okboomer wouldn't be a thing. It is a thing because so many Boomers are using their political power to keep selling everyone else's future for the sake of their own comfy retirement.

No matter how often we pointed out that college is, in general, vastly more expensive, and summer jobs comparably less well-paying, he'd just repeat himself. "I just don't get it, you go work for the parks department, you work all summer long, why isn't that enough? It's your iphones, your cell phone plans, etc." when, you know, yeah we're paying $20 a month for cheap cell phone plans and five-year-old iphones, but the reality is that working three months at, say, $15 an hour, nets you what, $5-6k? That might cover a year's tuition at a community college if you live at home, not a year living at a state-run four-year university.

I can agree that it's not nearly as easy for us as it was for the past few generations, but it's not nearly as grim as most make it out to be. To put it bluntly, I see a lot of the same "me me me" mentality that the Boomers have been criticized for.

There's the idea that life is just handed to us, so long as we "do the right things." It's perfectly possible to own a home, raise a family, what have you. You just might not get to work the job you want, study the degree program you want, or live in the neighborhood you want.

There never was a "turnkey" existence.

The contention is that the world left by boomers has less opportunity than what the one provided to them. It’s not entirely true (if you’re black in America, the civil rights movement sure changes a lot for the better), but that’s the argument.

Exactly. Later generations simply inherited expensive college after the devastation of Nixon.

If Nixon wasn't stopped, they would have continued until all Americans had been returned to lower opportunity levels equivalent to many minorities before Civil Rights, other than those whose significant capitalist privileges had already been well established before the early 1970's.

EDIT: more rapidly returned to lower opportunity levels

Edit: It's still too easy to underestimate Nixon Youth.

These people grew up when a factory job could support a family of four, and companies hired people with no experience and then paid actual benefits.

Boomers benefited from very generous circumstances. To suggest they earned the postwar economic boom is laughably misguided.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I didn't write or imply this in any way.

My point is that many boomers conveniently gloss over the fact that they benefited immensely from the economic climate of yesteryear, and the common refrain of millennials needing to just tug harder on their bootstraps isn't received well because of it.

Some of us would argue that is a garbage mentality at the root of the problem.

I would sooner wish to emulate the "Greatest Generation" than the Boomers.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/may/15/austral...

I think it's important to differentiate between "media-driven narrative" and real-world relations, though that line is a bit blurry. It seems the former often creates the latter.

Right now I'm not sure that "Ok Boomer" is anything more than a meme.

Today, there's maybe 100 brands. Almost all come in 4-packs, and are priced between $15-$20.

Price increases may just be inflation and even 10 years ago you could find tons of craft beer stores with huge selections in cities big and small. (Beer is one of the easier small businesses to get into; still expensive but they tend to be less likely to fail if you get the consistency of batches right).

Maybe that store just decided to expand from a small selection to attract more craft beer people. That's a really freaking weird conclusion to draw over the history of one bottle shop.