Combine this with a consumer heavy society, where people seem unable to control their impulses, and this is not a good result.

I just moved into a new place and had a painter do the walls. He started working at Safeway with 17, retired at 52 with a pension, has 2 houses and raised 2 kids. that sounds almost impossible these days.

That said, it's hard not to see such complaints as a combination of entitlement and cluelessness. As a Boomer, I never would have considered taking on college debt without a pretty clear analysis showing breakeven in a reasonable period. The idea of getting an arts degree crossed my mind, and I dismissed it as ridiculous within a couple of months.

Most of my friends went straight into the military, the trades, or general employment. State college was for maybe the top 20%, and I'm not sure I even knew anyone that went to a name school.

Work? Full time every summer starting at 16, and half time while school was in session. Housing? Live at home, or maybe the cheapest dorm. Car? Find a friend and give them gas money. Phone? Picture an Obama phone that's nailed to the kitchen wall and shared with three other people.

By today's standards, Boomers were not well off. Even so, most of what I've earned has already been transferred to the following generation.

https://twitter.com/berniesanders/status/1121058539634593794

To approach these systemic issues as just the individual faults of young people is to essentially accept that these problems will never get better. That's the centrist boomer motto.

But seriously, I do accept that none of these problems will get better. The young and old are behaving as they always have and always will. As you get older, this becomes clearer, and the complaints of the young provoke a wry feeling when you remember issuing similar complaints yourself.

If it makes you feel any better, most of the people on HN are considerably younger and higher paid than I am.

An older person advises a younger one that that apparently very cheap old rotted house (with years of poorly done repairs executed by a variety of amateur repairers and fly-by-night gypsy home contractors, many repairs of which exacerbated the decay) is too far gone and trying to fix it is going to be a waste of money that will lead to a loss of time and money invested. They'd be better off in the long run looking into some totally different better house, or if they must have that house and location, knocking down the rotted house and building a new one that looks like the old one but which has a coherent and efficient modern infrastructure underneath the gingerboard.

The younger person then will always say, "OK, boomer, so you think better things aren't possible. Whatever, cynical grandpa!", rolling their eyes. The old person shrugs because he expected nothing different. And the young one finalizes that purchase of the house and they set to being the latest owner that's going to fix it once and for all and maybe even flip it for a profit. Decades later, the house is worse off than when they started and they are broke.

And when, pray tell, will that begin? I'm afraid I have to agree with the parent's overall assessment of the situation. The problems are endemic to the systems currently in place, which are self-defensive and won't be reformed without a bloody fight. We've seen how the attempts thus far have gone and in some cases they've only made things worse. I hold out hope that it is still possible to fix things, but I estimate the odds of it actually occurring as very slim.

For the young, I recommend resettlement in a more sane region.

For the old, hope that collapse doesn't happen and wipe out savings and impoverishment.

For those in between, nothing really. They are stuck with their car and unable to move to a new one so they hold on to the hope that the next car repair is somehow going to be the last one and the car will at last work as if new and functional.

When a wiser older person cautions a younger one, offering life or career perspective, they always respond by contemptuously telling that wiser older person they are a moron and should piss off because "adults are working here". It's how things are and how they have been. Everyone has to learn their lessons on their own, and in the end recognize their personal failures only when it is far too late, and at that point they try to warn the next generations, and are called old fools. The cycle of life, which is based on delusions and cult adherance.

My own frustration is that most of our so-called challenging problems have relatively simple solutions, but one or more of the above tribes will block those solutions so we go nowhere fast. That said, the world is a lot better than it was a hundred years ago. And if we ever collectively get our heads out of our butts and own our bipartisan $h!+, we can fix this. But I'm personally betting that won't happen until we get a moment of clarity delivered to us from China or India. And I'm not sure I'll still be above ground by then.

I'm glad you qualified that with if. When I said I was older the point was that "I too once stood where you stand now and said these same things."

Not only do I not think I am entitled to respect, I know for a fact I won't get it no matter what. That's why I said this dynamic is the cycle of life. Solomon commented on the phenomenon as well. Each generation is committed to learning their own lessons and knows for a fact that they know better than all that have come before. I would go insane if I thought offering advice would do any good. That is part of why the problems can not be solved. Everyone knows best and that their solution is going to work, and everyone that tried to fix the rotted house before simply didn't know what they were doing. The problem is not that the house is rotted, it can't be, because then how could we justify keeping it. Therefore the problem is not that it is rotted.

Let's check in in 20 years and see how all the various proposed costly repairs have worked out. It will be great to be proven wrong and see that restored house standing proud, working just as well as a brand new one using modern materials, and the repairs all done and delivered at a lower cost than building anew. Alternatively those "OK boomer" chanting people will now be hearing "OK millennial" directed at themselves from a new generation that is convinced their own proposed repairs to the nearly totally collapsed rotted wreck will be the ones to restore the house to glory and the only problem was that the millennials and the boomers didn't know how to repair it properly, not that it was rotted.

We will have solved artificial intelligence and that's a game changer. It will create an age of limitless wealth. But what I wonder about is whether our hindbrains will insist on maintaining inequality in an age where everything is cheap and plentiful. And what will the AIs make of us?

Who cares about health care if there's cheap immortality? That's the best healthcare of them all. But will we make it generally available or will we try to attach artificial value to it as an entitlement?

And that's because once people stop dying from natural causes we're going to have a population problem. That means we're going to have to get off world.

That also means that climate change becomes irrelevant because if we can terraform Mars etc, then tweaking the climate of the Earth is trivial.

The one true god that has delivered on all of its promises is science and I don't think it's done delivering the good stuff. But it's also a wrathful and vengeful god in the wrong hands.

But even then, I'd rather live in the above future then in a future where we continue all of our petty squabbles over which nation state is the best. That's creating misery worldwide. We could end hunger and homelessness today for pennies on the dollar. But we refuse to do so in favor of a huge military and prison industrial complex. All that's doing for us IMO is giving other countries a chance to leapfrog us mid-21st century.

So I'd suggest you do as I am doing. Fight your own mortality to your dying breath and try to make a difference between now and your probably inevitable dirt nap because it might not be inevitable because we're heading for one hell of a phase transition (no singularity required).

Uh-huh. We Boomers are still waiting for that electricity that's "too cheap to meter".

Life goes on and it will improve. Incremental improvement is light years better then war and famine. Too many people are willing to block any improvement because it takes a dollar out of their pocket, when the alternative is destroying much more of their wealth.