Why Do Boomers Blame Young People for Poverty?
That damn avocado toast!
“If you can’t buy a house, it’s ‘cause you spend all your cash on fancy phones, expensive coffees and avocado toast! When I was your age, we went without the luxuries and saved up, and we were able to buy homes and live well.
Young people just don’t know how to handle money these days. No work ethic, no willingness to make sacrifices for a better future.”
That seems to be the standard Boomer attitude towards my generation and younger.
I’ve run into this attitude so many times, usually from people in my grandparents’ generation who made a good living back when pensions existed and you were not only rewarded for working the same job for years and putting your hours in, but you were paid enough to go to college and buy a home.
A lot of them struggle to come to terms with the fact that things are different now.
Back in their day, mobile phones and televisions and going out to eat were expensive, major purchases you had to save up for. It was a splurge, something you needed to set money aside to achieve and represented wealth.
They can’t fathom how that is no longer the case. I can get a decent TV for a fourth of the average monthly rent around here. I can get cheap takeaway whenever I like — heck, we order out just because we’re tired. It’s expensive for the four of us, but when it’s just my spouse and I we can get pretty good sushi on the cheap.
And phones? Not only do you no longer need to pay per call, but you can get a phone that is literally a computer and camera rolled into a telephone and text machine, and you can get them for the same price as your television.
Not only that, but a mobile phone is no longer a luxury. It’s a basic necessity. There are charities that exist purely to get mobile phones for homeless people, so they can access the internet and call 911 if they need to.
Right now, those ‘luxuries’ are the cheaper things. Avocado toast is not a wildly expensive buy. Nor is a latte every now and then, if you don’t go overboard.
These days, the real expense, the thing you can’t afford, is a home. It’s a college education.
The things those Boomers saw as basic necessities are now the unimaginable luxuries of my generation and younger.
Nowadays, working the same job for 40 years gets you nothing but a fleece jacket with the company logo and a retirement party when you leave. Pensions are hard to come by, and your pay isn’t nearly enough to save for retirement if you have student loans gobbling up your monthly cheque.
My $16:50 an hour is not paying me enough to get a home. I’m saving as much as I can living with my parents, as is my spouse, and we hope we may have enough to put a downpayment on something a few years down the line.
Until then, when he moves here, we will be renting as cheaply as we possibly can.
And here’s the thing, Boomer. $1600 monthly rent isn’t expensive. It’s pretty standard. I think the lowest rent I’ve seen where I live is $1300, and it’s in a fairly out of the way spot far away from where I work.
There are no $600 a month apartments here. You can’t ‘just find a cheaper place.’
And houses? Don’t get me started.
I just glanced at the real estate listings for my city. The cheapest house I saw on a quick scan was a small home, barely more than a trailer. It’s in the rough side of town, way out in the sticks, way outside of the range for getting to work in my current placement.
Again, it’s the cheapest. It’s $174,500.
Most of them were in the $500,000 range.
Nobody is buying a home and retiring unless they won the family money lottery, or they manage to land an insanely good job with high pay in an area with a low cost of living.
And when you’re our age and you realize that all of those things we were told would happen for us, that we’d get a degree, get a good job, buy a home, get married, have kids, go on vacation once in a while and retire young enough to enjoy our golden years…
None of that is likely to happen. We will likely be working until we die on the factory floor, renting all the while.
When you realize that, you have to live with it. Those little luxuries, like the avocado toast or the latte, or a good TV to watch your favourite shows, those are not what’s preventing you from buying a home.
They’re the bread and circuses that keep you from going mad because you know you never will.
Solidarity wins.
Not to mention that most of the global wealth is being hoarded by Boomers right now under the guise of "survival". Many have a home and one or two rental properties, which they are not willing to release back into the market for those coming up. It drives me absolutely nuts.
Speaking as a Boomer born at the end of the Boomer generation. I am more aligned with Gen X in how my life has been and how my finances are going. I have never assumed that what Millennials and other generations spend their money on is the problem. The Boomers who say avocado toast is the problem are most likely the ones who had a job at a Fortune 500 in upper management, or a union job that protected their pension, and the company did not get sold to a venture capitalist.
I am lucky so far that I still have my pension and Social Security. If the Republicans get there way Social Security might not be around soon.