Hope I die before I get old(er)

[GrownupGirl]

Talkin' 'bout my g-g-generation!

But seriously, I'll be 47 in only a few more months, and as if getting older wasn't bad enough, it's always "boomer" this and "boomer" that like all senior citizens are horrible now. Yesterday I even saw an Ask Reddit question about what you would do if you were a dictator, and someone said they'd forbid anyone over the age of 50 to use the internet! Seriously, 50?!? So, they think 50 is no different from 90, and I should be sitting in a rocking chair watching trashy soap operas and knitting sweaters for my 25 cats and definitely not on the internet, where they think the only thing I should be discussing is the latest brand of denture cleaner. I even still have all my teeth!

The last thing I need is for people 20 and under online to automatically stereotype me as some ancient dementia-ravaged idiot who knows nothing about technology the internet and thinks all young people are lazy snot rags with no problems at all when I know how much their lives all really suck. They already act someone my age didn't have indoor plumbing or TV as a kid.
And you what's really hilarious? A lot of toys, music, video games and movies that came out in the 70's and 80's are still popular today. Maybe more than ever. And do we get any thanks for that? Nope.

I'm not a boomer either, I'm a Gen X-er but no one cares. It's like we don't even exist. Boomer this, boomer that. Must be really hard for my parents, they actually are from the Boomer generation even if they don't really act like stereotypical boomers.

Everyone is going to be old some day, if they're lucky.

 

[tree]

An old saying, about age.
And a satiric movie about aging.

Jack Weinberg - Wikipedia


"As teens either take over or threaten the reins of government, the "Old Guard" (those over 40) turn to Max to run for president, and assert his (their) control over the changing tide. Max again agrees... but once in office, he turns the tide on his older supporters. Thirty becomes a mandatory retirement age, while those over 35 are rounded up, sent to "re-education camps", and permanently dosed on LSD."

Wild in the Streets - Wikipedia

 

[Judge]

I'm inclined to think that most of such prejudice is based primarily on envy and impatience. Where younger generations feel entitled to similar wealth that in reality takes nearly a lifetime of hard work to accrue. But then in most cases this is a dynamic that never changes from one generation to the next. Just as my own parents had more wealth and assets than I did.

As for technology, this Boomer was building PCs and websites before today's teenagers were even born.

Millennials dominate the US workforce, but they're still 10 times poorer than boomers

 

[AprilR]

I'm 30, but most sites about my interests (anime and kpop fandom) are dominated by teenagers. As a precaution i don't interact with anyone much and keep a low profile.
I am not about to apologize for not abandoning my hobbies, especially since there is not much i enjoy aside from them.

 

[oregano]

I will be 46 on the Friday after US Thanksgiving (Friday of next week) and fortunately for me the places I hang out online tend to skew towards white guys older than me, such as ham radio forums. Gen Z uses "boomer" as shorthand for all older people, who to them got all the breaks and had all the fun and then handed "zoomers" the wreckage, said "have fun cleaning it up, kids", and walked away. And I can see their point-by the time they're my age there will be no economy and the earth will be uninhabitable in many places due to climate shifts, and Xers ("boomers") will simply sit in gated communities in wherever the next retirement haven will be after Florida disappears under the ocean, collect exorbitant rents from zoomers, and the only jobs will be wiping the butts of old people in assisted living homes. Yeah, I can see why young people are so angry. So I don't hang out on TikTok. I know that it's hard for auties who still think like 15 year olds, but the fact is that we simply can't relate to today's young people.

 

[FreeDiver]

I will be 46 on the Friday after US Thanksgiving (Friday of next week) and fortunately for me the places I hang out online tend to skew towards white guys older than me, such as ham radio forums. Gen Z uses "boomer" as shorthand for all older people, who to them got all the breaks and had all the fun and then handed "zoomers" the wreckage, said "have fun cleaning it up, kids", and walked away. And I can see their point-by the time they're my age there will be no economy and the earth will be uninhabitable in many places due to climate shifts, and Xers ("boomers") will simply sit in gated communities in wherever the next retirement haven will be after Florida disappears under the ocean, collect exorbitant rents from zoomers, and the only jobs will be wiping the butts of old people in assisted living homes. Yeah, I can see why young people are so angry. So I don't hang out on TikTok. I know that it's hard for auties who still think like 15 year olds, but the fact is that we simply can't relate to today's young people.

I agree with you on that one. Now only are we giving our children the messes we created. But we never raised them with a proper family as well. Fact: Did you know that only 1 in 100 kids raised in the US will ever grow up with their original biological father until their 18 years old. Did you know that the US has one of the highest incarceration rate in the world, 1 out of 100 of it's citizens is in jail. So ya! the future look really bleak for the zoomers out there. How many zoomers are treated like a unwanted by-product of their parents having a one night stand.

 

[Thinx]

I am over 60 now but I don't think of myself as old yet. I'm not sure when that will happen, maybe at a certain point a blue wig descends on Yr head along with support stockings and other stereotypical accoutrements of aging. However it hasn't happened to my mother yet and she's well older than I am...

Yes, it's up to those Zoomers to sort things out now, and I expect they've noticed a few things they'll avoid doing, based on recent history. Hopefully.

 

[oregano]

I agree with you on that one. Now only are we giving our children the messes we created. But we never raised them with a proper family as well. Fact: Did you know that only 1 in 100 kids raised in the US will ever grow up with their original biological father until their 18 years old. Did you know that the US has one of the highest incarceration rate in the world, 1 out of 100 of it's citizens is in jail. So ya! the future look really bleak for the zoomers out there. How many zoomers are treated like a unwanted by-product of their parents having a one night stand.

Actually, a good number of zoomers are exactly that, a product of a brief sex fling that was "just fun" until the woman got pregnant and in a lot of cases the man took off at warp speed once he realized what he did, leaving the woman all alone with an unwanted kid.

The woman then had to take a string of low end jobs to feed the kid, handing it off to a revolving door of boyfriends who mainly wanted access to a sex crime victim. I believe that sexual abuse towards zoomers is nearly universal among females and almost so among males. So you have a generation raised largely without parents, and even worse without a stable place to call home since the mother went from eviction to eviction in ghetto apartments full of vermin (human and animal).

On the other end you have wealthy Xers who were too busy in their careers to care about a kid, mainly wanting it as a trophy to show the world (meaning social media and employers) how perfect they were while shoveling money and stuff at the kid in lieu of parenting. The kid existed to buff up the parents Facebook profiles, and that's about it.

A generation of unloved, unwanted kids, living lives of a kaleidoscope of abuse, faced with a future of civilizational decay and climate havoc. All they see are the miles and miles of rotting suburbs, self-absorbed and narcissistic adults, no job prospects at all, no way to get food, tap water that smells and tastes like black mold, and on and on. I'm actually shocked that it took until 2020 for them to burn the cities down in an act of nihilistic rage.

 

[FreeDiver]

On the other end you have wealthy Xers who were too busy in their careers to care about a kid, mainly wanting it as a trophy to show the world (meaning social media and employers) how perfect they were while shoveling money and stuff at the kid in lieu of parenting. The kid existed to buff up the parents Facebook profiles, and that's about it.

Funny you mention this. I went to a boarding school for about 6 months and all I ever saw was a bunch of rich, spoiled and yet, lonely kids. They had all of their material needs meet and then some. But their parents were never around. All the parents would ever do is call once a week to see how they are doing and the calls would only last for about 15 minutes. All these kids wanted to do was end the call ASAP without being rude in the process. These places only exist as daycare centers for teens. All the parents wanted to do was pay someone to raise their kids because money is cheaper then time.

A generation of unloved, unwanted kids, living lives of a kaleidoscope of abuse, faced with a future of civilizational decay and climate havoc. All they see are the miles and miles of rotting suburbs, self-absorbed and narcissistic adults, no job prospects at all, no way to get food, tap water that smells and tastes like black mold, and on and on. I'm actually shocked that it took until 2020 for them to burn the cities down in an act of nihilistic rage.

There are 2 cities that I wouldn't mind seeing burned to ashes, and that's Seattle and San Francisco. Being that both those cities are built on fault lines. Maybe a good mag-9 earthquake would help shake things up a bit.

 

[SusanLR]

So stop having kids. Then no one will have to die at any age.

 

[oregano]

San Francisco has already been burnt to ashes once, in 1906. Given that the San Andreas Fault is only a few miles away, a second round is a matter of when. Los Angeles has never had a major earthquake since the arrival of Europeans, and that's the city I was thinking of, a giant sprawl of crumbling houses built very cheaply in the 1940s and 1950s, inhabited by the destitute, meaning Latinos and Blacks, whose kids have no futures except prison or an early burial. The city's small Hollywood elite live in a separate world, but their kids are just as abandoned, albeit in a superficially different fashion. Eventually the fault will give way and flatten the whole mess. Maybe it can be returned to barley fields and cow pastures.

 

[Judge]

Los Angeles has never had a major earthquake since the arrival of Europeans

Depends on what you mean by "Los Angeles", which amounts to an enormous metropolitan area in general.

1933- Long Beach Earthquake, estimated magnitude 6.4, 120 dead; injured unknown.
1971- San Fernando Earthquake, estimated magnitude 6.5, 58–65 dead; 200–2,000 injured.
1987- Whittier Earthquake, estimated magnitude 5.9, 8 dead; 200 injured.
1994- Northridge Earthquake, estimated magnitude 6.7, 57 dead; 8700 injured.

Statistics well known to most anyone underwriting earthquake coverage in California. Worse for me, as one of my fellow underwriters lost her sister in the Northridge quake of 1994. Where her apartment building collapsed, and "pancaked" on top of the lower floors.

 

[Pats]

I'm a boomer and I'm tired of the attitudes toward our generation, too. Groups of young people saying we destroyed the planet and they leave plastic bottles and trash piles all over what used to be beautiful sites. We took better care of the planet than they do. And our opinions count for nothing.

 

[Doliba]

I'm 19, so I hope I can provide some insight on this since this type of hatred is coming from my age group.

It seems people have strictly divided others into boxes. The people who are discriminating are looking at the few extremely rich, privileged and narrow-minded people who happen to be between 30 and 70, and saying that millions of people in that age group are exactly the same. There are plenty of people just like that who are in their twenties. It's even worse when that discrimination is used only to help someone win an argument by saying that your opinion is invalid because you're old.

The issue with the word, "boomer", is that it's a absolutely a slur when it's used in any context like that, by definition. It says that this person no longer values you or your opinions, which means that it's really hard to speak your mind online if you're older. Its only purpose is to invalidate others, which is the point of derogatory slurs as a whole.

I guess the point is that being called a boomer says nothing about you at all. Calling someone a boomer, on the other hand, is really awful, no matter how normalized it is.

 

[Progster]

someone said they'd forbid anyone over the age of 50 to use the internet!

That's ridiculous! I'm approaching 50 and I've bee using the internet for a lot longer than someone who is, say, 20.