Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The Myth of Boomer Privilege

Your anger towards me seems displaced. I posted once on this thread and that includes a reference from what is considered an industry standard source on new car prices. You cited "a site" as the source for your data then manipulated it.

Personally, the whole argument is semantics. I was born Jan of 64, a boomer by definition, but to claim that I have it so much better than someone born in Jan 65 is silly. Instead look at other concepts of why people "succeed" and I put that in quotes because that definition if very personal, and shoud be. I would look instead at many other factors.

- Did they go to college or a trade school? Education matters
- Did they choose carefully so they left debt free? Certainly undergrad you don't need to go to a top flight school nor do you need to go right to grad school.
- Did they pick a course of study that is employable? Your degree in underwater-basket weaving may have been fun but.......
- Did they serve in the military? It is a superb transition from early adult to adult. It introduces many aspects of reality in living color and sets the stage for those first few years.
- Did they stick with a company long enough to see work through good and bad and help them succeed and build their reputation as an asset or when things were rough depart?
- Did they save to buy their first house and buy far less than what industry wanted? No one says you have to spend what a realtors says and you know what? Your first house is not your forever house. Fixer uppers are great.
- Before the first house did they have roommates to help defray expenses as they saved?
- Did they take advantage of employers 401K plan to the maximum extent possible? Yes, you can afford it and it will work in the long game.
- Did they buy used cars until they were in a position to buy new? Your average cost of new is irrelevant if you buy 2 years old.
- Were they willing to move to seek employment and career? One of my big irks is "the economy sucks here" Then leave!
- Do you decide you have to marry and have kids at 22? Works out for a lot but don't think it won't affect you.

None of this matters to the date you were born or some silly lines of "generation" they are decisions people make that affect their near and long-term success. Today I manage a project worth about $50 million. I have employees from 23 to 63 years of age, male and female, many ethnicities, and religions. They work they do, are capable of doing, and how they are doing in their measure of "success" is least measured by their age. I have young folks that are clearly going to do well and have considered the aspects above and acted on them. I have a couple folks in their late 50's, early 60's who "going to work forever" because they made poor choices.

To blame your lot in life on some arbitrary range of birthdates is lazy.

As for me? Off to deer camp in 20 minutes so I'm grand.

I was born in 53, right in the middle.

Lot of good guidelines above. I did most, struggled a lot, but still enjoyed life. Early retirement for me, and financially I was handed nothing.
Im a late boomer too, but I was far behind the classic boomer timing. I graduated hgh school with record high interest, and record high unemployment, and I smell of war with USSR. Really scary times to leave the nest.

Truth.

About fuggin time they fixed that road. Bicycle lives matter 👍🏻

Love your sig line. Dunno if it is new or if I just hadn't noticed it.

So many times some fu ckhead will say, "That's just your opinion."

Duh. I had some bull dyke bitch tell me regarding softball that, "statistics don't matter", to which I had a rebuttal, obviously. She then offered that it was just my opinion and I agreed with her adding, "and it's also a fact, Jack,".

my grandson is aroun 38 these days, married, two kids. He grew up in his early years dirt poor, moving around the country, multiple stepfathers, an absolutely horrible childhood. Except for the summers he spent with us.
He graduated summa cum laude from an engineering school, paid for by himself, although we provided food and shelter. next day he pinned on the bars as a secont lt. in the airforce, i now have those bars hanging on the wall in my living room. He later went on to get two advanced engineering degrees, is a major in the air force, and doing stuff i don't want to talk about on here.
Has no debt other than his house morgage, puts aside about 20% of his gross income, and doesn't ever want to be poor again.
some of his brothers raised in the same condition live paycheck to pay check, or have absolutely no life goals.
he structures his life so he can tell you where he wants to be five years, ten years, fifteen years from now.
I went through college in the 60's and 70's no real help from anyone. My mother sent me 25bucks a month and thought she put me through college. In a way she did, when she was sending me that money making .75/hour waiting tables.
My wife kids i was trying to figure out how to retire before i left school.
LBJ was a disaster, i lived through the vietnam period, i remember the drills of hiding under your desk when the bomb dropped.
But life was as you made it.
Some young people are still that way, others are not, similar to my generation.
It's just some have brains and personal drive, others do not.

one thing i do know is that i come from really poor people. Each generation tried to do better than the last. I now have a "few" assets and sometimes get questioned about whats going to happen to them. For sure they are not going to those that played the blame game to make up for poor personal decisions. I still want after i am gone that one of the future ones will make it into the really wealthy class.
that in a nutshell is what America is about. Having the ability to dream, to work for your own future, and to make life easier than the last generation had it.

You have done well with your Grandson, that little lift is all it takes.

That said, it is our job to provide that lift as we are here to do what we can to make the next lot better than we are...it is not our job to baby them and coddle them in cotton wool and rose petals, that would be a disservice to both them and ourselves.

We need to bring back the vent window in cars

You guys ever had a situation in school where like every year the Senior class or 8th grade class or whatever got to go on some great school trip to like a national park, a major city or Washington D.C., but then when its your class time to go, they announce "due to the class before you guys doing drugs and someone getting arrested" we aren't taking you on the trip, instead we're going to have a picnic on the football field"

that's what it feels like to be a Gen X'er following the Boomers.

Can't blame a person for taking advantage of the opportunities available to them.....

Can blame them for voting for politicians that sell out the country.... that is what I blame the boomers for!

Problem is the millennial's are even more foolish with their vote.....

Gen X'ers started out with more than boomers could ever dream of...air-con, tv, electronic media,etc.

All provided by the sweat of boomers.

And along the same vein, we had far more than our parents could even imagine.

That little triangle window picture just took my memory back to my first ride, a 1977 Chevy Silverado. When I lost the door key (remember when cars had 2 keys?), if I needed to lock it up, I had to pocket knife into the little window to unlock the door. Ahhh memories...

Boomers invented all that?

Definitely paid for it.

My parents were Greatest Generation

If you insist, personally I think that it is circumstance that makes people stand out...but at the base people are generally just people.

Greatest Generation was coined by commie Tom Brokaw in 1998.

You guys realize that the refrigeration cycle was invented before the Boomers right?

well, i am one of the very early boomers, and didn't know what drugs were until after leaving high school and then attending college. and even then it was a couple years into college to find out what "weed" was.
I was better than a german shepard when i later became a deputy, being allergic to the stuff if i stopped a car and my nose started to fill up and sneezing, i had probably cause.
Most of my friends and people i grew up with were pretty dull, and missed the drug scene, we were too busy trying to make a living.
the worst thing we dealt with was you could get a case of coors beer for about five bucks, and two or three cans would knock you over.