Man I try and be an equal opportunity bigot--a couple of my best friends are in the 55-70 range--but sometimes it's tough. Old people are so bad with speech to text it's remarkable. Yes, the tech sucks, but it annoys me a lot when I get a storm of texts that are like "getting off worse in 20 minutes want to hitch the Jim" "gym" "work" "dammit" "dammit" "work". Wait till you can actually type or something. Lot of overlap between this and everyone being fucking illiterate these days.
To be fair, us millennials can't stroke themselves off about being the only tech savvy generation the way we love doing, because a lot of them are also dangerously retarded with computers. Seen multiple people I know who work in tech jobs that require actual programming knowledge using the same screenname for both professional stuff and a Reddit account they comment on porn and hentai posts on.
I think alot of picky eating was simply from Boomers being bad cooks.
Few fats used, nothing baked or fried, little to no salt, every meat overcooked. Kids naturally gravitated to pre-packaged and salty foods or takeout that actually did use these basic techniques. Chicken nuggets have instructions and sauces so its hard to overcook them and they are salty. That alone makes them better than most Boomer cuisine.
Obviously some Boomers have the magic touch of cooking, but the vast majority alternate between bland slop and processed slop.
Boomers also have a problem of using expired/stale food and chicken nuggets take much longer to degenerate to that point.
This definitely extends to the Silents, but with more of a split. My grandparents are/were all Silent gen. Currently only have one grandmother still. One side of the family was all frozen veg and TV dinner sloppa and didn't learn real cooking outside of grilling until meeting my other parent. The other parent's family, their mom had a bunch of family recipies and cookbooks and loved to cook. Unfortunately, this side of the family was dysfunctional and among other things, Grandma would get angry and chase the kids out of the kitchen and didn't really teach them well. Recipies and stuff were saved after she passed though
My personal experience with boomers have mostly been out in those blended suburban/countryside towns. There are entire pockets of boomers that worked at a grocery store their whole lives, retired early, and live comfortably now off of a pension. Of that type of boomer there are two subtypes that I've noticed. The first type are the churchy-boomers, these have been mentioned before as the types of people that give most of their monthly stipend away to the church collection basket each week. Because genX and millenials tend to have lower rates of religious affiliation, these boomers will neglect any and all family duties for the sake of the church. They do not cook meals for their families, they cook meals for the potlucks. They do not help to raise their grandkids, they dodge birthday parties in favor of going out with their fellowship bowling night. They're functionally braindead cult members who turn up their noses at their "godless" children and bleed money by getting a new shiny car with an 800$ monthly payment.
The second type is the druggy/hoarder boomer (because usually they overlap). These people have usually been in some kind of accident, a car crash, a slipped disk, a fall that busts their hip, what have you, and got hooked on every pain pill their doctor gave them. Gabapentin tends to be the worst for these people. They just never stopped taking pills, and they got loopy. Their houses are full of garbage and usually too many animals too. Any attemps to get them to downsize to a more manageable living situation for them (most of them can barely navigate the piles of junk and shit without falling and injuring themselves again) is met with literal screeching fits. I primarily feel bad for the animals in these situations because they obviously suffer from poor care, but god forbid you say anything about that. They'll kick you off of their property and not speak to you for 2 months, only to then forget about it on a night when they've just downed a beer and a hydrocodone, and you'll get a facebook message notification from them at 2AM that's just a link to "Five pretzel salad recipes you HAVE to try this summer!!"
Both types of boomer sits down on their lazyboy recliner and turns the TV to Dr. Oz or The View, and they sleep for 4 hours.
My great grandmother lived with me for 8 years when I was a child. 8. Years. She doesn't even tell me happy birthday now.
They just don't care about anything but their creature comforts and if you will not enmesh yourself into their bullshit, you can get fucked. Family be damned.
Easily the most rage inducing thing about a lot of boomers is they will pay lip service to family being important and all the other bull...but they're easily the worst examples of familial devotation. Public schools (or nannies) raised their kids. They pushed their kids to be independent and on their own as soon as possible with no help, literally just starting from scratch. But they'll go on and on about how no one is close with their family anymore and yatta yatta.
Easily the most rage inducing thing about a lot of boomers is they will pay lip service to family being important and all the other bull...but they're easily the worst examples of familial devotation. Public schools (or nannies) raised their kids. They pushed their kids to be independent and on their own as soon as possible with no help, literally just starting from scratch. But they'll go on and on about how no one is close with their family anymore and yatta yatta.
Because to them, family is a safety net for when they die. Nobody wants to die alone getting raped by somalians in a puddle of their own shit in a state run facility. They know that's always an option. How many families have stories of "difficult" family members being sent away to penitentiaries or even to get lobotomies? I was a quiet kid and I listened to them talk about deep family secrets when the pleasantries are out of the way. They weep and scratch at their faces about the importance of family because they fear losing access to the resources of it so desperately. It's a guilt trip, and it's something the boomers do very well.
The boomers bought the computers but it was us that learned how to actually use them. I sat there and figured out DOS worked on the IBM when my parents, teachers, and friends parents all knew less than me.
A boomer never bought me a computer, but I'm very impressed you just sat down with a machine like a caveman and intuitively discovered everything by yourself. I myself had to read endless books and manuals, which were all written by the generation preceding mine. Must be wondrous to just intuit things out of thin air like that, and you certainly couldn't be slightly misremembering your journey or attributing some cognitive achievements to an immature brain that weren't really its own.
A boomer never bought me a computer, but I'm very impressed you just sat down with a machine like a caveman and intuitively discovered everything by yourself. I myself had to read endless books and manuals, which were all written by the generation preceding mine. Must be wondrous to just intuit things out of thin air like that, and you certainly couldn't be slightly misremembering your journey or attributing some cognitive achievements to an immature brain that weren't really its own.
When someone says they “sat there and figured out” something, they usually mean they did this by reading books or manuals or exploring on their own. What they are trying to convey is that they didn’t need handholding to learn. You might be a little bit autistic if you took their statements to literally mean they intuited things out of thin air. Or you might be a boomer.
What made you leave out the first sentence of the person you were quoting?
A very very small minority of boomers created the tech and good for them for doing do. The boomers bought the computers but it was us that learned how to actually use them. I sat there and figured out DOS worked on the IBM when my parents, teachers, and friends parents all knew less than me.
Did anyone else have grandparents who A) had no toys of any kind in their house, and B) only gave presents that were "educational" e.g. encyclopaediae, microscopes, literal school desks, etc?
As an adult, I was able to gain some insight into what childhood must have been like for my own Boomer father. - Not much fun to be had in his upbringing!
Boomers feel like a deep chasm in American history where blood memory cannot cross. I have met so many people who have no history of their own families beyond grandparents.
There is certainly an upper limit to the amount of kids you can have. That's the amount to which you and your husband/wife can actively edify and care for them all yourselves, not have the state do it for you.
The state does not and should not educate children in the matters of lineage, that is your job, the job that was failed in the creation of our boomers.
A boomer never bought me a computer, but I'm very impressed you just sat down with a machine like a caveman and intuitively discovered everything by yourself. I myself had to read endless books and manuals, which were all written by the generation preceding mine. Must be wondrous to just intuit things out of thin air like that, and you certainly couldn't be slightly misremembering your journey or attributing some cognitive achievements to an immature brain that weren't really its own.
I watched people use the computer and memorized commands then when nobody was watching me i fucked around with the computer to see what they did. I cobbled together bullshit from parts since i was in double digits. Endless books to learn how to navigate fucking DOS? Are you for real?
My parents bought a computer because it was the thing to do, it was an IBM. My dad would play golf with it and my mom would print banners with a program called banner. After they hired a guy to fix or modify the computer somehow my dads golf game installation got moved and he didn't know how to play it for a solid year until one day he walked by and saw me playing it.
Boomers teaching people about a computer is laughable.
I cannot blame Boomers for not wanting to experiment in the kitchen, given how their parents were putting literally fucking everything they could find in aspic.
I personally think the old generations had too much faith in the concept of a housewife, such that they never actually understood how much they KNEW about cooking and baking and they expected some boomer woman with a job and access to all the store made stuff to passively acquire what is a tremendous amount of work and knowledge that was never properly written down.
Like my mother apparently made a mean casserole. You say "made?, I'm sorry for your loss" but no she just hasn't made it in like... 40 years? She made it once for my father. When they were dating. And never again. - And it's weird because literally every time I make something, it gets requested whenever I come back. Yet somehow all the boomers signature dishes that they insist were sooooo good never manifested.
My dead millennial dad's parents were vampiric country club baby boomers. And his family were more clout than care or nurture than my mom's family are.
You don't have to imagine what I think about them.
I was born in the last year of the Baby Boom (1964).
Always feel like I get the shit for the generation I'm part of without many or even any of the benefits. Somewhere or other I recall a nickname for the ass end of the Baby Boom cohort being called "Atari Boomers" and perhaps there's something to that? (And yes I did own a 2600, right off the shelf from Sears.)
I'd powerlevel in my defense, and boy could I drop a wall of text vomit, but I suspect (fairly) nobody otherwise gives a shit, so I'd either be shouting into the void or embarrassing myself. Or more likely, both. Why don't I just say, except for some of the music and a few other minor things, I kind of hate my generational cohort, too. Odd place to find oneself, I suppose. But here I am.
Early 1980s here, and I, too, share the similar frustration of being in a transitional period between generations.
I spent K-12 going to school with people born in the 1970s, have friends born in the 1970s, and generally share a lot more in common with people born in the 1970s than people born even a few years later than me. But according to the "experts," I am not the same generation as them (Gen X). Nope, I am the same generation as the child who was four years-old when 9/11 happened while I was in college (Millennials). The "experts" expect me to identify with Millennial four year-olds and not the similarly-aged Gen X.
I feel generationally "homeless" and always wondered if the other generations in transitional periods, i.e. late Boomers/early Gen X in your case, felt the same way. You answered my question. Thank you for sharing. I'm curious to hear any further thoughts you might have on being stuck in this generational transition zone.
In my case, I refuse to call myself or identify with the generational label I've been assigned ("Millennial"). I recommend you do the same. You don't have to identify with, defend, or feel any attachment to the Boomers just because some shithead somewhere said you have to.
Thread tax: Fuck the Boomer who came up with these awful and inaccurate generational labels.
Do those of us in the GenX department get a pass or we do we receive some hate as well? Either works for me, the more people I can call a nigger, the better.
