Zach M. Stafford | Website
Transcript
Comic in 4 Panels
Panel 1: A young bright-eyed man stands in front of a house.
Grandpa: I’m going to buy a house!
Panel 2: The young man is now old and bespectacled. He’s telling this story to his grandson, who is listening politely.
Grandpa: …and that was how I bought my house when I was 23!
Panel 3: Grandpa’s story turns into a yelling rant
Grandpa: I WORKED AT THE DRIVE-IN ALL SUMMER FOR THAT HOUSE!! NOBODY WANTS TO WORK ANYMORE!
Panel 4: Grandpa watches as his grandson unplugs a cord from the wall with a * POP *
Grandpa: …why are you unplugging my lamp?
Grandson: I’m just practicing
————-
Footer:
Pervis
Zach M. Stafford
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I’m 60. I grew up in California and when I had to start earning my way at 18, I soon realized I’d never be able to afford a house there. So, I moved to NM. I was barely able to afford to buy a house here, and I’m almost done paying it off.
My son works, but I don’t think he’ll be able to afford to buy a house any time soon. My hope is I’m able to hang on to the house till I die and give it to him. So, at least he’ll have that.
I’ve never told my son what I think he should do. But, if he asked… I’d have no idea what to tell him. Shit is fucked up, now, and I didn’t see it coming.
Serious question: Has anyone here had firsthand direct experience of a “boomer” saying sh*t like this? And I mean recently, not 20-30 years ago when the inequity was seemingly more obscure in popular culture.
I was at a party one time. Right before covid, so not super recently, but more recent than 20-30 years ago. Older guy was complaining about young people complaining about housing costs. “Just buy a cheap house in %suburb! You could get one for $200,000,” he said.
I was like “uhhh I’ll call that bluff. I’m in the market right now. I’ve been preapproved for $300,000 and I can’t find a house around here. If you can find me a house in %suburb for $200,000, I’ll pay you a $10,000 finders fee.”
This dude spent the next two hours of the party not talking to anyone, locked in on his phone, looking at real estate listings. Then he finally apologized to me and was like “wow, I really didn’t know it was so bad.”
My mother who is in her mid 70s says shit like this, but she is very divorced from reality at this point. My right leaning in laws probably say things like this, but I try to speak to them as little as possible so I don’t hear the regurgitated Fox News that comes out of their mouths.
It almost happens weekly to me for aome reason. I’m a house technician in my forties, but i look really young. Eapecially older people often think i’m 20 something. I often work in their homes, fixing and renovating. I’m not much into Smalltalk, so i usually don’t start conversations, but at some point they go: man, young people or young people like you just don’t want to work anymore. Anf i go: yeah? Crazy. And then they tell me that they were a woodworker and their wife wotked a service job three times a week to afford this home and 3 kids when they were 23. They continue to tell stories that their grandchildren or whoever only work to 5pm, or whenever their shift is over and fon’t care about the company they work for. They kinda never seem to be self aware enough to realise that their grandchildren or whoever they talk about are also around that age and often have way better jobs then they had and can’t afford children, don’t even think about owning a house because it’s so far out of the scope. Anf it has nothing to do with them being lazy.
I find the idea of company loyalty so fucking funny, especially as even as far back as 1980 the Dolly Parton movie 9-to-5 was satirizing how the concept was dead (even for the bad guys).
My company of roughly 25 people has seen 100 people come and go in 2 years. Offer vested pensions, locked in severence, workers comp, mat/pat leave, separate sick and PTO leave, abandon right-to-work and implement wellness programmes and watch company loyalty massively spike.
Never.
(Figured I’d answer since I’d usually only be compelled to answer if I was a yes.)
My father, pretty fresh out of Viet Nam and only a couple years in the Chicago Fire Department was able to get a mortgage for a cute house on the outskirts of town.
Unfortunately for me, now that it is time to pry my aging mom from the property it has been largely unimproved and we’ll be lucky to get 300k for it. That’s still twice what they paid for it, ultimately.
I could have taken it over like my dad did his mother’s house, but there’s no way I’m rotting out where I grew up. I like culture too much.
Edit: It was probably 50k when they signed the mortgage, but ended up paying for it 3+times. She’s lived there almost 50 years and still doesn’t own it.
:To Add: My father had an entry level blue collar job for the late 70s-80s, minor promotion in the 90s, was able to support a family of four and a shadow family of three in the 90s-00’s when he got bored of us.
Yep. The excuse was “but we earned far less back then too!” and then you have to show them what their income actually was scaled to 2026 inflation. And then they shut up for a bit. Until they bring it up again.
In my limited experience, they are not interested in factual truth as much as they just want their opinion and biases validated. When push comes to shove, they’ll fall back to “everyone’s entitled to their opinion” (which they don’t apply consistently to others with differing opinions).
Oh absolutely. They nod sympathetically during the explanation, but do not absorb it. Hence the repetitive cycle
No shit. I hear things like: “Only immigrants still want to work.” at my summer job. Yes, I DON’T WANT TO HAVE A JOB WHICH DESTROYS MY BODY MY WHOLE LIFE AND WILL BE AUTOMATED THE SECOND IT CAN BE.
This needs to be qualified by socioeconomic status. It’s got to be the upper class or conservative sycophants saying things like that.
And there’s the confirmation bias effect. Nobody is asking about the majority of the “boomer” generation who don’t talk like that.
Literally had my step dad say something to this effect recently, yeah.
Yes. Twice within the last 3 years at least.
An acquaintance of a friend of mine owns their own business and was saying that they voted for Trump and weren’t worried that so many of their hard-working employees had quit our been deported because
“Nobody wants to work anymore. My employees work hard because they don’t have a choice, but now that I don’t have enough eventually I’ll have to hire white people and they’ll learn how to work hard because they’ll have to. Trump’s plan is working.”
Or something very similar to that.
Not the house part directly but I got the work part repeatedly after graduation from my own family (who are renting). It was constant verbal harassment about laziness and ‘not wanting to work’ under threats of being kicked out onto the street. Stopped only after a job agency they picked had every partnered employer reject me and my degree for 6 months straight. The only reason given was a paradoxical “overqualified and under-experienced” which is to say the boomer retoric of “degrees = jobs” was fatally backwards in an era where employers only offered minimum wage for the job responsibilities of 3 people.
Took 4 years after university to land my first job and only as a contract labor hire on an assembly line in late 2019… FML. Spent the past 5 years of underpaid work forcing my way back into software QA just in time for the era of slop… FML part 2. I now make decent money and live with my partner but to my parents it’s like those 4 years of victim blaming never happened and my success is magically attributable to their ‘support’.
TLDR: It is absolutely a real mindset still driving boomer cognitive dissonance with reality.
Not this extreme, but yes
Yeah I have a couple 80 year old relatives who post shit like this on facebook
Yeah
My parents
Admittedly, they did put in a bit of work to get where they are, but they happily ignore the fact that they were born into a position of relative privilege and that the world is a very different place
Even while they moan about how different things are now…
I bought my house with my military sign in bonus. I got 20k that i put into the s&p. After college it was 40k. My house was 120k.
Then the federal reserve made the choice to raise housing prices like crazy by lowing interest rates to 0.25% (1.9% apr for houses) and my house blew up to 500k.
Low interest rates have killed the market for anyone to ever buy a house now. They really need to raise rates to 10% before housing becomes affordable again
The problem is all that will do is freeze the housing market. If the prices have dropped through the floor, people just don’t sell (unless they are forced to)
If the prices have dropped through the floor, people just don’t sell (unless they are forced to)
The good news is that people often are forced to sell, either because they’re moving to a new city, or because they died and now their kids need to unload the house.
My grandma repeatedly told us that their house was expensive because the interest rate was 10 3/4%. We have tax benefits based on the interest rate you pay. Also, their monthly payments were, adjusted by inflation, still way lower than what I pay for a worse house.
Hell, the house my dad got when he was a train driver with a wife that didn’t work and with 2 kids is a house I can’t buy as a senior software developer with 3 cats.
Hell, the house my dad got when he was a train driver with a wife that didn’t work and with 2 kids is a house I can’t buy as a senior software developer with 3 cats.
My dad bought a house when he was mid 30s and the solo bread winner for the house a couple of years after I was born. I loved that neighbourhood. It wasn’t anything too special. The houses there are 50s-90s builds, 2-3 bedrooms, maybe 2 bathrooms (our second bathroom in that house was almost an outhouse in the basement – concrete floor, exposed pipes, door that looked like it belonged on a shed, etc. My dad and a friend built a back deck which was really nice. There is a park nearby. There’s access to a nice bike path. It’s not on a through-route at all, so the only cars entering the neighbourhood are residents or guests. It’s not near shopping, not near public transit, not really near any schools. It was just a quiet, modest, neighbourhood.
I’m significantly older, don’t have any kids to support, have been saving for ages, had better, and higher paying jobs (inflation adjusted) than him. I can’t really afford any house in that neighbourhood. The only people buying there now are multi-millionaires, but they’re moving in next to families who have been there for 30ish years and know enough not to give up a good thing.
It just seems to me that a rule of thumb with housing is that in general you should be able to afford to buy in the neighbourhood where you grew up. I know sometimes that isn’t possible. Cities get denser, areas become highly sought after, etc. But, if the neighbourhood really is basically the same, and you earn what your parents did (or better), you should be able to stay nearby.
It seems like a reasonable approach. However, “decision makers” in the western world have broadly given up on making actual decisions and only being managers, and delegated this like so many other things to the power and joy of the unfettered free market.
Also, they are generally not personally too affected so they don’t have an incentive to enforce this approach.
Camera pans uncomfortably and refocuses on MoonRaven’s cat buying NFTs on an old laptop in the background.
All true. But on the bright side, cats.
You are not wrong at all.
good thing we got that second taxable income to supplement the rise in capital costs.
Ok , so?
“Ok , so?” - zout
Ok , so?
I’m guessing it’s just the three cats, no SO, otherwise they probably would have mentioned it.
Please don’t buy any propaganda from the capital class that attempts to divide the working classes. We have more in common with our grandparents than with the billionaires oppressing us.
Nah, a fuck ton of people have CPTSD from persistent and consistent narcissistic abuse from their Boomer parents and those who think and act like them.
Its why 1/4 to 1/3 of millennials and gen z have gone no contact with at least one of their parents.
This is a legitimate phenomenon of the Boomer generation being disproportionately absurdly selfish and abusive.
If you’re a millennial and your grandparents are still alive, pretty good chance they’re no where near as fundamentally shitty and horrible as your parents are… significantly less people going no contact with the grandparents.
There can be no solidarity with an abuser.
my grandparents and parents never owned and have been dead for decades and i’m only 33
I understand the sentiment, but the main boomer in my life still thinks I’m lazy despite working 12-14 hours a day 7 days a week.
I found out the other day they also badmouth me and my partner for not having kids. They also think we don’t own a house yet solely because we’re irresponsible.
They also voted for Trump three times and currently believe the economy is thriving better under him than it would have otherwise. They have insane levels of American exceptionalism.
I have nothing in common with them and I will also go practice unplugging a lamp.
Unfortunalty that not specific to america. All boomers in the world think like that. Say it when they are wrong but love them when they act right.
They may change or maybe not. But you will not become like them. Stupid, selfish …
This unfortunately, honestly American exceptionalism needs to die and be dead and buried 6 feet under
Exceptionalism is just a cutesy name for hubris and arrogance.
For such an exceptional country it really does look like shit from over here. Glad I don’t live there.
You’ve only been here 5 months, so I forgive you.
But you can go back years browsing the threadiverse, and find these very same boomers and Gen X saying it’s our problem, and that we have to revolt, without an ounce of support from them.
All the while you’re aware what generations voted for what. It’ll probably take you a week to review. But yes, we’ve been digressively victimized, and I am not happy about it.
We’re not fighting them because they’re rich, we’re fighting the boomer class because they keep giving the billionaires power because they think we’re lazy and billionaires worked hard for their money
The problem is definitely both. While the old coots that talk like the guy in the comic might not have directly ripped off everyone (except many have on more personal levels), their ignorance and entrenched positions make it far more difficult to fight the billionaires when there is a massive group of people who are totally unwilling to even admit there is a problem to address.
I think that’s fair. My hope is that we can encourage class traitors to come over to our side, rather than be angry at them.
This would be ideal but in my personal experience with my parents and their peers, who are all in their early 70s, is even if you can convince them to agree on the class war they almost universally will state they’ll be dead soon with the implication being it’s not their problem
I once told a boomer that we were all just waiting for them to die off so we could actually make some positive changes in the world, and they were shocked. I’m like “You said you were going to continue voting like this no matter who the candidates are until you die. I’m just waiting for the terms to be fulfilled.”
Every four years our president gets four years older, surely that trend can’t go on forever?
It’s the billionaire’s that are actively shaping the boomer’s opinions to create the division that distracts from what the billionaires are doing. Yes, they are using existing notions and amplifying them - just like they’re amplifying younger adults natural distain for the previous generation.
boomers have always been entitled
Yes, some have. And some people of the following generations have been lazy and unable to comprehend the hardships of the post-WWII years. But it’s not all of them, not even the majority. It’s bigotry to throw shade on a whole group. The divisions are played up in the media as per the billionaire’s way to control the masses. They make you hate the boomers, they make maga hate immigrants, etc. it’s so you don’t focus enough on the real enemies - those who allow corporations to keep wages and benifits low while making a lot of money and paying no taxes.
The boomer in the comic has already fallen for the propaganda though. Boomers like the one in the comic are helping the billionaire class oppress us. Are we not allowed to point that out?
At the same time my grandfather told us we could just buy a used car for $100. He had made his money and did not keep up on how expensive these things are now. So while I agree, I do wish they would maybe accept things are more expensive now.
That old guy in the comic is exactly like my boomer parents.
Ah boomers they stole from their parents , they stole from their kids. The most selfish generation in history.
The thing that angers me the most is that I said to my mom “I’m never going to have a retirement…”
I’m 42, no house, no retirement savings, no 401k, and no way to save for those things. Some weeks I don’t have enough money to buy food.
My moms response was “Oh you’ll be fine! I struggled when I was in my 20s, with both of your sisters, and I turned out ok!”
Yes, it’s true that for about 5 years my mom had it as hard, maybe harder than I do. The difference is, then she met my dad, moved in with him, her money problems disappeared. She then got a better job, with retirement options, and a 401k, and benefits.
Then she bought her own house in the 90s. The seller wasn’t sure if he wanted to sell to her as a single woman. So she said “you can either sell to me, or sell to someone else. The price is the same either way. You may as well just sell now, rather than waiting for the next buyer.”
THATS the speech that got her the house.
Today, you’d get laughed at.
My biggest problem with boomers isn’t their selfish nature, or the fact that they’ve had an easy life. My biggest problem is that they refuse to admit that times have changed. I CAN’T live life the way boomers did. I’d LOVE to wear a suit, walk into a business, demand to see the manager before I even fill out an application and talk myself into a job. I’d LOVE to do that…but thats not how it works anymore! Now you fill an application out online, submit it to an AI crawler that steals your data, be in competition with 500 other applicants, and most of the time never hear back.
I asked my brother in law 10 years ago if he could get me a job at his fortune 500 company. He works there, he’s not the owner, but I was asking him to put in a good word, get my application even looked at.
He’s my age, and this was said right in front of my mom. He said “I couldn’t do that. That would be nepotism”. I said “Yeah. I’m fine with nepotism if it means I canpay my bills.”
And my mom asked if I wanted her to storm the corporate offices of Progressive Insurance, and hunt down the CEO for an interview.
So I just said yes. Not because I think it would work, but because I knew she’d fail spectacularly. Maybe even get arrested on a light charge. Then maybe she’d realize how times change.
But she just said “I can’t always fight your battles for you. This is something YOU need to do.”
God dammit.
See that last quip there shows that she knows she is entirely full of shit.
She knows none of her advice is actually useful.
She doesn’t care.
She just wants to always feel superior to you.
Same with bro in law.
‘That’d be nepotism’ means 'that’d be nepotism that I personally might not benefit from.
… here, I have the glasses from They Live, you can have them, but you’re not gonna like what you see.
They know they’re full of shit, they’re complete hypocrites. Otherwise the advice they give would… you know, generally work. They don’t care that they are complete hypocrites.
They have the mentality of scammers and con artists; a massively oversized ego that must continually be fed with I am awesome and everyone else is a sucker.
They do not actually care about you or your wellbeing. They care about feeling like a success.
If I were you, I’d cut them out of your life; all they’re good for is wasting your time and causing you sanity damage.
During the worst of one of the recessions I was trying to find a job right out of college, and my dad (who regularly told me to use old-school job hunting tactics) asked me if I wanted him to apply for me and show me how it’s done. I said yes.
A week later he had applied to five jobs. Taps out with a “Man, it’s rough out there!” That perspective really helped us communicate in the future.
He did, at one point, help me get a nepotism hire. While I was there they got bought out, and they made him personally fire 80% of the company, including me and my mom, before firing him as well. Live by the sword die by the sword I guess.
2008? I was lucky during that time period. I had a job, I saw the recession. I still applied to other jobs, but I put up with my shitty job I had, because it was all I had. I’m sure many lives were ruined for those that didn’t have jobs at that time.
Some countries haven’t even recover from 2008 when Covid hit (Spain for example) and are now in a three-economic-crisis spree.
I genuinely believe a lot of these people are straight up delusional and so insanely stubborn they’ll never see it.
This is correct.
They’re pathological narcissists, the idea that they are ever fundamentally wrong about anything is essentially not a thinkable thought for them, because that would damage their ego, their self-image.
They genuinely cannot comprehend the idea that their worldview (which revolves around themself) can be substantially wrong.
The world and everything and everyone in it exists to validate them and everything they’ve ever thought said or done.
They basically have the arrogance of Old Testament God, something like that.
They are also called the “me” generation back in the '70s.
When I went to college it was only 500$ a semester.
I worked 9 hours a week to pay for it.
I pay pretty much the same for university right now
My dad only worked during summers to pay for the entire year + rent/dorm. I literally can’t imagine how that’s possible. Like, it’s time to make money, so you just go get a job at the job store? And three months can cover you for an entire year?
Oh, look at mr brag over here, with his lack of a life long crippling student debt, and his “ability to work 9 whole hours in a single week”.
I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at the system.
Also, lived at home and rode the greyhound bus to school every day.
So your parents didn’t kick you out at 18 while saying something about birds?
I’ve had people your age literally yell at me that this wasn’t the case. XD
I’ve also spent an entire career in academia watching this sort of thing happen.
Well, it also depends on the school you go to. There were more expensive ones, I chose the cheaper closer one, so no room and board had to be paid.
No, it doesn’t. If we’re talking state schools, you go back before Reagan’s time and the states paid upward of around 80 or 90% of the education through taxpayer dollars. My parents and aunt’s were part of the ones that could go to school on a part-time summer salary. Fundamentally the price is irrelevant at that point.
Reagan went out of his way to defund education in California prior to becoming president which was wildly successful because it turns out there’s a lot of assholes in this country who are willing to sacrifice the future for a few tax dollars.
Other states follow the model and suddenly you have a situation where the state funds very little and the rest has to come from aggressive student loans.
The shit has zero to do with proximity to home, whether or not you stay on campus, or any other factor. Those are largely modern effects.
Your answer in no way matches what I said. I was talking about 40 years ago.
I must say that I understand why your coworker yell at you.
Not coworkers morons on the internet. My colleagues largely understand how education is funded.
And I’m talking a lot longer than 40 years ago. People always want to attribute simple answers to complicated, long-term funding issues.
Oh, you’re just a troll.
I should have picked up on it sooner.Bye
I mean, you came in and added absolutely nothing to the conversation. Why not get sassy and to make a big deal out of announcing that you’re leaving?
The numbers are so far off of reasonable now that I misread it as “$500 a week” and thought “damn, they made $56/hr?”
ah, practicing
spoiler
unplugging life support
that took me a minute
thanks, I was genuinely confused.
Nope, and many of my grandparents criticisms of “the current generation” I kinda agree with. Although I strongly suspect it isn’t generational and is just society in general, like that list of “the kids today are feral” said throughout history.
deleted by creator
Yeah, I’m fairly certain that every generation had it The Worst once that generation reaches 50-60, and the young ones have never respected their old, out of touch elders.
![I’m going to by a house [Pervis]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8224d205-3e9d-4c9b-8108-a4384c30c170.webp){kind=link}