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Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

“What’s old is new again. The paper observes that some of the millennials’ parents were subject to similar baseless grumbles of "kids these days" from their elders.”

I don’t know though. Seems like part of the nastiness of the times is the baby boomers constantly taking jabs at millennials. Perhaps the silent generation complained the boomers weren’t “frugal enough” but I have a hard time believing they had such widespread disdain for their kids as the boomers do. Anyone seen any research that quantifies that?

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Baby boomers were teenagers and young adults from the late 50s through the 80s. So the birth of rock-n-roll, the protest movements of the 60s and 70s, emergence of drug culture, the sexual revolution, disco, the crack epidemic, and the birth of rap.

As a Gen X'er I can personally remember the mid-70s to the late 80s and the hate spewed out at baby boomers by previous generations. I don't think the Millennials have it any worse or better. Those who are currently going through it always see it as the worse.

I think out of everyone my generation had it the easiest. We were teenagers and young adults during a time of general peace and prosperity.

Now it's our job to bring peace and prosperity to the next ones.

The boomers have made it so difficult to buy a house that I chose to not have kids so I have a chance at having some peace and prosperity myself. Sucks but true.

That’s helpful perspective, thanks for sharing :)

Yeah, we were lucky. War was mostly over and all the debt hadn’t caused any problems yet when we were teens in the 80s and 90s.

I think that, like most stats now, it's inflated by the bullhorn of the internet.

Basically it probably happened but the world at large didn't have the ability to hear about it. Sort of like crime rates, even though they are lower than nearly any other time in the US the fact that the internet and 24 hour news cycle constantly talk about crimes the population as a whole feels its a bigger problem than it used to be.

I think it's largely that bullhorn. Before the Internet, you might read a magazine article or hear a news story once in while, but now that (almost) everybody can have a global voice, there are a lot more voices complaining about everything.

> I have a hard time believing they had such widespread disdain for their kids as the boomers do

It's always interesting when I hear boomers complain about millennials. Didn't they have an influence on raising the same generation they complain about?

If you pay attention you'll note that it's always other peoples' kids who are the problem.

Yeah this has become my standard reply when a boomer makes a stink about Millenials to me. “Sounds like they didn’t have very good parents.”

Only the positive part :)

I don't think that was any less in previous generations. I seem to recall hearing about a lot of grumbling about people protesting the Vietnam war, for example.

This sort of covers that:

"Older people love to gripe about the entitled, lazy millennial generation. But it's nothing new – by delving into the archives, we found plenty of parallels stretching back 2,000 years."

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20171003-proof-that-people-...

Boomers were disdained as the "me generation" by their parents. Freaks, geeks, and long-haired hippies. It seems like the kids are always maligned by the olds, and vice versa.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_generation

There was an article the other day that said divorce rates for millennials is down a notable amount from baby boomers, but without the marriage rate lowering. One way of interpreting this is that baby boomers have more selfish tendencies than other generations, and millennials are realizing that their parents' ways (including divorce) are selfish, and learning from their parents mistakes. If this is true, then it's perfectly in character for a stereotypical boomer to complain about millennials more than their parents complained about them.

Or it says that people can't afford to get divorced. In dense urban areas the cost of housing/rent has gone way up and the incomes for younger people have not kept up.

I don't think "millennials" are really all that different from the previous generation. However they do have very different forces pushing them in different directions.

Divorce rates also decline when the economy declines. When the economy is booming people feel more confident in their potential future economic security post divorce and are more willing to roll the divorce dice.

I would guess that has more to do with the rates than any moral superiority between generations.

I saw that study and it matched what I observe anecdotally around me. Millenials mostly have divorced parents and mostly feel that was a terrible way to grow up. So they’re waiting until they’re ready to have kids to get married to their long-term partner, and they’re approaching it with more of a sober commitment to stay together for the kids.

At the end of the day, marriage is a choice you make every day. Different cultures have higher and lower divorce rates largely based on how seriously they take that commitment.

The greatest takeaway from this is that we [millenials] ought to make an effort to treat Generation Z with a respect that we are often not given. Let's not propagate that nastiness down the line.

I'm not having kids largely as a result of the mismanagement of the boomers.

I'm holding on to my nastiness.

Boomers originally earned the label of "the 'me' generation."

This has been a common meme forever. See: Fathers and Sons by Turgenev.

The culture wars have enveloped everything nowadays, from #MeToo to GamerGate to Trump. I wonder if gripes between boomers and millennial are just another facet of that upward trend in polarization.

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