The Invisible Hand of Gerontocracy
terminaldrift.substack.com
terminaldrift.substack.com
You were born into a deal you never signed, written in a language you don’t speak, enforced by people you’ll never meet. ...
Let’s be crystal fucking clear about what gerontocracy actually is. You think it means Biden forgetting where he is on live TV or McConnell blue-screening mid-sentence like Windows 98. That’s adorable. That’s like thinking cancer is just a lump. Gerontocracy is the operating system itself. It’s the total architecture: familial, fiscal, psychological, sexual, by which the old arrange for the labor of the young to be converted into their continued existence, plus maybe a Viking River Cruise. ...
You think you’re choosing your own life. You’re not. You’re a rat in a maze designed by dead people, optimizing for cheese that someone else already ate. ...
You think you chose to live with roommates at thirty-two because you’re “figuring things out” or “enjoying the social aspect.” Bullshit. You live with roommates because zoning laws written in 1973 by homeowners who bought their houses for the price of a Toyota Camry ensure that nothing can be built that might lower their property values. Those homeowners are now seventy-eight, sitting on $2 million in equity they did nothing to earn except not die, ...
Or consider why you’re not having kids. ... The real reason? The entire economy is structured to extract maximum value from you during your prime reproductive years. Student loans ensure you start your career pre-fucked. Housing costs ensure you can’t nest. The gig economy ensures you have no stability. Meanwhile, the people who designed this system had three kids by twenty-eight on one salary ...
Every “smart” decision you make is smart within a framework designed by and for people who will be dead before the bill comes due. ...
The NIMBYism by people in the 70s is not related to their age, but to their acting in their own interests, as anyone else today would almost certainly have done too. The issue is lack of regulation.
The other points have literally nothing to do with old people.
What prevents us from thinking of class instead of race/gender/age/anything else?
> conflate capitalist elites with old people
Old people have accumulated capital, especially the prior generation which bought homes and other capital, and now has done nothing to make it affordable
> as anyone else today would almost certainly have done too
That's only the excuse; not everyone does it - people have long fought for, sacrificed for, and invested in other's rights and welfare; that is the basis of the United States; that's how we have much of what we have today. The generation before the Boomers made homes, college, etc. affordable to future generations. The Boomers made those things prohibitively expensive.
'Today' is another way of ducking the responsibility, as if the time causes you to do it.