Ideas for this article germinated from a conversation with a close contact from Generation X. At a certain point, when we realised how bad things were, he exclaimed: “Boomers ruined everything!” Too true.

There they are! The 60, 70 and 80 somethings lounging in their large, paid-up homes, managing their investment portfolios and shutting the rest of society out. Most younger people cannot afford to get on the property ladder, save for the future or get a chance to lead. Case in point: in the US, two octogenarians are fighting to be president … too old to be able to remember how they got onto the stage, but too stubborn to ever consider leaving it.

The generation known as the Boomers took everything for themselves and left nothing for the following generations:

• from the 60s drug culture to the sexual liberation in the 70s, Boomers left the generations to follow with bad acid trips and AIDS.
• From the financial wealth creation in the 80s to the ecological pretentiousness of the 90s, the Boomers left the rest with the Great Recession, a popped property bubble and climate anxiety.
• From the growth of the Internet in the 2000s to the social media control on our personal data of the last decade, the Boomers gave our world hackers, online predators, data breaches and widespread misinformation and fearmongering.

Now the Boomers long for the good old days (even running election campaigns on this desire), completely oblivious as to how they have ruined everything for the generations that follow. The Generation X, Millennials and Gen Z populations cannot afford decent housing, secure employment, comprehensive healthcare and financial security. The Boomers enjoy all of these privileges but little responsibility for the consequences of their excesses.

As they age (and refuse to die), pension funds and healthcare reserves will dry up, once again leaving the following generations with nothing but problems and headaches as the Boomers selfishly bankrupt these further institutions. Education has been in a state of decline and disrepair from the time that this generation enjoyed their senior proms – too expensive, too political and too pedantic.

Unlike the Great Generation before them, Boomers learned to live with debt and leave the mess behind for others to pay off their bills. This culture of permanent indebtedness (where parents who had not paid their student loans were sending their kids off to college at even greater costs) has become the norm, leaving younger generations vulnerable to the next great financial crisis.

The Boomers enjoyed the best moments of the economic expansion, and in their affluent greed and excessive development left us all to battle the consequences of their excesses. But now, when climate change is becoming an issue, Boomers are telling us we cannot afford the luxuries they enjoyed and that we need to make sacrifices to save the planet (just like they pretended in the 1990s). We can’t fly to exotic destinations like they did, drive big cars like they did, acquire consumer goods like they did. Now the Boomers at the World Economic Forum are telling the younger generations to embrace degrowth and living with less.

While inflation, unemployment and financial debt are hitting the working classes, the Boomers’ investment funds are bloated and paying dividends. As they putt around their golf resorts, take cruises and meet their financial advisors, the rest of the world struggles. Do they even realise what they have done?

When the pandemic hit, everyone went into stifling lockdowns with the consequences of increased substance abuse, domestic violence and mental health issues… all so that the more vulnerable, the Boomers, could be protected. Meanwhile, their investments and net worth doubled during the pandemic while the rest of the world wondered how they could survive the fallout. If other generations had thought like the Boomers do, they would have let the pandemic weed out that generation (using COVID-19 as a “Boomer Remover”).

The Boomers won the Cold War and pilfered away the peace dividend to leave us with a vengeful Vladimir Putin. They gave us international trade agreements that led to the rise in Chinese global power and influence while Western factories and jobs went offshore.

Now Boomers, reminiscing their great awakening from three decades earlier, are demanding green solutions to ease their guilt: organic food, renewable energy, electric vehicles… leaving the rest of society to cope with food and energy insecurity, infrastructure problems and the environmental consequences of their short-sighted green solutions.

Boomers are narcissistic so they could not imagine standing down and passing the mantle onto the next generation. Having created dysfunctional families, they would rather donate their vast wealth to foundations that fund campaigns creating fear and outrage than to help their next generation take over the levers of power and industry. No wonder Millennial anxiety levels are so high – they have inherited nothing but hardship from their parents and grandparents.

Boomers indeed ruined everything. And since they are too full of themselves to step down and let others lead, accumulate wealth and enjoy life, the least they can do is apologise.

On behalf of all Boomers, including myself, I am terribly sorry for everything my generation has done to the world. We’ll be gone soon … promise.

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Image source: https://www.imagine.art/ An AI tool that will soon take care of the Boomers so the rest of the world can finally move on.