The relative comfort that boomers (and to some extent Gen X) received, sounds, at least to me, really fucking boring.
You go to college, graduate with a degree with minimal debt. Get a good paying desk job, and save up money. Find someone and get married, and use those savings to buy a house in the suburbs. Have children and then keep working until you are 65. Then retire to a sunny place like Florida, California, or Hawaii.
Obviously that sounds like heaven compared to our situation. But doesn’t it sound really dull? I mean working 40hrs a week, just to come home to a boring house with a spouse who’s just as exhausted as you are, and then repeat for 40 fucking years.
To me, that doesn’t sound ideal. I don’t want to work 40hrs a week at some soul crushing cubicle every week just to retire at 65 when I’m old and frail. I want to do what I want to do on my own time. That sounds entitled though. At least I would like some more control over my situation. Why is it when a company is shitting itself it’s the workers who get laid off, or have their pay cut, or have their hours cut, or have their benefits reduced, but not the owners? It’s never the ones with the actual responsibility of owning the capital. It’s always the ones who do the actual on the ground work.
Still that’s preferable to our situation, I mean we have rising costs, shitty jobs, stagnant wages, worsening inequality, rising fascism, political turmoil, energy crises, a pandemic, and don’t even get me started on climate change.
Seeing how boring the idealized “good life” the boomers got was and then seeing even that taken away and replaced with this has all got me really disenchanted with the system. When even the “good life” doesn’t sound good, you know the system fucking sucks.