"The Boomers Deserve A Horrific End."

Is it fair to ask whether this is their own fault?

We’ve had jokes about the Boomers and how great they’ve had it for literal decades now, with this being a good, funny take:

And

Paul Millerd

even made the case a while back that there was a “Boomer Blockade” that was causing leadership and community involvement erosion.

And then there’s “OK Boomer,” etc.

But now there’s a different reality emerging, and again, it’s a subset of Boomers, not all of them. As with most things in America, it’s along class/money lines. I first became more aware of it in this video:

That video has some flaws, because he keeps referring to a “three-legged stool” of Boomer wealth without mentioning housing, which is the primary leg of the Boomer stool in many cases.

But right at this moment, housing is an absolute cluster-f*ck because of “rate lock.” If Boomers think they have a house worth $2M, and there’s an audience for that house, said audience is not going to pay $2M at 7%, unless they can find the $2M in cash. As a result, Boomers are kinda stuck not being able to access capital from conceivably their biggest investment. And when and if they do access that capital, rents are also jacked up in a lot of places — for people who (a) may lack a pension of any note and (b) will have a hard time finding solid-paying work due to, well, ageism and tech.

In that article:

From 2007 through 2017, the percentage of people 51 and older in homeless shelters rose from 16.5% to 23%, a rate greater than what would be expected just from the increase in people of that age group. In 2018, the department started tracking people 55 and older in homeless shelters, and the figure rose from 16.3% to 19.8% in 2021.

The National Health Care for the Homeless Council reported that the proportion of patients 50 or older who it serviced in 2022 was 36%, up from 25% 15 years earlier.

Seems kinda dire, actually.

There are some other concurrent Boomer trends that are both interesting and disheartening:

1. “Silver Splitters,” i.e. Boomers are now the highest divorce rate.

2. “Deaths of Despair,” i.e. how some of them are dying.

If you take this all together, you can paint a picture whereby people are reaching their glorious twilight years and … things are not as they expected or seemed to have been promised.

Let’s start by listing some of the bigger buckets of what is going on here.