"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.

1. People are living longer.

2. It is harder to find quality employment, especially the older you get.

3. Their kids don’t have the time (their own babies) or resources to help them as much.

4. Rate lock.

5. Rents are very high.

6. Again, if you are living until 90 vs. 77, that is more money that you need.

7. Social safety nets eroding, especially social security (probably dead by 2032, if not sooner).

8. Stock market up and down.

9. Poor financial literacy because for a long time, everything seemed great for them.

10. Confrontation of new American realities.

And again, if you have money/assets/resources, these grim outcomes are not really in store for you. It’s more brie and chablis on that side of the coin.

The next subset of this discussion is: should we be embarassed as a collective society that we’ve done the Boomers so dirty if they lack money? These people potentially helped build aspects of modern society — and we’re gonna let them live under a bridge? Egad! (I guess if you’re in the “OK Boomer” camp, you wouldn’t care much.)

From this article:

“It’s an entirely different population,” said Kushel. “These are people who worked their whole lives. They had typical lives, often working physically demanding jobs, and never made enough to put money away.”

That’s where I would see a moral problem with Boomer homelessness. If you literally work your entire life and the end result of that work is society telling you, “Well, I hear the tents in Portland are nice this time of year,” then like … what’s the point of working? Why wouldn’t you just suck at the government teat as much as possible for your supposed “prime” earning years? It completely changes the incentive structure for work and work ethic to see this happening.

Here’s a photo gallery of Boomers becoming unhoused.

I think one rationalization you will see here is “these people must be addicts or otherwise messed up.” Probably true in many cases, but not all. You might also see “they managed their money poorly.” Indeed, many probably did — but in the “richest, greatest society on Earth,” shouldn’t we have at least a tiny house for someone who just worked for 50 years? That would also seem manageable, even if they bounced a bunch of checks along the way.

I think the “quiet part out loud” on this trend line is that we tend to deify the young for their exuberance, virility, they’re contributing babies to the world, they’re working, they’re spending, etc… we tend to view our elders as a nice-to-discuss, but we’re more comfortable with them out to pasture on Princess Cruises, only checking in once or twice a year. So if Boomer Bob is close to homelessness, I’m not sure who exactly Boomer Bob has to speak to. If he’s a widow or something, it’s double awful.

Compassion isn’t the norm:

In this article:

“Baby boomers are becoming homeless,” TikToker @straightouttasalem said in a video back in September, “and that’s what spending decades as a ‘pick-me’ for capitalism will get you, and frankly, everyone else as well.”

Goddamn.

So, I don’t know how true or has-legs this trend line is, but it seems a bit concerning. I’ve seen headlines about Boomer decline use the phrase “it only takes one crisis,” which seems to mimic the broader problem with the U.S. economy — it only takes one blown tire, one unexpected medical expense, etc. to set people back for 3–4 months. That doesn’t seem like an aspirational economy to me, but perhaps I’m some communist liberal joke.

What are you thinking or seeing about the Boomers right now?