I was at a party one time. Right before covid, so not super recently, but more recent than 20-30 years ago. Older guy was complaining about young people complaining about housing costs. “Just buy a cheap house in %suburb! You could get one for $200,000,” he said.

I was like “uhhh I’ll call that bluff. I’m in the market right now. I’ve been preapproved for $300,000 and I can’t find a house around here. If you can find me a house in %suburb for $200,000, I’ll pay you a $10,000 finders fee.”

This dude spent the next two hours of the party not talking to anyone, locked in on his phone, looking at real estate listings. Then he finally apologized to me and was like “wow, I really didn’t know it was so bad.”

It almost happens weekly to me for aome reason. I'm a house technician in my forties, but i look really young. Eapecially older people often think i'm 20 something. I often work in their homes, fixing and renovating. I'm not much into Smalltalk, so i usually don't start conversations, but at some point they go: man, young people or young people like you just don't want to work anymore. Anf i go: yeah? Crazy. And then they tell me that they were a woodworker and their wife wotked a service job three times a week to afford this home and 3 kids when they were 23. They continue to tell stories that their grandchildren or whoever only work to 5pm, or whenever their shift is over and fon't care about the company they work for. They kinda never seem to be self aware enough to realise that their grandchildren or whoever they talk about are also around that age and often have way better jobs then they had and can't afford children, don't even think about owning a house because it's so far out of the scope. Anf it has nothing to do with them being lazy.

Yes. Twice within the last 3 years at least.

An acquaintance of a friend of mine owns their own business and was saying that they voted for Trump and weren't worried that so many of their hard-working employees had quit our been deported because

"Nobody wants to work anymore. My employees work hard because they don't have a choice, but now that I don't have enough eventually I'll have to hire white people and they'll learn how to work hard because they'll have to. Trump's plan is working."

Or something very similar to that.

Not the house part directly but I got the work part repeatedly after graduation from my own family (who are renting). It was constant verbal harassment about laziness and 'not wanting to work' under threats of being kicked out onto the street. Stopped only after a job agency they picked had every partnered employer reject me and my degree for 6 months straight. The only reason given was a paradoxical "overqualified and under-experienced" which is to say the boomer retoric of "degrees = jobs" was fatally backwards in an era where employers only offered minimum wage for the job responsibilities of 3 people.

Took 4 years after university to land my first job and only as a contract labor hire on an assembly line in late 2019... FML. Spent the past 5 years of underpaid work forcing my way back into software QA just in time for the era of slop... FML part 2. I now make decent money and live with my partner but to my parents it's like those 4 years of victim blaming never happened and my success is magically attributable to their 'support'.

TLDR: It is absolutely a real mindset still driving boomer cognitive dissonance with reality.

Yep. The excuse was "but we earned far less back then too!" and then you have to show them what their income actually was scaled to 2026 inflation. And then they shut up for a bit. Until they bring it up again.

No shit. I hear things like: "Only immigrants still want to work." at my summer job. Yes, I DON'T WANT TO HAVE A JOB WHICH DESTROYS MY BODY MY WHOLE LIFE AND WILL BE AUTOMATED THE SECOND IT CAN BE.

My father, pretty fresh out of Viet Nam and only a couple years in the Chicago Fire Department was able to get a mortgage for a cute house on the outskirts of town.

Unfortunately for me, now that it is time to pry my aging mom from the property it has been largely unimproved and we'll be lucky to get 300k for it. That's still twice what they paid for it, ultimately.

I could have taken it over like my dad did his mother's house, but there's no way I'm rotting out where I grew up. I like culture too much.

Edit: It was probably 50k when they signed the mortgage, but ended up paying for it 3+times. She's lived there almost 50 years and still doesn't own it.

My mother and stepdad were Silent Gen, but they were chalk full of pithy folk whizdum such as this. Mostly involving the virtues of being a doormat at work.

Mom paid $5700 for the house in 1972. After they were both dead, we found out my stepdad had been a hoarder and ruined the place. We still got 600K.

My mother who is in her mid 70s says shit like this, but she is very divorced from reality at this point. My right leaning in laws probably say things like this, but I try to speak to them as little as possible so I don't hear the regurgitated Fox News that comes out of their mouths.

Literally had my step dad say something to this effect recently, yeah.

Boomers and Gen X on a regular basis yea

Yeah

My parents

Admittedly, they did put in a bit of work to get where they are, but they happily ignore the fact that they were born into a position of relative privilege and that the world is a very different place

Even while they moan about how different things are now...

Not this extreme, but yes

All. the. time. From family and from friends of the family

Yeah I have a couple 80 year old relatives who post shit like this on facebook

No. My parents had 8% interest for their loan and the rate was something like 80% of their income. This was 1990 already though.

Never.

(Figured I'd answer since I'd usually only be compelled to answer if I was a yes.)

This needs to be qualified by socioeconomic status. It's got to be the upper class or conservative sycophants saying things like that.

And there's the confirmation bias effect. Nobody is asking about the majority of the "boomer" generation who don't talk like that.

Yes. You don't get it unless they're related to you. To your point they have a concept that their attitude is reactionary, but if you're in the right family with sad enough people they'll hit you with shit like this. Honestly I don't experience it from my family but I've been there when my friend's dad pisses and moans about the current generation and how he had it harder than us and still worked more etc.