Zach M. Stafford | Website

TranscriptComic in 4 Panels

Panel 1: A young bright-eyed man stands in front of a house.

Grandpa: I’m going to buy a house!

Panel 2: The young man is now old and bespectacled. He’s telling this story to his grandson, who is listening politely.

Grandpa: …and that was how I bought my house when I was 23!

Panel 3: Grandpa’s story turns into a yelling rant

Grandpa: I WORKED AT THE DRIVE-IN ALL SUMMER FOR THAT HOUSE!! NOBODY WANTS TO WORK ANYMORE!

Panel 4: Grandpa watches as his grandson unplugs a cord from the wall with a * POP *

Grandpa: …why are you unplugging my lamp?

Grandson: I’m just practicing

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Pervis

Zach M. Stafford

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[–] 42 points 4 days ago

I'm 60. I grew up in California and when I had to start earning my way at 18, I soon realized I'd never be able to afford a house there. So, I moved to NM. I was barely able to afford to buy a house here, and I'm almost done paying it off.

My son works, but I don't think he'll be able to afford to buy a house any time soon. My hope is I'm able to hang on to the house till I die and give it to him. So, at least he'll have that.

I've never told my son what I think he should do. But, if he asked... I'd have no idea what to tell him. Shit is fucked up, now, and I didn't see it coming.

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  • [–] 148 points 5 days ago (13 children)

    When I went to college it was only 500$ a semester.

    I worked 9 hours a week to pay for it.

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  • [–] 61 points 5 days ago (2 children)

    Oh, look at mr brag over here, with his lack of a life long crippling student debt, and his "ability to work 9 whole hours in a single week".

    I'm not mad at you. I'm mad at the system.

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    [–] 100 points 5 days ago (11 children)

    My grandma repeatedly told us that their house was expensive because the interest rate was 10 3/4%. We have tax benefits based on the interest rate you pay. Also, their monthly payments were, adjusted by inflation, still way lower than what I pay for a worse house.

    Hell, the house my dad got when he was a train driver with a wife that didn't work and with 2 kids is a house I can't buy as a senior software developer with 3 cats.

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    [–] 117 points 5 days ago (8 children)

    Ah boomers they stole from their parents , they stole from their kids. The most selfish generation in history.

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  • [–] 91 points 5 days ago (6 children)

    The thing that angers me the most is that I said to my mom "I'm never going to have a retirement....."

    I'm 42, no house, no retirement savings, no 401k, and no way to save for those things. Some weeks I don't have enough money to buy food.

    My moms response was "Oh you'll be fine! I struggled when I was in my 20s, with both of your sisters, and I turned out ok!"

    Yes, it's true that for about 5 years my mom had it as hard, maybe harder than I do. The difference is, then she met my dad, moved in with him, her money problems disappeared. She then got a better job, with retirement options, and a 401k, and benefits.

    Then she bought her own house in the 90s. The seller wasn't sure if he wanted to sell to her as a single woman. So she said "you can either sell to me, or sell to someone else. The price is the same either way. You may as well just sell now, rather than waiting for the next buyer."

    THATS the speech that got her the house.

    Today, you'd get laughed at.

    My biggest problem with boomers isn't their selfish nature, or the fact that they've had an easy life. My biggest problem is that they refuse to admit that times have changed. I CAN'T live life the way boomers did. I'd LOVE to wear a suit, walk into a business, demand to see the manager before I even fill out an application and talk myself into a job. I'd LOVE to do that......but thats not how it works anymore! Now you fill an application out online, submit it to an AI crawler that steals your data, be in competition with 500 other applicants, and most of the time never hear back.

    I asked my brother in law 10 years ago if he could get me a job at his fortune 500 company. He works there, he's not the owner, but I was asking him to put in a good word, get my application even looked at.

    He's my age, and this was said right in front of my mom. He said "I couldn't do that. That would be nepotism". I said "Yeah. I'm fine with nepotism if it means I canpay my bills."

    And my mom asked if I wanted her to storm the corporate offices of Progressive Insurance, and hunt down the CEO for an interview.

    So I just said yes. Not because I think it would work, but because I knew she'd fail spectacularly. Maybe even get arrested on a light charge. Then maybe she'd realize how times change.

    But she just said "I can't always fight your battles for you. This is something YOU need to do."

    God dammit.

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  • [–] 39 points 5 days ago (2 children)

    During the worst of one of the recessions I was trying to find a job right out of college, and my dad (who regularly told me to use old-school job hunting tactics) asked me if I wanted him to apply for me and show me how it’s done. I said yes.

    A week later he had applied to five jobs. Taps out with a “Man, it’s rough out there!” That perspective really helped us communicate in the future.

    He did, at one point, help me get a nepotism hire. While I was there they got bought out, and they made him personally fire 80% of the company, including me and my mom, before firing him as well. Live by the sword die by the sword I guess.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 days ago

    See that last quip there shows that she knows she is entirely full of shit.

    She knows none of her advice is actually useful.

    She doesn't care.

    She just wants to always feel superior to you.

    Same with bro in law.

    'That'd be nepotism' means 'that'd be nepotism that I personally might not benefit from.

    ... here, I have the glasses from They Live, you can have them, but you're not gonna like what you see.

    They know they're full of shit, they're complete hypocrites. Otherwise the advice they give would... you know, generally work. They don't care that they are complete hypocrites.

    They have the mentality of scammers and con artists; a massively oversized ego that must continually be fed with I am awesome and everyone else is a sucker.

    They do not actually care about you or your wellbeing. They care about feeling like a success.

    If I were you, I'd cut them out of your life; all they're good for is wasting your time and causing you sanity damage.

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  • [–] 106 points 5 days ago (23 children)

    Please don't buy any propaganda from the capital class that attempts to divide the working classes. We have more in common with our grandparents than with the billionaires oppressing us.

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  • [–] 107 points 5 days ago (4 children)

    I understand the sentiment, but the main boomer in my life still thinks I'm lazy despite working 12-14 hours a day 7 days a week.

    I found out the other day they also badmouth me and my partner for not having kids. They also think we don't own a house yet solely because we're irresponsible.

    They also voted for Trump three times and currently believe the economy is thriving better under him than it would have otherwise. They have insane levels of American exceptionalism.

    I have nothing in common with them and I will also go practice unplugging a lamp.

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  • [–] 83 points 5 days ago (8 children)

    The problem is definitely both. While the old coots that talk like the guy in the comic might not have directly ripped off everyone (except many have on more personal levels), their ignorance and entrenched positions make it far more difficult to fight the billionaires when there is a massive group of people who are totally unwilling to even admit there is a problem to address.

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  • [–] 19 points 5 days ago (2 children)

    I think that's fair. My hope is that we can encourage class traitors to come over to our side, rather than be angry at them.

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  • [–] 34 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    This would be ideal but in my personal experience with my parents and their peers, who are all in their early 70s, is even if you can convince them to agree on the class war they almost universally will state they’ll be dead soon with the implication being it’s not their problem

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  • [–] 31 points 5 days ago

    I once told a boomer that we were all just waiting for them to die off so we could actually make some positive changes in the world, and they were shocked. I’m like “You said you were going to continue voting like this no matter who the candidates are until you die. I’m just waiting for the terms to be fulfilled.”

    Every four years our president gets four years older, surely that trend can’t go on forever?

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  • [–] 40 points 5 days ago

    We're not fighting them because they're rich, we're fighting the boomer class because they keep giving the billionaires power because they think we're lazy and billionaires worked hard for their money

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  • [–] 9 points 4 days ago

    Nah, a fuck ton of people have CPTSD from persistent and consistent narcissistic abuse from their Boomer parents and those who think and act like them.

    Its why 1/4 to 1/3 of millennials and gen z have gone no contact with at least one of their parents.

    This is a legitimate phenomenon of the Boomer generation being disproportionately absurdly selfish and abusive.

    If you're a millennial and your grandparents are still alive, pretty good chance they're no where near as fundamentally shitty and horrible as your parents are... significantly less people going no contact with the grandparents.

    There can be no solidarity with an abuser.

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  • [–] 16 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

    You’ve only been here 5 months, so I forgive you.
    But you can go back years browsing the threadiverse, and find these very same boomers and Gen X saying it's our problem, and that we have to revolt, without an ounce of support from them.
    All the while you're aware what generations voted for what. It’ll probably take you a week to review. But yes, we’ve been digressively victimized, and I am not happy about it.
    genx&boomers🦂everyone else🐸☠️

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  • [–] 20 points 5 days ago

    At the same time my grandfather told us we could just buy a used car for $100. He had made his money and did not keep up on how expensive these things are now. So while I agree, I do wish they would maybe accept things are more expensive now.

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    [–] 41 points 5 days ago* (1 child)

    ah, practicing

    spoilerunplugging life support
    that took me a minute

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    [–] 19 points 4 days ago (27 children)

    Serious question: Has anyone here had firsthand direct experience of a “boomer” saying sh*t like this? And I mean recently, not 20-30 years ago when the inequity was seemingly more obscure in popular culture.

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  • [–] 25 points 4 days ago (3 children)

    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.”

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  • [–] 29 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 18 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    I find the idea of company loyalty so fucking funny, especially as even as far back as 1980 the Dolly Parton movie 9-to-5 was satirizing how the concept was dead (even for the bad guys).

    My company of roughly 25 people has seen 100 people come and go in 2 years. Offer vested pensions, locked in severence, workers comp, mat/pat leave, separate sick and PTO leave, abandon right-to-work and implement wellness programmes and watch company loyalty massively spike.

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  • [–] 25 points 4 days ago

    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.

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  • [–] 20 points 4 days ago

    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.

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  • [–] 14 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    In my limited experience, they are not interested in factual truth as much as they just want their opinion and biases validated. When push comes to shove, they'll fall back to "everyone's entitled to their opinion" (which they don't apply consistently to others with differing opinions).

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  • [–] 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 4 days ago*

    :To Add: My father had an entry level blue collar job for the late 70s-80s, minor promotion in the 90s, was able to support a family of four and a shadow family of three in the 90s-00's when he got bored of us.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 days ago

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 days ago

    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.

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