Are your parents "baby boomers" like me? (Post WW2 until late 1950's or so). Most of us are still pretty aware and on top of things but there is a certain sub group of us that are dumber than a box of rocks.
Absolutely. The rampant sense of entitlement and the willingness combined with the economic means to throw away perfectly good cars, expensive electronics that have barely been used, the works is a pretty good clue that we're dealing with total heads in the clouds baby boomers here. To their minds, it's still 1968, good jobs are plentiful, housing's cheap, energy's cheap, cars are cheap, everything's cheap and there's unlimited prosperity out there. So clearly there's something wrong with everyone who's still in the workforce earning stagnant since 1980 wages and complaining that they can't afford a $1-million-plus teardown in suburban Toronto.
Do you want some cheese to go with that whine?
As always with people who bring up the "bash the baby boomers" line, you fairly obviously come from a quite affluent demograph.
Most "baby boomers" (& "war babies" like myself) are "poor as church mice", as we were subject to the same "stagnant since 1980" wages, as well as the propensity of employers to chuck older workers on the scrapheap & replace them with younger ones at lower wages.
After finally paying off the bloody millstone called a house, we haven't got a lot left, & if we don't have a nice fat superannuation nest egg, on retirement, are stuck with the Aged Pension.
"Throw away perfectly good cars, expensive electronic equipment"?
Nah! cars have to last at least 5 years, with many around 10 years .
If you are talking about consumer electronics, most of that stuff also has to last around a decade.
Some becomes just useless crud----- who but a collector, would want a Nintendo "Wii" these days?
The requirement for long life was already there in the 1960s.
I kept my first new car for 10 years, same with my second, & only bought secondhand after that.
1968? Yeah, I had a good job in '68, after I had studied hard whilst working at a fairly lousy one for six years, then spending 3 years " learning the ropes" at the new one.
The pay was great after the old job, but the guys who were still doing that job weren't getting paid much more than when I left.
'68 definitely was a time when the ordinary worker was beginning to share in the prosperity, so we could start buying a few things.
They were still expensive compared to our wages, but were usually well made, & would last years, plus be fixable if they failed.
Easy to get a job?
Definitely much easier than now, but "going down to mill & asking" didn't hack it.
You had to send an application in your own handwriting stating why you should get the job.
That would get you an interview, but get this, -------there was no HR dept, so you usually talked to either your new boss to be, or their boss, people who actually knew how things worked!
To be fair there are people who are dumber than a box of rocks in every generation but the out of touch and entitlement I've seen with a good cross section of baby boomers starting within immediate family is jaw dropping. I've given it a lot of thought and the only conclusion that I've been able to come to is there's a lot of them out there that don't understand that the decades of post war prosperity are over and a lot of people have been born into a world where the music's stopped and all the chairs have already been taken.