Blaming Boomers has become a global pastime. A warm-up stretch before complaining about rent. My generation—and the generation beneath mine, exhausted by everything except TikTok—treat it like a civic duty. From London to Paris, Australia to every corner of America, the chorus is the same: Boomers ruined everything.
Housing? Boomers.
Wages? Boomers.
Loneliness, nihilism, existential despair? Still Boomers—despite the fact that many of us haven’t spoken to our own friends in weeks unless a group chat summoned us to complain about Boomers again. It’s fashionable. It requires no effort, no evidence, and no self-awareness. Blaming Boomers is the avocado toast of political analysis: overpriced and nutritionally void.
The Boomers deserve a defense. Not because they were perfect. They weren’t. They bought houses at the price of a large pizza. They went to college for roughly the cost of a moderately-priced jacket. They entered labor markets that weren’t set on fire and then sold to private equity. But Boomers didn’t create the system. They simply walked into the one they inherited and, like any sane person, used it.
Would my own generation have behaved differently if we had those conditions? Please. We’d have colonized the moon, and Airbnb’d it. It’s also worth remembering that the Boomers didn’t spend their 20s crying online about the price of rent. They worked. They saved. They lived through recessions, energy crises, wars, and polyester. They didn’t have therapy apps, UberEats, or the ability to tweet their trauma every 20 minutes. And they bought property. The houses were sitting there, waiting. They simply noticed them— a basic human reflex my generation now treats like a premium subscription.
The hatred for Boomers has become hysterical. Younger people talk about Boomers with the same tone Victorian novelists reserved for wicked aunts who locked orphans in attics. It’s melodramatic. It’s childish. And it conveniently ignores our own part in the mess. We tell ourselves we hate the Boomers because they hoarded assets, but what we resent is the mirror they hold up. They managed adulthood. We inherited adulthood and immediately tried to return it for store credit.
Boomers laid foundations. We lay on the floor and wait for motivation to return. Boomers argued about the Cold War. We argue about whether a barista “weaponized” the word latte. Boomers built retirement plans. We build coping mechanisms that look suspiciously like shopping carts.
They’re not saints. But the hatred lacks scale and context. The world they lived in was simpler. Not because they made it that way, but because history hadn’t yet detonated the economic and cultural charges we’re now standing on. Tech-driven inequality, globalized competition, asset inflation—these weren’t Boomer inventions, but historical traps waiting for someone to step on them. And somebody did. Us.
But we don’t smash the system that trapped us. We smash the generation that benefited from luck and timing. It’s tidier. It’s emotionally satisfying in the way junk food is satisfying—briefly, then shamefully. It makes us look ridiculous. We carry on like entitled contestants from a reality show, furious that life hasn’t given us VIP access, scrolling through our feeds like hamsters on a wheel greased with self-pity.
Boomer-blaming is so fashionable it’s practically couture. Even people who’ve never met a Boomer will complain about them. Some Gen-Zers are convinced Boomers are a shadowy cabal, sitting in Florida condos, plotting economic ruin between reruns of Magnum P.I.
Boomers aren’t the enemy. The system is. Unless we acknowledge that, my generation will keep ranting, raging, waiting for an inheritance that may never come—while the people we mock quietly enjoy their gardens and their grandchildren. As defenses go, this is hardly a heroic one. Boomers don’t need chivalry. But they also don’t deserve to be painted as cartoon villains by generations who struggle with the basics of humanity, including making eye contact. Because if we’re being honest, the real reason young people resent Boomers is brutally simple: they won the game.
We were handed the controller after the console exploded. But that’s not their fault. It’s not our fault either. It’s history, economics and timing. Blaming Boomers for everything is like blaming your grandmother for World War 2: childish, charming in an absurd way, but disconnected from reality.