BoomersBeingFools is for images, videos, and stories of baby boomers and elders behaving in an obnoxious, entitled, or otherwise foolish manner. Paired with r/BoomersBeingBros
Boomer Story
Was grocery shopping yesterday. As I'm going up and down the aisles, every single boomer aged individual had a scowl on their face. I swear, all of them. I smile at everyone as we make eye contact and they don't even return the courtesy. They just scowl their way thru the store.
Why? Why are they so pissed off? I don't get it.
Edit: Wow. Didn't expect all the insightful responses. Thanks for contributing. Lol. Gave me some different things to think about.
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I honestly think that Abe Lincoln was right about people being as happy as they decide to be. I’m a retired boomer living a nice and happy life. I game online, work on my model railroad, and hang out with our kids and grandkids. Maybe they are reaping the whirlwind from not building a good relationship with their kids over the past 40 years.
As a relatively young person (mid 20s)
I’ve made multiple earnest friends in online games who turned out to be 10 or even 20 years older than I was at the time and it just didn’t matter that we came from different generations.
Once you have a shared cultural understanding to work with, everyone seems to have a lot more in common than not from my personal experience.
Personally, I think this is what the literal fascists have been trying to hide from the rest of the world, the fact that we all have common desires and interests and this entire idea of isolating ourselves into various cultural cohorts that are fated to conflict among one another has been a big fat lie.
We are all just people trying to get through life with as much happiness as possible. I make it a point to be friendly and polite to everyone I encounter including retail and service workers. They are also people and deserve that from me. During my working career as an engineer, I worked with people from all over the world and spent much time in Europe and China. Travel opens your eyes.
Agree. Retired teacher here and I miss the kids, if not admin tasks. Also taught overseas and I still see those students' posts on FB. We're are such a divided country that reinforcing a barrier between generations will make life much worse, no matter who is doing it. I do smile at young people and if they smile back, I'm happy.
Yes, another retired teacher here. I miss the actual teaching, giving something to children...but the other stuff was not fun. And now, from what I see and here, not sure why ANYONE wants to become an educator.
I encourage every young person to travel. Travel far away to cultures that are vastly different than your own. You will quickly see that humans are just humans making through their day. You will quickly realize that most of the evil in the world is perpetrated by a few people who are hell bent on controlling everything for their own gains. Power for power sake. We don’t need to fight their wars. We don’t need to hate each other. If everyone realized this, the world would be a far better place.
The most important thing I got out of it was realizing how much of my person was just conditioning. I could have been anyone. Had to let go of some dumb hang ups and I'm better for it.
Agreed. And don't just do the tourist things. Talk with people. Be friendly and respectful and you'll make friends everywhere and learn more about the local customs.
Told both my kids to travel after high school and before they were 25 to Europe and elsewhere. Even if it delayed their post secondary education. Going to Europe first time at 66 is NOT the same as being 20...
You've absolutely figured it out. Fascism is individualism taken all the way to its logical end: everybody is alone, existence is an eternal struggle, and the only safety is power, to be obtained and kept by whatever means necessary, including brazen lies, abuse and atrocities.
It's why fascist institutions, like the bureaucracy of Nazi Germany, are infamously shitshows of corruption and petty power games: it's built-in. Fascism is fundamentally contradictory and doomed to fail because it's fundamentally anti-civilisation. Politics and ideology being a product of civilisation, fascist ideology necessarily contains its own end.
Also mid 20s. Met a much older Scottish dude playing 6 days in Fallujah awhile back. I honestly thought the guy was Eastern European for a bit because it didn’t sound like he was speaking English. I finally was like hey man where you from and I finally understood him to say Scotland and then it must’ve flipped a switch in my brain and I could half ass make out some of what he was saying after that.
Also saw a YouTube video about a guy who was an F-4 pilot in Vietnam who now mains the F-4 in War Thunder.
This can definitely be one of the really cool things about gaming. Back around the turn of the millennium, I was a clueless 15 year old who played EverQuest. I joined a guild, made some friends, and over time learned that one of my guildmate friends was a 50 year old transwoman.
I had no real life experience at that point, had never met an openly trans person. Had nothing against them, really, just barely even understood it was a thing. She explained why properly gendering her was important, explained why deadnaming should be avoided, some struggles she'd dealt with even among self-professed beacons of tolerance, etc. I'm really happy I got that exposure when I did. When a couple of my own friends came out or started experimenting with gender nonconformity a few years later, I felt a lot better equipped to support them.
what games? fallout 76 seems to have quite a large following amongst older folks as well as the young'n's!
shooting up ghouls and mutants with some grandmas is a ton of fun!
Our son got me hooked on Lord of the Rings Online. It is a great game for a Tolkien fan.
neat, i've looked at it but never played it. so many games to play! i hear it is a fun one.
LMAO Does it ever feel normal to hear yourself referred to as “older folk”?
I was realizing how many generations have come after me and how few are left from before me and dreading the day 😅
I have accepted that I’m old and make the best of it.
It's got that range. I can get sweaty jumping into the most hectic events where I hardly know what's going on or I can spend the next 2 hours arranging my CAMP and finding a spot for that latest FOMO unlock.
Appreciate that note. My dad tries to be the strong silent type like his dad was. He did plenty of fun stuff with me as a kid, but we could never talk. I don’t think he has the capacity, to be honest. I hope I’m not that way with my son.
You can choose a different course.
Thank you. One thing I’ve definitely learned, wish I’d learned earlier, is that the key to happiness is health and the people and experiences in your life. He checked out to watch tv and enjoy cocktail hour for 15 years after he retired.
After having a stroke and not drinking any more, he’s way more pleasant and engaged. I hope I get to see more of that person from here on out.
I hope in my retirement I get to play LOTR online and play with my grandkids. Take care!
Marcus Aurelius
"Free your mind, and your ass will follow" - George Clinton
My perspective has always been the happiest old people are the ones that focused on good relationships with family, friends and kids. The ones that are the least happy are the ones that were toxic and drove away their kids and family because of religion, narcissism and greed.
My MIL is so miserable, man, and I think this is it. It hit her that she bred and fed the kids but made no effort in getting to know who they are as humans.
As a nearly 40 year old child of boomers, I really feel this.
Everything my parents did was for them. I was a lifestyle accessory.
After having my own child, I realized what a poor job at my parents really did.
There now reaping what they’ve sown. I haven’t spoken to them in years and it’s been fantastic for my mental health!
Not just Abe. Pretty much all saints, gurus and spiritual teachers advocate this outlook.
When you are happy with less, it takes less to make you happy.
This. I work with the boomer and silent gens. I have some absolutely miserable patients and they’re always the ones who have bad relationships with their kids or other family members. I don’t mean miserable like boohoo- I mean miserable like grumpy rude and just angry at everything. They’re not having a good time 😕
They don’t have a good relationship with themselves, which I think sets them up to fail everywhere else too.
Your last sentence says it all. They never learned to love. In their defense, the silent generation did a pretty awful job parenting them. When they had jobs and their life was relevant, they could get by on transactional love. But now it's not worth it to engage in a transaction with them, especially since a lot of them lack basic kindness.
Agree with this. My maternal grandparents are from Europe and saw and experienced terrible things during WW2 and absolutely had trauma. They then had my boomer mum and struggled in parenting her and showing love. My grandmother in particular was a cold, hard woman. She wouldn’t speak about the war or her experiences.
My other set of grandparents were also in the war. My grandfather was abusive and beat my boomer father black and blue as a kid/ teen.
And in turn I got messed up parents who are selfish and had no idea how to parent. My childhood was a mess. Lots of emotional and verbal abuse. Alcoholic father who was a bit violent - loved to get out the leather belt and broom to discipline us kids.
My mum is lovely in her way, but messed up too. I do love my mum and overlook some of her ways. My dad was a brute, and I have minimal contact with him. Many of us are the children of emotionally immature parents. I was so done with family that i chose not to have children.
I love that you have a model railroad. What a neat hobby!
You should try it. It’s a lot of fun.
....are you future me?
They just want their world back. The one which never really existed, despite what they think. Nostalgia's a hell of a drug.
Fake nostalgia for a world they never got to live in. One that looks like those advertisements from the 1950s, With a smiling, obedient housewife (Who is probably drugged up on everything in the medicine cabinet), And children who are seen, but not heard, even in their own adulthood where they serve the needs Of their father above their own.
And this toxic shit here is why they keep voting Conservative.
I saw this meme once of the happy 1950s family at the dinner table with captions around each person:
“Mothers taking pills to cope with being a subservient housewife”
“Father is hiding he’s gay”
“Son has polio”
This is maga
"Encasing a whole ham in jello."
Suddenly it all makes sense.
And though she's not really ill, there's a little yellow pill, she goes running to the shelter of her mother's little helper.
My grandfather & grandmother had a little country GP/medical practice in their house back in the 60s/early 70s (grandfather the doctor, grandma the nurse.) My mom has told me numerous times how when she and her sister got home from school, they'd sit there counting pills and making little envelopes of all the valium pills he was doling out to housewife patients just about every day.
And two help her on her way. Get her through her busy day
Maybe we could make an exception and let them all start talking quaaludes
I'm not yet a boomer (Genx) but I would like to be included when they're handing out those lovely yellow 714s
I miss quaaludes
What is funny about this is that most of that 1950s-1960s nostalgia doesn't even originate from that era. It is all boomer produced retrospective bullshit from the 70s and 80s. Shit like Grease, Happy Days, American Graffiti, etc. etc. There are HUNDREDS of movies and shows that portray this bizarre idealized era, and none of it was ever real.
If you look at media actually PRODUCED in the 1950s and 1960s is is FAR from idyllic. Those people were not happy, but the boomers were little kids so they don't remember it that way.
I'm convinced they remember their childhood like it was Leave it to Beaver and forgot it was just a TV show.
Agreed. I always found that the US public has nostalga, but it's not actually from a life they led in childhood; it's from TV shows they saw in their childhood. So all of this yearing for the "kinder, simpler time" was really cobbled together by script writers and showrunners, and financed by Dolly Madison and Coke.
This is soooo accurate !!!
Kinda like my generation and the 90s
I read that in a transatlantic accent
so accurate it's unreal
They miss the world where gay people were closeted, where they could hit their kids and wives, where minorities stayed on the other side of the tracks. Mediocre white men had it so easy back then. They hate that the world is more equal now.
“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” They’ll demand they are not privileged, but experiencing the most minuscule loss of their privilege over minorities will trigger a vicious wrath.
And blatant racism while also not being chastised about it.
This is the big one. What I hear out of my boomer relative (I'm a Joneser myself) is, "You can't say anything anymore without somebody getting offended!" Yeah dude, that's because the things you want to say are offensive! And nobody's going to allow you to insult and belittle them without calling you out on it anymore! Nobody is afraid of your bullying bullshit anymore and you can't stand it!
This is spot on. They also act like cancel culture was invented in 2017.
Oh this right here. They sincerely cannot handle getting called out for the truly awful shit they say.
A black man became president and it broke their tiny little minds
Literally yesterday, my Dad was telling me about a CNA at the nursing home that he really liked. Dad's functionally blind, and thought the ethnicity of the CNA was important to his narrative, for whatever reason that her genetic background might impact how easily she was able to change a grown man's disposable brief after he shat himself.
"Her name is Z. She's a little woman, I think she's mulatto."
Internal record scratch noises.
"Dad, you can't use that term. It's perfectly OK if you say 'mixed' or 'biracial' or whatever. But you can't go around describing people by that term. You were born in 1947, not 1847."
(Same man told me a few days ago that he liked being at the hospital, versus the nursing home, because the staff at the hospital was white. While the black charge nurse was in the room removing his IV at the hospital in preparation for two black men there to transport him back to the nursing home.)
I told the old fart that I'd be back to see about him when I feel like it. I don't feel like it today. Probably not tomorrow either. I'm the person he's relying upon for all of the damned details.
But his words have consequences. Deal with it, snowflake.
This makes me sick. It's disgusting.
Yup. That Leave it to Beaver world that never actually existed or happened is the cause of the pull towards fascism in the US.
What my dad says about late 50s/early 60s never sounded fun to me. His brother was older and a beatnik who was always going toe to toe with my grandmother who must have been on meds cause she was a psycho. The fun stuff he relates was kids being able to buy stuff like hand grenades at the surplus stores. A lot of the kid's dads had fought through WW2 and many probably had bad PTSD. Those dads would get drunk after their shift in whatever hellhole job, kick mom's ass and see if the boy wanted any after that? Some of these things still exist, but then I consider segregation and institutionalized white supremacy and it's a world I want nothing to do with. My dad concedes about the same because he's always been a good boomer who is still capable of insight and empathy.
Hand grenade Danny Trejo and my dad are the same age and grew up in the same neighborhood.
your dad sounds like a rare boomer. you should keep him
So my parents both overall had pretty good childhoods (it probably helped that both of my grandfathers had mild disabilities that kept them out of military service) but my dad has this insane story about how he used to go down to the railroad tracks to collect beer bottles from the hobos to exchange for the deposit. He was six. Nothing bad ever happened; the hobos were fortunately more responsible than his own mother and would sort of drop the bottles at a midway point so he could keep his distance. But still. HE WAS SIX
My mother would have had a stroke if we had done that.
My parents happen to be understanding boomers as well my dad more than my mom sometimes, but growing up they told us it’s gonna be harder for us than it was for them
Your comment about their fathers returning from WWII with PTSD is 100%. And they never got help for it. My millennial daughter pointed this out to me and I was like, "Whoa, no wonder my Boomer mother is a narcissistic asshole."
God yes, this is my mother, forever bitching that all she wants is a family like the Waltons but she did nothing to cultivate the family she does have.
She wanted to be granted a family like the Waltons, not actually work for it.
I saw an ad in the JAMA for Valium back then, and it featured a picture of a basic middle-class housewife. I was raised by Silent generation parents, and those people were all kinds of messed up, from being children during the Depression.