Member-only story
Ten Ways Boomers Can Bug Younger Folks
It’s kind of fun
A few weeks ago I was standing in line at the register at my local supermarket. I noticed the young woman behind me had a cart full of what looked like party foods, a large cake, bottles of wine, appetizers.
I smiled at her and said, “Looks like fun. I wanna go to that party,” and nodded at her basket. She frowned at me and said, “Only if you want to go to a stranger’s birthday party,” and turned away, cutting off any further chatting. Clearly, I had annoyed her. I finished checking out and left the store but couldn’t get the interaction out of my mind.
Later at home I did some research and was shocked to learn that younger folks, Gen Xs (born 1965–1979), Millennials (born 1980–1994), and Gen Z’ers ( born 1995–2015), find us Baby Boomers exasperating. The young’uns even complain there are too many of us in Congress. Trump’s a Boomer which doesn’t help our image.
As a Boomer myself, I find this difficult to understand. How could the Flower Children generation be annoying when we did all this:
- Fought in Vietnam
- Danced naked in the fields at Woodstock, the original in 1969, not that travesty in 1994
- Broke taboos about sex
- Tie-dyed everything
