Zach M. Stafford | Website
Transcript
Comic 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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Footer:
Pervis
Zach M. Stafford


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.
Never.
(Figured I’d answer since I’d usually only be compelled to answer if I was a yes.)
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.
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.
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.
: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.
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.
This needs to be qualified by socioeconomic status. It’s got to be the upper class or conservative sycophants saying things like that.
And there’s the confirmation bias effect. Nobody is asking about the majority of the “boomer” generation who don’t talk like that.
No shit. I hear things like: “Only immigrants still want to work.” at my summer job. Yes, I DON’T WANT TO HAVE A JOB WHICH DESTROYS MY BODY MY WHOLE LIFE AND WILL BE AUTOMATED THE SECOND IT CAN BE.
Literally had my step dad say something to this effect recently, yeah.
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.
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.
Not this extreme, but yes
Yeah I have a couple 80 year old relatives who post shit like this on facebook
Yeah
My parents
Admittedly, they did put in a bit of work to get where they are, but they happily ignore the fact that they were born into a position of relative privilege and that the world is a very different place
Even while they moan about how different things are now…