like iPhones or cars with airbags or thousands of other significant quality of life improvements. It was 25 cents a minute to call long distance back then. Today it's included in the plan. I wouldn't want to go back and live in the 70's for anything. The 70's sucked ass.

When I pushed back that my personal experience with Boomers not being grateful for the lot they were dealt it came back with this:

"First, I would disagree with your assertion that Boomers don't generally agree with my own circle's perspective, What evidence do you have?"

"You're right to challenge me on that. I did not have sufficient evidence to suggest that your experience was unrepresentative of Baby Boomers generally. I should have distinguished what I knew from what I was speculating about.
I went looking for survey evidence, specifically whether Boomers recognize that they were fortunate to live when they did and that younger generations face greater economic challenges. Here's what I found.
What the evidence actually shows
A particularly relevant finding comes from Pew Research Center. In a 2008 survey, 66% of Baby Boomers said it was harder for people to get ahead than it had been a decade earlier, compared with 55% of younger adults and 58% of older adults. Boomers were also especially likely to say it was becoming harder to maintain a middle-class standard of living.
That survey doesn't directly answer whether Boomers feel fortunate about the circumstances in which they grew up. But it does show that Boomers were not generally oblivious to changing economic conditions.
More recently, a Pew Research Center survey conducted in May 2026 found that 58% of Americans aged 50 and older believed finding a job was harder for young adults today than it had been for their parents' generation. Across all ages, 87% said buying a home was harder for young adults today.
The limitation is important: those results group everyone aged 50 and older together. They don't isolate Boomers, and recognizing that younger people face difficulties is not quite the same as feeling grateful for one's own historical circumstances.
I also found a more direct survey from Clever Real Estate, conducted in July 2024 among 1,100 Americans born between 1946 and 1964. It found that 75% of the Boomers surveyed said their generation got lucky buying homes when they did. Two-thirds said they felt sorry for younger generations trying to buy a home, and only 19% thought they could have afforded a home in their twenties if they faced today's housing market.
That is quite consistent with the perspective you've described.
My revised conclusion
The evidence supports your point more strongly than my earlier wording suggested. Many Boomers do recognize that they benefited from favorable circumstances and that younger people face greater economic challenges today. I have not found sound evidence establishing that your view is unusual among Boomers.
I also can't establish that most Boomers feel exactly as you and your acquaintances do across all aspects of life. But I was wrong to imply that your circle's perspective was somehow atypical without evidence."

are hated.

Boomers really believe that they "worked harder" / pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, etc and that no one after them is deserving of anything.

The reality is boomers enjoyed the single best economic period in the world's history. Today, Gen Z has 86% less purchasing power than you did in your 20s. The median US home in 1974 was $36,000. That was $229,000 in today's dollars. Today the median US home is almost $500,000. Rent was $143/month or $910 today vs. the average that Gen Z pays of over $1,500. Healthcare spending per capita was $153 or $972 in today's dollars vs. nearly $2,000 today. College tuition in 1974 was $514 or $3,270 vs. over $10,000 today for in state tuition at a shitty school. Public tuition is up 310% in real dollars since the 70s. You could literally pay for college, afford a decent car and apartment, and have discretionary income from flipping burgers. Today you can live out of your car / below the poverty line for that same job.

Your generation didn't work harder, they were handed the greatest era of prosperity to ever exist and they chose to dismantle it in favor of getting every ounce of blood out of the turnip.

Today the generations behind the boomers have inherited $45 trillion of your debt and now 73% of Millennials and 66% of Gen Z live paycheck to paycheck. 33% of Gen Z cannot afford to save any money for retirement.

Meanwhile, the boomers own 52% of the wealth in the country....often brag about how they "are spending every penny of it" and leaving nothing to their kids/grandkids (and let's not even get started on how disconnected the majority of boomers are to seeing/helping to raise their grandkids despite getting tons of help from their parents). Last, and my personal favorite, is the recent Cato institute poll: 89% of boomers support raising payroll taxes on younger working Americans rather than cutting or reducing current retirement checks, even when they are told those younger Americans won't get the same benefits.

Hope this helps.

. . . how so many of them acted during the Vietnam War / 1960s and 1970s. A lot of coddled, entitled middle class and rich white kids decided they were not going to make any sacrifices for their country.

(We can have an entire separate discussion about her at another time)

One of the first criticisms against her the the Teeki crowd always trots out is: “for an anti-Socialist she was quick to go on Social Security!”
Social Security is not some optional mutual fund investment.
It is a mandated government ‘tax’
You have no choice but to comply, or armed men will drag you off to a cage.
One can be against the program in principle, but if one is forced to participate, then one is entitled to the benefits under whatever the current terms and structure of the program
She paid in, she was due a payout upon retirement.
It’s forced Socialism, because that’s the only kind that works.
If Socialism is voluntary then all of the producers would opt out and you’d be left with only the leeches and no one to support them.

And yes, means testing would be awful.
If we knew that years ago we might have strategized differently

Anyone who ever mistook it for a retirement savings program....well, that's on them.

many years that the government will absolutely cook Gen X and Elder Millennials with some sort of change to the RMD schedule on qualified retirement accounts and then the imposition of a massive surtax on Social Security disbursements if your RMDs are above some threshold. It would be sold to the proles as a tax on rich fatcats but it would leave the actual SS tables unchanged while backdooring in something like a 75% effective cut to benefits if you showed a modicum of responsibility while you were young. I haven't made a 401K contribution in almost 10 years because I'm so positive the tax drag on getting the money out is going to be so fucking bad by 2040. There's just too much money in those accounts for the government to ignore.