Are the boomers the worst generation ever? If you visit the reddit.com message boards devoted to hating boomers, you’d think yes. They’re clueless! They’re musty! They call reddit a message board!
A sample complaint: They don’t know how to use emojis properly. One news article discussed how Mom had broken some bad news and used the “laughing so hard you’re crying” emoji, mistaking the tears for sadness. You’d think she’d put her clothes on backward and drove the Impala through the window of the beauticians. Mom, it’s time to have that talk about taking your keyboard away.
Someone born in 1949 does not know the particular nuances of these infantile yellow faces? Big deal. Emojis can be “amusing” in the barest sense, or useful for implying some unspoken sentiment, but for the most part they’re illiteracy-facilitators for people who have little to say and spend all day on Twitter proving it.
Spoken like a boomer, brah.
I never considered myself a boomer. That term was reserved for the cohort before me, the people who came of age in the 1960s and decided they knew everything and regarded their elders as antiquated reliquaries. I came of age in the ’70s, and had nothing in common with those close-cropped, sweater-vest collegians who sang along with the Kingston Trio’s “Hootenanny: Live from the Hungry Eyeball in Greenwich Village” or whatever, and nothing in common with the whole hairy, unsanitary Woodstock era where people painted flowers on their face and got crabs.
We had our own culture and our own problems. The idea that we would someday be lumped in with the ’60s in the general rubric of “boomers” would seem absurd. But here we are.
So, let us go to the specific complaints in the anti-boomer subreddit, /r/boomersbeingfools. See if they apply to you. I’ll check myself for sins and supply a Cliched Cranky Boomer Reply, or CCBR.
Their phones are loud. “It seems like every boomer I know keeps their phone ringer volume on FULL. BLAST. What could possibly be so urgent that they feel the need to hear it ring IMMEDIATELY?”