We deserve blame for gladly accepting the Boomer mindset, and applying it to the tech industry once we came of age. Gen X honestly has been caught in the middle in a weirder way than we were, and because of how the timing of media development went, they never had a boom era that really applied to them in the same way. Many of them were raised in the economic downturn of the 70’s and the 80’s cultural and (dubiously calling this positive) economic boom and bust and 90’s boom and bust was either too early or too late for most of them. For Boomers it lined up perfectly with regular generational cycles to get kids that grew up in a similar culturally monolithic era.

Millennials have every bit the same sense of entitlement to cultural similarity, expecting everyone to know about and like the same 80’s and 90’s cartoons, movies, and video games - just like how the Boomers demand everyone just assume that the 60’s were the peak of human civilization - when Boomers were still kids or just graduating high school. This was facilitated by the Boomer themselves. We grew up scarfing their hubris and art and media and asking for seconds. We just did stuff that was stupid without thinking about it, or thinking through long-term repercussions, just like how Boomers put all our food in plastic. We didn’t learn that was bad and stop doing it. We just invented different BS scams to sell more crap made of plastic that is health snake oil. We pushed social media acceptance and use and abuse. Boomers and Millennials don’t do well with counter-culture until it becomes mainstream enough to be cool. Gen X especially and Y to some degree embrace it because the Boomer/Millennial cycles were out of sync for them age-wise. So the reaction to why do these people like this weird, brightly colored shit is to go the other direction.

The the Boomer hubris is to tell us for 20 years that we’re idiots for not owning a home by age 21, but messing up the housing market over and over again. And we just sort of brushed it off, like “oh, well, it’s fine, I’ll get around to it. Mom and Dad say it’ll be OK.” We didn’t think for ourselves until it was too late. We didn’t think. We didn’t protect harm to Gen Y. We didn’t see the lessons and learn from them because we were too jacked up on pixie sticks and Jolt cola to see what was happening.

There are some positive parallels - for example, we grew up at a time when computers were new and so many of us are comfortable using them and fixing things and getting under the hood metaphorically. Boomers grew up as cars became widely available and affordable as status symbols, which is why many of them spent their lives comfortable with changing the oil themselves or replacing the spark plugs. But it still just confirms the connection between the generations.