Boomers and the introspection black hole. Every time I criticize "Boomers" I lose followers (or remove a bunch because they're so infuriating). It's so predictable. I especially like Conservative Boomers who try to separate themselves from Liberal Boomers. Challenge typical Canadian boomer about their life and the script writes itself: “We had it harder than anyone. We worked harder than anyone. We earned every single one of our benefits, pensions, and house values. Nobody handed us anything.” What they almost never say is that they were born in Canada in the decades right after World War II... one of the single luckiest demographic lottery tickets in human history. They entered the workforce during the longest sustained economic expansion the country has ever seen. Housing was cheap relative to wages. Education was heavily subsidized. Unions were strong. Interest rates and inflation eventually cooperated. Governments expanded the welfare state while the population pyramid still looked like a pyramid. They bought houses for sums that a couple of years’ salary could cover, watched those houses balloon in value for decades, and then watched successive governments protect those gains. Sorry, but none of that was pure personal grit. A massive share of it was timing, geography, and postwar happenstance. Being born Canadian in 1948, 1955, or '63 was an extraordinary stroke of luck compared with any previous generation and compared with most of the world at the time. Yet their reflexive response is still the same. Any acknowledgment of that luck is treated as an attack on their work ethic. Hardship stories from the 1970s oil shocks or high interest rates in the early 80s get elevated into unique suffering, while the broader structural tailwinds get erased. They remember the bad, never all the good. The result is a generation that can lecture millennials and Gen Z about “entitlement” while remaining almost pathologically incapable of seeing their own. Introspection would require admitting that personal effort mattered, but that the starting conditions mattered even more. Most of them can’t do both at once. So the myth continues. They alone built everything the hard way, and everyone after them is just lazy.

I love this quote.