Later in the same chapter, he had some words for their elders: “They are small-minded, because they have been humbled by life: their desires are set upon nothing more exalted or unusual than what will help them to keep alive.”
He could have been reading my email.
A striking number of my readers—older, almost uniformly—skipped past the data entirely and went straight to character: younger generations complain too much. They spend recklessly. They don’t sacrifice. They whine.
What was notable wasn’t the anger. It was the precision of the deflection. No one challenged the Federal Reserve data showing that Baby Boomers control roughly 52% of U.S. household wealth while representing about 20% of the population. No one argued that Millennials are, in fact, thriving. The response to a structural argument about wealth and power was, almost invariably, a moral argument about character.
That pattern has a name in psychology. And understanding it—alongside what actually makes Boomers different from every dominant class that preceded them—tells you more about where America is stuck than any balance sheet. Is it whiny to try to understand this psychology, or is it a form of self-knowledge?
