I’ve received some spam email promoting an essay. I know I’m being their puppet by mentioning it here, but my god, this thing was stupid and annoying and feeds into stereotypes about my generation, so I’m going to link to it anyway. It’s an article titled I’m 70 and I recently realized my children love me but have no use for me — they don’t want my recipes, my stories, my experience, or my perspective on the life they’re building, and the hardest thing I’ve ever had to accept is that the person who taught them to walk doesn’t get consulted on where they’re going
. Yeah, that’s the title, and it gives the entire essay away. I’m already annoyed.
The body of the essay goes on and on in the same vein. Paragraph after paragraph with the same structure as the title, my kids may love me, but they aren’t fawning appreciatively over my old scraps of paper with recipes scrawled on them
. I’m pretty sure the author, Marlene Martin, doesn’t actually exist, but is a particularly dull AI that is churning out repetitive garbage that simultaneously feeds the entitled self-righteousness of a class of boomers, and outrage all the non-boomers who see confirmation of their low opinion of old people. Click click click. Just like I did.
The purported author claims to be 70 years old. I have to reassure everyone that I am a youthful 69.
I also checked the photo of Marlene: it’s a stock photo of “smiling elderly woman”. Fake fakeity fake.
I’ve seen a few of these in my news feed. I can’t tell if they’re meant to validate the entitlement of old grumps or validate the resentment of their children or if they’re just AI churn of whatever gets clicks.
I checked out the vegout mag website, and two of their current top articles have headlines starting with “Nobody Talks About…” We are all susceptible to clickbait to some extent, but man this so blatant and hardly tempting, and yes it’s annoying.
That parent sounds lonely and wants someone to talk to (not with). OTOH boomers (as a whole) don’t understand how much things have changed and their ways aren’t working anymore. Gone are they days where you can go into a business and demand a job. Salaries have not kept up with inflation and unless you already own a home, the odds of being able to afford one are small. Hard work just gets you taken for granted, not promoted.
If you’re not happy with the way your adult children are behaving toward you, you might want to think about the behavior that was modeled for them…and who did it.
Fake or not, I fear some of this nonsense actually makes sense to some. Fortunately, my kids actually grew up,and that means they don’t ask me where to go, just tell me where they went.
Forgive the cluelessness of someone very happily without children, but does one have to actually teach them to walk? Is that not something they generally figure out on their own through trial and error?
I doubt historians in 1,000 years would be interested in sifting through my 60 year high piles of rusted, crumbling spiral notebooks. My 38 yo son loves me a lot. He has no interest in it at all. I find no fault. I barely give a r@t’s @ss myself. I am, gaggingly, the same age as RF’ucking’K Jr. born 9 years after WWII, 1954. We’ll be 73 this year. Way well beyond time to get out of the way and let the young take over their world. We’ve had all the money, all the power and all the resources for over 80 years; and this is as far as we’ve gotten. From one War to another War to the Next War to the Current War. That’s all we got. We tried. We failed. If the young can’t break the chain, then it’s on them. They’ll have tried and they’ll have failed. We’ll be dead and buried deep. Un-lamented verses weep. But if they find a way ahead, to keep all children well and fed; and keep them safe from mortal dread: then good on all them living said.
Alverant @ #4 — “OTOH boomers (as a whole) don’t understand how much things have changed and their ways aren’t working anymore.”
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you, but that seems to be painting “boomers” with a rather broad brush. I suspect some boomers understand how much things have changed, and have managed to change along with them.
Classic Boomer here – born in 1948 at the very beginning of the Boomer wave. My older siblings were not boomers, either by date of birth or culture. And it’s that culture which belies the complaint above. We came of age right into the Vietnam mess and revolted. The Generation Gap was a real thing. People’s memory of being close to their parents may be real, or we may get a different answer if we could go back in time and ask the parents about their views of “kids today.”
Is the essay possibly AI-generated?
Well, why in the hell should your children and grandchildren care anyway?
We’ve left our descendants a wrecked planet and now a wrecked democracy once known as the USA.
I’ve pointed out many times that our Boomer lives weren’t all that easy.
I grew up in a dead end rural area with an almost nonexistent future to look forward to. (The 1960s and the university saved me/us from all that though.) The fallout shelters, duck and cover drills, Vietnam war, Nixon, Reagan, and after Obama, the American Bad dream has become the American Nightmare.
I knew people killed in Vietnam and killed in Iraq.
And so what?
AFAICT, for kids growing up today, it is a whole lot harder for them than it was for us.
Jobs come and go, income per hour worked isn’t keeping up with inflation.
A lot of the civil right gains made by anyone other than white hetero xian males are being attacked or outright canceled, e.g. abortion, Roe versus Wade.
We handed our children a broken world and a future that looks like everything is steadily getting worse rather than better.
So why should they thank us for that?
Maybe you should have better recipes than “Jello salad with Miracle Whip”?
The essay may be AI slop, but the “issue” is real. There’s an absolute split happening between Gen X / millenial kids and their parents who cannot comprehend that their children are actual human beings with agency.
There’s whole “subcultures” of children who cut off their parents who treat boundaries like something that happens to other people, and aggrieved parents who really don’t think their children get to have boundaries. I should know, I’m almost one of them. I did cut off my mother for a while. The only reason I haven’t cut her off completely is because I did a lot of work and therapy and accepted that I will never have an actual adult relationship with my mother and also limited contact.
I agree. And the problem is not with the kids, but with the boomer parents.
I am quite happy with how my kids turned out, and I don’t need ego-stroking from them.
I thought the focus was now off the Boomers and shifted to us Xers and our brains addled by exposure to…what was it…ummm…wait…oh yeah, our lead addled brains. Who will think of us? They should make us another after school special.