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.