Never Trust Anybody Over 30

An excerpt from the book "How Not to Become a Millennial" that discusses how the Boomer adage "Never Trust Anybody Over 30" has come to bite them in the ass.

"The Millennials didn’t grow up in a vacuum.  They weren’t born in the cabbage patch, sprouted legs one day, and then “POOF,” 22 years later found themselves $120K in debt with a Master’s degree in Diversity and Inclusion.  Like everyone else they were a product of their environment.  And a huge part of that environment, if not the most influential part, was the elders who would raise them.  Parents, teachers, professors, guidance counselors, therapists, bosses, even politicians and media personalities would directly and indirectly wield incredible, if not total influence over the Millennials and would be the single most determining variable in how the Millennials would turn out.

This is the way it has always been throughout human history because there’s no other way for it to be.  Younger generations have to be raised by older generations.  But the Millennials were going to be raised by a very unique generation of elders.  A generation of elders that the world had never seen before in terms of its wealth, stability, pampering, and privilege.  Nor had the world seen such an arrogant, self-important, completely delusional, and completely wrong generation before. And it was this generation that was going to prepare the Millennials for the real world - the Baby Boomers.

What I absolutely love about the Baby Boomers, what I find so incredibly rich is how they were the generation that coined the phrase “Never trust anybody over 30.”  And you need to really break down this statement to appreciate how hypocritical, delusional, arrogant, and simply wrong that statement is and therefore how wrong the Baby Boomers are.

First, Boomers said this when they were young.  Not only stupid, but inexperienced and young.  They were a bunch of teenage, 20 something know-nothings, who never worked a job, had yet to start families, draft-dodged a war, but somehow they thought they knew better than their elders and the culminated eons of human history.  Not only is this against common sense, it’s the epitome of hubris and arrogance.  Many of them hadn’t even gone to college to have a political religion installed in them so they’d parrot such outlandish stupidity.  They were just that naturally stupid and arrogant on their own!  And this was the raw material that would go on to raise a generation of children of their own.

Second, “over 30” meant the WWII generation.  Implying the generation that went through:

the Great Depression
fought WWII
came back home and built the most successful economy in the history of the world
put a man on the moon,
and then as an encore performance, during their retirement years, won the Cold War

was not to be trusted.  Never in the history of the world had a single generation fought, staved off, and defeated such evil and created such good with such sacrifice.  But yet some 19 year old, pot-smoking Boomers knew better and insisted you couldn’t trust, of all people, the World War II Generation.

Third, when it came time for the Boomers to take stewardship of the United States they went and completely shat the bed.  They inherited the greatest country the world has ever seen and in nearly every capacity destroyed it.  Instead of surpluses they ran massive government deficits.  They increased the national debt from 40% GDP to its current-day 106%.  Household debt from 40% to 100% GDP.  Economic growth tanked from the WWII generation average of 4.25% to 2.25%.  And there’s their collection of “bubbles” and financial crises they collected like Pokemon cards – the Dotcom Bubble, the Housing Bubble, the Education Bubble and the Volcker Recession – all making genuine economic progress damn near impossible.  And this says nothing of the sociological and societal destruction they wreaked upon America.  Divorce, broken homes, crime, welfare, single motherhood, dead beat dads, teenage pregnancies, drugs, STD’s, and The Doors.  A generation could not have failed more at being responsible adults if they tried. 

But about the worst thing they did was to shame, mock and ridicule American culture itself.  The pinnacle of human achievement and good.  The best culture and country the world has ever seen. The country every other human on the planet desperately wants to move to or become like.  And the Boomers could not wait to destroy it, throwing it under the bus for such petty reasons as being edgy, to curry favor with anti-American leftists, or to simply fake being some kind of academic or intellectual.  In the end, they managed to take the world’s greatest asset and in one generation turn it into the world’s largest liability.

Finally, and perhaps most ironic, is that they have provably become what they so arrogantly mocked in their youth.  You absolutely should have trusted somebody over 30 back in 1968, not the 20 something dipshit hippies the Boomers were.  But today, well over the age of 30, the Boomers are the ones you should never trust because they are such an absolute, abject failure of a generation.  Nobody listens to them.  The entire country hates them.  Their half-sibling children debate whether they should bother visiting them in nursing homes.  And this optimistically assumes the Boomers even have the money to afford nursing homes as they all reverse-mortgaged their homes to afford basic living expenses.  They are so bad of a generation that instead of commanding the respect eldest generations normally did in the past, they are the butt end of jokes, minimized and completely encapsulated with a the simple hashtag of “OK Boomer.”  They are no better than the Millennial generation they raised and their only value in society will also be to serve as a warning to others."

Check out the book!