Grumpy Old Maher

I'm concerned about the youngest generation that's been given an official designation, the Millennials, but not in the way Bill Maher and some other Boomers are. I see Millennials as victims of the failings of the Boomer and Gen X generations, where Maher only sees them as dumb, lazy, spoiled and entitled...

Bill Maher needs to shut up about Millennials. No, really. In the video I've included here you'll hear him complain about how Millennials have forgotten what it means to make an honest living by working shitty jobs, thereby promoting the work ethics that are so essential in Protestantism and capitalism, you know, the ideologies that made the world so shitty for Millennials and Gen Z in the first place. His generation and my own were raised with the idea that progress was omnipresent and everlasting, that our generations would have it better than all preceding ones. That was true, and was a gift given to us by the "Greatest Generation" who fought and died in World War II and then came back to rebuild where that was necessary. Also they started having sex, and a lot of it, after the years of combat, producing the Baby Boomer generation. I'm from the generation after that, and I've always said that my father's generation was the last to be able to promise their kids that their lifes would surely be better than his own.

Since then everything went downhill, and Maher doesn't seem to have noticed. He's a true caricature of the Boomer generation who doesn't seem to notice how much worse the world is which subsequent generations have been born into. Instead he admonishes them for not getting one of the many shitty, underpaid and meaningless jobs available on the market. He calls them stupid and entitled for wanting to become "internet famous" before working their ass of for a faceless corporation that will shove them aside as soon as they dare ask for a raise. Maher makes fun of Millennials for being addicted to their iPhones, and yes, I agree that addiction to social media is a problem, but not one to make fun of; Maher should use his influence to blame the creators of Facebook and the likes for deliberately making addicting products that imprison their users in a carefully constructed confirmation-bias-bubble built on anger and hate.

Bill Maher doesn't see the irony in criticizing internet influencers, when he's exactly the same, only on a platform from and for previous generations. And he's a millionaire to boot, which makes it somewhat disingenuous for him to criticize online influencers for making money by cultivating an audience. Maher, to me, comes across as a grumpy old man who stopped being funny a long time ago. But especially his stance on the younger generations is disturbing in my eyes. His and my generations have saddled them with problems they'll have to solve when us Boomers and Gen X'ers are long gone. It's just too easy to blame younger generations for an admittedly nihilistic world-view, when we are in large part to blame. Our education was almost free. Our fathers could provide for the whole family with a single steady job. Houses and rents were reasonably priced still. We didn't start our professional careers with tens of thousands of dollars worth of student-debt weighing on our souls and bank accounts. We didn't have to worry about climate change and climate refugees. We had it sooo much easier Bill, so please stop complaining about how spoiled and entitled the young adults of today are...

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