Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Why Did Boomers Have It Easier? The Unspoken Truth
Mom and Dad… You’re fucking stupid.
Not because you’re evil. This is not due to your lack of love for us. You’re fucking stupid because you believed a lie so hard, you built your entire life around it and then forced that same lie down our throats.
You weren’t born stupid. You were trained to be. And now we’re living in the fallout of your education.
This isn’t an “I hate my parents” rant. This is a “let’s finally tell the fucking truth” rant. It’s a diagnosis of the lie one generation was trained to believe and the next generation is forced to live in. It’s about what you were sold, what you passed on, and why your kids are drowning in a system you still defend.
2. The Lie You Were Sold: The Myth of Inevitable Progress
You were handed a story, a simple set of rules for a life that was promised to work. It was a clean, straightforward contract with reality:
- Work hard.
- Follow the rules.
- Respect authority.
- Get a good job.
- Buy a house.
- Have kids.
- Retire.
- Be grateful.
But the story had a dark side, a set of psychological tripwires designed to keep you in line. If the rules didn’t work, it was never the rules’ fault. It was yours.
- If you struggle, it’s your fault.
- If you can’t keep up, you’re lazy.
- If you’re stressed, just “budget better.”
- If you break down, get a prescription and go back to work.
You were told that progress was inevitable, that every generation would be better off than the last, and that economic growth would magically roll downhill to everyone. You believed the presidents, the pastors, and the pundits. You believed the American Dream, the free-market fairy tale. And to be fair, for a little while, it looked real.
For decades, productivity has grown while wages have stagnated, breaking the promise that working harder would automatically mean living better.
3. The Last Good Deal: Why It Worked for You
You caught the last good deal. You got on the last train right before they torched the station.
You bought your house when it cost 2–3 times your annual salary, not 15–20 times. College didn’t chain you to 30 years of debt. A single income could often support a family. You had pensions, or at least decent benefits. Healthcare hadn’t yet fully mutated into a debt collection agency.
And then you turned around and told us:
“Just do what we did. It worked for us. If it’s not working for you, you’re doing it wrong.”
That’s the stupid part. Not the loving us or the working hard. The stupid part is refusing to see that the game changed—and defending the old rulebook like it came carved on stone tablets.
Unlike today, you bought homes when they were affordable—because home prices have far outpaced income growth in the generations that followed.
4. The World We Inherited: Life in the Fallout
Here is the world we walked into, the reality built on the foundation of your myth:
- Housing: An asset casino where every roof over our heads is somebody else’s “investment vehicle.”
- College: A lifelong debt subscription. You don’t graduate; you just start making payments.
- Healthcare: A hostage situation. You get sick, you go broke, or both.
- Work: Gig apps, 1099s, and “be your own boss” bullshit that leaves us broke, exhausted, and uninsured.
- Daily Life: A minefield of junk fees, “convenience” fees, and AI-powered pricing designed to squeeze every last drop out of us for groceries, rent, and flights.
You had a future. We got a content warning.
When we point this out, you call us negative, unmotivated, and entitled.
No.
We’re not entitled. We’re not lazy. We’re just not hallucinating the way you were trained to. We can see the system naked. And it’s ugly as hell.
5. Why We’re So Angry: It’s Not the Hardship, It’s the Denial
We’re not just mad that things are hard. We’re mad that you keep defending the people and systems that made them hard.
We’re furious watching you trust the politicians who sold your pensions and the corporations that hollowed out your towns. You trust the talking heads who blame poor people, immigrants, “the other side,” anybody except the people actually cashing out. You hear “record profits” and think that means progress, even while your own kids can’t afford rent. You believe the stock market is the heart of the country and that GDP is a national mood. You cling to the myth like a religious relic while everything around you screams that it’s over.
6. You Weren’t Born This Way: You Were Trained
You weren’t born like this. You were marinated in it. You were raised on a steady diet of Cold War propaganda, Reagan fairy tales, corporate news, and a constant drip of advertising telling you that you are your job, your house, and your car. You were taught:
“America is the greatest country in the world.” “Capitalism brings freedom.” “Progress is unstoppable.” “We’re the good guys.”
You were trained to believe unions were bad, regulation was bad, and welfare was bad. You were taught that the only people you should be suspicious of were the ones asking for fairness. All the while, the people you trusted were quietly selling your future to the highest bidder. You were trained to equate criticism with disloyalty and to mistake questioning for ingratitude.
So no, you’re not monsters. You’re just deeply, thoroughly, and systematically misled. And now we’re the ones choking on the smoke from the fire you were told didn’t exist.
7. What We Need Now: A Different Kind of Inheritance
Here is what we don’t need from you:
- We don’t need another lecture about hard work.
- We don’t need another “back in my day” story.
- We don’t need your guilt, your defensiveness, or your spiritual bypassing about “everything happens for a reason.”
- We don’t need you to pretend this system can be tweaked.
Here is what we do need. We need you to admit it.
Admit the myth failed. Admit the dream was rigged. Admit that you were sold a story and then became its unpaid sales reps. We need you to stop gaslighting us when we say, “This doesn’t work,” and stop treating our anger as a personal attack instead of a sane reaction to a collapsing reality.
You can pass down a different kind of inheritance. Not money. Not property. But truth. You can say:
“Yeah, we were lied to. We believed it. We benefitted in some ways. And it fucked you over. We’re sorry. And we want to help tear this shit down or rebuild something better.”
That is the only inheritance that matters now.
8. Conclusion: Let’s Break the Spell
So yes, I’m going to keep saying it: “Mom and Dad, you’re fucking stupid.”
Not because I want to hurt you, but because I want to break the spell. I want your generation to stop serving as unpaid PR for a system that’s bleeding everyone dry. I want my generation to stop thinking we’re the failure for not winning a rigged game. We’re not broken. The story is.
If you’re a parent reading this, sit with the discomfort. Don’t run. Don’t hit me with, ‘But we did our best.’ You probably did. But your best was built on bad information.
If you’re younger, you’re not crazy. You’re not lazy. You’re not alone. You’re just finally seeing the lie clearly. And once you see it, you don’t have to live inside it anymore.
This isn’t about disrespecting your parents. It’s about ending the cycle that’s been eating all of us alive.
Mom and Dad, you’re fucking stupid. And for the first time… that might actually be the beginning of something honest.
Listen to this audio discussion; it dives into what this article is all about.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this article saying our parents are bad people?
No. This isn’t a moral attack. It’s a systems diagnosis.
Most parents worked hard, cared about their kids, and did what they thought was right. The problem isn’t effort or love—it’s that an entire generation was sold a false story about how the economy works and then trained to defend it as truth. Being misled doesn’t make someone evil. The issue is that people refuse to question the situation once the damage becomes obvious.
Why use such harsh language?
Because polite language is part of the trap.
Soft words make hard truths easier to ignore. “Economic headwinds” doesn’t describe what people are actually living through. “Structural adjustment” doesn’t capture losing your home, your health, or your future. The language matches the reality. Discomfort is the point—it’s how spells get broken.
Didn’t older generations struggle too?
Of course they did.
No one is claiming life was easy. But the rules of the game were different. Housing was affordable relative to income. College didn’t require lifelong debt. Healthcare hadn’t been fully financialized. A single income could support a family. Unions and pensions existed at scale.
Struggle inside a functional system is not the same as struggle inside a rigged one.
Isn’t this just blaming Boomers for everything?
No. Blame is lazy. Accountability is not.
This isn’t about pointing fingers at individuals—it’s about recognizing how a generation became unpaid sales reps for a system that no longer exists. When that system collapsed, the script didn’t update. Instead, denial became the defense mechanism.
This is about ending the cycle, not winning an argument.
What about personal responsibility?
Personal responsibility exists—but it isn’t magic.
You can’t budget your way out of structural exploitation. You can’t “work harder” in an economy where wages are disconnected from productivity and survival costs are artificially inflated. Responsibility matters, but pretending it’s the only factor is how systems avoid responsibility themselves.
Why does this make people so angry?
Because gaslighting hurts more than hardship.
People can endure difficulty. What they can’t endure is being told the difficulty is imaginary, deserved, or self-inflicted—especially by people who benefited from a system that no longer exists. The anger comes from being told reality isn’t real.
Isn’t capitalism still the best system we have?
That depends on which version you’re talking about.
The capitalism people defend today is not the capitalism that built the mid-20th-century middle class. It’s financialized, extractive, and designed to funnel wealth upward. Defending it on autopilot—without acknowledging how it changed—is how harm continues.
Questioning a system is not the same as rejecting progress.
What are you actually asking parents to do?
Admit it changed. Stop denying it. Stop defending it.
That’s it. No grand gestures required. Just honesty. Acknowledgment. Willingness to say:
“Yeah. The story we were told doesn’t work anymore—and maybe never fully did.”
That alone would heal more than a thousand lectures.
Is this anti-family or anti-respect?
No. It’s anti-denial.
Respect doesn’t mean silence. Love doesn’t mean pretending everything is fine. Real respect is being willing to confront uncomfortable truths instead of passing them down unexamined.
This isn’t about tearing families apart. It’s about stopping the lie from being inherited.
What’s the takeaway for younger generations?
You’re not broken. You’re not lazy. You’re not failing.
You’re reacting sanely to an insane system. The problem isn’t you—it’s the story you were told about how life was “supposed” to work. Once you see that clearly, you can stop internalizing blame and start demanding better.
So what now?
We tell the truth. Out loud. Without flinching.
We stop treating criticism as betrayal. We stop worshipping a past that can’t be recreated. We stop letting anger be dismissed as immaturity. And we start building something that doesn’t require lying to survive.
That’s how the spell breaks.
