Boomer Tells His Laid-Off Adult Granddaughter To Hang Out At Local Parks & Ask Elderly People To Pay Her $20 A Chore To Make Up Her $85K Salary
The generation gap seems to be widening.
fizkes / Shutterstock Kate Hindman is a millennial mom who shares her politically-charged perspectives on parenting and economics on social media under the username @leftistmommy, in case anyone wonders what side of the aisle she falls on.
She recently touched on the ever-widening generation gap that exists between boomers and, well, everyone else, when it comes to finding work, sharing the advice her grandpa gave her after she lost her job.
The boomer told his laid-off granddaughter to go to local parks and ask elderly people to pay her $20 a chore to supplement her $85,000 salary.
Hindman relayed the story of telling her boomer grandfather how scared she was after losing her job, saying, “He recommended that I go hang out at local parks, start up a conversation with any elderly folks that I see and offer to do, like, chores around the house for them in order to make ends meet while I was jobless.”
While her grandpa’s advice was well-meaning, it was also incredibly out-of-touch, highlighting just how different life has become in the past 50 years.
She shared that she was “down $5,000 just in income and also didn’t have health insurance.” She also had to take her child out of preschool because she could no longer afford the tuition, which in recent years has been as expensive as college.
Her grandpa recommended that she charge $20 per chore, like “Getting old people’s mail [and] helping old people make their appointments.”
Hindman’s response to her grandpa’s out-of-touch suggestion was to wonder, “Where do you live? Where does your mind exist?”
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“In his defense, I didn’t tell him how much I was making,” she continued. “I don’t think people who have been retired for decades have any concept of our salaries and how they still just kind of barely cover the necessities.”
As inflation rises and wages stay stagnant, even people earning salaries that once seemed exorbitant are having trouble making ends meet.
Hindman posted a follow-up on boomer work advice, responding to a comment saying, “My boomer grandpa told me to always carry a stack of resumes with me.”
She described this as “a terrible piece of advice,” outlining all the ways applying to a job in person can actually backfire.
“You should send your resume, send an email, connect on LinkedIn,” she advised. “If you are calling and showing up all the time, they’re going to think you’re annoying, and they’re not gonna wanna work with you.”
“Likewise, if you hand someone your resume, first of all, it shows that you don’t have a LinkedIn account and you’re like, living in the past, like, how do you have any technical skills,” she explained. “It’s just socially taboo.”
She shared the one thing that bothers her about cross-generational communication, specifically with boomers, saying, “I get really annoyed at older folks that give advice like this because it’s like, we adjust to speaking to you. We adjust when we come into your world. We listen to your stories, and we talk a little slower, or we explain certain things, but they do not adjust to our world at all.”
According to Hindman, boomers 'literally talk as if we live in the 1970s and it is just alarming. It also fosters a lack of connection.'
It often seems like there are two opposing directions people can take as they age. They either open up and grow more flexible, or they become rigid, stuck in their ways, and unable to reflect on how the world has changed.
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It’s not particularly earth-shattering to note that life feels especially difficult at this moment. If anyone were to zoom out and analyze the larger state of the world, they wouldn’t be remiss in saying money is tight, rights are restricted, and violence abounds.
Yet, in hopeless times, Hindman shared a perspective rooted in nurturing abundance as she discussed her wish to give future generations a better world than the one she was born into.
She explained what keeps her going in this world, which is “imagining younger generations having all the things that we’re fighting for.”
She said that “imagining Generation Alpha having six months to a year of parental leave and universal healthcare” offers her some semblance of hope to hold onto.
“It’s been really frustrating as a millennial; I think that obviously, baby boomers paid for their college, like, out of pocket; if they had student loans, they were able to pay them off within a couple of years,” she said.
Yet “Gen X and millennials were saddled with student loan debt and Gen X is in their 50s and they’ve pretty much paid it off, Millennials still have it, and you hear a lot of times from Gen X, like, ‘Well, I paid it off, so they should pay it off,’ and I just cannot relate less,” she said.
“I look at the things that I’ve gone through or previous generations have gone through, and I will be healed, like part of me will be healed, to see new generations of people and families have the privileges that I didn’t get to experience, but that would have made my life so much more fulfilling and so much easier,” she said.
Part of healing wounds that have been passed down through generations is to break free of the scarcity myth that wealth is a finite resource only some people should be able to access.
The truth is, we don’t all have to repeat the exact same struggles to deserve liberation from those struggles.
Instead of walking through open doors of opportunity and slamming them shut behind us, we should want to leave those doors wide open so the people who come after us can walk through freely and easily without spending their lives in struggle.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers social issues, pop culture, and all things to do with the entertainment industry.