Boomers spent their lives accumulating stuff. Now their kids are stuck with it.
Millennials are about to be crushed by all the junk their parents accumulated.
Every time Dale Sperling's mother pops by for her weekly visit, she brings with her a possession she wants to pass on. To Sperling, the drop-offs make it feel as if her mom is "dumping her house into my house." The most recent offload attempt was a collection of silver platters, which Sperling declined.
"Who has time to use silver? You have to actually polish it," she told me. "I'm like, 'Mom, I would really love to take it, but what am I going to do with it?' So she's dejected. She puts it back in her car."
…
Sperling's conundrum is familiar to many people with parents facing down their golden years: After they've acquired things for decades, eventually, those things have to go. As the saying goes, you can't take it with you. Many millennials, Gen Xers, and Gen Zers are now facing the question of what to do with their parents' and grandparents' possessions as their loved ones downsize or die. Some boomers are even still managing the process with their parents. The process can be arduous, overwhelming, and painful. It's tough to look your mom in the eye and tell her that you don't want her prized wedding china or that giant brown hutch she keeps it in. For that matter, nobody else wants it, either.
Much has been made of the impending "great wealth transfer" as baby boomers and the Silent Generation pass on a combined $84.4 trillion in wealth to younger generations. Getting less attention is the "great stuff transfer," where everybody has to decipher what to do with the older generations' things.
There is a whole industry to transport Silent Gen and Boomer treasures to the landfill. Most commonly, a waste management company is going to park a construction dumpster in your driveway the same week you die. And there are hands for hire if your children can't be bothered to go through your crap themselves.
There are also auction and estate companies that will try to get value out of furniture. That's dying out though because IKEA doesn't make furniture suitable for inheritance.
Estate companies will take the "good stuff" to auction, and house sale the rest for a few weekends. After that, there are businesses whose sole thing is buying up the remnants for their resale/thrift store. Think Big Lots but for dead people's stuff.
I really hope there's a store called "Dead People's Stuff."
“Big Plots”
🏅
I drove past this place the other week. It's almost what you want. Shop called 'Vintage 2 Die 4' with the moto of "We have the best deaf people stuff"
https://maps.app.goo.gl/8q4VpvZjLYkWYnUN6
Personally I hope my stuff gets handled like this. I’d rather someone, who wants the object, gets it for cheap, rather than it be a burden to my kids.
It’s how I got it all anyways. At leas the tools.
I have hoarder grandparents... I sometimes wish for a house to go up in flames while they're not home just so nobody has to deal with going into it.
What the article doesn't say is the stuff is all there is - there's no money. Just stuff.
So if you throw it out, your inheiritance is nothing, otherwise you have to be come an online seller which - if you're not already you know why you're not already.
There are multiple whole entire industries dedicated to fleecing such individuals. Health care in the USA for one... Donald Trump's campaign to name another...
Estate sales and auctions are where this stuff goes.
archived
Woof those are both true
My mom keeps investing in diamond jewelry. I've tried explaining to her that diamonds do not hold their value, but she won't hear it.
My girlfriend's wedding ring from her previous marriage with a 8900 appraisal would have fetched a mere 1200 dollars at the jewelry exchange. Her pile of old gold was worth way more.
I have a TV armoire from the late 90s that I thought I was finally going to get rid of. I had been using it to store brewing supplies but was downsizing. My son said he wanted it so it went to storage with most of his stuff. When I was moving all that stuff a year or two later, I wanted to hauled to the dump but wasn't sure if he remembered. So now it's at his place and doesn't fit at all. So I think I'm going to cut it up and toss it.
When my grandmother (Greatest Generation) died, it took my mom (Boomer), my wife, and I six weeks to go though everything and six days (over 2 weekends) to sell it at estate sales.
She had full house decor for winter, easter, spring, summer, autumn, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. She had a giant Rubbermade bin just of tiny porcelain shoes. I've never seen so many candles that had been burned once of twice then put away. At one point my wife screamed because she found an access door in a closet, leading to a smaller closet. and the tiny closed had half a dozen bins full of fake flowers. The house was always pristine and never looked cluttered - she spent decades pulling off one of the better magic tricks I've seen.
My mom majorly downsized a few years later, and just did so again. I think she saw her future and didn't like.
My father's mother died a few years back and due to a rabbit hole I won't get into, was left with cleaning out her condo by himself. She wasn't a hoarder or anything, but he was floored by the work involved.
During the pandemic hermitude, he absolutely purged his own house of everything like this. He didn't want us to be burdened with it when his time came. It's ironic that I was a little upset over some of the things he threw out xD
My mom made them sell their house because "it's the only way I could think of to get the basement cleaned out before we die". She didn't want to burden us but it really just changed the time line.
Anecdotal but so far the only "great wealth transfer" I've seen has been to elder care organizations, not descendants.
That's exactly what's happening. Parents live longer, and by the time they die, all their wealth is skimmed off by aged care providers, health care providers and various scammers.
For the low price of 6 grand a month, surprisingly well calculated to drain off their IRA's, force them to sell their property, and close out their other retirement accounts just in time for them to meet overall life expectancy.
My mom has kept everything from my childhood I mean everything. For a few years she was trying to pass some of it off to me and I kept having to turn down a lot of stuff, it made her feel bad. One day I finally managed to have a proper conversation about it with her. I don't remember most of my childhood and things like second grade report cards don't have any context because of it. Those are her memories of me not my memories of me. She finally understood after that and now she keeps what she can and doesn't feel bad about "robbing" me of anything when she does get rid of stuff. Some heirlooms I've been asked about and many of those I accept, or in the case of one larger one I've accepted it "if I ever live somewhere that can fit it"
My mom held on to just about everything, but for rid of all my early 90s GI Joe's and my stack of big box computer games.
My poor poor Sierra collection fine to the charity shop once I moved out.
I've managed to hold on to my computer games and even acquired my dad's collection. GI Joes all went to my niblings though because I didn't have as much sentimental value for them, same with my Legos and bionicles save for a handful. My pokemon collection recently resurfaced though and my mom handed those off I was pretty excited about that
We have the same mom.
My mom is in the middle of downsizing. I have some storage space, so I let her keep her stuff in my house. It gives her an excuse to come visit and we go through her things while she decides what's worth keeping or donating. I'm involved in the process, and I've saved a couple heirlooms with sentimental value.
My mother-in-law likes to show up unannounced and drop crap off. So far she's given me two lawnmowers, a bunch of rusty garden tools, and a leaky water cooler. I think she thinks she's helping, but it's getting to the point that I feel like I'm her dumping site.
Put it on marketplace and get some money for it.
Wow, can you imagine having that?
A house that you could put "stuff" into?
Oof.
Seriously, my life has always been downsized.
Going home to parents feels like stepping into a fucking hoarders den, comparatively.
They lived in a different time period. Climate change hadn't already happened yet, and the USA especially was sitting on top of the world, as the rest of it had been if not quite decimated then at least heavily damaged by all the bombing from WWII. And we were a socialist nation! Schools, roads, bridges, a fully functioning post office, and so much more. The top marginal tax rate was ~90% and... well anyway.
So yeah, like the Kings of Old, they accumulated "stuff". It made sense to them at the time. Surely nothing would ever like... "change" or anything like that, would it? And they even okayed the dismantling of things like social security, and maintenance of infrastructure - so long as such did not directly impact themselves, it's all good, right? So long as women also lose bodily autonomy, anything that went along with that is A-okay, r-r-right?!
On the bright side, do younger people have less stress, knowing that they don't have to save up for retirement, bc they'll surely die sooner than it would be able to keep up with anyway? Especially with inflation like we've seen lately?
Anyway that was quite a tangent wasn't it? TLDR: people's lives are so very different now, and look to remain that way permanently. And not just in the USA, but due to Brexit, in the UK too. Disinformation campaigns are strikingly effective.
Man take the silver, you can scrap that
I was thinking the exact same thing, maybe it makes a cold bastard, but they clearly didn't use it....so I will... at a smelter!
My parents went through this when their parents died in the early 2000s. This is an old people vs young people thing. Let's see what millennials accumulate as they go senile.
There's going to be so many Funkopops.
Probably not as much, what with not having anywhere to keep it
Mine is all on my server, photos and videos of me and my kid. Movies and TV shows I ripped from when blockbuster went under.
I’m leaving a bunch of tools and crafting supplies. I hope I jumpstart a career or hobby when I die or it gets tossed whatever I will be dead.
We will own temporary licenses to things, and we will be happy.
That's a good point. My wife has an extensive audio CD collection. There's something to be said for "owning" that music. But if she does, I will be keeping that collection on some other long-lived media instead that consumes less physical space.
My grandmother recently died. Her son and his awful wife couldn't wait to swoop in and take all her stuff. I actually didn't mind though. They took all the tvs and old fur coats. Me and my brother got the pictures they left on the walls and the silly fridge magnets she liked. I think we ended up with the better stack of stuff at the end of the day.
Yeah, you can get tvs and old fur coats from the store, but not family photos. Silly fridge magnets can also be hard to find.
This is the truth. Both sets of parents have dumped stuff on us often enough that we’ve had to put our collective foot down and refuse most items. Gone are the days were there might be just a few real nice items people wanted to keep, now it’s collections of Precious Moments figurines or similar that nobody wants.
It’s really hard to get rid of stuff that is still good and useful. You can barely literally give it away. I hate waste, so just dumping whatever it is in the trash is an absolute last resort. Places you would think that would take stuff are also overwhelmed and won’t take a ton of different things. Salvation Army, Goodwill…all of them have gotten picky and will refuse things even if new on occasion.
It’s really given me a deep revulsion for “stuff”. If something comes into our house it has to have a real purpose, or if it’s replacing something, the old thing must go ASAP.
Salvation Army and Goodwill don’t refuse things— I’m not sure where you’re getting that. They take their free donations, mark them up so much you could almost buy things mew elsewhere for the same price. They’re not a resale shop like Buffalo Exchange
The trick is to pack up a big box full of stuff and give it to them all at once so they don't have time to look through it and refuse it.
They absolutely will refuse things they know they'll have a hard time selling, and trust me they have unique insight into what people want and don't love the idea of warehousing unsalable merchandise. Many Goodwill location's FAQs acknowledge that they refuse to take certain things. Salvo has a whole page dedicated to why they refuse certain things.
Do they not have drop off bins where you are?
They do! They're where I leave all of my used motor oil, dead batteries, and bedbug-ridden mattresses.
Come on. Just because you can subvert their policies by dropping stuff there indiscriminately doesn't mean you should. Most of them say, right on the bin, that they're for donations of clothing and shoes only.
Personally, I think we should bring back the custom of grave goods. If there's some precious heirloom that holds sentimental significance to a person but isn't otherwise valuable or useful, why not bury it with them?
I'm already thinking about getting some land and making an "indefinite time capsule" for storing a bunch of stuff that I have no use for but that I wouldn't want to see go off to a landfill for sentimental reasons.
I love that your last paragraph explains that you want to avoid things going into a landfill by reinventing a landfill.
There's rather a big difference between a time capsule and a landfill.
The difference being a landfill might one day be mined for raw materials, whereas no one past your grandchildren will know about your time capsule until archaeologists discover it and misattribute all your sentimental crap as religious or sexual paraphernalia.
You've made a heck of a lot of assumptions about how a time capsule like this would be set up. But even so, how is being mined for raw materials better than having some of my stuff be misattributed?
No. We do not do nuance here
Yes, but it's a curated and cataloged landfill.
Was that the one where he kills himself so he can haunt Meatwad?
ed: Oh yeah, s3e1 "Video Ouija".
"Dearest Meatwad, turn on that dumb game cause I'm gonna whale on you from beyond the grave!"
I of course remembered Billy Witchdoctor but for some reason I didn't think it was from the same ep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_Teen_Hunger_Force_season_3?useskin=vector
Ultra mega chicken
Seeding the land for the next generation of American pickers?
Every time I pass a cemetery, I think, there’s a million bucks in jewelry just sitting there.
We'd need to take some cues from how the ancients did it. Either arrange for long term security, like the Egyptians, or rely on secrecy, like the Mongols. It won't work forever, but as long as it works for a couple of generations I'd be satisfied.
One idea that comes to mind for modern grave goods would be to bury them in a nuclear waste disposal facility.
I don't think we want to give an incentive to plunder nuclear waste.
"This necklace is beautiful, but why does the air taste like metal?"
Bring back kurgans and put parks on them.
At my grandmother's funeral, she wore her jewelry for the viewing but it was quietly removed by the funeral home folks and handed to my mother before the burial. So there might be less jewelry than you'd expect.
Your mother is a grave robber. Smart woman.
I didn't mind the wedding ring, but I do wish they'd let Grandma be buried in her cheap costume jewelry. Let the dead woman have her bling.
Same funeral, my aunt asked me accusingly if the pearl necklace I was wearing came from Grandma's jewelry chest. It didn't. Grandma didn't own pearls.
I'm thinking more along the lines of future archaeologists. We learn so much about ancient cultures from what they bury with their dead, I figure we should return the favor.
Geez they had a lot of absolute tat!
"Why the fuck was this man burried in a refrigerator and why the fuck was it set on fire?" I want these to be the exact words for when my inevitable redneck viking funeral is done.
Bury me with my sweet vice I scored for free that one day.
So... a storage unit?
No.
Silver has an inherent melt value though, $30 an ounce.
So say you inherit a silver set weighing 110 troy ounces.
https://www.silverqueen.com/item/250501?Mcat=e7c15b48-b610-4c99-831d-937f77ccc4c9
Just the silver, BY ITSELF, is worth $3,300.
That might be true if it were pure silver, but it isn't.
At best, it could be sterling silver. If it was made in the past century or so, it's likely just silver plated.
Those silver platters are plated
What's the melt value of Elvis commemorative plates?
First world problems
Most boomers aren't leaving shit to us but debt and worse economy ever. What fuck is this article. Answer is sell the shit.
Sell it to who? Nobody else wants the shit either, that's the problem
Ahahahaha thank you.
To who? Aquaman?
Don't let the scammers trick you unto paying your parents debt. Debt cannot transfer to you.
I'm Gen-X and oh my god you have no idea.
My dad was pre-Boomer (born in 1931), but he just endlessly collected stuff. Thousands of movie soundtracks and classical music albums on both LP and CD. Hundreds of DVDs. Mountains of movie memorabilia and posters. Coins. Stamps. Rare books. Antiques. That's just the major collections. Lots of minor ones- sheet music, British cigarette trading cards, and then there are not just the over 20 books he wrote, but extra copies of them. Most of them are academic texts on film. The rest is stuff like terrible poetry and bad plays that no one is interested in but I can't bring myself to get rid of.
Much of it had value, so I didn't want to just dump it. We did an auction for some of it, garage sales, a flea market stall, I ended up spending about two years selling stuff on eBay, I gave a lot to friends, the CDs eventually just had to go to Goodwill because no one wanted them.
And I'm still stuck with a ton of stuff. A garage full of stuff that I don't want to just toss because someday someone might want an almost life-size ceramic bust of Charlie Chaplin and it feels stupid to just throw it away.
Meanwhile, my also pre-boomer mom (born 1942) has been collecting antique furniture.
I think I'm just going to do an estate sale when she dies.
I have one "collection." 5 bakelite radios and one Weltron Space Ball radio/8-track player. My daughter has my permission to take them to some charity place if she doesn't want them. Preferably not Goodwill or the Salvation Army, but those are the choices you get in this town unfortunately. Nothing else I have is of any real value and I'm fine with that. And having seen what I've already gone through to get rid of all of this stuff, my daughter is too.
Edit: I forgot to say that the stuff I talked about doesn't include all the stuff I said to my brother "just take what you want" about because I really didn't want to argue about it and he was going to fuck off back to Atlanta after the funeral anyway. But he doesn't have any kids and he's 11 years older than me, so I'll probably get all that shit too one day.
GenX here and, yeah, I'm guilty too...
At least (I would think) you could sell all of those as one collection.
This is awesome
My wife's uncle has a huge comic book collection, and he's getting up in years (never married; still lives in the house he grew up in). He mentioned getting it appraised, because I guess he does have some that may have some value.
Personally I'm just glad he's thinking about this kind of stuff.
New price guides come out every year, I keep asking Overstreet for a digital edition and API access. :)
I'm at a point now where I can't update the prices before a new edition comes out.
Happy I have sane parents who consistently downsize and donate without bothering me. We had one conversation where they asked me what I'm interested in. Of course I told them to enjoy their things as they wish.
There was a painting of a beautiful waterfall landscape, painted in 1890, (verified) my grandmother and grandfather bought early in their marriage. I always admired it and it made me think of nostalgic, fond memories of growing up. My dad hated it because that was the formal room he had to sit in for time out. Yoink. It sits in my living room and inspires me every day. A happy trade based on adult conversation.
Context is everything.
Same here. My mom is into the "KonMari" method and it's a godsend.
Part of this seems like it's attributable to changes in lifestyle and material conditions of younger people, relative to their parents. Different aesthetics might mean their parents' stuff looks incredibly gaudy to them, and doesn't go with anything else in their apartment. My parents' home is larger than any place I can reasonably expect to be able to afford, so I also don't want their big dining room table that I'd have to pay for storage on for years before I can afford a space that it will immediately fill all of. Even if it's a nice piece of furniture, that's just a pain in the neck to go through, all for something I might never get to use.
On the topic of collections, boomers just fundamentally ignore key parts of collectibility. First, old collectables only became so valuable precisely because people weren't obsessively hording and caring for everything with the intent of selling it down the line. Old Superman comics are rare and valuable due to people who bought them at the time they first came out largely treating them as disposable. They didn't assume they were anything special that merited being held on to and cared for, so they didn't. When everyone and their dog buys up commemorative plate sets, or Beanie Babies, or whatever other collectable grift boomers fell for, and they take great care of them, they don't generally see their value do anything but decrease. The supply doesn't get significantly reduced, and everyone else can see that they didn't pan out as the collectable investments they were billed as, so who would want them?
That said, even for collections of items of genuine worth, you mostly need to hope that whoever you're looking to give it to is as into whatever hobby as you are. If I were planning on having kids, I think it would be pretty unreasonable to expect them to know what to do with my fountain pen collection, unless they were into them as well. Otherwise, it's just a ton of fussy pens that seem to have a fair number of duplicates that are really only distinguished by knowledge I couldn't expect them to take the time to go gathering. Then, it's still a big pain to actually identify things, make sales listings and sell them off. Hell, I have the knowledge, and even I find it annoying to do so.
Maybe we could address this, in part, by normalizing expanding options a bit for inheritance. If my hypothetical kids aren't going to know how to make heads or tails of my pen collection, but I've got a younger friend who is just as into the hobby as I am, it would be nice if I could just leave them that specific collection, without having to worry it'll kick off some acrimonious squabbling. Failing that, have parents indicate who they trust to sell an item for a fair price if nobody wants it. You can take it and think about it, but if it's just not for you, you've got a trusted source to sell it off for you, so you (hopefully) don't have to go through an ordeal trying to find someone to sell it for you that will give you a fair shake.
My dad just passed and I got a box of ninja swords and a telescope. He didn’t even have any pictures. I wish I had stuff to remember him by but he was destitute the end of his life.
Im sorry for your loss. But I am also incredibly curious about the box of ninja swords. Were these mall ninja swords or legit swords from Japan?
Mall ninja swords mostly. Some bokkens and knives too.
There are fencing leagues that use real swords you could try to find.
There’s a HEMA gym by me. I’ve thought about it before but I don’t know if I would stick with it and it seems like a steep buy in.
If that were me, I'd use the telescope to remember him. We're all made of the stuff of stars. Everything inside of you is due to supernovas. Every time you look at the stars, you're looking at what made us all, including your dad.
Yeah it is. We used to use it when I was a kid. I gotta clean it though. Thick cigarette dust coats everything he left me.
A trip to the thrift store can help. Its full of fine silverware and crystal and all sorts of nice boomer things. They will see that their treasures are worthless and can be painlessly donated or disposed of.
I get your point— but in truth thrift stores have started charging tons more in the last few years. Boomer zombies might also go “but honey look, they’re charging $1 per fork!” , which, yeah but I’m not doing a whole yard sale for your crap Mom.
“YARD” sale, like any of us has one of THOSE lol
That's why it's still here in the store, mom. If it was priced reasonably, they would have sold it.
^(I^ ^do.)^
I mean, I grew up with one , it’s not the biggest character flaw 🤷♂️
It keeps the dogs happy.
Ouch. Right in the furniture.
Yeah, but there's likely a house included in that. For some of you that's the only house you're going to get.
A small price to pay for having to take a load of Precious Moments to the tip.
I myself have a baby's cot in the attic, courtesy of a mental mother-in-law. Nicotine stained blankets, the lot. I have no idea why. We don't want kids. We have never expressed any interest in having one. It's just taking up room. Shipped to us at great expense by somebody who I can only assume thinks she's getting grandchildren out of this. She is not. Not from us anyway. So in the attic it will sit until she dies and then the missus can finally throw it away, safe from a random surprise inspection to make sure we still have it.
If it was left to me it would already be gone, probably into a bonfire.
What really pisses me off is that she had a NES in the room she kept this junk in. Didn't fucking send us that.
A lot of these folks that rave about "owning their home" and about how "bad the younger generation is with money" have re-mortgaged their home to fund their insane lifestyles and owe enough that it's just gonna be a headache for whoever "inherits" the poorly maintained asbestos farm.
https://youtu.be/VMOdzWBu8Ic
My auntie has done the opposite for fucking years : she'll come visit her mum and leave with some knicknacks she's had her eye on from a previous visit. My mum is absolutely fuming about it. She absolutely does not need anything, but just the principle of her sister being such a fucking vulture...
My grandmother came in for years and asked for handouts from stuff that was mine when I was younger. My mother kept giving her my old stuff. When I went to move out I went to look at the storage area and nothing that I really cared about was still there.
A few years ago my father mentioned all the toys I still had and that I should come and get them, I told him that They had already given away anything I cared about and all that was left was junk It just needed to go away. He got all defensive. But if you're going to let somebody come in and take from a pool of goods they're going to continually take the best things until there's nothing useful left. I ended up with a small bucket of Legos and a couple of my favorite matchbook cars.
I'm not really sore about it, but at the same time him asking me to drive 7 hours and get the collection of broken items that were passed over No, either sell it in an eBay lot or throw it away.
What did your grandmother need with kids toys?
She ran this elaborate trade. She'd tell my mother she was giving them to my nephew or to some other relative, then I would check up with them and ask them how the toy was and they'd say what toy.
I don't know whether they ended up in a thrift shop or some kind of trade-up rubber band for a car kind of thing.
She showed up this one time with her trunk absolutely full of just random garbage toys, Tell me to pick whatever I wanted for my birthday. I was around 16 I was like no no I'm good I'll take a hug that's all I need. You could see she was highly disappointed.
I was only marginally disappointed that none of my kids ended up with any of my toys but in the long run it's not really that big of a deal. Those things all meant things to me, They likely never would have meant anything to my kids.
I dunno man, that's pretty weird.
That side of the family was all pretty weird. There's drug addiction, violence, mystery. I have no idea how my grandfather was on that side and no one would ever talk about it which makes me think it was probably something pretty bad.
I'm not stuck with anything, I put all my boomer parents shit in the trash
About to be? My dad and mom are TV level hoarders. It's going to take dumpsters to clean their houses. And very little to none of it is worth anything.
Estate sale my boy. You will actually come out ahead... it's whoever buys responsibility to throw the garbage away.
I am thinking of doing an estate sale on myself. :-/
When we bought our current house, the previous owners had the basement walls covered with framed pictures of various things (I don't remember what all they were - likely family and friends, that sort of thing). When we stopped by for the inspection or something, I noticed the trash was out, and one can that was open on the top was filled with those pictures.
That moment really reinforced the point that all the crappy knick-knacks we have laying around will likely also end up in the trash someday. We've definitely reduced our purchases of stuff like that and try to stick to stuff we'll actually use.
Going through this with my MIL. My wife is hurt that she got cut out of the decision-making, but it has been somewhat of a blessing in disguise in that her older siblings are the ones having to handle disposal of the decades' worth of knickknacks lining every wall in her house.
My father was an incorrigible hoarder, but my mother had been culling his shit for years ever since he got too sick to stop her. Now that he's buried she's culling the last of it all, which is still a lot. She is not a hoarder but we kids have no use for her stuff even tho it's quality. Estate sale is what it's gonna be.
Adults having to have adult conversations. Oh no
Millennials are just worn out from Boomers parentifying us as children, then arguing with us for decades, and now still fighting us over decisions that seem obvious and necessary.
They're exhausting.
I know it's hard, I'm not trivializing it, but no one (edit adult) should be treated like a child. It only happens to those who let it happen. (The alternative is distancing)
Edit I mean adults shouldn't be treated like children.
One can feel how one feels, however, the boomer generation's brains are locked in a time loop. They can't be changed. It's like visiting someone with alzheimers. It's quite sad and frustrating.
Oddly, the silent generation peeps are more adaptable.
Huh? You decide how you are treated. Even by your parents. I've had good conversations with my now aged and forgetful parents where I clarify how I want to be spoken to.
Edit not all boomers have Alzheimer's
Sorry, that's not how it works with people stuck in a loop. It's a very American problem, if you aren't American. Not sure if it was the leaded gas, or what, but some people are just broken. The person you want to change needs to want to, and be able to change for your idealism to work. Otherwise you're just building a delusion around a fixed point to fit your viewpoint while that person remains unchanged.
It's terribly sad, really.
That's just ageism, with a nationalist(?) crust.
There's lots of dumb boomers. There's lots of Alzheimeric boomers. There's lots of smart, respectful boomers.
Suggesting an entire generation can't respect others is junk.
Imagine you subbed out "boomer" for a race. It'd be insane to say.
Tons of boomers have completely accepted 2024, their children, and their choices. You apparently just haven't met them.
I wonder if the comment you're replying to applies to the people who downvoted yours.
Or it's only selective to the people they don't know yet decided to hate. Sad really.
As good for me as going no contact would be, I love my parents and do alot to keep them in my life.
A terrible weakness. If only I could be strong like you.
I never said go no contact, edit or that I was some model of strength. I'm just an adult.
Just consistently assert the standards you as an adult want to live in.
I can't even get folks to use the right pronouns for me. I have no hope of getting my narcissistic mother to treat me as an adult. She won't even believe me about basic facts about, for example, about how my city's public transit works (facts listed on a very large poster she could read herself) if they contradict her first impressions.
I'm taking this as solicited conversation as we are still here. I also assume you are an adult.
I've dealt with this. If they use the wrong pronouns, or otherwise infantilize you, you calmly and respectfully say "mom we've discussed that I'm not going to be spoken to in that way. If you must, I'll be leaving and we can try again tomorrow". Then you get up to leave if they don't correct, and try again tomorrow. No fighting, no yelling.
You do not deserve to be disrespected.
No worries. "No contact" is the only path to a peaceful existence with my mom. I've tried working with her and it doesn't take. Latest example of why I should just lose her number which happened just now: I missed a text from her then got one less than 24 hours later saying
That's gross dude on a dating site behavior. Tbh, if it was important she could have called or emailed.
Anyways, I'm going to treat her like a gross date and lose her number. This isn't the first time she's threatened to go no-contact and I see no reason to protest.
That's a tough one. Good luck dude / dudette / duderino
Thanks. She's blocked everywhere I can think of. I'm going to be a messy feelings blob today and that's ok. I have coffee and chocolate.
It took
107 years of low-contact to go to no-contact. I'm not making this choice lightly. She just sucks that much.And I'm going to steal "duderino". It's mine now.
Hard disagree. Children should be treated as children, not parentified.
I mean adults. I was unclear. Editing.
Some of us do it to help our surviving parent who can't handle all the stuff the other parent collected.
My folks have been spinning off their treasures for a couple decades now. They waited until their kids had already established & furnished their own households, so a lot of it ended up in the category of "Yes, I can put this in the trash for you."
Lifespans are at the awkward stage where the kids are too old and the grandkids too young to want any of those household staples.
My basement is already half full of my inlaw's crap.
Much of the consumerism that taught them to accumulate junk turned into a burden for us all. Everything they bought is "vintage" and many pretend it holds onto some type of value. That or they didn't want to clean up their garage for 30 years. The boomers' posthumous contribution to landfills is truly staggering.
My mom was disappointed when I said I didn't want any of my dad's things when he died last year. Hell, I hated turning some of it down. And I'm not taking any of her stuff, either. I'm really not into the "50+ years of cigarettes" aesthetic.
You actually don't have to polish silver. It's anti-bacterial properties still work if it's tarnished.
But it looks shitty, it's not nice to eat with black spoons and forks that never look clean.
Goblincore...
And yet I am watching a re-resurgence of collecting crap began anew. Take vinyl for example: heavy, bulky, environmentally awful and on par with if not worse sounding than alternatives. But people want something tangible. Which I am also beginning to see with old collectables. Also art: there is a movement to get physical art since digital is not tangible and possibly not even made by a human.
China, silver, and plastic ware: I have seen an uptick in those as well which is bizarre. Is it just a matter of time till the cycle comes around again?
Nothing new. My both deceased grandmother's left behind houses, pole barns full of things. In the 80s, and the family resorted to renting a dumpster to get rid of much of it. It's kind of sad, but everyone already had lots of junk of their own. I'm guilty of this as well, I'm starting to fill up a storage unit of my own. I however think twice now when I make a purchase.
My sister moved into my grandmas house and my grandma moved to my moms. She also rented a dumpster. So much junk that they saw as an investment and though was worth passing on that was simply worthless clutter.
No one wants fancy ass Christmas decorations and a crap ton of glassware.
I've spent the last two decades training my parents to understand that I generally don't want their hand-me-downs, and probably don't want a lot of their belongings when they depart this world. Maybe a few items that have sentimental value, but the rest will likely be sold, assuming we can find people to buy it. And they do have a lot of stuff. Some of it valuable art and trinkets they've collected over the years. Very little of it resonates with me, though. They're in their 80s now, so we've had discussions about plans between them and my older brother and myself. There are trusts. We have access to their accounts. I count myself lucky that they're so practical.
Donate it to a thrift store or someone who needs it
Haha jokes on the kid! My grandmother would buy all sorts of crap only use it once then give it to my mom. My mom has it piled away in a store room and when she goes, I'll add it to my hoard collection. (Were not super hoard-y and can still walk and use all my furnature, etc, we just cant bring ourselves to throw away things that work, in case we need or want them one day / possibly sell them as collectables, even though they're worth nothing now...) when I go, the kid will inherent 3 generations of crap. Sucker!
Fantastic! We can rebuild Florida!
The universal accumulation of stuff in western (& western influenced) societies:
I'm given hope, hearing recent art show in California is entirely made from trash.
That said, our inheritance is banks of shit & "trash", oil & plastics centric toxic energy-hole, and a society that subscribes to corporate dependence.
Wake! Create! Remediate!
I feel like I just read a Dr. Bronner's soap bottle label.
Cool can we get this over with and have the generation just die off? Thanks.
I don't know if you realize it, but each "generation" is actually a group of diverse individuals with their own character traits and behaviors. Demographers strain to lump them together with some attributes that are more common for them than for other groups. That certainly doesn't make them a monolith.
Tarring all members of a group as the same, especially when their membership in that group is due to an accident of birth, would be considered bigotry in enlightened circles. Wishing them dead is much worse.
What if we just wished they would give up their driver's licenses, stop voting, and stop watching the news (or the "news")? That would have the same objectively positive impact on the world without requiring any deaths.
That is precisely the problem the article is about.
It's the 1% vs the working class, not generation vs generation.