35 Things That Are Classic Baby Boomer Stereotypes

Why are they like this?

Kylin

• Published in Funny
• July 1, 2022

There seems to be this weird, ongoing inter-generational war between Baby Boomers and the Millennial generation. And honestly, I think it’s because Boomers are having a huge-ass temper tantrum.

I’m going to explain, but there’s some background needed to help my theory make sense. Baby Boomers, or Boomers for short, is a term that’s used to describe the generation of people that were born between 1946 and 1964, so folks that are between 76 to 58 years old currently.

And up until fairly recently, Boomers have made up a considerable portion of the world's population, especially in the United States and other developed nations. According to the 2020 Census Data, Boomers made up about 71 million people of the population and were slightly surpassed by Millennials, making up nearly 73 million people of the population.

Since Boomers have been around significantly longer (as Boomers make up the majority of those who are parents to Millennials, there are always exceptions, of course), they got really accustomed to the world being literally catered to them. This is due to their high population numbers and the overall prosperity of the economy during their careers (the cost of living even before the pandemic and supply chain shortages were already skyrocketing).

Boomers were, and still are as many are still a few years from retirement, an economically influential generation. They became the focus of marketing campaigns and business plans because they were largely who were making and spending money for a long time. 

And then came The Millennial Generation (I’m not purposefully ignoring you, Gen X’ers, I promise! You’ve been lovely, little to no complaints here). Millennials grew up in a really incredible time, where technology exploded and rapidly advanced.

We’re the generation that grew up with landline phones, beepers/pagers, desktop computers, Nokia brick phones, and T-9 texting. And as we grew, so did technology.

Millennials were learning brand new technology as it was released, and naturally, some things evolved outside of having Boomers as the main focus. Faced with the natural progression of change and evolution that was taking Boomers out of the spotlight mixed with rapidly developing technology that may have been confusing or overwhelming, Boomers started to shit on Millennials for taking away their comfort of a world that was solely focused on them.

Boomers widely used tactics of infantilizing (for reference, Millennials are roughly between 26-41 years old) and mocking Millennials for not achieving the same things as them (going to college/graduating without debt, purchasing homes, getting married, having children) and for enjoying small luxuries (like avocado toast, lattes or other “fancy” coffees). All while purposefully ignoring, (it’s also possible that they’re so freaking myopic that they just never noticed) that it is largely because of the Boomer generation that things like going to college without overwhelming debt, purchasing a home, starting a family or similar things are largely unattainable.

So, being fed up with the state of the world and the shitty attitude directed at Millennials by Boomers, some have taken a page of the Boomer playbook and have started to poke fun at some of the more very Boomer-centric things. Keep scrolling to see what some stereotypical Boomer habits some Twitter users have pointed out.

1. Mowing their lawn at ungodly hours

2. Overusing thumbs up emojis

3. Using their Bitmoji with the megaphone

4. Knowing which route you took

5. Putting their phone calls on speaker and shouting at them

6. Watching TV News or Church broadcasts 24/7

7. Zooming in on pictures on your phone

8. Drinking from the hose and talking about how they did

9. Collecting Coca-Cola memorabilia

10. Overusing ellipsis

11. Talking about their dead friends

12. Wearing jeans to the gym

13. Calling cannabis "pot"

14. Participating in weird Facebook chain-posts

15. Overly complicated universal remotes

16. Sending random links

17. Paying with exact change

18. Mustard

19. Turning on all the lights in the room you're in

20. Taking videos with their iPads

21. Nautical themed bathrooms

22. Taking terrible selfies

23. Talking about what TV was like in their time

24. Using the cry-laugh emoji

25. Wanting to ban cellphones from concerts

26. Telling you the time they're leaving the voicemail as if your phone doesn't already do that

27. Criticizing younger generations for buying lattes

28. Those "Despicable Me" Minions

29. Nuts

30. Outdated skills like cursive

31. Sitting in booths

32. Talking so much about their ailments

33. Voice-to-Text

34. Gross cough drops

35. Pot pies, according to this guy

Now, before you come at me with the "Not All Boomers," OF COURSE it's not all Boomers. It's a broad, sweeping generalization about the stereotype of Baby Boomers as a whole for entertainment.

And being an older Millennial now, there were definitely some tweets that felt like an attack too, like my overuse of the cry-laughing emoji or talking about my poor failing body. Did you have a favorite tweet on our list?

Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below, and be sure to share!

Kylin