Boomers actually do hold most of the wealth and power. So why do they call it ‘whiny’ to point that out?

Over 2,000 years ago, Aristotle had some bars about the kids these days: “Young men have strong passions, and tend to gratify them indiscriminately,” the great philosopher wrote in Rhetoric. “They are changeable and fickle in their desires, which are violent while they last, but quickly over… They have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learnt its necessary limitations.” Later in the same chapter, he had some words for their elders: “They are small-minded, because they have been humbled by life: their desires are set upon nothing more exalted or unusual than what will help them to keep alive.” He could have been reading my email. A striking number of my readers—older, almost uniformly—skipped past the data entirely and went straight to character: younger generations complain too much. They spend recklessly. They don’t sacrifice. They whine. What was notable wasn’t the anger. It was the precision of the deflection. No one challenged the Federal Reserve data showing that Baby Boomers control roughly 52% of U.S. household wealth while representing about 20% of the population. No one argued that Millennials are, in fact, thriving. The response to a structural argument about wealth and power was, almost invariably, a moral argument about character. That pattern has a name in psychology. And understanding it—alongside what actually makes Boomers different from every dominant class that preceded them—tells you more about where America is stuck than any balance sheet. Is it whiny to try to understand this psychology, or is it a form of self-knowledge? Two kinds of threats—and why they’re not symmetrical In 2023, researchers Stéphane Francioli, Felix Danbold, and Michael North published a peer-reviewed study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin examining precisely what makes Boomers and Millennials hostile toward each other. The findings map almost perfectly onto the reader m