DESPERATE MEASURES: BOOMER ADVICE LIFE STUDY

Online complainers went to desperate measures over education. The through line was how boomers pushed college on their kids, among other piercing whines.

Boomers created student debt, boomers ruined the housing market, boomers killed the jobs. With that reputation, how are boomers supposed to take any comfort in living long lives?

The underlying message, the take away? Whatever boomers have, or haven’t done, they’re not going away like magic.

What makes them hang on so effectively? BoomerPdx life study installment:

A man, call him Joe, came from a rural family that got more rural as he grew. He was born into a working family that lived in a working town until his dad got hurt and couldn’t work.

They moved out of town to a house on farmland that he and his family cultivated. It wasn’t an easy life in the best of times; his dad added to the family budget with his moonshine hobby.

They raised cows and sold the beef. Joe’s dad had regular customers until the law caught up with him and made him stop selling beef. So he gave it away, since the real money was in booze delivery.

Desperate Measures Pt.1

Joe was sure he didn’t want that life and worked and saved to go to college.

He scratched and scrimped together enough money to cover a year, by his reckoning, with plans to do the same every year until he got a college degree and his ticket to the white collar world, a company car, and a territory.

Joe got married and had kids who grew up knowing the same thing he knew: They didn’t want to live their father’s life, even if it was a good white collar suburban life.

One became an adventurer, one became a leader, one became an investor. One ran off to the big city, one moved from any town that put up a second stop sign, one chased the sun. They all went to college for a good education.

Inspire of their earlier protests, they lived aspects of their parents’ lives. They loved their partners and championed their kids; they engaged in community work and were well liked by neighbors, all the while aging and seasoning into form.

Whether they know it or not, the culture they were raised in, the behavior Joe and his wife were raised in, eventually shined through.

Higher Education Questions

Joe got off the farm by going to college, lived a civilized life, and then after all that dust settled, moved back to the land.

His kids saw his example and followed along. Their kids saw the same example.

The online noise about college education, the cost, the reward, and the big decisions in between, continues to grow in the wake of new ideas about student debt.

Old college grads don’t understand, they say. How can anyone who paid $200 a term tuition understand? Six hundred a year in student loans? That’s not student debt, that’s free money.

How can old people understand the stress and pressure of the housing market when they bought their first house for $45K, the same house on the market for $450K today?

And jobs, they say. Why won’t everyone in a corner office retire already?

I’m happy to say that these are the question that get better answers after going to college. That’s the place where you dive deep with, “Why am I even here wasting so much money I’ll never be able to pay back.”

And, “The parties aren’t as good as they were in high school.”

That’s a traditional student pulling a bachelor’s in as few years as possible. Non-traditional students see it differently.

For them it’s about finishing and losing the dropout tag, career development, and setting an example of how to look at things from more than one angle.

Even better, a college education tunes up the bullshit detectors, and includes instruction on how to be polite when it goes off.

Don’t go to desperate measures right away.