The single most destructive thing the Boomers did was tell my generation to wait "until we were ready" to get married or have children. Everything else they did can be lived with or overcome. Whole genetic lines are dying out because they told us to use our mating years for fun.

When people my age had kids in their early 20s, I remember people my parents' age shaking their heads sadly and saying, "Oh! She's so young, her whole life was in front of her!"

The consequences of this messaging were far worse than the housing bubble.

That "whole life" the Boomers said we needed to delay love and family for is staring at a fucking screen for Global Megacorp and then going home to watch television. We were told we'd be hiking the Great Wall, sampling Parisian cuisine, and exploring Macchu Picchu.

No, mom, there won't be grandkids, I did what you told me, FUCK you.

"But my friend, Caroline, had children at 37!"

Yeah and my friend, Amy, did the "smart" thing and didn't even try until 35, at which point the OB told her that her uterus had too many fibroids to sustain a pregnancy.

Whoops, turns out your uterus is even more likely to give up in your 30s if it's not ever fertilized in your 20s, whoops whoops whooops.

Sorry, Millennials! Looks like you're gonna die alone!

For all intents and purposes, "careers" don't exist. They're just "jobs," and they're boring. Yeah, mom, pretty fun to have me visit you in your 60s? You know who's gonna visit me in my 60s? NOBODY.

Not having children turns your life into a slow-motion suicide after 40. They tried to vicariously have it all through us, and left us nothing.

My generation barely even has siblings or cousins to relate to. Our parents "responsibly" had 1-2 kids and "responsibly" chased career across the country, and told us to do the same. So we're going to be really, really, really lonely when we get old. Awesome. Thanks, guys.

This isn't gonna get better. Millennials start turning 40 next year. A generation can't recover from suicide. Gen Z is hitting adulthood, and their marriage & birth rates are even lower. Stop teaching people to do this.

A Boomer down the street from me has a bumper sticker that says, "I love my granddogs."

Hey, at least her daughter has gotten in lots of quality screen-staring time for her employer.

The best thing any of you with kids can do is tell them how filled with rage and regret everyone is who "did the smart thing" in their 20s and now faces a cold, empty, barren middle age, and how we got way off track on a social and policy level. Nobody wanted this.

If you want to see this is prose form, I wrote an essay on this back in January. https://lexic.co/barfblog/millennials-dying-children