At a recent family dinner, various younger relatives were talking about music streaming services and began to wonder aloud whether Pandora was still around. They, of course, use Spotify.

“Ask Mom,” said my 31-year-old millennial daughter.

“Yeah, Pandora is still around,” I said. “I use it all the time.”

Was their muffled laughter tinged with condescension?

Listen, I was just grateful no one said: “OK, boomer.”

Objectively, I know I am aging. But because I am a boomer, I can’t bring myself to say, “I am old.”

My father, who died three years ago at 91, was my model for what “old” looks like. He slowed down, but he never stopped, even when I wished he would. For example, by the time he turned 90, I thought he should relinquish the car keys. But he insisted that his macular degeneration was no impediment because driving was a matter of “muscle memory.”

In so many ways, though, he defied the idea that generations can be stereotyped.

He was technically a member of the Silent Generation (1928-1945), but he was a college professor, always interacting with younger people, super political and anything but quiet. An early adopter of all kinds of technology, my dad had the first Mac, the first iPod, even the first Walkman in our family. He was delighted when he received a letter from the FBI warning him to stop using the Pirate Bay to illegally download movies or face legal consequences. “Oh, yeah, like they’re really gonna put an old man like me away,” he scoffed.

He and my mother produced four baby boomers, born between 1953 and 1960. And the four of us gave our parents six millennial grandchildren, born between 1981 and 2000.

Do we conform to stereotypes about our generations? I don’t think so.

Our parents were working and/or distracted by the arrival of a more liberated, less strait-laced era than they’d come of age in. My cohort of boomers essentially had free-range childhoods. By contrast, I rarely let my millennial daughter out of my sight until she was in high school.

Boomers have promoted a caricature of millennials as having a weak work ethic, being emotionally fragile and spending too much money on avocado toast when they should be saving for a down payment on a house. But those are risible generalizations. Millennials have boundaries. They can talk about their feelings. We boomer parents taught them those things. And when you take into account today’s staggeringly high home prices, the shortage of affordable housing and the phenomenon of retiring boomers who don’t see a benefit to downsizing, which would free up more housing stock for younger families, the avocado toast fallacy is revealed for what it is: generation trashing.

Millennials and their slightly older forebears in Generation X (1965-1980) can come off as embittered at times – angry about what they perceive as the shortcomings, entitlement and youth obsession of their parents’ generation.

When the pandemic hit, some millennials took to calling COVID-19 the “Boomer Remover.” That, wrote a Financial Times columnist, “may reflect the general lack of empathy in society these days, but it may also mirror the free-floating political anger that the current generation has for their elders.”

Isn’t the current generation always angry with their elders?

If you can’t blame your parents’ generation for the stuff that’s wrong with your life, are you even alive?

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