Generational conflict narratives distract from class-based inequality

The endless discourse about boomers versus millennials functions as a sophisticated misdirection campaign. While people argue about avocado toast and participation trophies, wealth continues its relentless concentration at the top.

This is not accidental. Generational conflict narratives serve specific structural purposes in maintaining existing power arrangements.

The Demographic Sleight of Hand

When you frame inequality as “boomers hoarding wealth from millennials,” you obscure a more fundamental reality: most boomers have no meaningful wealth to hoard.

The median boomer household has retirement savings of approximately $152,000. This sounds substantial until you consider that healthcare costs alone can consume this amount within years of retirement. The majority of boomers will depend primarily on Social Security—hardly the picture of generational privilege painted in viral tweets.

Meanwhile, millennial tech executives, finance professionals, and property developers accumulate wealth at rates that would make previous generations envious. A 35-year-old software engineer in San Francisco earning $400,000 annually has more economic power than a 65-year-old factory retiree living on $1,200 monthly Social Security payments.

But the generational frame makes these comparisons invisible.

Class Interests Disguised as Age Conflicts

The most effective propaganda appears as organic cultural discourse. Generational conflict narratives achieve this perfectly—they feel spontaneous and grassroots while serving elite interests.

Consider who benefits when working-class boomers and working-class millennials blame each other for economic hardship:

Media companies generate engagement through age-based outrage content
Political elites avoid addressing wealth concentration by focusing on demographic tensions
Wealthy individuals across all ages escape scrutiny while attention focuses on intergenerational resentment
Corporate interests deflect from wage stagnation and benefit cuts by encouraging workers to blame retirees

This is classic divide-and-conquer strategy, updated for the social media age.

The Housing Illusion

Housing provides the most compelling example of how generational narratives obscure class dynamics.

The story goes: boomers bought houses for pennies and now refuse to let millennials have the same opportunities. This narrative contains enough truth to feel credible while missing the crucial mechanism.

Housing prices didn’t rise because boomers are greedy. They rose because:

Investment firms treat housing as a financial asset class
Zoning laws restrict supply to benefit existing property owners (across all ages)
Monetary policy inflates asset prices to benefit creditors
Tax policy subsidizes real estate investment

A working-class boomer who bought a house in 1985 didn’t engineer this system. They simply participated in it. The system itself was designed by and for capital, not for any particular generation.

Yet the generational frame makes individual homeowners the villains rather than the structural forces that financialized housing.

Retirement as Battlefield

Social Security and Medicare debates epitomize how generational framing serves power.

The narrative presents these as “intergenerational theft”—boomers selfishly consuming resources that won’t be available to younger generations. This framing has several convenient effects:

It normalizes the idea that social programs must be cut
It positions cuts as “fairness” rather than austerity
It creates artificial scarcity around programs that could easily be expanded
It prevents coalition-building between different age groups who benefit from social insurance

The reality: Social Security could provide more generous benefits to all generations if we simply removed the cap on payroll taxes. Medicare could be expanded to cover everyone. These aren’t resource problems—they’re political choice problems.

But generational conflict narratives make such solutions unthinkable by positioning young and old as zero-sum competitors.

Technology and Generational Mystification

Digital technology amplifies generational narratives in particularly insidious ways.

Social media algorithms reward content that generates strong emotional responses. Age-based resentment provides an endless source of such content. “OK boomer” and “millennials are killing industry X” posts reliably drive engagement because they tap into real economic anxieties while providing simple explanations and clear villains.

This creates a feedback loop where generational conflict feels increasingly real and urgent, even as it remains analytically superficial.

Meanwhile, the actual beneficiaries of technological change—platform owners, data brokers, surveillance capitalists—remain largely invisible in public discourse.

The Meritocracy Connection

Generational narratives reinforce meritocratic ideology by suggesting that economic outcomes result from generational characteristics rather than structural forces.

If boomers are wealthy because they were “harder working” or “more responsible,” then millennial economic struggles must reflect generational deficiencies. This logic absolves the economic system itself while pathologizing individuals and demographics.

The truth is messier: economic outcomes depend far more on when you entered the job market, what assets you inherited, and what opportunities were available than on personal virtues or generational culture.

What Gets Obscured

While people argue about generational differences, several crucial dynamics remain hidden:

Wealth concentration: The top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 50% across all age groups. This isn’t a generational phenomenon—it’s a class phenomenon.

Policy capture: Economic policy is made by and for the wealthy, regardless of age. Young billionaires and old billionaires have more in common with each other than with their generational cohorts.

Labor solidarity: Workers of all ages face similar challenges from employer power, but generational narratives prevent recognition of shared interests.

Systemic causation: Economic problems result from policy choices and structural arrangements, not from demographic characteristics.

The Function of Distraction

Generational conflict serves as what Antonio Gramsci might have called “cultural hegemony”—a way of organizing public consciousness that serves dominant interests while appearing natural and inevitable.

By encouraging people to think in terms of generational rather than class categories, these narratives:

Channel legitimate economic grievances toward safe targets
Prevent coalition-building across age groups
Normalize inequality as natural demographic conflict
Obscure the role of concentrated wealth and power

This isn’t necessarily conscious manipulation. Many people genuinely believe in generational explanations for economic trends. But belief in false explanations can serve power just as effectively as deliberate propaganda.

Beyond Age-Based Analysis

Understanding how generational narratives function doesn’t require dismissing all age-related differences. Different generations do face different economic conditions and cultural contexts.

But these differences are primarily symptoms of broader structural changes, not their causes. Treating symptoms as causes leads to misdiagnosis and ineffective solutions.

A more accurate analysis would focus on:

How economic policy shapes opportunities across different life stages
How wealth concentration affects people regardless of age
How corporate power and financial markets drive economic insecurity
How political institutions serve concentrated interests rather than democratic constituencies

The Way Forward

Recognizing generational conflict as a distraction mechanism opens possibilities for more effective political organizing.

Instead of “boomers versus millennials,” imagine “working people of all ages versus concentrated wealth.” Instead of “generational fairness,” imagine “economic democracy.” Instead of age-based resentment, imagine cross-generational solidarity against shared oppression.

These framings don’t eliminate genuine intergenerational tensions, but they place such tensions within their proper context: a broader struggle over how society’s resources are distributed and who gets to make those distribution decisions.

The real conflict isn’t between generations. It’s between those who benefit from concentrated wealth and power and those who suffer from it. Age is just another tool for obscuring this fundamental divide.

This analysis doesn’t dismiss the real economic challenges facing younger generations. Rather, it argues for understanding these challenges in their proper structural context rather than through the limiting lens of generational conflict.