Boomers are people who were born between like the mid-1940s and the mid-1960s. Today, that makes them between about 55 and 75 years old. That's getting up there! A lot of boomers are our moms and dads.
The term "Boomers" is short for "baby boomers"—a reference to the fact that they were mostly conceived when people fighting in World War II came home and had sex for the first time in awhile. It doesn't really mean much on its own. However, as a category name for people whose lives were defined by common economic and social conditions (also called a "generation"), the term gives us a convenient shorthand for the people who are responsible for the popularity of Jefferson Airplane, Microsoft, and the persistent myth that a part-time job can pay for college. As an example, Steve Jobs was a boomer.
Boomers are uniquely predisposed to communicating with "voice assistants" despite broadly misunderstanding that this communication requires adhering to a set script and a related list of available commands.
In the United States, Boomers are among the oldest and increasingly least sensible sector of the electorate. When the oldest boomers were 25 years old, a typical American 25-year-old had about a 40% likelihood of completing high school. When the youngest were 25, that number was about 60%, and rose towards 85% if you extended the age bracket up to 29 years old. Today, about 85% of 25- and 29-year-old Americans have a high school degree. In other words, everyone younger than boomers received more education. These numbers are substantially worse for college—probably around 20% of boomers earned a bachelor's degree, and a 29-year-old today is about twice as likely to have completed one than a 29-year-old in 1980.
The striking thing about that last observation is: college today costs a whole lot more money! Today, most (though not all) college students graduate with student loan debt, which typically comes with a grueling payment schedule and a high overall cost, which then compounds over time, as most loans do. So, despite having gone to less college, boomers as a group believe that college is significantly more affordable than it is. To make matters words, the value of labor in first-world economies (and especially in the United States) has not grown in proportion to the overall wealth created by those economies—so college is more expensive by a large factor, but the earning potential of young people is significantly less. This understanding gap has led to significant intergenerational strife.
Because the problems facing younger people do not line up with boomers' understanding of the magnitude of the problems, and because as people in their late middle age and early seniority boomers are increasingly crotchety (as is common among older people), boomers as a set seem to dismiss the unevenness of the challenges facing younger people, and to vindictively dismiss the concerns of their own children because they do not line up with the economic realities facing boomers when they were the same age that young people are today.
To make matters more dangerous, voter turnout in the United States increases according to the age of the voter. Boomers vote at rates around 10-15% higher than people in their late 20s and early 30s. So, boomers have an outsized voice in the American electoral conversation—despite the fact that they also have outdated opinions about the economic realities facing their juniors, the fact that they are more poorly educated, and despite the fact that they feel like yelling at Alexa is productive.
And we didn't even get into climate change or Ronald Reagan!
All in all, we consider boomers to be medium dangerous. They may mean well, but they're not really doing good. However, boomers love to be acknowledged—if one near you expresses an opinion, it's considered common courtesy to respond with an enthusiastic "Okay, boomer!"
