So true. There is something about Boomers and cheap crap. The generation before them was thrifty and frugal and conserved and made things last; products of the Depression. Then they showered their kids with the material things they never had; so many Boomers as a result seem to have this emotional attachment to shopping and accumulating things. The more the better and the cheaper the better. I got (another!) set of steak knives for Christmas. Why, I asked. “It was only $9.99! You can use them somewhere.” Aunts come home with bags of junk whenever they’re together. More cheap clothes for everyone that fall apart in months or go immediately out of fashion. Uncles constantly buying more cheap junk from the end-caps and checkout aisles of Home Depot literally *because* they’re cheap. Their eyes light up. A flashlight for $1.99!! It’s LED! A screwdriver set for $6.99! It’s got 29 attachments or bits! If you already have it, throw it away! More toys for the grandkids.

Since 1970, new, bigger houses every seven years four or six or ten miles “further out” into the burbs (former farmland, forests, rivers and wetlands now plowed and paved under) than last time.

ZERO consideration for the environment. ZERO concern or awareness of the social costs that enable us to buy such junk for so cheap. They have a vague awareness that things used to be more expensive, but that was a *problem*, not a reason to conserve and buy quality things and make them last. Things are cheap now. And cheap is better. (Of course in the same breath they’ll complain about low-quality junk that’s not made “like it used to be” but they are unwilling or unable to connect the dots about how their purchase patterns drive and create that same race to the bottom.)

They’ve been totally sucked in by planned obsolescence. They are attracted to cheap metal and plastic garbage like bored raccoons.

Is it the pinnacle of psychological advertising? Is it how they were raised?

I don’t know, but it is disturbing.