Colleen: Another pointless battle fought in the generation war
Nov 17, 2023, 9:09 AM | Updated: 10:23 am
I am so tired of the generational fighting. Thursday on Seattle’s Morning News, we had Gee Scott on to talk about the wealth gap between millennials and baby boomers based on a Cambridge study.
And I left the conversation frustrated because I pitched the segment, I felt the results of the study were newsworthy, and yet…
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“Again, we are talking about the wealth gap between millennials and baby boomers,” Dave said.
“I tell you what, we don’t have to talk about it as long as anyone that is a baby boomer will agree and admit that things aren’t as good for the millennials as it was for them and we’ll be done,” Gee said.
“Fine, but you’re getting all our stuff in a few years,” Dave responded.
So we did it again, a worthy conversation about a Cambridge study that offered a stunning statistic about the financial disparities between generations, and it turned into boomer bashing and millennial mashing — a pointless conversation that offered no solutions.
And we all left the same as we entered, not heard. We fell into the ‘one thing is true’ trap.
The ‘one thing is true’ trap is from Dr. Becky Kennedy, who became an overnight sensation on Instagram during the pandemic as a parenting guru. She writes in her book “Good Inside,” that when we’re in the ‘one thing is true’ mode, exchanges escalate quickly.
Each person thinks they’re arguing about the content of the conversation when, in fact, they’re trying to defend that they are a real worthy person with a real truthful experience.
I should just send her the link to our segment because it proves her theory. A couple of millennials who had data at their fingertips argue the wealth gap is worsening and about to get worse for the generation behind us. But instead, we just saw ‘boomer’ and unleashed all of our misplaced anger.
And I see the writing on the wall because my back hurts, my hair is graying, my 401(k) is looking pretty good.
And here comes Gen Z. If we as millennials don’t get better at discussing content rather than our feelings and knowing two or more things can be true at once, Gen Z will come for us next.
I really don’t want my death to be what makes the next generation prosperous.
Listen to Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien weekday mornings from 5 – 9 a.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.
