Well yes. Why do real estate people call generation x people Baby Boomers? The answer is more simple than you may think. It is based on the generalisation that anyone who was born between 1965 and 1980 is too old to pay all the interest on a home, which was sold at $2 million. Yes, that's right, most of are too old for them to sell us real estate!! When I was in school it cost nowhere near $2 million dollars to buy a house.
People who were born in 1980 are now aged 44. When I was 44 and faced a horrible redundancy. I joked that I was 44 and through the door! I did not know back then how serious this was. Indeed, little old me - a late Generation x person had become a baby boomer!!
When they treat people as commodities, in the same was that way and sugar are commodities, then they are treating people as numbers and not individuals. This, however is what they are doing when they define me, someone in his mid to late 50s as a Baby Boomer, in this current context of 2024.
Not only has the real estate industry taken away my Generation x status and given it to people aged under 44, in order that they can qualify them for certain types of real estate - be that first home buyers or investment properties, but they have taken away vast swathes of my personal identity!
I do agree, however, that as someone who turns 57 in July this year, I had similar education to some of the late baby boomers.
Scientific calculators came into Australian schools in the late 70s/early 80s. The late baby boomers in high school had the same access to calculators to me as an early gen x person. Neither generation had a computer at their desks. In my generation, there were some computers in the high school science lab, for the nerds or those who they had earmarked for engineering at university.
When you consider schools in this argument, it is very clear that many people move to catchments which have the best schools. This is helps to increase real estate prices.
I think the difference between late Baby Boomers and early Generation x more likely lies in contemporary music. The early generation x people were much more influenced by the post-punk, new-romantic, British New Wave music than the late baby boomers. If you ask me which piece of music was a soundscape for my musical memories in the early 80s in high school, I would probably say 'All of my Heart,' by ABC. The late baby boomers may be more likely to say something more in the rock genre of the Little River Band, for example. Whichever way you look at it, the real estate industry is not interested in us.
Music is a very interesting point. Not that long ago I complained to Sydney AM easy listening radio station for putting my age group into the Baby Boomer category. While I listened to a lot of contemporary radio music in the mid to late 70s when I was in primary school, my music tastes came of age in high school. I was very much someone who listened to the new romantic / British new wave sound. For this radio station to put me in the category of 60s and 70s music was pain dumb, because I don't belong there. Likewise many people my age listen to the FM grunge genre. Again this does not have anything to do with 60s and 70s classic hits.
Maybe the radio stations are selling real estate as well. What a ridiculous thing for me to say! Of course they are!! But must we all be defined by this insane lowest common denominator of real estate?
If you don't know, Karl Jung said we have 16 different personalities. The word real estate does not come into these 16 personalities - at least not as the title of a personality type. Lets keep it that way ― Joseph Walz
Comments