Somewhere between your third streaming subscription and your fourth attempt to flag down a waiter who keeps pointing at a QR code, something shifts. A thought creeps in, quiet and uncomfortable. A thought that sounds suspiciously like your grandfather.

You try to push it away. You know better. You are not that person.

But here’s the thing. Neither are about 123 million other people who stopped scrolling long enough to weigh in on one of the most unexpectedly honest conversations the internet has had in years. And what they said might make you put down your $7 coffee and rethink everything.

Why We Love to Mock Boomers

Baby boomers carry a heavy cultural tab. Younger generations have spent years building a solid case against them. Climate inaction. Wealth hoarding. A stranglehold on workplace power that somehow never loosens. A general worldview that often seemed to ask: what’s in it for me?

Add to that a reputation for crankiness, a deep suspicion of change, and a tendency to romanticize a past that wasn’t as golden as they remember, and you have a generation that makes for an easy target.

Deserved or not, that reputation has stuck. Boomers are the punchline. Boomers are out of touch. Boomers need to log off and let someone else drive for a while.

Except maybe, just maybe, they weren’t wrong about everything.

A Question That Broke the Internet

A since-deleted post on X asked a simple question: “What is the most boomer complaint you have?”

Nobody expected what came next. Over 123 million views. Threads on Reddit spiraling into thousands of comments. Young people, many of them millennials and Gen Zers, lining up to confess their most embarrassing agreements with the generation they spend so much time criticizing.

What poured out wasn’t nostalgia from people who remember rotary phones. It was frustration from people who grew up with smartphones and still feel like something has gone very wrong. Read through it and a pattern emerges fast: we built a more connected, more convenient, more optimized world, and somehow made daily life more exhausting in the process.

Tipping Has Become a Social Trap

Start with tipping, because nobody is happy about it.

“Tipping culture has gotten out of hand,” one user wrote, and the replies moved fast. Over on Reddit, someone captured the absurdity perfectly, joking that readers should tip 20% for the comment they just read, and asking whether they’d like to view cookies, rate the comment five stars, and accept updated terms and conditions while they’re at it.

Funny, yes. But also a direct hit. Tipping screens now appear at self-checkout kiosks. At coffee windows where a machine made your drink. At counters where you ordered, picked up, and cleaned your own table. At some point, a system built to reward good service became a system where saying no feels like a moral failure.

Nobody built this trap on purpose. It crept in one iPad payment screen at a time. And now, across every generation, people are standing in front of a tip prompt for a bottled water they grabbed themselves, doing quiet moral math while a line forms behind them.

Technology Was Supposed to Help

Here is where the complaints start stacking up fast.

“I miss buttons,” one Redditor wrote. Short. Clean. Devastating. Replies piled in fast. Especially in cars, someone added, where physical knobs and dials let you feel what you were doing without taking your eyes off the road. Volume knobs. Tuning controls. Push-pull switches with actual positions you could sense with your fingers. Now you tap a glass screen and hope for the best at 70 miles an hour.

Another thread hit account creation fatigue hard. “Don’t make me have an account for everything,” someone posted, racking up over a thousand upvotes. One reply expanded on it with a frustration that reads less like a Reddit comment and more like a cry for help: too many apps, too many accounts, too many ads, too many notifications, too many questions, too many email lists. “My very real political position,” they concluded, “is that computers, websites, devices and apps should shut up.”

One commenter laid out the password situation with a logic so absurd it almost sounds like a bit. Make a password for everything. Never reuse one. Make each so complicated you couldn’t possibly memorize it. Never write them down. But it’s fine to let Google manage all of them. A system designed to protect your information now requires surrendering all of it to a single corporation just to function normally.

Buttons just worked. You pressed them. Something happened. Nobody sent you a notification about it afterward.

Nobody Asked for AI Customer Service

If tipping culture is the slow burn of generational frustration, AI customer service is the open flame.

“I. WANT. TO. TALK. TO. AN. AGENT!!!!!!” one Reddit user wrote, the capitalization doing all the emotional heavy lifting. “DON’T. WANT. YOUR. SHITTY. AI. CUSTOMER. SUPPORT!!!!!!”

555 people upvoted it before lunch.

One reply came from someone who used to work at an insurance contact center. Callers screaming “REPRESENTATIVE” into the phone became routine. When they’d answer and explain they were the representative, it usually got a laugh. Gallows humor from both sides of the same broken system.

People have started developing workarounds. One commenter shared a hack: mumble nonsense when the automated system asks how it can help. After a few failed attempts to process the input, the system gives up and transfers you to a human. We built machines to replace human contact and now we are tricking those machines just to reach a person again.

At what point did a phone call become a puzzle to solve?

QR Codes at Restaurants Are Nobody’s Friend

Paper menus were not broken. Nobody filed a complaint about paper menus. They existed, they worked, you read them, you ordered food, and everyone moved on with their lives.

“Please don’t make me scan a QR code for the menu,” a Reddit user wrote. An X user agreed, adding they didn’t want QR codes replacing posted store hours either.

QR codes at restaurants became widespread during the pandemic out of genuine necessity. Fair enough. But years later, many restaurants kept them, not because customers preferred them, but because replacing menus costs money and digital menus are easy to update. A reasonable business decision, perhaps. A terrible dining experience, definitely.

Now you sit down, pull out your phone, find the camera app, hold it steady, wait for the link, watch it load, try to read a menu on a screen already full of notifications, and accidentally close the tab twice before figuring out what the soup of the day is. A laminated piece of paper could have handled that in four seconds.

You Pay, but You Don’t Own Anything

Ask someone under 40 what they actually own, digitally speaking, and watch the silence stretch out.

“I wanna go back to Blu-rays and DVDs and actually own the content I like,” one user wrote. Another asked why everything good requires a subscription. A third put it plainly: “I am absolutely not paying a monthly subscription to use your shitty app.”

Streaming killed the video store and promised convenience in return. For a while, it delivered. One flat fee, access to everything. Then the libraries started splitting. Studios launched their own platforms. Prices crept up. Content got pulled without warning. Now you pay five different services monthly for access to things you can lose at any moment when a licensing deal expires or a platform decides to cut costs.

A DVD you bought in 2003 still works. Nobody can take it back. Nobody can add a price hike to it. Nobody will notify you that it’s leaving your collection at the end of the month.

Food Got Expensive and Also Harder to Chew

Kettle chips taste fine. But at some point, regular chips became harder to find than artisanal ones, and somewhere a dentist is very grateful for that shift.

“Potato chips are too expensive and too hard these days,” someone posted on X. A small complaint. A deeply relatable one.

Then there’s coffee. “I remember when coffee wasn’t the cost of a meal,” an X user wrote. A cup that once cost a quarter now regularly runs $6 or $7 before tip, which, as we’ve already established, has become its own ordeal. A McDonald’s cheeseburger has nearly doubled in price over the last decade. Fast food stopped being the affordable option. Nobody planned for that. Everyone is annoyed about it.

Food getting more expensive while simultaneously getting harder to eat is a specific kind of indignity that crosses every generational line.

Fashion Lost the Plot Somewhere

Adults dressing like children made the list, and it generated strong feelings.

“Adults shouldn’t dress like children. Jordans, Yeezys, slides,” someone wrote.

Leave aside whether sneaker culture has merit, because it clearly does for a lot of people. What the comment points at is something broader: a cultural shift where the markers of adulthood, in dress, in behavior, in how seriously people take their responsibilities, feel less defined than they once were. Whether that’s liberation or erosion probably depends on who you ask and what day it is.

Either way, the complaint exists, younger people are making it, and boomers who said the same thing thirty years ago are somewhere nodding with a complicated mixture of vindication and regret.

Crankiness Is Just Wisdom in a Rough Mood

Here’s what the whole conversation points to, if you sit with it long enough.

Every generation eventually becomes the one standing in the kitchen, coffee in hand, explaining to whoever will listen that things used to be simpler and better and why can’t anyone see that. Gen Xers are already there. Millennials are arriving. Gen Zers are closer than they think.

Growing older means watching the world change faster than you can process it, and sometimes the thing that changed wasn’t actually an improvement. Sometimes a paper menu really was better. Sometimes owning a DVD really was smarter than renting access to a movie forever. Sometimes the old frustrations were pointing at something real.

Boomers weren’t right about everything. Not even close. But 123 million views on a thread about their complaints, driven largely by younger people saying “yes, actually, same,” suggests something worth sitting with.

Maybe complaining about the right things, at the right time, is its own kind of wisdom. Maybe the circle of life includes the moment you hear yourself say something your parents said, and instead of cringing, you just quietly nod.

At least Gen Z will post about it better.

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