If Gen Z and millennials stopped wasting their salary on avocado toast and lattes they could buy a home, critics of a certain age often lament. However, the American comedian Tim Dillon has just pushed back at the rhetoric and highlighted the perceived hypocrisy of baby boomer’s unsolicited property advice.
Dillon, a New York native millennial who has a book coming out about the generation, Death by Boomers, branded those born between 1946 and 1954 “very sick people” and “emotional terrorists”.
“I love the boomers, they are a selfish generation of people,” Dillon said in the most recent episode of Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO podcast.
“The state of the boomers is these paranoid people who refuse to leave their McMansions—they will not leave, they will not retire—they lord around their houses (and) diminish their children, they say ‘I can’t believe you can’t own something like this’, holding these houses over their kid’s heads.”
“They retired with bigger houses, they have thousands and thousands of square feet”, he continued his rant, before joking: “They’re holding the planet hostage, they won’t die, they won’t leave—I’ve suggested it before they be forcibly evicted from their homes and committed to mental institutions.”
He’s got a point about boomers in big houses: Research shows that baby boomers with empty nests are occupying roughly one-third of three-bedroom homes in the U.S.—twice as many as millennial families. Meanwhile, Gen Zers with children own less than 0.5% of the large home supply.
Today, more than half of America’s wealth belongs to baby boomers, and most of it is tied to their real estate as they hold off downsizing.
But by hanging on to their sprawling suburban homes, they’re cutting off the supply of houses for young people.
It’s one key reason why getting on the property ladder today is both nearly impossible and unaffordable for the so called “avocado toast” generation—and why, as Dillon points out, baby boomers scrutinizing Gen Z and millennials for wasting money on rent or raising children in an apartment is ironic.
Fortune has contacted Dillon for comment.
The ‘avocado toast’ gen is over advice from baby boomers
Millennials in droves signed up for college on the promise that it would lead to a lucrative career. Yet, despite being the most educated generation in history—with Gen Z closely following behind—millennials’ financial prospects and chances of getting hired are significantly dimmer than those of Gen X graduates.
To top that off, once young people do manage to find a job they are finding that their salary doesn’t quite stretch like it did for their parents.
To afford the median-priced home of $433,100, Americans need an annual income of roughly $166,600. However, the median household earns just $74,580, according to the brokerage Home Bay, and entry-level positions pay around half of that.
To put that into context, house prices have increased more than twice as fast as income has since the turn of the millennium—and it’s forcing young workers today to hold down not one, but three or more jobs to keep up with the rising cost of living.
It’s why 27-year-old Robbie Scott said in a viral TikTok video that he’s no longer taking advice from baby boomers who don’t know what it’s like working hard only to “get nothing in return”.
“We need to stop expecting the same damn people who bought a four-bedroom home and a brand-new Cadillac convertible off of a $30,000-a-year salary to understand what it’s like to be working 40-plus hours a week with a master’s degree and still not being able to afford a 400-square-foot studio apartment in bumf-ck Iowa,” Scott scoffed to over 2 million viewers.
Instead, they’re ‘scamming’ the system
As well as blocking out the wise words of baby boomers, Gen Zers who feel like they were sold a lie are now “scamming” their employers, ditching degrees and doom-spending to make a point.
Anette Suveges, a 27-year-old account executive previously told Fortune that her generation is spending like there’s no tomorrow because low salaries paired with record-high rent and living costs means they’ll never be able to save enough to buy a home anyway—so they may as well enjoy the fruits of their labour instead.
“I’m going to get the expensive avo on toast, I’m going to get the expensive coffee because I know that it’s not these things that are sabotaging my future—it’s the system that we live in,” Suveges said. “Me and the rest of my peers, we see through the flaws in the system and that it’s ultimately the salaries and the economy that make a difference, not our purchasing decisions.”
It’s leading the next generation of workers to shun college altogether and take up traditional trade jobs like plumbing and carpentry where they can earn six-figure salaries in the suburbs, without the burden of student debt.
“People are starting to smell a rat,” Mike Rowe, the CEO of MikeRoweWorks Foundation, recently quipped.
Gen Z “have figured out the country’s a scam,” Dillon echoed, before explaining that this helps explain why employers are struggling with their youngest cohort of workers being lazy and “always late”.
“When you figure out the country is a scam you can approach it the way a con artist or a scammer would approach it which is what a lot of them do,” he said. “They invent mental health ailments they don’t have, they take days off on end, they terrify their superiors into respecting their mediocre shoddy quality of work.”
“This is something that I fully support,” Dillon added. “They’ve realised that a lot of this is bullsh-t so they’re like why shouldn’t I get in on it?”
