The Boomer Philosophy

Published on September 9, 2025

I received a reel on Instagram from my 34-year-old brother-in-law. It was a fake AI-generated video of a bear bouncing on a trampoline — a "boomer trap".

Boomer traps are fake photos or videos generally poorly made by AI to attract naive boomers. The one I received was well-made, at first glance I thought it was real. To mock my brother-in-law, I called him a boomer — a common insult these days to make fun of anyone less up-to-date.

I thought of a reflection I've had for some time: what if a boomer wasn't necessarily a boomer?

What is a boomer?

Originally, a boomer is someone born during the post-war baby boom. It's the first generation not to have experienced war but a period of full economic growth and prosperity called the Trente Glorieuses (Thirty Glorious Years).

The boomer stereotype is someone who never had too many problems, who enjoyed their life, benefited from a house at a ridiculous price, and who did everything to do as little as possible.

Today they're known for enjoying life at the expense of working people, going shopping when it's crowded on Saturday morning, not wanting new construction next to their houses, and not wanting to take care of their grandchildren. A selfish generation: the worst generation.

All this is of course a cliché and fortunately, few boomers are really like that — but like all clichés, there's some truth behind it.

Are boomers necessarily boomers?

I thought it was a different generation that behaved differently. Then, I met people behaving like boomers while being younger, forty years old, or even thirty years old.

What is being a boomer?

Being a boomer is refusing to evolve, refusing to see further ahead, to take risks, it's wanting to do as little as possible while taking as much as possible.

A fact that struck me recently was a meeting between developers aged 30 to 40 that I attended discussing the usefulness of AI for coding. None used it, all were very critical of it: it's not good, the quality of the code produced is terrible, the code isn't maintainable and we no longer know how to code by ourselves. I thought I was seeing my middle school teachers 20 years earlier who refused to let us use Wikipedia for our presentations because it wasn't reliable and wasn't quality. We had to learn to search by ourselves in encyclopedias.

History repeats itself, it's both fascinating and depressing.

These developers weren't even 40 years old yet and were already behaving like boomers. Today everyone uses AI, it's getting better and better — not a quarter passes without a new more powerful model dethroning the previous one.

It saddened me greatly to see such young men refuse to live with their times and move forward.

Another typical manifestation of this boomerism: the obsession with real estate as the only investment path. Just mention an ETF or gold, and you'll see these same people panic by invoking "unimaginable risks". Their irrational fear prevents them from seeing that there's an entire universe between a diversified investment in a World ETF and unbridled speculation on the latest trendy shitcoin.

A final striking example: these young adults under 40 who desperately cling to "social benefits" that have been sclerotic to our society for 50 years. Seeing thirty-somethings, in the prime of their lives, tooth and nail defending unemployment benefits, the 35-hour work week, early retirement, or a social security system that's falling apart, is the perfect illustration of modern boomerism. Rather than innovating and building the future, they prefer to settle comfortably into a parasitic system inherited from the past.

Conclusion

The example of my brother-in-law at the beginning of the article was just an anecdote to set the context — anyone could have been fooled.

Boomerism won't disappear with the boomer generation. It's a harmful philosophy that has nothing to do with a generation. It surely existed before the baby boom but the exceptional post-war economic effervescence allowed a significant number of people to behave like parasites. This wealth creation that has existed nowhere else in the history of humanity revolutionized our society. Before the Trente Glorieuses, it wasn't possible to be a parasite or even do the minimum — you died of hunger.

If the boomer philosophy doesn't disappear with the boomer generation, we'll have to wage a permanent battle against this mentality. Faced with this reality, we must cultivate opposite values: the ability to evolve, the humility to question ourselves, the curiosity to learn constantly, optimism in the face of challenges, honor in our actions and a sense of responsibility. These qualities are the foundations of a society that progresses and makes humanity prosper.

The boomer philosophy risks persisting but I think it has always been present among us. This mediocrity is part of human nature and will always accompany us. It's up to us to constantly fight against this tendency and remain vigilant so that it doesn't poison our society.