I know when all joy went out of my job as department chair. It was when the Boomers retired. Once the last one left, all I had was people who wanted to work as little as possible, work only remotely, come to campus twice a week at most, teach only the same old courses to avoid preparing new ones, assign as much stuff from self-grading digital textbooks, use pre-canned tests from those digital textbooks, and who have zero buy in into the future of the department or the institution.
Boomers were the soul of the university. Their retirements coincided with the post-COVID era when people discovered that they don’t like working. Moderate-effort workers turned into low-effort while the low-effort ones went aggressively zero effort.
Clarissa's Blog 
Yes. A man cannot reap what he does not sow.
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Interesting. At my university my take on Boomers is a mix between admiration (they were vocal and stood more against administration than members of my generation, who tries too much to create an impossible dialogue with admin.) and despise (they had a real “après moi le déluge” attitude). Many of them also left with a hefty retirement package I can only dream of.
Ol.
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COVID completely ate people’s interest in working. I don’t know why but it was an absolute calamity for us. And we were only officially closed for 10 weeks. Weeks! And still the result has been devastating.
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Oh, yes. Of course, people who have to go to work instead of working from home are frustrated because it is obvious that people working at home have it easy in comparison to them. I remembered we talked about that during COVID. And I do not care about study showing that people are as efficient at home than at the office. The issue is more profound. Working from home is a civilizational disaster.
Ol.
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Watching in real time how every function of the academic self-governance was taken over by admin because professors were literally not there was hardcore.
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LOL, Kid. and here I was led to believe that Boomers were personae non gratae, unspeakable dalits, responsible for the 60’s, thus underminimg Western values, and obviously guilty of greedily undermining real estate values. But actually, the most likely culprits from my careful assessment are ;-D
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I know people like to complain about Boomers but my experience is different. They can be annoying and pissy but they do like to work. I can deal with pissy. It’s disengaged and lazy that gets to me.
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Kid, I was just giving you the gears. We were just the last generation where most were raised in relatively solid nuclear families and for some, an extended family — and those were clearly major advantages.
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Boomer could afford stuff. A house, car, family, etc. why wouldn’t they work hard when the system worked for them? Same can’t be said about younger generations.
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After accounting for inflation, male wages did not increase from the 70’s tol Trump’s first administration — essentially two generations of debased currency.
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Honestly, I’m talking about people with $100K salaries who find the idea of being at work 3 days a week instead of 2 to be an utter outrage. Let’s not to feel too sorry for these poor victims of an exploitative system.
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Yeah, well, I am sure that most truly do feel for those poor suffering wretches ;-D
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Earning a salary makes you a victim of capitalist exploitation by definition. The only escape is to become an owner of capital.
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Hmmm, well, I suspect that whoever produced that definition has never had to worry about making payroll ;-D
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