Memes of Production

The rationale for this piece of conventional wisdom was that the older you got, the more established you became in life, the more your estate grew, the more you owned your home, your car and whatnot. And of course, the more stuff you own, the more you want things to stay the same.

The reason it's been broken is because that path to better old days has been broken too: younger generations can't save, can't own a home, have a hard time finding a job, and are pretty much guaranteed to be worse off than their parents.

This will be the conservative parties' undoing ultimately. Unfortunately, it also fuels the rise of populism and the return of idiotic extremist ideas - both extreme left and extreme right.

Until the world blows up again, recovers, then people get rich again, conservatism goes on the rise again... Rinse, repeat.

It's not the age, it's the money that ruins people.

Kill billionaires!

I'm in my late 40s and still not.

I'm a lot older than that, and I have definitely gotten more left as I aged. I'm far more radical now than I ever thought I'd be.

I have seen this phenomenon across the world and across social classes.

Gen X and elder millennials tended towards the left as they aged.

But I do wonder if the consequence, to keep the weird equilibrium is that the younger generations are becoming far more fascist.

There was that other rule that supposed successive generations would become more liberal, but we are witnessing a reversal of that to puritan values, misogyny and nationalism.

I like using this as reply to pretty much the same sentiment on the book of faces.

A secret unspoken thing about this is that in the past, more lefties died before ever reaching old age, by the systems in place intentionally making their lives harder, so they'd either get killed or kill themselves.

So the older and more conservative hung around by purely survivorship bias.

But the systems in place are now even failing those who they used to unfairly benefit, making it so more lefties survive and also more conservative get radicalised against those unfair systems and turn left

I enjoy the theory that this idea you get conservative as you age was was due to lead exposure.

They only say that referring to people who burn out or get a personal stake in the system.

The only thing that I'm more conservative with now is my back and knees.

I always thought of this as society as a whole moving more to the left as time goes on, whereas individuals tend to stay anchored to the same beliefs. Now I'm no longer convinced!

I have definitely become more conservative as I aged moving from Communist to Socialist.

On one hand, I recognize, from a neutral standpoint, that this is fucked. People become more right-wing with age because they acquire more that they can lose - not just materially, but socially as well - more family, friends, connections.

Instead of becoming deeply rooted in life, which engenders some limited degree of conservatism insofar as it prioritizes stability (ie, getting rooted doesn't make you anti-gay, but it might make you more anti-riot, because you don't want your kid or spouse getting brained by a stray brick on the way home from the grocery store), we're becoming literally less rooted in life. This is contrary to every generation since the 1930s. It is a sign of instability, which is bad - yet that it is instability indicates the need for instability - the current situation is untenable at any level of stability.

How fucked.

On the other hand, thank fuck I won't be in the old folks home with a bunch of fucking conservatives. We'll unionize when we get there and demand the good tapioca pudding, and give out hard candy to all the protestors while reminiscing about when we were limber enough to toss bricks through cop windshields.

Getting older and having kids made me think about the community they're growing up in (or lack thereof...) and the future they can expect to have (or not have).

The neoliberal policy boomers are defending as the status quo has made us poorer for decades. It's clear it isn't working. The past they talk about needing to go back to predates their own political awareness so they don't even have the language to describe it. In lieu of attempting any reform they just shit on us instead.

Funny thing happening in Australia at the moment is that analysts are suprised by the millenial generation not shifting conservative as they age, instead holding onto progressive values and its showing in the current political sphere.
Turns out if you take away people futures via income, housing/rent affordability, cost of living, etc that people are actually committed to making change.

An article on the topic if your interested. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-26/millennials-rewriting-the-rules-of-australian-politics/106050836

I’m 64 and still leftist commie scum

Yup, conservatives and those willing to succeed in order to have shiny stuff appear in all ages.

OP posting a Meme like this is a low hanging fruit, and is infact borderline passive aggressive against an age group...it distracts away from the true cause.

The boomer who told me this died of covid 2 years later 😂