In my speculative novel Lifers, longevity suddenly explodes, and very old people begin to overpopulate the globe, creating a host of social and political problems, including housing shortages, the crash of social welfare programs, and a drastic reduction in intergenerational transfers of wealth.
In the book, which is set in the near future, people call it the “Methuselah Plague,” but in real life, right now, these very things are happening, and they’re calling it “Total Boomer Luxury Communism.”
Conservative Gen-X influencer Russ Greene has concocted that inelegant phrase to argue that demographics have outstripped the original remedial intentions of government entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, resulting in a situation where “retired millionaires have become the greatest recipients of government aid,” with Social Security distributing up to $117,000 per annum to households that don’t really need it. “Medicare programs are paying for golf balls, greens fees, social club memberships, horseback riding lessons, and pet food,” Greene laments. [1]
There is nothing new about the young complaining about the old, and vice versa. When I was young, my generation (the one The Who were actually singing about) regarded our parents as warmongering stuffed shirts, and ourselves as the harbingers of an enlightened Age of Aquarius that would spread peace, love, and understanding throughout the world.
We see how that turned out.
We Boomers assumed that because our generation’s sheer numbers had commanded the world’s rapt attention to our adolescence, everyone would continue to fawn all over us in our old age. Wrinkles would become fashionable, politicians would court us, advertisers would glamorize our seniority.
Instead, the Boomer population bulge has become a demographic plague, sucking billions out of public welfare programs and warping politics toward a tribal self-interest we would have thought contemptible when we were still wearing bell bottoms.
And the young are beginning to hate us for it.
Not our actual children, hopefully, but the usual inter-generational nitpicking is curdling into an overt resentment of the Boomer generation — or, as it is coming to be called, the “gerontocracy.” There are rising calls to curtail what are seen as its unearned privileges and political power by whatever constitutionally dubious means necessary.
The New York Times recently published a surprisingly sloppy but provocative article titled “Older Americans Are Hoarding America’s Potential.”[2] In it, Samuel Moyn, a professor of history and law at Yale (for the record, a GenX-er), asserts that “America needs to confront gerontocracy before the system collapses under the weight of its inequality and injustice.”
The injustices identified fall into three broad categories: Boomers hog jobs, Boomers hog housing, and Boomers vote too much (which wouldn’t be so bad, except they tend to vote in their own interests). The cumulative result is that Boomers have too much wealth and are disinclined to give it up anytime soon.
According to Moyn, Boomers hog jobs because “mandatory retirement was eliminated in most fields in the late 20th century, [and] older workers held on to some of the best positions.” Well, yes. Guilty as charged. Like most humans, we’d prefer to remain productive members of society as long as possible, but leave that aside.
The result, not surprisingly, is an enormous income gap: those over 55 get paid a ton more than those under 35.[3] That this is less a function of age than of accumulated experience and time on the pay ladder seems obvious, but that, I suppose, makes it no less annoying. Moyn wants to reimpose mandatory retirement ages not just on the Trumps and Schumers, but on Boomers generally.
Then there’s housing: “Older Americans own much of the most desirable real estate in the country’s best cities” [whatever those are] “and they are not moving. The 70-to-74 age group has the highest homeownership rate in the nation – above 80 percent.”[4] The result is that, due to the vast appreciation of homes bought when they were young, Boomers own fully half the value of all US real estate.[5]
Moyn’s solution to this aspect of the gerontocracy problem is to tax the Boomers till they give up and move to the old age home, and for God’s sake don’t let them attend town council meetings: “Besides circumventing the disproportionately high elder participation in town meetings where land-use decisions are made, I advocate a progressive tax on older homeowners to incentivize them to downsize rather than retain. The longer you stay, the more you should have to pay.” Then, presumably, Zoomers could buy abandoned homes they couldn’t afford to maintain in suburban enclaves they’d be bored in, but that’s a problem for another day.
Finally, for their sin of active participation in democracy, seniors “do not deserve the stranglehold they currently enjoy through overrepresentation in elections, which produces too many regressive policies and too many seniors in the highest offices.” It’s unclear what solutions for this the author has in mind, other than perhaps that Boomers be disenfranchised once they reach a certain age, or please die faster. But getting the young off their asses and into the polling booths on election days would certainly help.
Better written and more evenhanded but covering exactly the same statistical territory is an article in the current issue of The Atlantic, “A Fine Country for Old Men,” in which it’s pointed out that “the median 35-year-old Millennial earns 38 percent more in post-tax, inflation-adjusted income than the typical Boomer did at the same age.”[6] This rings true to someone like me, who in 1974 joined a big Wall Street law firm at the starting associate’s salary of $17,000 per year and proceeded to pay off student loans for the next five years.
Nonetheless, the author notes that “most current Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries will receive more from the program over their lifetime than they paid in taxes, and the extra money will necessarily come from the pockets of younger generations…This bodes poorly for intergenerational peace. Respect for elders is being replaced by resentment of elders.” And of course we all know that the Social Security trust fund is expected to go bust by around 2033.[7]
It all comes down to longevity. We Boomers are living to inconveniently advanced ages, and that trend is only accelerating. We’re the leading edge of an era of rapidly lengthening average lifespans, and not only are we unprepared for such a superannuated society, but, much like our chronic pig-headedness about climate change, we’re resistant to the sorts of structural change that will be necessary to adapt to it.
“Boomer Communism” will have to be addressed in part by reforming the Social Security and Medicare systems to raise qualification ages and impose means-testing. This will of course be met with howls of protest and political backlash from us selfish, entitled Boomers, but it will have to be done (he says, knowing full well he’ll be “grandfathered” out of most such changes).
As for age-based housing disparities, let me paraphrase the protagonist in another of my novels:
“I’ve long thought that the way most Boomers live is absurd, married off in fragile little dyads that we frantically fortify with kids and pets and wall off from the world by spending inordinate amounts of time and money on spaces and buildings in which to maintain that separateness, until we grow old and the pets die and the kids move away to replicate this folly, leaving us paired alone in these expensive, mostly unused monuments to some outworn notion of domesticity.”[8]
The only generally available alternative to this “folly” is the classic retirement community, but that requires consigning oneself to a ruthlessly enforced age ghetto, and the entry costs are often uneconomic compared with staying put in your underused but mortgage-paid home.
This sort of age segregation, whether in retirement homes or college campuses, is hugely expensive and wasteful. Land and housing used to sequester the old on one hand and their grandchildren on the other could be better applied to build inter-generational cohousing, where the old live communally with the young, whether or not they’re relatives. There are lots of such communities in Europe, and we should learn from them.
Here we come to the heart of our cultural inability to adapt to increasing longevity: the young can’t imagine being old, and the old have forgotten too much of what it’s like to be young. As I’ve argued here previously, we – of all ages – need more explicit education in the implications of living lives that won’t be divided neatly into the canonical three stages of education, work, and retirement.
Grade-schoolers are routinely educated in the realities of puberty, but what college student receives instruction in the challenges of later adult life, like hormonal changes, memory preservation, disease prevention, or strength and agility maintenance, not to mention the great gratifications that older age affords, like ever-deepening friendships and marriages, the joys and tribulations of parenthood, the necessity and dividends of maintaining social connectedness across time? They don’t, unless they infer it from a required reading in one of the remaining “humanities.”
This needs to change. Imagine, for just one example, a sociology/psychology seminar in which undergraduates were challenged to reverse-adopt their 65- or 70-year-old selves, fully imagine their future circumstances, communicate with them through essays and letters, and begin to research and plan for the most optimal version of their future lives.
And imagine if each of us Boomers were obliged to interact with or actively mentor a person of half or a third our age who wasn’t a descendant? Maybe we need an “Age Corps” modeled on the Peace Corps of old, where the old and young would actively mentor and care for each other outside the traditional boundaries of the family. And colleges need to consider starting a mid- or later life curriculum in re-education or longevity management, with us Boomers as fully reconstituted students.
What Boomers have in abundance – money and time – we often misdirect toward selfish or short-sighted ends. In truth, we may not need that big home, or half of that nest egg, and we should think more imaginatively about how they might be put to the best use during our lifetimes, rather than after.
In Lifers, the really old people end up being sequestered in internment camps by a federal Department of Longevity Management, though some of them manage to form their own country and emigrate to it in a massive gerontocratic diaspora.
Let’s make sure it stays fiction.
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[1] R. Greene, “What is Total Boomer Luxury Communism?” The American Mind (December 10, 2025).
[2] S. Moyn, “Older Americans Are Hoarding America’s Potential,” The New York Times (April 21, 2026).
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] C. Richardson, “Boomer-Zoomer Housing War,” First Things (May 2026).
[6] I. Kahloon, “A Fine Country for Old Men,” The Atlantic (May 2026).
[7] Ibid.
[8] K. McWalter, When We Were All Still Alive (2021).