Are we really the laziest generation?

I was reading the news on the internet the other day, as I do, and I stumbled across an article that just comes right out and announces: we’re the laziest generation.

How this person could write this with such certainty astounds me so I wanted to write a retort to how the Baby Boomer generation are not the laziest at all.

The writer, Elspeth Reeve, said bluntly, “The worst people in the entire world are old people. From now on they should be called by their rightful title: the Laziest Generation”. She went on to use examples from the American government to prove her point that baby boomers don’t use the internet. US senator Lindsey Graham doesn’t use email, and neither do John McCain, Chuck Schumer or Orrin Hatch (whoever they are). She thought it was preposterous that these men weren’t ashamed of their lack of emailing. She went on to say, “boomers and their Silent Generation elders are preying on millennials: stealing time from them by refusing to learn technology and therefore making extra work for everybody else”. Do you think this is a fair statement?

It irks me that this young woman could think that not using emails could somehow be a carefully devised plan by all baby boomers, ahem, “laziest gen-ers”, to make life hard on them. In fact, I say good on these senators and anyone else who isn’t a slave to emails. Call me old fashioned but I think that verbal communication is much more valuable than emails. While I can absolutely see the necessity of emailing in 2015, I think it’s a bit of a stretch of the bow to say we’re all so lazy because we don’t want to use emails. Maybe we don’t want to be flooded with deals and spam! Sorry if that’s not my right as a computer user.

Miss Reeve continued to agonise over baby boomers in the work place, complaining that “This is bullsh*t. The truth is they are lazy. They are lazy and they are afraid that if they actually started using the same tools as everyone else, they would be exposed as less productive and less good at their jobs”. Actually, honey, we’re already highly discriminated against in the workplace…and you are just contributing to the problem. I think you’ll find for the most part that we baby boomers are actually willing to learn anything to get us a job.

I’m not sure if this sentence is tongue-in-cheek or if she is serious…”this is an epidemic. Older workers who refuse to learn computers are torturing millions of millennials every single day”.

I think us Starts at 60 community members are at the forefront of the technological world. We’re actually real, living proof that baby boomers love the internet and are embracing it! We are 94,000 of the smartest and wittiest over 60s and are bucking the trend.

According to a Pew Research Centre report, that Miss Reeve has even referenced in her article, 79 per cent of older adults who have the internet say that “people without internet access are at a real disadvantage because of all the information they might be missing”. Yes!

She points out that of the older adults who don’t have the internet, only 48 per cent say that they are at a disadvantage. She translates this as “Old people don’t understand why they need to use the internet until they use it”. Yes, very true. But there are so many people online in their 60s that it’s just insulting to say we’re the laziest generation.

I’ll tell you what’s unfair, Miss Reeve, that millennials, Gen Y-ers and even Gen X-ers don’t “get” that baby boomers are online. They think we’re all withering away inside with a crossword and a book that’s falling apart, yet we’re on our iPads, getting outside and communicating more than ever. When will they realise this?

Share your thoughts below.