Dear Baby Boomers:

We need to talk. We were surfing around online yesterday for a couple hours—just like any other day, really—when we stumbled upon an article on Wikipedia that we think gets to the heart of your recently revealed spiraling debt problem. Turns out, you suffer from oniomania—the compulsive desire to spend. Unfortunately, it looks like it’s a progressive condition, and likely to get worse. You need to get help before it’s too late, either for you or for us.

You might not be inclined to believe us, so let’s review what got us to this point. For the last 20 years, while we’ve been struggling to finish school, start our careers or keep our jobs, you’ve been maxing out your credit cards, buying new Chevy Tahoes and Canyoneros, taking on super-mortgages, investing in hedge funds and high-yield Chinese ETFs, burning every ounce of fossil fuel you can get your hands on, and just basically consuming the hell out of everything.

That all came crashing to a halt in 2008. You lost a bunch of money. We would have too, if only we’d had any savings. You seemed pretty shaken up by the experience. It seemed to give you a glimpse of your own financial mortality. You said, “Never again! We’ve learned our lesson. No more exotic credit default swaps for us. We promise we’ll start saving more prudently, and start spending less. We’re going stop living only for today, and start planning for tomorrow.”

We were pretty caught up in our own problems at the time—you may remember that our shifts were cut in half at Starbucks right around then—but even so, we noticed, and we thought to ourselves, “Better late than never!” We allowed ourselves to hope that you had really changed, even as we worried that we’d have to wait longer to get the jobs that are supposed to open up once you retire.

But now, we see that it was just words. Many of you started borrowing even more heavily after 2008! Seriously, how on Earth do you expect to pay all that off after you retire? You know you can’t fund a second mortgage, let alone the first one, without any income, right? (And no, we don’t want to buy the house after you retire so you can downsize. It’s too big, it’s too far from downtown, and you know we don’t own a car. We’d never get approved for the mortgage anyways. Thanks for asking, though.)

You’ve meant so much to us, provided us with such important guidance in our formative years. You’re our parents, our teachers, our political leaders. In a few cases, you’ve even our grandparents. You inspired and encouraged us to follow our dreams, which come to think of it probably helps to explain why we still don’t have a full-time job yet. So much of what we are we owe to you, and we don’t just mean that figuratively. (Thanks again for the help with university tuition!) You’re family and we’ll always love you.

All of that makes this letter just that much harder to write, but we need to be honest with you: you’re lovely one-on-one or in small groups, but as a generation you’ve become positively sociopathic. You’re incapable of thinking about anyone else. It’s actually worse than that, as you don’t even seem to realize the implications of your actions for yourselves over the long run. You’re the Bernie Madoff Generation, and the last 20 years have been one big Ponzi scheme.

We’ve been watching you party since we were born, but it’s only now, just as we’ve arrived, gotten our coats off and placed our first order at the bar, that we learn that you’re planning on asking us to settle up the bill while you head on over to the retirement after-party. No matter how hard we work—and let’s be honest, we’re never going to work all that hard—we’re not going to be able to support you in retirement at the same time we try to raise our own families.

(Speaking of which, yes, we haven’t quite settled down yet, and no, we haven’t found the right person yet. Just give us some time, all right? We don’t want to rush into something before we’re ready, like you did with… Oh, sorry. Forget we brought that up, okay?)

To make matters worse, we’ve picked up some of the same habits that have gotten you into such trouble. If you think about it, you shouldn’t be so surprised. You were there when we got our first credit cards; heck, you drove us to the bank. (Of course, that was back in the days when you couldn’t order a credit card and become insolvent without getting out of bed. Thanks again, Internet.) It was your idea for us to get a line of credit to help out during university. You even co-signed it! (Incidentally, we promise we’ll start paying it off soon, once things settle down at work.)

But we still want to help. To show how serious we are, we’ve jotted down a couple of ideas that we think could really help you turn things around, to refocus on the most important things in life.

First, we would like you to try yoga. We think that it’ll really help you clear up your chakras, which are probably pretty clogged up from all the debt-related stress you must be feeling. (Actually, we thought it was spelled “shackra”, but luckily we got Gen X to proofread this and they caught the error. They’re such good proofers! Must come from all those years working as copy editors, waiting for you to retire.)

We also think you might have a better perspective if you spent a year volunteering in Africa. It’ll really help put things in perspective, to appreciate all that we have in our world, and really inspire you to make it a better place. Maybe in Bali? Bali’s in Africa, right? Anyways, we’ve heard it’s amazing.

Initially, we asked Gen X if they wanted to help write this letter. They’re still pretty bitter about that whole “grey ceiling” thing though, so we decided to just do it ourselves. However, they did suggest that you might want to think about therapy. Gen X swears by it, saying that it has really help them come to terms with themselves and their place in the world. Within another few sessions, 20 or 30 at the most, they’re sure they’ll be ready to get on with their lives. They believe it could do good things for you too.

We spoke to the Millennials about contributing as well, but they didn’t want to be seen making positive suggestions about how to change the world. Apparently, it would ruin their Occupy street cred. They did send some advice for you by text, though. We’ve copied it out here verbatim: “Dunno lol… mb they shd gt 1 more job? jk lol” They went on to add, “Hay aks them if we cn have teh car 2nite. Dnt 4gt k? Ok g2g l8r lol.”

We also asked Greatest Generation for their thoughts. They send their love, but they’re really worried about you too. Not sure how useful their suggestions will be, but we promised we’d pass them along so here they are. First, they thought that you should start investing in something called a “government savings bond”. We didn’t really know what they were talking about, but they said you’d know what it was. They also suggested liberating Europe as a way to build character and stimulate the economy, and asked when everyone was coming to visit.

As good as all of these ideas are, we know the problem isn’t going to get solved all at once. Because of this, we want this to be an ongoing conversation, and not just a one-off. It’s really important that we keep the lines of communication open. So, we started up a Facebook page where we can continue to exchange ideas. We’re talking about these issues on Twitter as well (#debt, #BabyBust, #GenXgetoveritalready), and we’re setting up a channel on YouTube to upload vlogs about it. We’ll also forward you a link to an online petition, asking the prime minister to fix the economy. Please sign!

Love,
Geny

P.S.: Could we borrow $100? We dropped our iPhone the other day and need to get a replacement, but we only have a couple hundred left on our line of credit. We promise we’ll pay you back this time, as soon as things settle down at work and we start getting more shifts.

Stewart Prest is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of British Columbia. His views and sense of humour are both his own.