Most of the responses were not violent. They were angry, defensive, sometimes generous, and often revealing. Taken together, they didn’t refute the idea that a giant cohort of older Americans is lodged in the economy’s throat. They tell a story, sometimes a primal scream, that’s more complicated than “boomers bad, everyone else good.” They also show how hard it is to write about generations as economic facts without people hearing it as a moral indictment. Above all, many of them feel just as stuck as millennials and Gen Z.

Another reader, a 73-year-old who described herself as an “old lady in Phoenix,” threatened something much tamer. “If I was your mom, I would spank you!” she wrote. But it’s true, she added, boomers like her were lucky that they were able to “play outside and had the best music and affordable homes and good jobs with no college.”

One correspondent dispensed with metaphor entirely. “You and people like you should all be shot in the head and dumped in a ditch,” he wrote, before insisting this was “not a threat” but “a statement of fact” about what “ought to” happen to people like me. That exchange went to our legal team.

“Dear Nick,” one email began. “I apologize for not dying soon enough for you, so your generation can pick over my financial bones. Sincerely, a boomer who is in excellent health (sorry).” Another wondered: “Are you suggesting putting boomers on ice floes or turning them into Soylent green?”

The reaction to my column was less a comment section than an X‑ray of how aging Americans feel and think about age, blame, and a system that feels stuck. Some readers heard a structural argument about demographics and housing; others heard a death wish aimed at the Baby Boom generation. A few went further than that.

The piece argued that the U.S. economy is like a python that swallowed a pig when boomers entered the housing and labor markets in the 1970s, and that bulge is still moving through. Boomers, boosted by falling interest rates, rising asset prices, and better health, are staying longer in big houses and senior jobs, leaving less space for younger families to buy homes or move up at work. They also dominate the presidency and the Senate, with little sign of relinquishing control. As a group, they hold a disproportionate share of the houses, high‑status jobs, and institutional power—and they’re hanging on to all three. That’s great for them, suffocating for the generations behind them, and it provokes strong reactions all around.

I thought I was writing an interesting column about demographic changes and structural forces in the economy, but “ the pig and the python ” struck a nerve. America’s Boomers told me so.

Story Continues

‘What exactly did I do wrong?’

If you only read the subject lines—“Boomers Strangling the Economy,” “What’s your damage?” “Article is full of lies”—you’d assume the entire boomer mailbag was hostile. A fair number were.

But a large share of the mail didn’t start with ideology but biography. One reader laid out the classic life script in bullet points: “I bought a true fixer upper, worked 2 jobs through my 20s & 30s, went to night school to get a degree, raised my family, took care of my mom in her older years, started a business [and] employed young people,” they wrote. “What exactly did I do wrong? … What is it that you want me to do differently?”

Another email came from a boomer who built their home “with the help of a few friends” and bristled at the idea that they were expected to vacate it on command. “As a boomer born in ’61 it is now expected that I leave my home?” they asked. “I will leave it when I am good and ready to do so.”

A different reader put it more bluntly: “I’m 67, worked all my life, still paying on my mortgage and can’t afford to move or quit – my medication I MUST take runs over $2,000 a month after insurance.”

One of the most affecting responses came from a woman who described herself simply as “a boomer” living “in a large house with my four dogs..” She said her Gen X husband moved them to be closer to our jobs, “then in 2017, he went out running on his lunch hour and literally dropped dead.” She looked at downsizing, but “it was actually more cost-effective to stay where I’m at because smaller, not as nice houses were more expensive than the house I was living in … some of the houses that used to be $100k in the next subdivision over are now worth more than I paid for my house.” The mortgage wasn’t covered by his insurance, so she kept working.

The woman who wanted to spank me shared a similar experience: “We are not moving ’cause where would we go?? One bedroom apts. cost more than our mortgage! We cannot afford a senior living place … we are NOT rich, just comfortable at the moment.” She’s not imagining it. Since the pandemic, the median U.S. home price has grown roughly 40%-50%, with many Sun Belt and pandemic‑boom markets in the 60–80% range. This is roughly twice the rate of median income, and rents in many metro areas have outpaced both. A one‑bedroom apartment in a lot of Sun Belt cities now costs as much or more than the monthly payment on a 1990s‑era mortgage locked in at 3%.

There is a throughline in these stories. These boomers do not feel like they are hoarding anything. They feel like they followed the rules—buy, don’t rent; stay put once you lock in a good rate; work as long as you can—and are now being told that the compound effect of their choices looks, from the outside, like a historical crime.

‘One of the biggest reasons many don’t move: taxes’

Some of the most concrete replies came from people who agreed that the system is jammed but insisted that the culprit is policy, not personality. A California reader argued that my original piece “doesn’t address one of the biggest reasons many don’t move: taxes.”

“Our house cost $1.05M 28 years ago and is now worth around $4.2M,” they wrote. “Selling would trigger close to $1M in combined federal and California taxes.” Under current rules, they pointed out, capital gains above the $500,000 homeowner exclusion are hit with federal capital gains tax, a 3.8% net investment income tax, and as much as 13.3% in California income tax. With those numbers, staying in place is not selfish; it is rational. (This is a dynamic that I covered last fall.)

Another mailer pushed the same idea in more populist terms: “It’s not anybody’s or any generation’s fault that the economy [is] the way it is,” they wrote. “It’s more or less the government’s fault for being greedy and greedy corporations [that] drove all these prices up. Don’t try to blame people for what your corporations and your government is doing.”

Even some of the readers who seemed to loathe everything about the piece admitted the structure of our economy is the real villain. “We are mostly a generation of people who can’t pay their bills and have to work beyond retirement age,” one wrote. “We can’t afford to sell our homes and move.”

Boomers aren’t quietly exiting the stage: Americans now retire, on average, in their early 60s—around 64 for men and 62 for women, up from about 57 in 1991—even as full Social Security benefits for younger boomers don’t kick in until 67, and roughly 9% of Americans 75 and older are still working. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the 65–74 and 75+ age groups will continue to see labor‑force growth, much of it in part‑time or self‑employed roles.

The story of Kate

And then there’s Kate, from Montana. Kate wrote to me several weeks ago in response to a piece I wrote about how America got rich and then got sad, based on research from the University of Chicago’s Sam Peltzman. The retired economics legend found that over 50 years of survey data, nothing compares to the “great happiness crash” that occurred since 2020. Kate’s response has been sitting in my inbox ever since, with permission to use her first name.

Kate is 71 years old, she’s an operating room nurse, and she’s the opposite of a cartoon villain.

She started earning as a babysitter at 12 and filing tax returns in 1971, four years before she graduated nursing school. In 1975, she walked into an operating room as a brand‑new RN making $4.75 an hour and fell in love with the work—the precision, the stakes, the feeling of a team moving “like a single organism.” She would spend the next 51 years scrubbing, circulating, assisting, and eventually leading those teams.

“I am not writing this for sympathy,” she told me. “I am writing this because fine is not the same as secure, and I think a lot of Americans my age—especially women, especially those of us who worked in caregiving professions—know exactly what I mean.”

Outside the hospital, she raised five kids—two biological and three who became family through circumstances. Today, one runs a charter school and is preparing to open a second campus; another is a senior research scientist at Eli Lilly; another is a physical therapist; the others are building their own lives. “Whatever I did, however imperfectly, it produced people I am proud of,” she wrote.

If you want to understand how a country can be richer on paper and more anxious in practice, Kate is the kind of person Peltzman is talking about: decades of essential work, modest assets, and a constant fear that one policy change or medical bill could knock it all down.

By most measures, she’s doing fine. She has a 401(k) worth well over $100,000, a Roth IRA she’s barely had a chance to fund, and six months of emergency savings. She owns a house, though less than a third of the mortgage is paid off, but she told me, “I live in a state of unease, knowing my [Social Security] could evaporate to less than half of what I have earned over 51 years.” She said she doesn’t want to depend on a “handout” from her adult children, so she’s started renting out a spare bedroom to traveling nurses.

“I see myself continuing to work indefinitely and I am lucky enough to have good health so I can … I would also say, [I’m] not happy with the stage of my life so far, but still working towards the goal of living in solitude and peace.”

‘Everything is electronic’ and ‘ALL STUCK’

Some responses sounded like Kate’s. “As a 46‑year‑old with a child at home and 78‑year‑old boomer parent,” one wrote, “I’m continuously struggling to make sense of the economy.”

This reader shared that her father wanted to buy a smaller home and close out her deceased mother’s accounts, but feels left behind by the pace of change of modern life: “everything is electronic, including trying to buy a smaller home … The paperwork has doubled and the e‑signature process confuses him – there’s an app for everything. He’s too proud to let me help, but the fine print is too small for him to see.” He could no longer “walk into an office and talk with someone local,” she wrote, and she feared that all the changes that seemed normal to her generation were “making [it] harder for them.”

Other sandwich‑generation readers wrote in to say that the “pig in the python” metaphor captured exactly how it felt to try to raise kids and care for aging parents inside this economy. A 34-year-old with one kid said that even though he was a parent now, he still feels like a child next to his own parents’ generation: “They control the institutions and aren’t going to vote against their self interest – brutally put.”

Another accused my column of laying out “a table of untruths” that made her generation “a target for violence,” but then added: “I’m 67, worked all my life, still paying on my mortgage and can’t afford to move or quit.”

Kate could have written any of those lines. Divorce “cost [her] dearly,” she said; it took nine years to get back into a home of her own. She wasn’t offered a 401(k) until 1988. She was never taught how to invest; money was a secret in her family. Only later did she learn that her father, a blue‑collar Merck worker who burned his back in a vat accident the year she was born, retired at 55 with over $1 million.

“Dead‑old‑people sweepstakes”

A smaller group of correspondents engaged directly with the big, uncomfortable numbers. One reader sent a “boomer side‑note” about the looming wealth transfer, pointing out that estimates show it “accelerates dramatically from 2030–2045.” In a follow‑up, he compared it to “the nightmare that followed covid’s free‑money‑for‑everybody, only more sustained.” The question, he added, is if the government tries to “get in on the dead‑old‑people sweepstakes,” wondering whether Washington would try to take an even bigger cut of the coming inheritance wave than required minimum distributions already do.

“There are a lot of people on really tight finances,” he added, “so a smallish inheritance would get spent … at the level that drives consumer inflation.” He asked readers to remember the early‑pandemic moment “when all of a sudden the brands were just wiped off the shelves, along with steaks, roasts, etc because people had that extra money they’d never had before.” He wondered, will that dynamic play out on a wider scale for the next 15 or 20 years?

That is a darker version of the same structural argument: a large cohort with many assets moving through a constrained system distorts everything in its path. First on the way up, then on the way out.

Who is choking what?

The responses to the column split roughly into six buckets:

Bucket Typical move What it reveals Personal‑attack critics “You want us dead / Soylent green / a target for violence” Structural critique sounds like a death sentence Trapped but sympathetic “I’d move or retire if I could, but the math and red tape don’t work” The bottleneck is real, on both sides Anti‑label purists “Generations aren’t generalizable; we’re not a monolith” Discomfort with blunt cohort tools Policy‑first critics “Blame taxes, government, greedy corporations, not us” Will accept structure if labels soften Macro conversants “Wealth transfer, RMDs, inflation, institutions” Will talk frankly about power and demographics Fear‑voice emails “We are ALL STUCK…I live in complete terror” Aging feels precarious, not cushy

Under the rage, what comes through most clearly is fear. Fear of aging, fear of losing status, fear of running out of money, fear of being told that a life spent following the rules now looks like a historical offense.

“Yes we are ALL STUCK,” wrote one reader, offering perhaps the clearest summary of the response. “I have no idea what the economy is going to be like. I live in complete terror and anxiety all day every day.”

Boomers are stuck in homes they cannot easily leave, jobs they may not feel safe leaving, and systems they increasingly do not know how to navigate. Their children are stuck behind them, waiting for inventory, wage growth, and institutional turnover that never seems to arrive.

Kate told me that she laughed at the “pig in the python” description and said she thinks it’s true about Boomers “clogging the pipeline,” noting that it’s true for some more than others, of course. What bothers her the most, she said, is “millennials and those behind them not having the resources or houses available to them for their families.”

“I don’t know how people are surviving in this economy,” Kate said, adding that she’s felt this way since the Great Recession. And no, it wasn’t better in the old days: “The ’80s were hell, with interest rates of 18.5%.”

The real lesson is not that one generation is uniquely wicked or uniquely wronged. It is that policy, prices, technology and demographics have built a country and an economy where each cohort experiences the same blockage from a different side. The common refrain is the same: I did what I was supposed to do. I still don’t feel secure.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com