Typical boomer response: Misguided over-identification.

The other week I was talking with my mother, and I was commenting on how my general finances now look around the level that they did back in the mid-2000s, right when I had moved to the city that I used to live in, and I was refreshed by the rents there. "After the 2009 economic crisis, affordability just fell apart," I was like. "And though there were some improvements here and there with minimum wage, you'd get a little of that, and then other expenses would go up, and that would just happen over and over, and so you just never were able to get back to how things were back when I moved there." And, I commented on how my one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker from my old resthome job and I had been talking about that a few times, and she totally thought that, too. "But that's been going on for decades," my mom was like. So, I then broke it down for her, how rents increased like 50-100% over around 12-15 years, and how you could get maybe a very cheap $575 1BR right when I had moved to the city, but that type of apartment would be around $900 right now. "That's a lot of money," my mom was like, saying something about what a "big difference" it was. So, I asked her then if she had ever seen that before in her adult life in prior years, where rents went up 50-100% over the course of 12-15 years while wages just never really kept up at anywhere near that level, and she had to admit that she hadn't. "So there are some similarities," I was like, "But come on, this kind of thing just isn't on a comparable level to what you've seen in the past." And, she had to admit that it wasn't. Honestly, I swear we repeat this conversation around every 4-6 months, on some different economic thing, where she always wants to automatically dismiss current-day concerns by saying that they're the same as the past, but then when you press her on the particulars, she has to admit that they're not the same, really. It's like she can't intuitively grasp magnitude and scale differences in budgets, somehow. And, the worst part is that she claims that she gets how bad the present generation has it, economically. She really thinks she gets it.