The boomer people dislike is mostly a caricature: a big meta-analysis found generational differences in attitudes are small, while other research shows older adults reason more wisely about conflict, which is exactly the thing younger people actually want from them

Somewhere in the last decade the word “boomer” curdled from a description of a birth cohort into an insult. “OK boomer” did the rest, compressing a whole generation into a single eye-roll: out of touch, self-satisfied, lecturing from a position of unearned certainty. The premise behind wanting to be a boomer people appreciate is that there is a bad kind of older person and a better one. Before getting to the advice, it helps to notice that the caricature the phrase rests on is weaker than it looks.

The evidence on that comes from an unglamorous corner of research: studies of how generations actually differ at work.

The generation gap is smaller than the memes

In a 2012 meta-analysis in the Journal of Business and Psychology, David Costanza and colleagues pooled data on nearly 20,000 workers across four generations, from the wartime cohort through the boomers to the millennials, and compared them on job satisfaction, commitment to their employer, and intention to quit. If the generational stereotypes held, the differences should have been clear.

They were small and inconsistent. Contrary to the confident profiling in management books and comment sections, the generation a worker belonged to told you very little about their attitudes. Work is only one slice of life, and generational research is genuinely contested, so this is not the last word. But the popular certainty that boomers are a distinct psychological type runs well ahead of the data.

That is worth holding onto, because it moves the question. If the generation is not really the problem, then being an appreciated older person is not about escaping a generational essence. It is about ordinary behaviour, the same behaviour that makes anyone good or bad company.

What older adults genuinely bring

There is a more flattering finding to set against the stereotype, and it is about exactly the quality the young are supposed to find lacking in the old: judgement.

The psychologist Igor Grossmann and colleagues, in a 2010 study in PNAS, gave people stories about social conflicts, disputes between groups and between individuals, and asked them to reason through how each would unfold. They scored the answers for the ingredients of wisdom: taking multiple perspectives, looking for compromise, recognising the limits of one’s own knowledge, accepting that situations change. Older adults, between 60 and 90, did this better than younger and middle-aged people.

The asset that comes with age, on this evidence, is not speed or novelty. It is a certain skill with people and disagreements, a sense of how conflicts actually resolve. That happens to be one of the more useful things an older person can offer a younger one, and it is the opposite of the out-of-touch stereotype.

The difference between offering and imposing

So the appreciated older person is not fighting their generation. They are doing something specific with what age gives them. The psychologist Erik Erikson called the healthy task of later life generativity, a genuine investment in the people coming up behind you rather than a preoccupation with your own standing.

The failure mode is well mapped too. The psychologist Susan Fiske has shown that older people are commonly filed under a particular stereotype, warm but incompetent, likeable and slightly irrelevant. The behaviours that confirm the second half are the ones people quietly resent: the lecture, the certainty that the young have it easy, the dismissal of problems that look unfamiliar. The behaviours that refute it are unglamorous, and they are the ones that get appreciated: staying curious about a world that keeps changing, offering perspective when it is asked for rather than broadcasting it, and taking a younger person’s difficulties seriously even when they are not the difficulties you had.

A Nordic footnote

It is worth noting that the generational war is a largely Anglo-American production, sharpened by widening gaps in wealth and housing between the old and the young. The Nordic setup is not immune to this, but it is structured differently. Universal pensions and publicly provided elder care mean the generations are less locked into direct financial dependence on one another.

That is not a claim that older Scandinavians are wiser or warmer, which would be its own lazy stereotype. It is a structural point. When your parents’ security does not rest on your wallet, and yours does not rest on your inheritance, some of the resentment that fuels the boomer caricature has less to feed on. The relationship has more room to be a relationship.

What the evidence actually recommends

A few limits are worth stating. The wisdom finding comes from one study with an American sample, and it describes an average, not a rule; plenty of older people are neither wise nor curious, and plenty of young ones are both. Ageism runs in both directions, and treating any generation as a personality is the error this whole discussion started with.

What survives is unsurprising and quietly demanding. The older person people appreciate is not distinguished by their cohort but by generosity with what they have learned, curiosity about what they have not, and some humility about the limits of their own certainty. Those are not boomer virtues or millennial ones. They are the things that make anyone, at any age, worth listening to.