Boomerschland: the country of boomers, for boomers, by boomers.

I am writing this article on my way back from Berlin in the seconds class of DB train Berlin-Amsterdam and my butt can't hurt more. I have just spent a couple of days here and the feeling is obvious: I'm in 1985. The way people talk to you, the passive aggression that just fills every shop and every server, no ability to pay with cards virtually anywhere, nur bar. The Stockholm syndrome of everyone around believing that they have mobile internet and everything is okay.

It occurred to me for a 100th time: this country lives in the past. Most of the German population is either in retirement or is about to retire, and so everything in this country is directed to this and only consumer. Boomers don't need the internet, they need faxes. They don't need card payments, they pay with coins.

"Bares ist wahres",

they say.

The entirety of this country is a geriatric care facility.

Germany is mentally frozen in the golden years of its main electorate: the 80s and 90s. It's solving those decades' problems, and many of those result from this very fact. And when your entire politics and state are caring for problems of the last century, the society walks with its ass forward. The country rides on a wagon with quadratic wheels, needing more and more people to solve the problems of quadratic wheels when everyone uses round ones for a quarter of a century.

Western German boomers miss the good old days of the Wirtschaftswunder and still believe they can hold the time with their bare hands and stay an isle of stability in an ever-changing world. So stable they still rely on faxes for official communication and your tax number can randomly change because your folder in the tax authority has changed the room and shelf where they store it in. This is no joke or exaggeration. The 80s is where Germans remain in their heads and this is where they would like to get back so desperately, to the time of their youth, that is a fickle friend and a distant dream.

You can see this homesickness everywhere: people reading news on paper, the way their homes and streets look, the way their cities look. The way they dress and talk, the way their cars are decorated. BMW interior looks like it was designed in the 80s and stayed there. You get leather seats, high-quality panels, warmed up seats in the era when you need an electric vehicle that drives by itself. And that is because the people who control the way those cars look are boomers, desperately missing the good old days of their youth. So forgotten, so translucent and wore off in their memory. Like basically everything else in their memory.

The Boomers of Boomerschland are old and tired. The only thing they can dream of is Mallorca Urlaub, their faces are sagged down, their looks are empty and sparkless. They have been in this same location for 35 years, this very same hotel, this very same room. They don't want things to change because change requires thinking. Change requires adaptation, and boomers can't adapt. And therefore, boomers don't ask for change, they want 1985 to stay around forever.

And when the boomers take all the political power, there is no place for the youth. There is no place for the needs of the youth, their new ideas, their motion and their juice. Their voices are muted, muffed and ignored because the only thing the boomers want is 1985 to stay around forever. And the youth can get to their 40s, have three children and have no political power whatsoever. Because the boomers don't want their dreams, they want their youth back.

The boomers want Tatort to stay for another 2500 episodes, and then 2500 more, as the better the medicine gets, the longer they will stay around. The rule of the decaying flash is imminent in Germany and there is no way out of it.

The Boomers of Boomerschland don't trust computers because there were no computers around in 1985, the golden time of their youth. In 1985, they had Anrufbeantworter, and they still have kept the one they had back then. Because why replace it if it works. And computers are only for hackers to steal their Jugenstil porcelain collection, they know for sure those Russian hackers want only steal it. And nothing like that can happen to their cash they store right in that porcelain collection: 20s in the pepper, 50s in the sugar, 100s in the bay leaf porcelain containers.

They also don't need the Internet. Who needs the Internet if you have television, the same good old way as it was back in 1985. The Internet is only for the Russian hackers, vernünftige menschen don't need that. And smartphones. And cards. The boomers know what is Gegenstandware, only things you can touch can have value, as it was in 1985, only the things one can take and carry away. Paying for software? I don't think so. I would rather buy a car. And after all, it cannot be that good, that much faster than sending a good old letter or fax. Or just come by, you have a plenty of time and will to chat around when you are retired.

And this annoying newspeak they all push in the working place.

Scrum? Ja, we have that, but the sprints are three months longs (real story).

Story points? Ja, then we better make them person days.

Card payments? Ja, but only starting from 20€.

Digitalization? Ja, we scan our letters into PDFs, print it and send over fax. I promise I'm not kidding.

The senior electorate in Germany will only grow. According to Bundesstatistikamt:

...the share of working-age people (20 to 64 years) in the total population will fall from 61% in 2005 to 55% by 2030 and then to slightly more than 50% by 2050.

So the tendency will persist and somewhere in the 2050s, when Ady is old, Germany will live in 2019. But will Ady?

Almost any boomer is a guaranteed climate change denier, homophone, xenophobe and doesn't speak any other language than their own. German boomers are no exception.