My generation gets called selfish a lot. Fair enough—some of us earned it. But last month, while sorting through old photos with my daughter, I found my acceptance letter to art school. The one I never attended because Dad needed help at the store after his heart attack.

That yellowed paper got me thinking. Every generation makes sacrifices, sure. But Boomers might be the first to watch our kids genuinely not understand what we gave up. Not because they’re ungrateful. Because we succeeded in making those sacrifices invisible.

1. The freedom to fail spectacularly

We couldn’t afford to mess up the way our kids can. One bad job meant no mortgage. One failed business meant losing the house. There were no parents’ basements to retreat to—our folks had converted them to sewing rooms the minute we left.

So we played it safe. Took the steady job over the interesting one. Stayed in marriages that had expired. We created the financial safety nets our kids now use to take risks we never could. They change careers at forty, start podcasts, follow their passion. Good for them. That was the whole point.

2. Living where we wanted to live

Remember when you could just pick a city because you liked it? Me neither. We moved for the job, stayed for the schools, endured suburbs we never wanted for districts with decent test scores.

My wife and I dreamed of San Francisco in the seventies. Ended up in suburban Ohio for thirty years. Not for the strip malls and cul-de-sacs, but because that’s where middle-class kids got educated without going into debt. Our children now live in Brooklyn, Portland, Austin—all the places we put on our “someday” list. They think we chose the suburbs. Truth is, we chose them.

3. The casual relationship with work

Our parents worked to live. Our kids demand work-life balance. We got caught in the middle—the first generation to let work colonize our entire existence. The always-on culture started with us bringing home those first clunky laptops.

We missed recitals for conference calls. Checked email during dinner. Turned vacations into “working vacations.” Not because we loved spreadsheets more than family, but because we were terrified of falling behind. We became human bridges between the old economy and the new one. No wonder our backs hurt.

4. Retirement at a reasonable age

We invented the gap year but never took one. Started working at twenty-two, figured we’d stop at sixty-five like our parents. Then pensions vanished, college costs exploded, and retirement became this moving target we’re still chasing.

I’m sixty-seven and still at my desk. Not because I’m passionate about quarterly reports, but because my kids needed degrees without debt. My parents needed care their insurance wouldn’t cover. That golden retirement our parents enjoyed? We’re funding it for them while making sure our kids won’t have to fund ours.

5. The privilege of being bad parents sometimes

We couldn’t just let kids be kids. Every moment became a development opportunity. Every summer needed enrichment. We invented helicopter parenting because we saw what was coming—the competition, the college arms race, the narrowing path to stability.

Our parents let us roam until streetlights came on. We scheduled our kids’ lives like tiny CEOs. Not because we thought it was better, but because free-range kids wouldn’t compete with kids who had coding camp at eight. We gave up relaxed evenings so our kids could have options. Did we overcorrect? Maybe. But their opportunities suggest it worked.

6. Authenticity in our careers

We became whoever the company needed. Learned golf for client relationships. Wore suits that made us feel like imposters. Laughed at bosses’ bad jokes and memorized mission statements nobody believed.

Our kids pursue purposeful work, companies that share their values. Beautiful. We made that possible by being the generation that faked enthusiasm for quarterly earnings. Dale Carnegie taught us to win friends and influence people, but mostly we taught ourselves to survive forty years of being someone else from nine to five. The exhaustion was worth it—it bought our kids the luxury of being themselves.

7. The chance to process our feelings

Men of my generation learned exactly one acceptable emotion: anger. Everything else got stuffed down or handled at happy hour. Women could feel, but never at work, never too much, never inconveniently.

We raised kids who go to therapy, who set boundaries, who name their feelings with the precision of paint chips. That’s not accident—it’s architecture. We built it while white-knuckling through our own undiagnosed anxiety and calling it “stress.” We couldn’t afford to fall apart. Someone had to keep the lights on while the kids learned emotional intelligence from the books we bought them.

Final thoughts

Here’s what I’ve learned about sacrifice—it only works if nobody notices. The minute your kids see what you gave up, it becomes guilt. And guilt ruins everything. So we stayed quiet. Made it look easy, even fun sometimes.

Look, I’m not asking for medals. Every generation thinks theirs had it hardest. But maybe it’s worth saying out loud, just once: we gave up more than anyone realizes. We were the bridge generation—analog childhoods, digital adulthoods, and exhausted from translating between the two.

The art school acceptance letter is back in the photo box now. Sometimes I wonder who I might have been. Then I see my kids—living lives I couldn’t afford, pursuing careers I couldn’t imagine, feeling feelings I couldn’t name—and think maybe this was my masterpiece after all.