That wouldn't actually be such a bad philosophy if things were genuinely just as good and/or bad as it were when they were young. The main issue being that things are MUCH...much worse and they refuse to account for that in their thinking.

In their minds they "struggled to work their way through college, so why are you complaining about having to do it?" when, in reality, we're not complaining about having to work through college, we're complaining that we can't even do that. An entirely different problem...and yet, very easy to understand, but still...they persist in not wanting to admit simple and quite obvious truths about how shitty the general situation is, let alone role up their sleeves with us and work together to at least make it better.

Boomers think it's unfair to themselves, if their kids' starting platform in life is higher than theirs was.

Many of them do, and it's entirely backwards. I won't think it's fair unless my kids have a better starting position than I did.