Millennial Wonders Why Baby Boomers Are So Obsessed With Raking Leaves
nomadsoulphotos | CanvaWhere I live, sometime in late October, we finally reach the point where all the leaves are off the trees. While the sight of bare branches against a steel-grey sky is eminently depressing, it brings with it one major benefit: All the Boomers in my neighborhood have, at long last, given up the ghost on clearing away the autumn leaves and finally silenced their incessant leaf blowers.
If you don't live in a suburban setting, this might not mean much to you, but those of you who do have been absolutely beset by the (wholly unnecessary) fall ritual of leaf-clearing, for which Boomers, for some reason, seem to have a particular enthusiasm. And it left an online forum user wondering: What exactly is the deal with this?
Why are Baby Boomers so obsessed with raking leaves?
Seriously, what is this about exactly? Every year, the leaves fall as they should, and the Boomers in my neighborhood are out there immediately raking them up and blowing them into piles, and they're doing so incessantly practically every weekend.
Personally? I do it once. I wait until the trees are bare and then rake them up once and for all, and that's if I'm not feeling so lazy that I just suck them up in the lawn mower and keep it pushin'. I have better things to do!
Not so for the Boomers in my neighborhood or in many others' neighborhoods either. "I’ve got Boomers on both sides of my new house, and you would think that leaves are radioactive with the amount of time they spend on ridding their yards of them," this Millennial user wrote in a Reddit post.
Do Boomers all have some kind of collective trauma around leaves? Is it because Kennedy was assassinated at the peak of fall color or something? What is going on?!
The Millennial said his Boomer neighbors are constantly running their leaf blowers at all hours
As of today, I no longer remember what it sounds or feels like not to hear a leaf blower running somewhere at every waking moment of the day. That drone is as constant as the stars, as reliable as the sun rising in the east. It never stops. The Boomers shall not be deterred.
I'm apparently not alone, either. My co-workers messaged me today with similar stories about Boomers' unceasing leaf clean-up as this user's, which goes as follows: "Is 6:30 am too early to wake your neighbors blowing leaves? Apparently not for these Boomers." He went on to say, "Weekends are dedicated to, you guessed it, blowing leaves and then mulching them with the riding mower, a two-fold day of all things: leaves."
It just never ever ends, and it's not just us who have noticed it. Legendary Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett, in case you didn't know, has become famous on the internet for her exasperation with America's love affairs with leaf blowers. There are entire supercuts of her talking about it on TV shows and red carpets.
"I could be here talking to you for three hours about leaf blowers," Blanchett said in one interview. "I hate them so much." And it's the futility she finds most galling. "You blow them from one side of the pavement to the other, only for them to be blown back again," she told Hot Ones host Sean Evans. "And then you go, 'Oh, I gotta blow them back.'"
Nobody has ever so perfectly encapsulated this most foolish of man's traditions — or American man's traditions, anyway, and specifically Boomer American man's traditions. And her view on it takes on even more salience, given that raking leaves is totally unnecessary.
Fallen leaves are actually good for your yard and important to biodiversity — you can just leave them alone
There really is no need to rake leaves — and they're actually good for the biodiversity of your yard, from the animal life in your neighborhood to your lawn itself.
Those leaves have all kinds of upsides. The mulch created, as they break down, adds highly beneficial nutrients to the soil of your lawn and yard. They also provide shelter for all kinds of bugs, small animals, and little organisms, including ones that are beneficial to your lawn and garden.
They also help with everything from abating erosion to maintaining the proper moisture levels in your yard. Plus, they have a positive environmental impact. All that smoke from burning them is a pollutant, and the garbage bags you put them in otherwise take eons to break down in a landfill — if they ever break down at all.
So take a page out of Cate Blanchett's book and leave the leaves, Boomers. Please. We're all begging you. Release us from the tyranny of your leaf blowers. Your yard and our psyches alike will thank you.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
