Demographics show that we are entering a battle between young and old. I call it the 'Age War.' The young want to hang onto their money to grow their families, businesses, and wealth. The old want the tax and investment dollars of the young to sustain their old age.

When life stages become zero-sum

There's something genuinely uncomfortable about framing life stages as opposing armies, yet the tension Kiyosaki describes is real enough that most of us feel it without needing a catchy name. You see it when young people grumble about Social Security taxes, or when retirees vote against school funding. The problem isn't that older and younger generations have different needs—of course they do. It's that we've built systems where those needs feel like a zero-sum game, where your security somehow threatens mine.

But here's the part that doesn't quite land: this framing assumes people stay in one camp forever. Most of us will grow old ourselves, and most of us have been young and dependent before we could earn. The real issue isn't that generations are at war, but that we've created financial structures so brittle and disconnected from reality that they pit life stages against each other instead of building them as part of one continuous human journey.

What actually matters is whether the systems we inherit make sense—whether they're sustainable, fair, and honest about trade-offs. That's harder to think about than a battle, but it's the conversation worth having.