Tag: generation (page 1 of 1)

Let’s agree, per argumentum, that the Boomers ruined everything. Why? According to the STBP (Standard Theory of Boomer Perfidy), because their sense of absolute entitlement led them to feather their own nests to the detriment of everyone who came after them.

But where did they get this sense of entitlement? From their parents, who had lived through the Great Depression, who knew through long years’ experience what it was like to live in deprivation and who therefore wanted their children to have everything they themselves had lacked.

So the Greatest Generation ruined everything.

But wait. If the Greatest Generation ruined everything because of their experience in the Depression, then we have to look at the causes of that, and … that’s complicated. According to one common theory, the chief cause of the depression was the concentration, in the 1920s, of too much money in the hands of a handful of plutocrats and their banks.

So Daddy Warbucks ruined everything.

Of course, others see the complicated and ultimately disastrous monetary situation of the 1920s as resulting from massive dislocations of the Western world’s economy that were among the aftereffects of the Great War.

So Gavrilo Princip ruined everything?

Someone needs to sort all this out, because I don’t see how we can proceed unless we have someone to point to and say, “You ruined everything.”

Fusion’s Patrick Hogan counted 47 institutions and industries that millennials have been accused of destroying so far, including credit, car culture, the American Dream, relationships, and golf. Of course, in each of these cases, there is a real story to be told: Yes, young people are buying less on credit; yes, car sales are down; and, not surprisingly, 48 percent of economically squeezed under-30s don’t buy into the uplift of the American Dream, according to one poll. But the language of these articles tells another story on top of those, one that isn’t backed up by any evidence at all: that millennials are ‘killing’ those things, choosing to eliminate them from our shared life. That’s a deeply frustrating story to keep reading, when headlines of ‘Millennials are killing the X industry’ could just as easily read ‘Millennials are locked out of the X industry.’ There’s nothing like being told precarity is actually your cool lifestyle choice.

The Myth of the Millennial as Cultural Rebel | Laura Marsh. This is right, and right in an important way. Now, by way of full disclosure: I think pretty much all generational characterizations are bullshit. But the blame-the-millennials narrative is one of the most pernicious.

However: I want to say something about that last sentence I quote. I know dozens and dozens of young people who could have boring 9-5 jobs in their home towns, or in other places lacking evident cultural amenities, but who have decided instead to live in New York or Austin or Chicago or L.A. in order to pursue certain intellectual and artistic aspirations which they believe they can only seriously pursue in such environments. To seek the way of life they want, they piece together temporary and poorly-paying work in the gig economy, they live in sketchy or downright dangerous neighborhoods, and they typically do without health insurance.

You can argue that the decision to live this way is a reasonable one, given these young people’s temnperaments and hopes. You can argue that in a well-ordered society people wouldn’t have to make choices like that. But you can’t say that these particular people haven’t made choices. They could have social and financial stability, or at least a lot more of it than they currently have, because in the places they come from they’re among the best and brightest; they’re desirable commodities. But they’ve chosen the risks of precarity because there are certain goods they believe they can only get access to by doing so.

The question I want to ask is: Do they really have to make that trade-off? Is it really impossible to pursue their aspirations in towns and cities other than the handful that seem, to them, to burn always with a gem-like flame?

That we are now in the midst of a carnival of Boomer-bashing is testament to the dubious triumph of generational thinking, the prevailing tendency, that is, to view social and political problems almost solely in terms of generations – itself, ironically, an intellectual legacy of the Sixties. But, as Bristow notes, the construction of Baby Boomers as a problem is also testament to a deeper anxiety, and a more profound pessimism, about the future, about our societal ability to make the world anew, to progress as a society. After all, the attack on the Sixties, as the time of the Baby Boomers’ youth, is implicitly an attack on youthful optimism and confidence in general. They had the party, runs the common metaphor brilliantly dissected by Bristow, and now it’s our job to clean up.  

Perhaps the nastiest part of this generational buck-passing is the extent to which it turns children against parents. Problems of the public world, problems of housing, pensions and the economy in general, are ‘rhetorically [brought] into the “home”, imbuing them with a level of emotional intensity properly reserved for private family dramas’. It turns out that the easy answers generated by the Baby Boomer cultural script are not really answers at all. They’re dead ends, distractions, scapegoats. And what’s more, they militate against the very thing we need a lot more of: social solidarity. United we stand, generationally divided we fall.