The boomers represent the biggest social change of any generation in centuries. The pill rock and roll women in the workplace divorce MLK JFK Malcom X etc.
Everything past them is an echo and Im not even sure it's on the right side of history.
Churchill drank 12 ounces a day that was normal before boomers. They are not heavy drinkers historically speaking.
And they did not have access to material goods like we do.
The ME generation is every generation from here on in so long as consumerism expands.
If we're going off pet theories, mine's got to be the lasting effects of a lifetime of lead poisoning[1]. Difficult adult personalities[2], emotional regulation[3] and emotional intelligence[4] are linked to childhood lead exposure. I'll be the first to admit that this is a strong stance, weakly held, and that we're probably never going to have conclusive evidence as to the likely infinite factors at play, but it's still fun to try to explain the clear patterns of behavior associated with these people.
I don't see any popular evidence that Boomers were different in inherent personality, rather there were enormous social changes afoot brought about by inevitable historical shifts, which puts them in a different context.
Younger people also don't have little living memory of those before them for a basis of comparison.
My Great Grandparents were disowned from their respective families because one was French Catholic the other English Protestant. That wold have been 'normal' for the time. That's not even the tip of the iceberg for 'estranged family'.
My German ancestors would not attend my Irish ancestors wedding reception (they did the ceremony, but not afterwards), because they felt the Irish were brooding alcoholics. Which would itself be a bit of racism, but it was essentially true, I mean, the stories I've been told ...
Some of the casual Boomer bigotry I see on other Social Media and TikTok especially is fairly shocking, it's as though people have no insight into what happened in the last century, especially the later part of it.
Maybe it's possible that lead poisoning had something to do with it, but I wonder if it would have changed things that much.
We no longer have any living memory of the holocaust, the introduction of mass media / TV, life before vaccines, serious adversity, life before plastics (!), birth control, antibiotics, vast infant mortality, real war (Vietnam being the last), or overt and institutional racism (i.e. the bank policy says 'no loans to blacks'), or direct segregation (this fountain is for whites only) or when almost everyone 'went to church' as a cultural event, not so much for overt religiosity, but wherein it was an more or less just a community activity that 'people did'.
In terms of material possessions, safety, opportunity, legal recourse, and focus on self ennoblement and aspiration, we live in an age like no other. We are collectively like the children of a 'Very Wealthy Family' - some a little better off than others.
Hating on an older generation is a perennial pastime, it's the lack of context that's a bit disturbing.
Finally, I believe that every individual story of social malaise is 'very complicated' where there are generally few true heroes and few true villains.
Fantastic comment. People who cannot wrap their head around this can look at developing countries where generational change over the last few decades has been even more drastic. When you cannot figure out why certain practices came to be, it behooves you to look at the environment more closely.
I remind myself that even the broad use of Acetaminophen and NSAIDs as OTC pain relievers only came about sometime in the last 100 years. While the raw ingredients that go into pain control have been known for hundreds of years if not longer, their formulation and dose was not standardized until very recently, and you certainly couldn't get 100 pills for $10 from the grocery store. As someone who uses these drugs semi-regularly, I cannot imagine having to do without them. OTC analgesics improved QoL and productivity by orders of magnitude. This is something even Churchill's generation did not have.
To me it’s funny when people loudly shout the progress a generation made themselves while at the same time saying “and no further!”.
The truth is most of the older generations right now not only don’t want to understand what the struggles are of the day they live in, they insist on keeping as much power and influence as possible. They’re now learning (or not) the lesson that they taught the generation before them.
> In terms of material possessions, safety, opportunity, legal recourse, and focus on self ennoblement and aspiration, we live in an age like no other
This isn’t true by practically any metric other than violent crime rates.
My grandparents were born on farms without plumbing or electricity and they were not 'poor' relative to those in the region, they were about equal to others in nearby farms and villages.
In just a few generations we have: cars, electricity, ratio, air travel, safe air travel, plastics (just consider how pervasive that one is), dishwashers, washing machines/dryers (fundamentally changing domestic work), microwaves, 'all season' produce, vast array of selection, home ownership, consumer finance, credit, TV, the internet, access to information instantaneously from around the world, educational access (in 1930 about 4% went to College, now it's 40%), insulin, outpatient heart surgery, antibiotics etc.. Walmart, the Dollar Store, Target, Costco and Amazon have exploded consumerism far even beyond those things: you can buy any little trinket for a few dollars, and have it delivered from China to your door.
We live in an age of unparalleled material abundance, really, it's not even an argument, so it says more about perspective than anything.
You can draw the line probably anywhere from 'Silent Gen to Millenial' but there is no doubt, from here on in, the pluarity of people in Wealthy Nations have completely surpassed any concept of 'material need'.
You could also pay for housing healthcare and college with a part time job. This is like saying Rockefeller wasn’t rich because he didn’t have an iPhone. Individual economics for recent generations in the US is much more dire than you make out, though yes creature comforts are more abundant. Income inequality is already at levels of the 1920s. The ownership classes are making away with all the assets and the security of common people has gone down drastically.
Seems like you have the generations mixed up. Boomers are born 1946-1964.
JFK, MLK, and Malcom X were not Boomers, they were all born during the Greatest and Silent Generation. Most of the Boomers were children when those men died.
Rock and Roll was invented before most of them were born.
The birth control pill first became available to their mothers before half the generation was/wasn’t conceived.
Divorce law changed before many of them could be married so they were more likely the to be the first generation to have divorced parents.
You're conflating the pedantic aspects of an aspect of cultural epiteths such as 'when people were born', with the materiality of their impact.
All of the things I've mentioned 'came of age' during the Baby Boomer era - those are cultural epithets of their generation - not previous generations.
It doesn't matter when Malcom X was born - he was a figure of the 1960's 'massive shift in social justice' which is a definitive characteristic of the Baby Boomer generation - the were the one's out on the streets.
'Divorce' did not start happening in a material way until that time. Baby Boomers were the first generation to start to experience it as children - and then - were the first generation to do it themselves at rates never seen in history.
Baby Boomers were the first generation to embrace Birth Control as socially normative. Sex without babies.
Both of those things alone - Divorce and Birth Control - those are enough to make a very unique generation in history, but the Boomers had so much more.
You know the song 'The Age of Aquarius'? Well, they were not wrong, it was the dawn of a new age.
I recently saw some film footage from Manchester, 1907, with what seemed to be all sorts of happy children in the streets, though most of them were literally homeless. Children. All over the streets. Maybe it's a fact we are 'aware of' but seeing it live is visceral and shocking. If Gen X/Y/Z could be exposed to those things that are almost within living memory, I think they would have a different view of themselves. Gen X grandparents could tell them about a lot of that. Fewer Millennials and almost none for Gen Z.
I think you’re right about the impact of many of these on the Baby Boomers especially divorce and birth control.
I also feel like in your defense of Baby Boomers you’re taking away from previous generations, especially with regards to the civil rights movement which my grandparents were involved in and experienced first-hand when my parents were too young or weren’t alive yet and my parents are Boomers.
Same with music like Rock and Roll. No doubt Boomers grew up with it but the people at the first shows weren’t Boomers.
The civil rights movement had the most impact on the Boomers, but how could they be on the streets when most of them weren’t born or weren’t old enough to be involved?
This is a really weird way to respond to someone who suffered real abuse from a narcissistic abuser. You might get more sympathetic ears choosing to defend boomers in a thread not about abuse from predominantly boomer-aged parents.
"they are not counter-culture or friends of Rock,"
Boomers are almost 100% 'Rock' listeners, I don't know a single one who isn't. And of course - they created it.
The 'Satanic Rock' issue was a tiny blip in history, the extreme side of what is frankly an artifact of over conscientiousness and it really wasn't a big deal at all.
It was absurd for parents to be concerned about Swing, Jazz and the Beatles (but they were!), but for 'Satanic Rock' it's not completely outrageous.
It's actually rational for parents to be concerned that all of a sudden, children are listening music, reading about, and dancing around to people that sing about 'Satan' - who is ostensibly a bad character.
That hadn't happened in history, I can imagine it putting some people on edge.
It takes a second order awareness to understand that those things were not inherently destructive. It took some time to process.
Much like hyper realist and violent video games, where you go around mass killing and cutting people's throats - there was (and is) some fuss around that because it's not unreasonable for people to think that that could be really influential, and desensitize people to violent acts.
"they are not counter-culture"
Many of them were counter culture, but that's not really the point though ... being 'counter culture' is not synonymous with being moral, better, enlightened or anything really.
Calling the satanic panic rational is quite a statement. Nor a blip - it was a formative part of large amounts of the millennial generation, along with DARE, purity rings and the Christian Right legislating lessons into cartoons.
The problem is that people are speaking of two different groups of people when they speak of the boomers (and the boomers were more than two groups of people):
1. the activists who, in their heyday, brought about enormous social change and
2. the reactionary non-activists who later tried to tear that all down
The people who loved disco and the people who hated it were of the same generation.
I agree that people should avoid ascribing characteristics or assigning blame to entire generations like this. It just pisses people off and drives them into camps.
The boomers represent the biggest social change of any generation in centuries. The pill rock and roll women in the workplace divorce MLK JFK Malcom X etc.
Everything past them is an echo and Im not even sure it's on the right side of history.
Churchill drank 12 ounces a day that was normal before boomers. They are not heavy drinkers historically speaking.
And they did not have access to material goods like we do.
The ME generation is every generation from here on in so long as consumerism expands.