Sadly, this even applies to some extent to my thoughtful, educated, humane (boomer) mother who, nevertheless, to some extent buys into the centrist, system-supportive nonsense about civility and whitewashing of the past. She's done amazing things in her career, but she doesn't have quite enough bandwidth to encompass an unflinching understanding of how things have also changed for the worse since she defied her college advisor who told her "sciences are too difficult for women." Would I want to be back in 1965? Of course not! Does not wanting to go back mean that changes since then have been consistently positive and equitable? Nope!
@caitlinburke hard same. i think you hit it on the button there. there are plenty of kind, considerate, and smart boomers out there, but this is definitely a trend.
my parents are tail-end boomer generation; i'm at the very start of millennial (you know, the "oregon trail generation"). they're very kind, considerate people - in a way, a lot more considerate than many in their generation have proven themselves to be - but they also are stubborn about that willingness to accept that they were either lucky to live the lifestyle they did or that they've done anything to negatively impact the future.
most of the time it's an attitude like "i know this is bad [for the planet, for society, etc], but it's so CONVENIENT" or a "why would you go against this institution? it's been around forever!". they're carrying a certain obligation to longstanding things, not because they believe in them, per se, but because they're the way it's always been.
and i DO see change in them in some ways. but there's still so much of this attitude: "i know how i'm acting is destructive/exclusive/selfish/hateful, but it's just how things are!"
it's something i hope my generation learns to keep adapting to - i sometimes have to kickstart myself into being better than i am , so i hope we don't harden into a stubbornness of our own over time.
I can see some pretty obvious differences between the environment I graduated college into and today. First of all, housing prices were much lower. You could rent a room in a share house or a studio apartment for about 25% of your income from a full-time job that paid about $7/hr. There was a bad recession, but it was over fairly quickly, and was followed by a boom economy. And the big stroke of luck we had, Gen X, as we slacked our way to age 30, was the Internet boom and the explosion of new jobs that followed. That is ongoing to some extent, but it was a lot easier to break into the tech industry in 1998 than it is today, in my impressions. There was so much demand and much less competition. If nothing else, you could get an A+ cert and get a job with that, pretty much a sure thing.
I got yelled at for being a GenX person and we didn't "already do all the heavy lifting vs boomers" that millenials have too. I'm like, you're giving up just like we did. You think we didn't have a go already, we already had our turn. Maybe class analysis and not contrived intergenerational warfare is the answer you are after?
I can also relate here in Scandinavia. Many of my friends and I talk about our boomer parents (mine are born 47-48) who think the climate crisis is probably overrated, and who spend a lot of their retirement flying around the world etc. yet still, I keep thinking of how much the economy has grown in their time. They say when we were kids they used around ⅓-½ of their income just on (super simple) food! For us it is like 1/6, and we eat so much better. I guess they might feel “entitled” in some way to enjoying the affluent lifestyle they have always dreamed of. And excuse me if I’m wrong, but I guess that sense of entitlement might be a little stronger in America, where the idea of being “self made” and having “earned” your money seems much more important to quite a lot of people than I think is here.
my parents are tail-end boomer generation; i'm at the very start of millennial (you know, the "oregon trail generation"). they're very kind, considerate people - in a way, a lot more considerate than many in their generation have proven themselves to be - but they also are stubborn about that willingness to accept that they were either lucky to live the lifestyle they did or that they've done anything to negatively impact the future.
most of the time it's an attitude like "i know this is bad [for the planet, for society, etc], but it's so CONVENIENT" or a "why would you go against this institution? it's been around forever!". they're carrying a certain obligation to longstanding things, not because they believe in them, per se, but because they're the way it's always been.
and i DO see change in them in some ways. but there's still so much of this attitude: "i know how i'm acting is destructive/exclusive/selfish/hateful, but it's just how things are!"
it's something i hope my generation learns to keep adapting to - i sometimes have to kickstart myself into being better than i am , so i hope we don't harden into a stubbornness of our own over time.
whew, this response is LONG. sorry about that.