If there is one thing that has ascended over the last few years, it’s hatred of the Baby Boomer generation. I ought not have to link much to prove my point, but if you want a distilled sample, head over to Vox Day’s blog.
Vox is a little older than me – he’s Gen X and I’m Gen Y – but the last three generational cohorts (X, Y, Millennial) all share similar attitudes towards their immediate predecessors.
The thing is, this is not the standard intergenerational hostility and resentment that has been standard in the west for the entirety of modernity, perhaps all of history. This isn’t complaining about your square parents and their boring music. This is a much deeper, more spiritual resentment, and it’s a thing that has reached its apex recently, not when any of us were “rebellious” teenagers.
The hate is recent because it has taken us a while to fully inherit the world the Boomers have given us and to mature enough that we can accurately judge the collective actions of the post-World War II and make real comparisons.
The younger generations had to grow up and suffer failed relationships before they realized that their ability to pair bond and maintain a marriage has been crippled their own parents’ divorces and free attitudes towards sex.
We had to have our own children to realize just how bad it was to be stuck in daycare and public school all day. We had no point of comparison, no understanding of love to judge until we began our own families.
We had to exit college and struggle through the job market to understand how the entire education system was a colossal scam – that we were neither given knowledge nor skills to survive in the world the Boomers gave to us. Only away from public school could we see that our Boomer teachers were the ones who crippled our minds, and they were permitted to do so because our parents were missing.
We had to grow into fat, sick, sad adults before we could see what made us so – that we were fed a diet of processed garbage and medicated into behavioral compliance to a dystopian system. People in X, Y, and millennial cohorts all suffer a spiritual malaise – we were raised without religion, or our experience of religion was so vapid and shallow it might as well not count – and many of us still follow the “fix it with pills” approach taught to us by Boomers because that’s all we know. We had to grow up and learn how to exercise, learn how to eat, cut fat, lift weights, and be healthy because we weren’t taught any of that in school, and only then do we gain the negative judgment of the Boomer’s scientism toward health.
And of course, science trumps religion when you think religion is singing the same seven words over and over and talking about how much you love Jesus. When your evangelical church didn’t teach the most basic (protestant) doctrines, is it any wonder that you “gave up” on religion? The entire concept of the church service was rebuilt in the 1970s and 80s to appeal to Boomers’ emotional sensibilities, with the hilarious projection that you need rock music to bring in “young people,” (Boomers always considered themselves young, even when they were having hips and heart valves replaced. Even now they want to say “70 is the new 20” or some such nonsense) as though that is more important than the salvation of souls. They fed their children the spiritual equivalent of white bread and soda pop, and they have suffered as a result. Christian churches are infested with heresy, blasphemy, and the most degrading non-sequiturs (like atheist female gay priests in the Anglican church) because Boomers think it’s more important that everyone feels loved than feel the burden of sin and the need for absolution.
As many of those in my generation work excessive hours to pay down student debt, struggle to afford a home and children, we get attempted gaslighting by the boomer media – that we somehow never wanted to own property or to procreate. And certainly, our educations were valuable even though they have zero market value. They taught us how to think, you see, and we were graded on it. You got an “A” if you wrote down the Boomer’s thoughts for her on the term paper, if you mentioned the right talking points that have stuck around since the 60s.
Also, diversity is our strength. We all wanted to have neighbors who don’t speak the same language as us. We didn’t want to work those jobs that immigrants have – who would want to work with his hands, anyway? Let Jose do that. You probably didn’t want that programming job they gave to Ahmed, either; we have to have lots of those H1-B visas that tech companies turn Indians into indentured servants because it’s good for the Boomers’ portfolio.
If you are wondering why so much hostility, it’s because of what they gave to us.
This is not to say all boomers are bad. My parents were good. Not perfect, as nobody is, but definitely good. They didn’t divorce even though all my friends’ parents did. They sent me to public school because it was a functional institution when they were children. They fed me according to the knowledge they had, coming from sources that they thought were trustworthy. They took me to church out of love for me, and if the church was poor, the alternatives they considered acceptable were seldom any better. If they had a crime, it was assuming what worked for them would work for others.
Anyway, that’s all I have to say about that.
Feels like the boomers got the first wave of cultural Marxism, when you look back on what they were sold. Academics like Leary and Kesey running around literally handing out free drugs (the latter developed by the their employers at the CIA) brainwashing the youth with promises of free sex and no countries. Widespread experiments with communes and open relationships (both of which failed). You can kind of draw a line directly from here to the internet, which Ivy League scientists were creating at the time, in fact designing microchips on acid (when they weren’t designing the next nuclear device or Cold War rocket) and the future DARPA promised was a similar one of no country borders or property, the internet reaching it’s techno utopian hand across the entire world. In many ways it’s the same lie sold to us by the new snakes inhabiting Silicon Valley. My dad was in the anti war scene at the time and recalls communists showing up to demonstrations and messing them up by turning them into their own soapboxes. I almost feel like the combo of drugs + sex + occult was used to distract the left in the 60’s and successfully neuter the anti war movement. Ultimately it feels like a kind of pan-generations midlife crisis, people who have been told having a family is the death of freedom all their lives, upon reaching childless middle age, struggle to justify their living habits, which were perfectly fine when they were in their 20s. To deny the objective fact that they are aging (Boomers definitely grew the Cult of Youth) they regress into childish hedonism, and the fantasy that they can be young forever, a promise sold to them by the latest technology Silicon Valley can provide. It is a rapidly decaying illusion.
The main two things that get me about boomers is their lack of self-awareness and their materialism. You can see both in the inevitable replies that boomer articles always get.
First there’s the post from a boomer who begins by saying that he is different, and that it is immoral to judge a whole generation since there are always exceptions and the beginning and end of a generation are arbitrary. But he ends by trashing Gen X and millennials.
Second there’s always the post from the boomer who says that everything would be all right if other generations just had more money. Ex. in response to a complaint about the lack of social cohesion in modern America getting a response like “if only you had gotten a job in a high paying trade instead of getting a useless basket weaving degree, you wouldn’t have anything to complain about.”
Yeah I always see those “get a useful degree” things, when those basket-weavers (or more accurately, literature majors) got their degree because the boomers told them to, and also told them to follow their dreams, etc.
They live in white flight suburbs and wonder why the young people complain and call them racists.
In hindsight, _Fight Club_ and the responses to it predicted the current backlash against boomers. The shallow, consumerist, lifestyle the Narrator lives at the beginning and Tyler Durden wants to destroy, ravaged by credit card debt, latchkey programs, and divorce? It’s the same lifestyle the boomers were either born into or grew up in, and passed onto late boomers and Gen X’ers just like Palanhiuk, Fincher, Pitt, and Norton. Fight Club and Project Mayhem are both horribly misguided attempts to mitigate the damage the boomers did. That’s undoubtedly part of why _Fight Club_ resonated with Gen X and the subsequent generations, while the boomers largely ignored or misunderstood it.