Baby Boomers Defined: the Selfish Generation

Gail Collins is start­ing to under­stand why my gen­er­a­tion is so upset:

In 1972, The Times’s Rus­sell Baker noted that the peo­ple he had always thought of as “the kids” did not seem to be repro­duc­ing. Baker decided that the Wood­stock gen­er­a­tion was con­spir­ing to cut the birth rate so they would always be in the major­ity and could “go on being the kids for the rest of their lives…”

My own per­sonal the­ory is that we’re wit­ness­ing a defense mech­a­nism trig­gered by the cur­rent eco­nomic unpleasantness.

Since it appears that nobody is ever going to be able to afford to retire, we’re mov­ing into an era in which hav­ing your car fixed or your ton­sils removed by a 75-year-old will need to seem nor­mal. Mean­while, young peo­ple are going to have to stay in school and keep their heads down since their elders have no inten­tion of cre­at­ing any job open­ings in the near future. So it’s bet­ter if we read­just our think­ing and start regard­ing every­body as 20 years younger than the cal­en­dar sug­gests. Then you will feel much bet­ter when the 80-year-old post­man deliv­ers your mail and it includes a request for money from your 38-year-old off­spring doing post-post-post-doctoral work at Ohio State.

Baby Boomers Defined

To every Baby Boomer who won­ders why my gen­er­a­tion is refus­ing to “grow up,” I say: We are stuck in per­pet­ual ado­les­cence because it is impos­si­ble to mature as soci­ety needs us to do. Baby Boomers are unin­ter­ested in retir­ing, so we can­not move up the cor­po­rate lad­der and obtain jobs that would let us afford chil­dren and mort­gages. We are stuck purs­ing bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the expen­sive hope of obtain­ing such a posi­tion any­time soon. Since we can­not set­tle down, we choose to have fun, travel, and live life for our­selves. There is noth­ing else we can do. And we can­not pay our stu­dent loans and other debts until we are bet­ter off.

The Self­ish Gen­er­a­tion

And it is partly the fault of the Baby Boomers, who have gen­er­ally become known as the Self­ish Gen­er­a­tion. They did not have enough chil­dren of their own (pre­sum­ably because they did not want to sac­ri­fice as much), so now there are not enough peo­ple in my gen­er­a­tion to pay into Social Secu­rity and Medicare to keep the pro­grams sol­vent. Now the Baby Boomers hope of retire­ment seems to be a dis­tant dream. In Anya Kamenetz’s “Gen­er­a­tion Debt,” she reports a sta­tis­tic: When Baby Boomers were asked if they would sac­ri­fice their own eco­nomic well-being to help their chil­dren, a major­ity said “no.” So that’s that.

But there is a lot more. Read my prior essay.