I Don't Want to Hate the Boomers Anymore (731 words)
“Generation X” is not the most hopeless or nihilistic name for a cohort. Think of the so-called Lost Generation that suffered through WWI. We GenXers only suffered through the rise of video arcades and processed food. The prime decade of our young adulthood, the 1990s, was a time of relative peace and prosperity.
Still, we grew up in the long shadow of the ex-hippies, who, it seemed, were eager to tell us that we were shiftless losers—slackers—who didn't care about changing the world. Unlike them. I’m generalizing of course, but growing up, this felt like the message in the culture. I was once even lectured by a Boomer about how I had missed everything good because I’d been born after Woodstock. So when someone much younger than me coined the term “OK Boomer,” I admit to a little schadenfreude. We GenXers had grown up disliking the Boomers, and now we weren’t alone.
But then someone—some kid!—said “OK Boomer” to me, at which point I began to reconsider this intergenerational strife. It wasn't just the injustice of being lumped with an annoying cohort of people hell-bent on sucking the country dry. (Unlike us!) It was realizing that, for GenZers, there was no appreciable difference between a person who was born in the 1970s, and someone who was literally old.
Amid this disquieting realization, I ran across a music playlist by the chef Ina Garten. It's all 60s folk music, all really good stuff. And one morning recently, standing in my bathroom listening to young Paul Simon and young Joni Mitchell, young Bob Dylan, I could hear their yearning. It sounded like my own. And suddenly, my lifelong resentment towards this group of people evaporated. I realized that I don’t want to hate the Boomers anymore.
I heard Jane Fonda in a podcast recently say that it’s not hard to be old; what’s really hard is to be young. It’s true. As you age, you begin to realize how generations unfold over each other, how a set of youth are born into a set of circumstances that they must navigate. Young people bring their energy to bear within a continuum that spans not only individual lifetimes, but centuries. But we cannot perceive that continuum until we get older. It’s a wild system, really: we arrive in these bodies, and we have to figure out all this crazy sensory input and then fumble our way from there. Eventually, we’re offered the chance to recognize what makes life worth living and feel tolerance, even love, for the whole project of endless endings and beginnings. The Boomers overshadowed my youth, yes. And the Greatest Generation overshadowed theirs. And so forth.
I’m in my 50s, and it’s time to let go of my moldy grumpiness because I was once lectured by some foolish elder about my birth year. Intergenerational squabbling is destructive. It’s as destructive and hateful as squabbling between religions, or races, or nations, or what-have-you generalized groups of individuals lumped together.
It’s also inaccurate. Everything wasn’t so much better in the past. Yes, the country is in a state. But good lord, the country has been in a state before. Abraham Lincoln fretted over disregard for the rule of law in the 1830s. The late 19th century, that chunk of time nobody remembers between the Civil War and World War I, was a mess—to say nothing of the wars the bookended it. The Boomers themselves grew up hiding under their school desks in an absurdist pantomime of a nuclear blast. And the 1990s I remember as being so peaceful and prosperous? They weren’t that way for everybody.
We are born into a set of circumstances, and however tempting it may be, our job is not to blame previous generations for whatever messiness and inequality we encounter. Our job is to rise to our moment—for us today, this evolutionary hinge-point that feels like the frightening beginning of a new phase as a species, but might actually just be the latest wave of disruptive technology, no more or less disruptive than agriculture or the printing press. We get to confront problems as previous generations did, extending the same grace and generosity of spirit to them that we hope will be extended to us. Because we are all marching, inevitably, toward our own OK Boomer moment.
Notes:
The Ina Garten playlist titled "Road Trip!" is on Spotify. She has several other great playlists, too.
Jane Fonda's quote is from the wonderful podcast "Wiser Than Me," in which Julia Louis-Dreyfus interviews women in their 70s, 80s and 90s.