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That's a good summation of the ruin that our civilization has become. I would add the poverty of art to the list as it seems as visceral a symptom as the others of our spiritual bankruptcy.
I have lamented this to myself, that it feels unjust to be trapped in history and condemned to strife when our ancestors had the opportunity to squander what was given to them.
Yet this is not a fruitful scorn. The beginning of wisdom it is said it to forgive one's father. And the hate you see lobbed at boomers for their egoism, real or imagined, doesn't help us in any way.
Worse yet I've seen people use this resentment as an excuse to engage in a looting of their own, even as there isn't much left to loot of our culture and institutions before striking at protections from the monstrous.
No I'd rather see it as opportunity. We get to shape the heritage of the next civilization in more ways that is usual. If strife is ahead beyond our years we should at least fulfill our own duty to the future in preserving that which hasn't yet been destroyed for the benefit of our descendants, whoever they may be.
If this is really our twilight, and it definitely feels like it, I want to ask:
What would you want the last Romans to have done? What was their best service to us? What are we glad they gifted us, even as we are not Romans ourselves?
What was poison better left forgotten?
And what did they overlook?
I think blaming boomers, or any generation , is counterproductive, but people hate the boomers not because of ego but rather they are perceived as being out of touch. They, the boomers, don't understand or are not empathetic to how the younger generations 'have it harder' (even though I think this is debatable). True, homes were much cheaper 50 years ago, but so mortgage rates were way higher and I don't think 20-30 year mortgages existed. Jobs didn't pay that well even adjusted for inflation. The 6-figure white collar job didn't really exist in the 70s like it does today. Or the 7-8 figure 'exit'. YouTube, blogs, podcasting, apps and other ways of making money also didn't exist. It was better for highly conscientiousness people that Jordan Peterson talks about, who can put in long hours at a low-skilled factory job.
On the other hand, you could earn a living writing for a newspaper that was distributed in physical paper format.
Substack..true, you have to build your audience, but a lot of people are having success with it. I think writers for top and mid tier publications still make decent money though.
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That's part of it but the other part is that they hold direct responsibility in the destruction.
On the right you'll hear complaints about the sexual revolution, May 68, and ruining marriage and morality in general over short term bliss as well as handing a whole bunch of power to the state.
On the left you'll hear complaints about ex maoist neolibs crushing unions after benefitting from them, ruining the environment and turning the world into the car first concrete sprawl it is now.
Ironically these are sometimes the same exact people at different stages of their lives.
The frankly understandable and normal way in which old age makes them unable to understand the issues of the current world is just the trigger I think.
I question the relevance of your numbers though, given inflation. Boomers may not have had six figure jobs that often but they had cheap houses, job security and a whole lot of actually valuable things that you can't get easily today even with a whole bunch of paper
You're overstating the role of the Boomers. In '68, the oldest Boomers were 23; my mother was 17. Many were even younger. It was their parents and grandparents who were building the "car first concrete sprawls". If you want a point of comparison, the Boomers of the late 60's were like the Zoomers of today.
The marriage-ruining stuff was mostly Silent Generation, who tended to marry much younger than either preceding or following generations at 18-20, and in the 1970's experienced a massive, pan-generational sex FOMO, causing them to go divorce wild. This, in turn, did a lot of damage to their children, Gen X.
Aren't Xers normally categorized as the children of Boomers?
There is some overlap at the margins, but members of Generation X are typically children of members of the Silent Generation, and Millennials are typically children of Boomers.
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I think people tend to overstate how old the boomers are. They are people in their early 60s to 70s. So even as recently as 1990 boomers were finally entering politics and busines in stride. True, boomers grew up in the 60s but they didn't influence policy, nor did they have much influence in the 70s either. The blame instead is mostly on the silent generation.
If you include compensation the picture improves a lot https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/hcc-.png
Adjusted for inflation, today's college grads still earn more. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_381.asp
An MBA in 1976 made $10,200 ($52k in today's dollars) compared to $96-130k today. Even with student loan debt, this is way more.
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