God Save The King. The announcement yesterday that King Charles is receiving treatment for cancer has sent another tremor through a Britain that feels frailer by the day.
And yet, this reminder of our King’s frailty, at 75, also stands for a broader transformation now afoot: the Boomerdämmerung, or twilight of the Baby Boomers. In old Norse mythology “Ragnarok”, translated by the German composer Richard Wagner as Götterdammerung, or “Twilight of the Gods”, is a time of cruel weather, moral chaos, and monsters rising from all points of the compass. Mountains will fall, the seas will rise, and the world-serpent will come ashore, as the gods clash in one final, world-ending battle.
But there is hope. This fateful time, for ancient Germanic legend, is a period both of terrible destruction and also of renewal: the Götterdammerung may see Valhalla aflame, but in its aftermath the world will be rebuilt anew.
Wagner used this motif as a backdrop for the final opera in his four-part Ring Cycle, an adaptation of an old Germanic myth first performed in 1876. It premiered just a few years after the fateful 1871 union of Germany: a transformation that tipped the first geopolitical domino that would culminate in the cataclysm of two World Wars.
Living through the era from the Ring Cycle to Yalta must have felt itself like a kind of Götterdammerung. Certainly, the first generation born after its 1945 resolution were determined to build a wholly new world, amid the ruins of the old. A demographic bulge group, conceived and born amid the relief, reunion, and rebuilding that consumed Europe after the two wars, the Boomers threw out the old sexual codes, dismissed pre-war European culture as stuffy and “square”, and scorned anything that smacked of nationalism, patriotism, or old high European culture as dangerously Hitlerish. In place of all that, they dreamed of new, sunlit Valhallas, freed from the dark gods of industrialised wartime destruction.
The culture they bequeathed us — what today is denounced as the “Boomer Truth Regime” — worshipped transformation, freedom, youth, and the future. Tradition and heritage was a drag. We were all on a path toward ever more individual self-realisation. But it was two-edged.
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SubscribeGod help him. And God help us all when the Boomers pass on and the ignorant and self absorbed world view of so many of the younger generation becomes the societal norm across the West.
I’m an exer and, therefore, my view is supposed to be ignorant and self-absorbed. To me, it looks different, though. On the micro level, that of a family, I spent half of my life fixing the wreckage that my boomer parents did, being fully convinced they did the right thing. My generations seems to be way more cognizant of the world around us and of the potential consequences of our actions. I think, on the macro level, the younger generations will also have to do a lot of fixing after the boomers, the clintons, bushes and blairs of the world. I just hope we do not fall for the same trap and do not inflict grand disasters by building grand schemes. Just quietly plumb the pipes.
I’m 55, so not really a Boomer, but it’s tediously typical of older generations to lecture the young on their deficiencies and how much better they, the old, were. It’s always been garbage, and you don’t seem to have fallen for it. Good for you.
I would agree with this. I work with younger people (late 20s, I’m 52) and they seem, like most people, friendly and decent enough. They certainly seem more together and responsible than us hedonistic Gen Xers.
Speak for yourself please, I’m neither of those things.
I can imagine no grander schemes than (a) abandoning energy security for a Made in China energy policy based on technological fantasy; (b) experimenting with wholly unprecedented levels of immigration and demographic churn into a low growth, low build economy and (c) maintaining interest rates at there lowest level for over 300 years with a resulting inflation of asset values, particularly of property, pushing house prices out of reach for many. None of those policies were pushed by Boomers; all are of more recent vintage, and all were or are avidly supported by younger voters.
Young people are the biggest supporters of the mass immigration project.
I’m afraid I think it’s the generation younger than the Boomers who have caused most of the problems.
The boomers are the “greed is good” generation. The boomers gave us “no such thing as society”. The boomers have presided over the shrinking of the state and privatisation of previously public resources (putting them into their pensions but we won’t get into that one).
If the younger generation are self-absorbed they would have learnt it from their parents and/or grandparents. We just perfected it. The boomers made it the societal norm. The young are desperate to restore the state and to borrow and pay for things that benefit the collective – just check their social media feeds.
What you think of as “ignorance” is actually people seeing things differently to you. Often because they have a much wider range of sources of information. If the boomers weren’t so self-absorbed and ignorant they might reflect on that and think perhaps the youngsters are onto something.
Blimey, you guys do love your sweeping generalisations. Do you ever go out of the house?
> you guys do love your sweeping generalisations
Totally agree with this. Someone else will be to blame however.
“The boomers have presided over the shrinking of the state”. After 4 years of the greatest peacetime expansion of the UK state that will impact the economy, society and everyone’s health for the years to come?? Not forgetting the Government elected promising to reduce immigration, but instead passed work and study visa laws that enabled the largest ever increase in immigration to the UK.
Bliar is a boomer. Brown is a boomer yet both presided over massive expansions of the state.
Downvoted because I’m tired of “UnHerd Reader” comments.
“The boomers gave us “no such thing as society”.”
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan weren’t baby boomers.
“If the younger generation are self-absorbed they would have learnt it from their parents and/or grandparents”
No, they learnt it from social media. You know, their fabulous source of information.
‘No such thing as society” – was said by Thatcher, she was not a boomer. What actual power do you think ‘boomers’ had over politics, other than voting every four or five years? And before you blame them for voting Tory/Labour/Whatever, consider what power or foresight younger generations will have when they vote in future elections, especially the next one. None of us can ever know exactly what the people we vote for will do/change their minds about etc. nor what their true ideals, influences or incentives are.
Boomers swallowed Margaret Thatcher’s schtick wholesale (not this one, I hasten to add). Just like they swallowed and followed “child centred” parenting. Consequences play out over time and subsequent generations are the result.
Margaret Thatcher was not a Boomer, nor most of her ministers.
What’s the criteria for a downvote? I don’t think you’re quite right but I find your comment worthy of consideration.
There is a respected online English dictionary that has a complex definition for the word Carpetbagger. In addition to the standard US definition describing a lowlife opportunist who exploited impoverished citizens in the southern states after the civil war, the dictionary has a special UK entry for the same word.
In the UK the word carpetbagger describes a greedy opportunist in the 1980s who destroyed the mutual banking tier in the UK for short-term gain. These destroyers of the future are also known as The Boomers.
The Boomers are the most wretched generation of Britons in history. They broke the intergeneration covenant and broke the country.
If that is true, we just took the boomer generation’s lead and ran with it. Their legacy.
You said it better than I (a boomer) could. Having brought a Millennial and a Gen Z-er into this world, my remaining role is to try and atone for and mitigate, financially, my generation’s greatest crime: Brexit.
So the summary of this article: Boomers may be a selfish collective, but get them alone and some of them are really nice!
I don’t have a huge beef with the boomers (I mean, I’m on the cusp myself), but one thing I do hold against them is that they, being the last generation to benefit from a rigorous and classical education, quite purposely and bloody-mindedly decided that such an education would be unnecessary or even harmful for future generations, and so decided to dispense with it. In some cases, you can forgive perverse outcomes and being the unintended consequences of well-meaning gestures, but in this case I find it hard – the architects of the cultural and educational revolution knew exactly what they were doing, and did it in the full knowledge of what would be lost.
Yes, you could counter that all the elements of what we lost are still there in books and other media are can therefore be revived. However, what many don’t realize, or like myself, are only realizing belatedly, is the paramount importance of continuity. What proponents of “RETVRN” and other such larpers have failed to grasp is the extent to which knowledge can be only be handed down from generation to generation, and once the chain is broken, such knowledge simply disappears, and disappears forever (conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott is very good on this). Moreover, even when a revival (or “renaissance”) seems to occur, it can never be truly authentic, nor truly felt.
So here we are, floundering in the post-modern aftermath they their wanton destruction brought about. I jus re-read my first sentence and maybe I was too indulgent towards the boomers – perhaps I do have huge beef with them after all.
Will they be missed when they are gone, well their money will. What the later generations will do without the Bank of Mum and Dad, God only knows. At least it will give them an opportunity to grow up and take responsibility for their own lives before they die
Excellent, considered comment and a worthy response to another brilliant article by MH which captures where we are.
Great response, but was it the boomers that deliberately dismantled classical education? I thought that was Blair’s ilk, obsessed by the idea that the majority should go to university, had to water the whole thing down for the sake of such ‘inclusion’.
No, it pre-dates Blair by quite a while. It goes back at least to Anthony Crosland (Highgate School, Trinity College Oxford) who, as Harold Wilson’s education minster in th 1960s is alleged to have said “”If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f*****g grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland.”
There were those of us in Balliol, right beside Trinity, (“Hearties”, I hasten to add, not me) who used to chant when sufficiently drunk:
“If I was a bloody Trinity man,
I would, I would,
I’d go into a public rear,
I’d pull the chain and disappear,
I would! I would!
BLOODY TRINITY!!!
BLOODY TRINITY!!!
BLOODY TRINITY!!!”
If Antony Crosland had succeeded, I would never have got into Balliol.
Much, much more important, I would not now have the ineffable solace of reading Latin and Greek for pure pleasure!
BLOODY BALLIOL
Jack Johnson says so
And he ought to know
Your comment illustrates the importance of personal transmission of knowledge so ably voiced by Pat Davers above. Without your contribution, this riotously rude contribution to English poetry might have been lost for ever. As it is, it has given me, and probably many others, considerable enjoyment. And it may even end up in some anthology of unofficial Oxford verse. Like the many limericks about the student of Trinity which are already in print.
Yes, but Crosland’s generation was before the Boomers, and I’d argue Blair’s generation is mostly after the Boomers. The Boomers themselves were in the middle.
Let’s face it; since it’s impossible to vote for a party whose manifesto you fully agree with, life is a series of electoral lotteries. We’ve just been repeatedly unlucky of late. And I type that knowing that things wouldn’t have been much different had voting gone the other way. The Uniparty are in power whatever happens.
It predates Blair by a few decades. Anthony Crosland (Highate School, Trinity College Oxford) as Harold Wilson’s education minister in the 1960s is alleged to have said “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every ****ing grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland.”
In any case the issue is as much cultural as political. The Boomers may have had many great qualities, but it is their failure – or even downright refusal – to pass on these qualities for which they will be remembered.
Absolutely spot on sir!
It was Crosland & Co “wot dun it”. Loathsome little sh*tes that they were.
Tony Crosland was born in 1918. His generation had the Boomers.
I’m not sure I entirely blame the Boomers for what’s gone wrong with education. The students themselves seemed to go along with the idea that you could massively increase the number of people going to university, and that if you did that people would have to pay for it themselves, instead of it being subsidised by the government.
Young folk en masse were never likely to oppose avoidance of having to enter the job market for three or four years. Even if you don’t know what’s at the end of that delay period, at least you’ve offset the worry by that much time.
Many of us Boomers who benefited from the rigorous, classical education you laud are mortified by the transformation of the education system, and have been damn sure that our kids have access to classical schools. Classical Christian schools are growing in the US.
I’m a Boomer, and I have never made any such decision regarding the education of the generations to come after me. Such decisions were made by politicians and did not appear in any manifesto that I am aware of, since I first became eligible to vote in the mid 70s.
The dark ages came from somewhere.
I’d have said that the withdrawal of classical education was more a socialist left thing; a precursor to the current Common Purpose drones who’ve reduced time at university to avoidance of being ‘triggered’.
Excellent points about the importance of personal mentoring continuity in transmitting skills and knowledge. In some areas that importance is blindingly obvious. The instruction manuals for an Airbus A380 may be around for ever. Anyone fancy flying on an A380 where the crew have learnt it all from books? The US Navy found out the hard way how to handle huge 16 inch guns when they tried reactivating WW2 battleships and all the WW2 gunners were dead or long retired. The fact that the long stored powder was very old and very dodgy did not help. Try learning Latin from scratch using only grammar books and dictionaries, with no enthusiastic teacher.
An interesting piece to read here given that the voice I predominantly hear in the comments of this journal (alongside The Times of London and The Spectator) is most definitely, recognisably that of the Boomer generation. It’s the way to get a portrait of a generation nowadays!
Yes it’s interesting to see what concerns the people who don’t have jobs, mortgages or childcare responsibilities. They seem to be very bothered about TV show castings and the skin colour of their carers.
Well, I suppose I’m technically a boomer and I dislike my contemporaries (collectively) just as much as you do – and mostly for the same reasons. Although I don’t share your enthusiasm for statist authoritarianism which, paradoxically, I’ve always considered to be a boomer trait.
Once the younger generation are enjoying what they wish for, socialism (see almost every failed state since Lenin) and sharia law (an inevitable consequence of islamic mass immigration) who will they have to endlessly whine about?
The younger generation would be delighted to roll back on the socialism. Let’s start with the NHS, pensions and health and social care for the elderly. Then let’s see the boomers talk about socialist failed states!
As a boomer I would be delighted if they cut back the NHS – it just isn’t working. It needs a radical shake up and governments should concentrate on drastic reform of the two main cause of illhealth, pharmaceutical companies and food manufacturing. Re social care you do realise that over half the social care budget goes on younger people under the age of 60.
Your two causes of ill-health might equally have been lack of exercise (since it’s optional) and poor food choices (again, mainly optional). Of course avoidance of ‘manufactured’ food would result in more effort being required and so unlikely to find favour, as we’re all too busy to stay healthy.
Considering only around 20% of the population is over 60 years old and they use up half the social care budget (plus the bulk of the healthcare budget) you’ve inadvertently proved Readers point
This boomer experienced two socialist states. They were appalling. And the wall supposedly built to protect them was joyfully destroyed.
But, still, one more push might do it.
I doubt whether the younger generation would delight in the cessation of pensions (into which they’ll have paid for a working lifetime) once they’re of a certain age…
Having two ‘unherd readers’ is awfully confusing. Couldn’t one of you come up with a different alias?
What like a boomer individualist? It would make it easier to allocate the prejudice…
Ah, you’re a clone? That would explain it.
I’m not this Unherd Reader!
I’m Spartacus!
You and whose army?
Which one of the two UnHerd Readers complained on here about commenters making sweepering generalities? Hmm…
I just assumed it was the same Reader engaging in the usual Boomer practice of arguing with itself. And as a Boomer myself I find that opinion laughable.
Oh, I thought he [her, it, they] were arguing with themselves
I’m the other Unherd Reader, and I didn’t see anything about creating an alias when I subscribed. I’d gladly ditch Unherd Reader if I knew how.
He might not appreciate that.
It wasn’t the young who opened the door to mass immigration (which started in the 1950s and 1960s), it wasn’t the young who voted for Labour and Democrat governments in the post-war decades, and it isn’t the young who control our increasingly deranged public institutions.
Of course, if it started in the 50s and 60s, then it wasn’t the Boomers what done it.
They’ll be arguing about whose fault it is. (Answer: anyone but theirs.)
They won’t be complaining, they will be weeping. Silently.
Please don’t concern yourself on that front…they will find something or someone to demonstrate and whinge about.
My old tutor would call this essay a hot curry – tasty but designed mainly to inflame! I am not sure this demographic argument works. As Mary notes, Boomers volunteer, know and care for History and prize many traditional values (including patriotism) far more than all the super secular entitled Me Me younger generations. The Boomers were surely divided too – only a minority fit the Jane Fonda and Steve Jobs mould! Finally, I think the Blair Generation and the 40 somethings below are guilty of far more menacing and devasting failures and crimes. These Leftist Progressives have since the 90s succumbed to several ideological cults – EU Federalism, multiculturalism, DEI and Climate Catastrophism – and are responsible for three unfolding structural horrors. Failing to provide affordable housing; failing to supply cheap energy and the crashing of our public services via the uncontrolled mass immigration of near 10 million. Nothing the older SAGA generation ever did comes close to matching these disasters.
I agree and I would further add that the Boomers had a work ethic which is not now apparent in the latest generation. I have been married almost 56 years to the same Boomer and she would say that I have ‘Lived to work’ and not ‘worked to live’ which have marginally impacted on family life. However, she would not have had it any other way and we are reaping that toil in our retirement.
I do not see that work ethic being played out at all nowadays; rather I see a young population wanting and expecting the state to look after them and a minimal input into the integrity of the country..
Well, according to the WEF, by 2030, they will own nothing and be happy – or else.
Slight difference. In your day, hard work was rewarded with promotions, pay rises and your goals were within reach. Nowadays, hard work usually just gets you more work and nothing else. Why bust your backside and struggle financially when you can coast and struggle financially?
The result is that most Millennials (and plenty of Zoomers as well) now prefer to earn enough to what they want and that’s it. Housing is beyond the reach of most of my generation with net incomes being poor, wages stagnating and houses being priced too high.
Enjoy your retirement, you’ll be one of the last generations (maybe the last) to do so.
Exactly.
Fair comment indeed, John. Our daughter is going 36, single, and a highly qualified professional (dentist). Yet, she cannot afford to purchase her own property on account of massive prices and continues to live in ‘student’-style digs – i.e. renting a room in an ‘apartment’ on the second floor of a Victorian town villa, sharing living, cooking and bathing facilities with two other professionals in similar circumstances.
I have considerable sympathy for what Walter Marvell states; and he is right about the “EU Federalism, multiculturalism, DEI and Climate Catastrophism” of the Woking Class that has so damaged, if not destroyed, our entire social fabric. But there are people like our daughter who are casualties of this egregious mangerialism and whose truly hard work and commitment is neither appreciated nor adequately rewarded and whose lifestyle is constricted on all fronts. And she is. relatively, one of the better paid of her generation.
At least we have a moderately comfortable combined vocational pension and own our home.
The bit I never understand about the ‘housing’ thing is that prices are high only because people keep affording them. As new houses are built, someone buys them. Who are these selfish folk?
As to Chuck Rex being an exemplar of anything Boomerish, pull the other one. He’s a privileged popinjay as he’s spent most of his adulthood demonstrating. And he’d happily see us all confined to the WEF’s 15-minute cities, so long as he can continue to jet to Davos every year.
With the massive amount of wealth being passed down from the boomers, many might not need the state to look after them.
Reference SKI above in the article?
There seems to be an astonishing amount of money in some hands. When I put my very modest and decrepit house up for auction, late in 2022, I could not believe that dozens of people were bidding for it. I quickly got more than I expected. And these were not traditional millionaires.
I agree. There is a massive difference between attitudes towards work and self reliance between the UK of 1990 and today (a day the Fake Tories bung yet more cash to the ever expanding millions no longer seeking work and living on benefits – to ‘help with the cost of living’/actually a tyrannical China inspired lockdown). And the cause is clear. The Progressives and their Human Rights legal revolution have nurtured a sickly culture of Me Me individual entitlement, greviance and victimhood – with our faintly East German State & its evangelical BBC blitzing the idea that self reliance, enterprise and family should determine our fate. All too late – more is already being taken from our already Bailed Out Broken State than those who contribute to it. And the battered minority of middle class strivers who contribute most are taking a terrible pasting from the Redistributive Brownite tax fanatics at the Treasury. Think on two or three decades and do the terrifying math…
As a tail-end Boomer in the medical profession, I’d agree with your assessment. The impending retirement of Boomers from medicine and nursing will leave a big hole in US healthcare staffing, and I don’t see the Gen Xers being numerous enough, or the Millennials willing enough to pick up the slack.
Just when the Boomers will be needing the most medical care…
The younger generations are just as industrious. However the system doesn’t support industry. No worries, if the west crumbles the next jurisdiction with good governance will supplant those who falter.
When I still worked in a design office, most of the younger folk spent more time on Instant Messaging than doing what they were supposedly paid for. The hapless middle-management (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) scratched its head and wondered what could be done…
Studies show that youngsters today work longer hours on average than previous generations, yet it’s always the oldies who are lauded for their work ethic
Absolutely spot on. Historians will view the Blair era and what has followed as the most destructive period of post war politics. We are only now coming to terms with what he and his ill have done. It all seemed do harmless at the time.
“[T]he Blair era and what has followed as the most destructive period of post war politics.”
I dunno though. The 1970s weren’t exactly a day at the races.
That devil eyes poster was very accurate. Blairites ( incl Cameron, May etc) have build multiple roads to hell with all their vapid good intentions
Too true. One should also acknowledge the well-meaning but disastrous uglification of the West by the generation previous to the Boomers shown in architecture and the arts generally. Nihilistic kitchen-sink drama, sneering satire, obscurantist poetry, the values-based waters into which Boomers were chucked in their formative years. Osborne, Braine, Amis, Frost even Cooke and Miller, all prewar babies. Of course, decline and cultural sabotage is a continuum arguably going back to early 19th century romanticism. But that’s too big a subject, even for a Mary Harrington Unherd article.
That 1960s satire that for decades we were told had changed society and unseated the privileged from power.
The lament ‘o tempora o mores’ goes back a little further than that, I’d suggest.
As I noted in a comment above, mass immigration started long before the 1990s. I seem to remember that a certain Mr Powell complained about it in 1968.
But not all Boomers are dreadful. I think Ms Harrington’s essay simply shows that this generation had its fine heroes and its appalling zeroes, much like any other.
No mass immigration did not start before 90s – check figures
Are we really surprised people over the age of 65 do more voluntary work? They are retired after all and likely want something to do as much as they want to help their community.
Also, it was the Boomers who voted Blair in. Millennials couldn’t vote until at least 2001 and Xers were heavily outnumbered by said Boomers.
The most enthusiastic supporters of Blair were the youngest voters at the time, not really the Boomers. (In the UK, Boomers are a much narrower range of people than in the US, ie people born between about 1946 and 1955).
The overall result in 1997 was Labour 44%, Conservative 31%. Among Boomers, it was probably more like 37% each.
From memory, they voted Major’s Tories out. The two-party FPTP system did the rest.
Youngsters are too busy having to work long hours with long commutes in order to pay the rent on a single room in a share house to have time for volunteering
Thank you. Mary Harrington has it wrong for once.
I do think the author has a point that the boomers were possibly the first recent generation that thought you could dramatically alter the structural beams of society without undermining the entire enterprise. The pace of this type of thinking has clearly accelerated – you can ban misinformation but still have freedom of speech – you can admit millions of foreigners without changing societies values – you can shut down all your nuclear power plants and still have cheap power – but the boomers were where it started.
You might have added ‘you can admit millions of foreigners while building only thousands of houses’ and scratch your head when there’s a shortage and prices stay high.
A situation that benefitted the boomers though as most already had steady employment and their own home. Rising house prices and cheaper services off the back of imported labour made them considerably wealthy at the expense of the generations that followed
This seems a bit like listing all the things you happen not to like and blaming them on another generation. I guess you are a boomer. (BTW Winston Churchhill was in favour of European federalism.)
A moments reflection will tell you that treating whole generations as if they can be blameworthy or praiseworthy is nonsense. It’s like looking at old film clips from the 1920s and noticing no one was fat and putting it down to their superior self-control when faced with a cream bun! Take those same individuals and transplant them to the present and they would be just as over weight as us. Individuals are responsible agents, the same cannot be said for generations.
Perhaps ‘boomers’ are the ones holding the settlement together because they are the only ones who benefit from it. Put yourself into the shoes of a twenty year old, and how does the UK look to you? Over that period of the ‘boomers’ it lost its shipbuilding and domestic car industries, most of manufacturing generally, as stated the very recipients of free university education and grammar schools decided to end that option for others that came after. Job security and protection is gone, zero hours contractors and zero hope of buying a house. Crap NHS. The list is endless. The country is a basket case in almost all ways. People can call the young ‘ignorant’ and self-absorbed’ all they like but I think that’s is in itself ignorant and bigoted. The young have been left a mess to clean up though I suspect they probably won’t bother as (I believe Mary Harrington herself said) the UK is just a postcode.
Yep. Cut taxes and sold off the family silver at an undervalue and stashed it all into their pension pots to secure an early triple-locked rent-seeking retirement during which they intend to be dependent on the state and the overworked, underpaid (yet still overtaxed) younger generations whilst moaning that no one is willing to work anymore and it’s probably because the young are too selfish and also avocados.
And now after voting for lower taxes and shrinking the state for the majority of their working lives they’ve suddenly decided that big daddy state spending and taxation are actually a good use of resources so long as it supports the services they use, doesn’t have too long a period for return on investment and doesn’t touch their asset values or retirement rents.
What Western state has shrunk? There is no govt in Europe, the US, or anywhere else that uses democratic norms that is smaller today than it was before. Here we’ve created the single largest federal force in human history, and with very little of value to show for it.
Quite right. The U.S. government has grown enormously, as compared to GDP, and is involved in every last detail of our lives.
But in the end, every previous generation is blamed for all of our ills. A cycle that will continue forever, as long as something is printed for posterity.
Much to agree with, though you omit a vital class perspective. The children of the London/SE Propetocracy and home owning 60% are set to inherit unheard of riches. From 1994 their parents and nans secured untaxed Capital gains of over 100k a year as interest rates were pinned to zero and QE staffing & mass immigration stoked prices onward into the millions. A twenty year racket overseen by the now gleefully enriched political classes. Many of the metro class kids have had homes bought for them. It is those youngsters outside that magic circle who warrant sympathy, though jobs are out there in abundance for the determined.
And the majority of people who lost their jobs in those industries were boomers and their elders. Do you really believe the majority of any generation can be to blame for what the ruling classes (including governments) bring about? I had 6 older siblings, all boomers, none of them went to university, not all owned their own homes and none have private pensions – they just worked all their lives and brought their families up.
Your argument doesn’t really help. The problem for the young now is they also work hard but can’t afford to bring up a family like your siblings did. That’s the difference in your time and that of the young now. Why there is a baby bust in the UK. Those governments were voted in by the people of the day. The people who failed entire industries. The people who then shared in privatisations of publicly owned utilities with short term gains that have now left us with foreign owned offshore profit taking utilities unlike most of Europe who did not sell off their public assets. The people who bought council houses cheap. I don’t have any particular dislike of ‘boomers’ and all generations carry out their often unintended crimes but in many ways the ‘boomers’ did strategically cripple the UK for the future. That doesn’t mean they didn’t do good either of course.
You continually make the mistake of regarding each generation as a homogenous group. They are not. The housing market had not collapsed because there are no first time buyers. There are fewer of them, but a significant number of young people are still buying houses. A huge intergenerational transfer of wealth is happening, and will continue and grow over the next 20 years.
Wow, this has to be the biggest and most impressive strawman I’ve ever encountered. What a peculiar narrative.
Mary’s suggestion that a fortunate generation of somewhat blessed and a little bit righteous folks are the backbone of this country is a remarkable work of creativity.
Where is the evidence that society is going to collapse when Boomers are gone? The only place this is happening is in Mary’s brain.
Generation X (born 1965 – 1980) are a far more adaptable and open minded set of people that are willing to embrace the kind of problems the world faces today without grumbling, whining and rejecting concepts because of deep engrained biases.
The best thing that Boomers can do for today is move on quickly and make sure they have arrangements for Power of Attorney.
Firstly, it needs to be said that Generation X is a wholly Western generation. In the middle income and developing world the Western generational categorisations don’t really applym. In those countries today’s youngsters are in many respects more like “boomers” – upwardly mobile, much better off than their parents, experiencing new freedoms.
The evidence of a coming collapse is Generation X (of the West) overwhelmingly as a group refuse to work in the infrastructure and industry that literally makes the world they inhabit and survive by. No matter the pay or conditions and how rewarding the work can be, Generation X disproportionately avoids practical, disciplined work. HS2 as a mega example is staffed by well paid foreigners. Its enormous investments in local training schemes have have disproportionately been applied for, and filled by, more eager foreign born graduates and apprentices.
In many ways, Generation X’s attitude to productive industry is colonial: someone else can do the hard work. And someone else is, and usurping them in the process. There might not be a collapse but only because another parallel generation is prepared to do the work.
Maybe you’re thinking of Millenials or Generation Z, Generation X are the current 40-55 age group and I don’t see any evidence of the things you refer to.
I think you are right about this general trend re people’s attitude to employment, but I suspect much of the blame should be reserved for the people who have pushed so many young people through university. That has created a huge middle class of people who think they are above manual work or trades but can’t really compete against the proper brain-boxes in the City law firms etc.
If one has spent 4 years in university then it seems only reasonable that their aspirations would be to seek employment in that field of study.
I’m afraid “…education, education, education..” proved to be more useful as advise to institutional investors than the driver of beneficial social change.
Yes, but is not happening. The three years are spent in a random university reading for a random degree. The real purpose is to leave home and get pissed and doped up.
Reasonable right up to the point where there is no real world application for that victim studies degree that the recipient amassed tens of thousands of dollars in debt to acquire.
More than happy for those ones to work in McDonalds.
You mean ‘media’?
Oversupply of grievance studies graduates has led to a large cadre of angry resentful “activists” whose contribution to the world is to call the trades and manual labourers “cookers”, “bigots” and “supremacists”.
A lot of ambitious Gen-Xers would have made middle management by the mid nineties and many are in power today, they have also embraced as much Postmodern nonsense as the millenials.
I’m sure the world will be a much better place under their guidance once the Boomers have fallen off their perch.
Sarcasm much?
I was born in 1965 and it is the first time I learned that I’m generation X! I guess I must be an wannabe Boomer…and I strongly disapprove of this message.
Whatever the Boomers may or may not be responsible for they made lots and lots of really good music.
Indeed. Listening to the ’70s’ stuff is my guilty pleasure.))) That said, there are two problems with the boomer music. One is the way the Boomers use it to justify the questionable things they do (oh, we are the Woodstock generation, the Flower People, we cannot go wrong). The other is using the power of music to idolize profane things.
I can’t stand the flower power stuff either but a lot of really great and varied music was produced by the boomers – it was an extraordinarily creative period.
Britain alone produced many really great guitar players and songwriters. You just have to look at the vain, soulless sh*tshow that was the Grammys recently to see how far we have fallen. And even then they had to wheel out Joni Mitchell to lend it some gravitas…
Sadly, Joni’s gravitas, along with that of Neil Young, disappeared when they tried to blackmail Spotify into cancelling Joe Rogan (not a fan, have never listened to him). How far the progressive musos have fallen. Especially when their rock-like determination disappeared and they crept back onto Spotify with rather less fanfare.
Very true. I was especially disgusted with Neil Young, of whom I was a lifelong Fan and I have owned most of his stellar discography. Overnight, one of my musical heroes fell off his pedestal with a crashing bang! I have stopped listening to his music and I’m looking to sell all of his CDs and LPs. Joni will probably be next…
Until the non-music of Punk and Rap/HipHop swept all before it.
I am groping for the best way to express this but it feels as if much of post-war (“Boomer”) culture was a reaction against what came before and can only really be understood as such. Without a living knowledge of what came before it ceases to have much meaning as it only exists in the tension between the two, like a chemical reaction between two substances.
As a Catholic I think the changes in the liturgy that started in the 1960s show that particularly strongly, but it can be seen in everything from architecture to poetry. The era immediately preceding the Boomer ascendancy was experienced as something to react against, or as a sort of historical curio to be displayed in museums, but nothing better came along to replace it once the reacting-against had run its course.
As would be the case with many boomers, my grandfathers fought in the First World War and my father in the Second. I have always been aware of, and humbled by, the fact that I am part of the lucky generation. I imagine that if I’d come out with the sense of aggrieved entitlement that seems to infect so many in the younger generations today, my parents would have reminded me robustly of that fact.
If we boomers as a cohort are being held responsible for all the ills of the country today, well, we built and maintained a high standard of living; we upheld freedom and won the Cold War; we made huge strides in medicine with vastly improved longevity and quality of life; we created the IT revolution and enabled affordable food, travel, clothing and entertainment. And we did, echoing a previous commenter, make some brilliant music. Younger generations, you’re welcome!
Right, and which generation raised the Millennials who are apparently so entitled?
Boomers gave birth to Gen X who gave birth to Millennials. I’m not sure what’s being asked here.
Millennials were born between 1981 and 1996 with Gen X being born between 1965-1980 and Boomers 1949-1964. Sure, there’s some overlap, but most Millennials will have Boomer parents.
My four siblings, all boomers, had all Gen X kids and one Millennial.
Yah no. I’m Gen X and my mother and father were born in the 30’s.
Fair question, I suppose, but one that makes the implicit assumption that everything is the Boomers’ fault, and that we are the only age group with any agency and power while the rest of the population are just poor passive victims. If we stick with the categories as valid and meaningful, the youngest Boomer is pushing 60. Gen X have been able to vote since Margaret Thatcher’s day, and they have long established jobs and families. If the societal inheritance of patriotism and culture is being trashed, surely the younger generations have the economic and political heft to preserve, rebuild or recreate it if they have the will.
Boomers clearly aren’t responsible for everything that’s wrong. But most of what they achieved can be put down to the fact there was a lot of them. Everything you list can be put down to a booming economy due to the increasing and youthful workforce, or to social revolutions pushed through by a weight of numbers that previous generations didn’t have.
Whilst you seem to be aware of your fortune, many are not. Younger generations are aggrieved because, whilst small things are more readily available (eating out, consumer items), big things (job security, housing, pensions) are more difficult to achieve. And I don’t know what could be considered more entitled than making the young lockdown to save the old. It’s a sacrifice in the opposite direction to that the war generations made. Sacrifice by the generations before, and sacrifice by those after (lockdown may be much a much smaller sacrifice than the war, but I suspect there’s a lot more like that to come yet).
Anyway, people are people. If generations have different characteristics then that is down to the different circumstances they found themselves in.
I disagree with most of the criticisms of Boomers. I think, on the whole, they’ve been a pretty responsible and hard-working generation. It’s the generation slightly younger than them that are to blame for most of the problems we have at the moment, in my opinion. (Also one or two people older than the Boomers, like Anthony Crosland).
‘making the young lockdown to save the old’.
First, it didn’t work, old folk died in droves, especially in ‘care homes’ (that’s a misnomer).
Second, it was instituted by incompetent poltroons like the Celebrity Jungle contestant, who wanted to be seen to be doing something (other, that is, than grappling with his mistress on CCTV).
Old people died in droves because they were more susceptible. Those in care were even more susceptible, though there were clearly issues with sending people back into care homes from hospitals.
Regardless of whether it was effective or badly implemented, it certainly wasn’t for the benefit of the young, though they will be the ones to largely pay for it.
Don’t be too harsh on Jungle Matt. One of my unforgettable memories of the lock down is Matt threatening to lock us all up 24/7 unless we obeyed the rules more strictly. Seeing how frequently the lock down rules changed, that would have been a confusing order.
“And I don’t know what could be considered more entitled than making the young lockdown to save the old. It’s a sacrifice in the opposite direction to that the war generations made. Sacrifice by the generations before, and sacrifice by those after (lockdown may be much a much smaller sacrifice than the war, but I suspect there’s a lot more like that to come yet).”
For that paragraph alone, a much deserved thumbs Up!
I do enjoy the boomers calling the young entitled, when the young are working longer hours than their predecessors and being more heavily taxed than their predecessors, simply to pay the massive healthcare costs and triple lock pensions of a generation much wealthier than themselves, all while being locked out of the housing market and paying record rents. It’s the boomers who sold the utilities and pocketed the cash, sold the council houses and didn’t build any to replace them, as well as refusing to increase their tax contributions despite being well aware they hadn’t contributed nearly enough to cover their end of life care.
It’s the young who are entitled though
The term ‘boomer’ is a misnomer, probably invented by some social sciences professor to simpify branding. It doesn’t get near describing the complexity and interrelational developments taking place across multiple generations: technological changes, demographic changes, to name but two. And what about the end of the cold war? Surely that has been the major impact on the west in recent decades. The vast majority of us exist (and make our way) in societies that have evolved and over which we have little control.
Very good. Boomers has become one of those over-used journalistic shorthand terms and is an unjustified generalisation.
Yet, we are called the baby boomers, because after the pause of World War II , there was a baby boom, many, many returning soldiers married and had 3 or 4 kids.
The huge population bulge was described by one commentator as a goat going through the belly of a boa constrictor – so many to house, feed and educate had never happened since.
And don’t forget (for American boomers like me, born in 1952) it was boomer men, 56,000 of whom lay dead in Viet Nam, who were drafted in droves. Blame Johnson and his (WWWII cohort) who brought about the magic of that fiasco.
And I recently learned that Johnson the USA president “suggested” to our 1960s Prime Minister Harold Wilson that Britain should join USA in the Vietnam War but Harold Wilson politely declined. Unlike now when we say How High when USA says jump Labour PM Wilson told them No. Imagine if all the young men in 1960s Britain could have been CONSCRIPTED (new buzz word) to die in Vietnam,London would not have been so Swinging.
As Wilson knew,from Mossadegh on what happens to rulers who oppose USA wishes ever after he knew they were out to get.him,he got mocked by some media as paranoid but he wasnt. He just knew the score.
As the term originated from the boom in babies who were born following the end of World War Two, which for instance resulted in class sizes of 45 – 50 for those children entering school from 1950, it was certainly no misnomer.
“According to an answer given by the Minister of Education to my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle – under – Lyme (Mr. Swingler) recently, there are now in our schools 43,202 classes with over 40 on the roll. Of those, 1,380 have more than 50 on the roll. In 1950 the number of classes with more than 40 on the roll was 37,106, so that in the last three years the number of classes with more than 40 on the roll has increased by over 6,000. We reach the sad conclusion that nearly 2 million of our children are being taught in classes of over 40 at present.”
https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1954/apr/27/schools-size-of-classes
That is a meaningless and invalid comparison because the figures are absolute numbers. The population in 1950 was a great deal smaller than it is now. The only valid comparison therefore is one that is standardised for both age and sex.
If ‘Boomer’ defines someone who doesn’t mind being categorised by people whose opinion he/she resists valuing, then I guess I is one.
Another good metaphor for what’s happening as the Boomer generation fades is RAAC concrete. RAAC was a cheap mass-produced material and was one of the drivers of the architectural cultural revolution of the postwar-era. This was a revolution that rejected tradition – precisely because it was too stuffy, and because classical design reminded people too much of the baddies in WW2. But now, the edifices constructed with this material are literally crumbling, and so in yet one more way, what the boomers are passing on to their children is worse than what they inherited.
This would be true if RAAC concrete was championed by the Boomer generation. In fact it was deplored by them. (Viz. Big Yellow Taxi et al.) The material was developed in the 1920s and championed by the generation before the Boomers, principally architects born before WW2. Try another good metaphor – or at least reading a social history book.
https://www.lboro.ac.uk/news-events/news/2023/march/reinforced-autoclaved-aerated–concrete-raac/
Also, if you want social history about reinforced concrete (but not the aerated kind) you can try Jean-Luc Godard’s Operation Béton. A paen to the postwar wonder material, which typically lasts 100 years before crumbling apart.
https://www.noemamag.com/concrete-built-the-modern-world-now-its-destroying-it/
This RAAC issue was just an excuse.to.legitimide the removal of big areas of social housing and replace it with privately built ‘affordable”(not) housing with a few social units in order to look good.
A good article but, for myself, I’ll stick with the simple sentiment of wishing the King all the very best for a speedy recovery.
I find thinking about the future in any capacity exhausting, anxiety-inducing and depressing right now. I’m on the retreat from any kind of big thinking or hope that politics can provide adequate answers to our predicament. My new life philosophy is basically “Biedermeier 2.0”, ie à withdrawal from the political to focus on the small, the domestic, the things over which you have control. Because everything else is just too much.
Instead of this Germanic mental breakdown, I prefer the Apostle Paul’s ‘formidable seasons’ (2.Timothy.iii.1-5).
Being seasons, they occur at intervals. In them the world’s old evil becomes more acute. This old evil will still, even to the end, whatever that will be, have its earthquakes and cyclones.
The waxing and waning of these seasons neither destroy the old world nor create a new. Even though in these seasons in degrees awfully abnormal, ‘iniquity shall abound’ and the ‘love of many shall wax cold’.
Note the character of the men that Paul describes that dominate in these times. And his advice to his colleague, Timothy, to whom he writes – from these men, turn away.
As for the poor King, none of us knows the hour or the day. We must be prepared, not for the Germanic warrior’s defeatist immolation, but to be called to render our account.
Which leads one to wonder whether Paul was a bona-fide philosopher, or just winging it.
News of the King’s illness has been greeted with “consternation”? Really? Where?
It was for me – I was thinking ‘ahh Christ not another funeral/coronation!’ Back Dimbleby, back!
Technically, the senile husk known as Joe Biden isn’t a Boomer as he was born in 1942. And Trump is only just a Boomer as he was born in 1946.
That’s correct. The height of ‘boomer births’ in the USA was 1957.
There are two cohorts – Boomers, born from 1945 through early 1955, and Jonesers, born from mid-1955 through 1963. Jonesers are very different from Boomers. Think Hippie vs Yuppie.
Obama is a Joneser, Biden is a Silent Generation, while Clinton, Bush II and Trump are all early Boomers.
Please don’t lump us Jonesers in with the Boomers. We, at least in the US, didn’t have it as easy as the Boomers did. We were more concerned with getting decent jobs than protesting different issues. Vietnam Nam and Nixon were over before we were out of our teens. We were the “bright young things” of the 80s and 90s, not the hippies of the 60s and 70s.
Thanks, from a 1959 Joneser. We are very different from the older Boomers, in some respects more like the older Gen Xers.
Quite so. I never could identify with the Boomers and their ceaseless cultural battles. We were too busy fending for ourselves and dealing with the next economic crisis.
Nice to meet another Joneser!
True, but why interrupt the useful narrative of blaming everything on a particular cohort in order to deflect responsibility from everybody else?
Blaming may feel good but it doesn’t butter any parsnips.
I did not realise it was that scientific. Perhaps you could quote the hour and the day. Howabout Jan 1st 1946. You are joking right?
A properly thought-provoking piece, thank you.
Good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. The Greatest Generation gave us good times, which have bred successively weaker and weaker generations. The current “hard times” pale by comparison to decades gone by. Housing wasn’t cheap, and higher eductions were unattainable by many. In retrospect, the Boomers look entitled, yet they fostered an exploding economy that renders EVERYONE a better standard of living. The weakest today cry and complain about inequities of outcome and hardships that they are unwilling to address with hard work and genuine contribution to society. Rather, they virtue signal and talk of structural oppression. They are, in reality, the Boomers biggest failure. The Weakest Generation.
I don’t know about anyone else, but as a post-war child, I detest being referred to as a ‘Boomer’. The term seems to have been invented to offend us. If you doubt this, please notice it’s never used in a positive way. I usually like Mary Harrington’s articles, but her constant repetition of ‘boomer’, complete with the usual condemnations, made me stop reading. We of the post World War Two generation are not all philosophically the same. Nor did we all have it easy becoming educated, or have a right to ‘cheap’ houses. I was 37, with 3 children, before I could afford a mortgage, and the degrees I eventually earned were acquired through night classes and part-time attendance at university. Mary’s dismissive ‘Gotterdammerung’ allusion is an insult that should not be tolerated. No more please.
Thanks. My thoughts precisely.
But ‘Boomerdämmerung’ is a very jolly invention. Makes me feel that my imminent departure from the stage will have a little more class.
Nobody will be able to attend your opera; we’ll all be snug inside our 15-minute cities.
I like you attended evening classes before becoming professionally qualified. In my case 8 years in a row. Is there much of that sort of thing going on these days?
Most has been stripped back to the bone or is prohibitively expensive (usually both)
Furthermore, I can remember when our family of seven had one bathroom! (I’m not joking.)
To be fair we had that and I’m at the high end of the millennial cohort. The plants in the back garden were well watered in our house
As I wrote above, I think the generation referred to as “Boomers” has, on the whole, been a pretty responsible and hard-working one. I think the criticisms of them often have more to do with the people making the criticisms rather than this generation itself.
Rolf Harris had a song called Six White Boomers. So offensive on so many levels!
They f*ck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
“They tuck you up,your Mum and Dad,and read you Peter Rabbit too….,” Adrian Mitchell.
Were there working class people in the Boomer generation?
They were all up north and probably dead by now.
This is just another presentation of the culture wars and much the same as the class war its meaningless.
What is achieved by one generation throwing stones at another generation?
Real people don’t exist in neat little boxes – an individual is no more ‘A Boomer’ than ‘Working Class’ – the terms are crude and arbitrary constructs to lump a set of ideas together. There is much that is good and much that is bad on all sides – it depends on where you stand as to what you think is good and bad and who the villains are.
There is no point in casting slurs on one generation or another. Each generation does have its characteristics. But they come from what went before rather than personality types. Well named the boomers went boom in the very last pre-internet era. Advances in technology go hand in hand with advances in population. Our population increased to the extent that it couldn’t be managed without computers. Individuality, egotism, art, talent, leadership and the pursuit of excellence are what marked the disappearing generation. With such a massive world population this is no longer feasible – for a single individual to shine. Now it is about being a cog in a wheel and conformism. The world has gone online and is being dehumanised. Individual power is being eroded (the “elitists” deserve a separate chapter) and each person meaningless unless part of a bigger whole.There will be, is already, a backlash. Remains to be seen how successful it is retaining some of its roots.
The two things one can say about boomers is that their parent had more children and education was critically important.
No mention here of the threat of atomic or nuclear annihilation which for the early arrivals of the boomer generation were the catalyst for some of the most nihilistic and anarchic life styles young people have devised and enjoyed. Mary Harrington mentions free university education (actually paid for by parents through income and property tax) but not the post-Second World War economic boom, which was an era of considerable prosperity that followed the post-war recovery period and only ended with the 1973-1975 recession.
The “boomers” label as a pejorative is laughable. Those of us born in the early 60s have little in common with people the age of King Charles, but thanks to the innovations and technological advances of post-war children, the King will likely enjoy a pain-free recovery.
This publication and its comment section exist because of post-war ingenuity. What will the Tik Tok kids come up with? One shudders to think.
Think the author needs to put the boomers in context. We are in a period of major radical change. The final stage as described by Neil Howe in his book the Fourth Turning, A period of radical upheaval as described by Mike Duncan in The storm before the storm. So as a 78 year old boomer I’m really looking forward to the next six years they will be very interesting when the globalist optimates and all their ridiculous ideas like net zero, deindustrialisation, pan national institutions are destroyed and the populares who believe in such things as democracy, referendums, the nation state, the family unit etc take over. Beginning to happen in Europe and US. In the UK things are so bad here that we willi probably be the first out of the block to enact these changes – but its going to be pretty brutal!!!
There is a good bit to agree with and then, there is this: “It appears, too, that they are often doing so without passing on their skills to younger generations.”
My experience is that the younger generations are often puzzled that many professional disciplines existed before they came on the scene, as if life without an app for every waking function never happened. That aside, generational kvetching is as old as humanity though usually, it’s one generation complaining about the one that follows it. And it seems a stretch to solely blame boomers for the current state of affairs as if no other generation is involved.
Also, technically speaking, neither Trump nor Biden are boomers, both having been born prior to the 1947 date that typically marks the start of this generation. Perhaps the boomers became complacent for a lifetime that was free of world war, the depression, and other serious crises. People today freak out when the Internet connection is unstable or seek safe spaces when confronted by ideas different than theirs. If boomers can be legitimately blamed for something, perhaps it’s for that.
Technically speaking, the Boomer generation started exactly in 1946, which makes Trump an early boomer…
The calendar years that define a Boomer are a little different in the US, they started and ended 4 years earlier.
I use the US range because I would not sleep well if labelled under the British definition.
I believe the generational transition is more of a gradual process, depending on tthe age of ones parents, the interation between school/peers/parents. To me, it’s a cultural thing and nothing to lose sleep over. You might never be a boomer – how about that!
Why would you not sleep well, may I ask?
Boomers likely aren’t passing on their skills because they are likely to be obsolete. The world changes so fast now that by the time you’re at the end of your career those at the start are effectively in an entirely different career.
Yes and no. In my field (medicine), yes there have been huge changes since I started MDs school in the late ‘80s, but anatomy, physiology, and the value of a careful history and physical examination remain, despite online resources and fancy imaging. Those are skills that should be passed down, but increasingly I see over-reliance on tests and expensive imaging. And bedside manner is not something that an app can provide.
My brother-in-law is an aeronautical engineer, and was called back from retirement to help with projects that younger engineers were having trouble with. A lot of professions benefit from experience and the judgment that comes with it.
During and in the years immediately following the Second World War when food rationing existed, the UK, with the arrival of the National Health Service, managed to produce probably the healthiest generation of people we’ll ever see.
In 1948 the following items of food were still rationed: (years when the items were removed from rationing in brackets)
Bread (July 1948), Jam (December 1948) Tea (October 1952) Sweets (February 1953) Cream (April 1953) Eggs (March 1953) Sugar (September 1953) Butter, cheese, margarine and cooking fats (May 1954) Meat (June 1954)
And here’s the tiny amounts allowed in 1948:
Bacon and Ham 2 oz. (57 gm) per person a fortnight
Cheese 1½ oz. (43 gm) a week
Butter/margarine 7 oz. (198 gm) a week
Cooking fats 2 oz. (57 gm) a week
Meat 1s. (5p) worth a week
Sugar 8 oz. (227 gm) a week
Tea 2 oz. (57 gm) a week
Chocolates and sweets 4 oz. (113 gm) a week
Eggs No fixed ration: 1 egg for each ration book when available
Liquid milk 3 pints a week
Preserves 4 oz. (113 gm) a week
Yet the boomers, the generation that grew up on this diet have become the healthiest and most long living ever.
The good health claim might apply to the older 50% of Boomers but the 65 to 75 Boomer age range cohort is not healthy. Medical science is working overtime to prevent age expectancy heading sharply into reverse.
Thanks for the ration data, I have just been through the fridge checking food weights. Some of those rationed weights are quite generous, 3 pints of milk a week – I doubt I have that in a month. 198g of butter, about half that for me in 2024.
113g of chocolate a week – maybe 50% over that measure.
I would struggle with 43 grams of cheese a week.
I think ‘medical science” is now dedicated to reversing the trend of increasingly long healthy old age that has brought unforeseen and unintended consequences with it.
(Foreseen by a few who always got shouted down as vindictive nasty people in shoot the messenger style).
Yes, it wouldn’t have felt like it at the time, but the restricted diet in their youth has served them well.
What I can’t understand is why life expectancy calculations don’t seem to take this into account. The young bought up on plentiful food with limited exercise will not live as long (though they might live as long as those that were broken by the physicality of industrial jobs).
I’m 68 and grew up on Instant Whip, Smash, tinned soup, cheap white bread, endless sugar, and that was pretty common among the working class, as I recall. Awful teeth and other health problems as a result. Very many of my peers have diabetes, for example.
You know, Mary, if many of the people of your cohort had made better choices when they were young, perhaps they wouldn’t be looking for some collective group of people to blame for how things are going for them now. I suspect they had countless examples among the older people in their lives, as you allude to, that would have said to them, “Are you sure you want to do that? Do you really think that’s a good idea to live that way? Maybe you should get a job and start putting a few dollars away each month. Or, maybe go to college and study something useful.” But, it seems like many went all in on embracing the progressive culture of the times. I’ll go further and bet that you know of more than a few people from your cohort that have fared quite well in spite of the disaster the ‘boomers’ have wrought. Sure, they were boring and weren’t living amazing, exciting lives in their 20s. But, they’re also probably not looking for someone to blame for their bad choices. Choices like sleeping around, partying all the time, getting high all the time, drinking throughout the week, skipping work because of a hangover (and then getting fired and blaming their boss). I could go on.
And guess what? Every generation can tell these stories. I’m Gen X and see examples of outcomes in people’s lives that are the result of good and bad choices, or as is sometimes the case, just bad luck. We tend to roll our eyes at ourselves, try to laugh it off and pick up the pieces and go on (or try to). One thing we don’t do – we don’t tend to look for some collective entity to blame (not even the Church!). Young people (meaning those under 40 or so) could learn a lot from taking that approach.
This incessant boomer shaming is growing tedious.
If only I would take the good Boomer advice, forego my avocado-toast lunch habit every day and put the proceeds into a good savings account yielding 0.01% interst, I could own a three-bed semi in 84 years time.
When my wife and I bought our house in 1990, the interest rate was around 8%. Needless to say, savings accounts were not paying anything like that. Shortly thereafter, there was an economic downturn and we watched the value of our house stagnate for some time. It actually dropped within a few months of our purchasing it. We made early investments in mutual funds which all dropped almost immediately and we lost money there. We bought and prepared all of our own food for meals, did without premium cable channels and the like to scrimp and save. I could go on. Quite whining and blaming others.
I’d wager 100% of youngsters would take 8% interest rates if the salary to house price ratio was the same today as it was in 1990, as the weekly repayments would still be much cheaper than they’re currently paying (not to mention the higher inflation would reduce the debt in real terms much more quickly)
So ignoring the fact that youngsters on average work longer hours than previous generations, save a higher proportion of their income, drink less, smoke less, start families later and carry large student debts as many starter jobs that previously trained school leavers now ask for a degree in order to get a foot in the door, what else do you propose the youngsters do to improve their lot?
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: (and also my late grandmother, a State Registered Nurse who trained in the 1940s war years.).
Brompton cocktail, sometimes called Brompton mixture or Brompton’s cocktail, was an elixir meant for use as a pain suppressant dosed for prophylaxis. Made from morphine or diacetylmorphine (heroin), cocaine, highly-pure ethyl alcohol (some recipes specify gin), and sometimes with chlorpromazine (Thorazine) to counteract nausea, it was given to terminally-ill individuals (especially cancer patients) to relieve pain and promote sociability near death. A common formulation included “a variable amount of morphine, 10 mg of cocaine, 2.5 mL of 98% ethyl alcohol, 5 mL of syrup BP and a variable amount of chloroform water.” Brompton’s cocktail was given most in the mid twentieth century. It is now considered obsolete.
In popular culture it also came to be associated with medical euthanasia. According to legend (and perhaps in fact) doctors would provide a large dose to terminally ill patients who wished to die
Is a boomer someone who thinks no-one knows what a termite is ?
Ouch!
There is only ONE Boomer to really blame, despite a few other worthy candidates…….Mr Tony Blair!
Not only has he destroyed the United Kingdom, thanks to his devolution ‘adventure’, but he has laid the seeds for an internecine race war of epic proportions thanks to his ‘immigration fiasco’,.
Well done Tony, you will be cursed for eternity and probably exhumed and gibbeted as you so richly deserve.
Gibbeting is my specialty, I demand to be second in the queue after you.
The later part of the Cromwell story those who happily quote him don’t seem to know?
I suspect ‘most’ know but it just a little too bestial to talk about.
Rather the same with poor old Wycliffe.
Surely previous generations create following generations. So the “Greatest Generation” and the “Silent Generation” created “Boomers.”
Boomers created Gen X, then came Millenials, one of the largest in numbers to be born, and then Gen Z and so on.
Consequently one would think picking on Boomers, so far removed from the obnoxious Gen Z and Progressives of today, is a bit of a stretch. Yes, we can bear some responsibility in being the ancestors, and it’s nice we will be missed, but laying the consequences of today’s turnout on Boomers is a termite-ridden bridge too far.
Many parents of Gen X were from the Silent generation.
“Meh!” – he’s got BPH and a bit of prostate cancer, caught early; he’ll be fine. My old man had the same issue at 65 and he’s turning 90 this summer. Unless it’s caught late or is of the aggressive variety, it’s not the killer it used to be – in fact you’re more likely to die with it than of it.
As a matter of fact we are told that the cancer is not of the prostate..
As a very late boomer (b. 1960), of a working class background, and never able to buy a house but instead, coming to the world of work when Thatcher took over, and living in fear of a nuclear war possibly started by loony tunes Ronald Reagan, I fail to see myself in this generalisation of boomers.
I expect that all those boomer generation miners and other industrial workers who were put out of work in the early 80s, would feel likewise.
“…But in the end, as the Old Norse seeress reminds us, not even the gods can escape the cycle of death and rebirth…”
Well, the Old Norse seeress can speak for herself, but I (a late boomer) for one, plan to look for that escape. Rebirth is not needed if you can escape death. And, in all honesty, technology is dangling this brilliant light in front of me, so dazzlingly bright that it hurts even to look in it’s direction. Like a moth to the flame I go.
Forget culture and the Boomers and Wagner — bless his heart — and think government spending.
UK government spending was about 15% of GDP before World War I, 30% of GDP between the wars, and about 40% of GDP since World War II. Except for the hell-hole of Thatcher, when spending went down to 30% of GDP in 1989. The Horror!
I don’t know about you, but I call the ruling class commandeering 40% of GDP nothing less than slavery. I know: let’s call it neo-slavery.
It’s why we have VAT. There’s no value to be gleaned from excessive government spending.
I find it strange to find so many posters believe that the step function defines generational characteristics. This may be true with the two great wars to create a period characteristic more so that the generational years in Europe. With others I would suspect a swing could be as much as +_5years depending on the traits and disposition of the parents who bore the next generation. I would deduce that it was more like a flattened sine wave than a step function.
The idea of boxing everything is specious at best and ludicrous at worse.
“Jobs sought to free our inner rebels, but created instead the stultifying world of social media” Nonsense – he created a better looking computer and an iconic phone. He DID NOT create social media and its silly to say so.
I am a boomer, and along with half of Gen X, they are by far the greediest, self-centered generation in our history. They believe everything can be measured, dissected, algorithmed, put into bots, and controlled with technology and MBA uber training. We have totally screwed our grandkids and their kids. We are a sorry-ass generation, especially after we turn 42, the work ethic is replaced with a sense of entitlement and all knowing smugness. It makes us look like dumbasses. Which we are.
“They believe everything can be measured, dissected, algorithmed, put into bots, and controlled with technology and MBA uber training.” Really? All ‘boomers’? Except you of course! Most ‘boomers’ I know would not know what the **** you are talking about.
…and care less!
No fondness for boomers here. Raised by the Greatest Generation and born onto Gen X, I find myself more like my parents than the Boomers in between. Structure is essential. Rules are necessary. Hard work is the only way. Joy is found in service to others. Family is everything. And God is in charge.
Did the Boomers really think they would never get old and uncool? Such folly in their plan.
You are generalising. The so called Greatest Generation had its share of sexual licence and unfaithfulness. People’s behaviour wasn’t all the “Britain Can Take It” of the propaganda films.
The fighting generation lost their youth. So they encouraged their children to enjoy what they were denied. The anti-establishment satirists who so influenced Boomers were born pre-war.
But it wasn’t all “if you can remember the sixties you weren’t there”. Easy listening Ken Dodd had 19 hit singles.
Boomers full employment and cheap housing came out of the wreckage of two world wars and the Great Depression. Few went to university. The size of university grants depended on where you lived. Many left school at 15. Many grew up in shoddy housing. Polio, measles, German measles and whooping cough were a real threat to their young lives. There was Cuba…
Boomers also had to play an active part in reconciliation and forgiveness with Germany and Japan when wounds were very, very raw. And on and on.
All of us have our memories from different places in history’s swirl. Every generation is equidistant from eternity.
Boomers can legitimately be criticised for many things. And without any doubt whatsoever, their children will legitimately get their share from theirs.
I wish Mary could interview me. How often are we judged by labels? I am a Boomer and I don’t recognize myself in these generalizations. I was raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition which I hoped I taught my 3 children. I’ve become a traditionalist so my rebellion is against the moral choices of younger generations not my predecessors! Yes, I benefited from free degree education and low-cost housing. However, I feel no more responsible for my good timing than in truth I can feel for the timing of less fortunate generations. I am not ultra wealthy nor impoverished. I have benefited from good health, good judgment, and a decent amount of luck. Oh yes, born a British citizen. For all the above – some earned some happenstance, I’ll do what I can to help the next generation in any shape I can. In short I want to leave the world a better place for my part of it. I hope the “label people” decide to add that to the Boomer generation.
Point of correction: Joe Biden was born in November 1942, so misses out on being a Boomer (1946-1964). Trump was born in 1946 and qualifies.
At least in the USA there were two separate populations of boomers; the hippies that were represented best by the show Laugh In, and the straights best represented by the show Hee Haw. The hippies won the culture war but the straights enabled the country to function and that is who will be missed.
This article makes the same mistake all these anti Boomer articles do. Assuming their generation would have done anything differently from ours. Human beings are human beings. If my son’s generation had been the ones in that post war world with access for the first time to reliable contraception, they would have done exactly as we did, turned sex into a commodity without consequence and rethought the role of women in society. If they had existed in that long gone era of lower population, a post war reconstruction boom, and Victorian and Edwardian properties in cities able to be broken up to offer millions more homes, they too would have taken advantage and then ridden the waves of asset inflation that followed. We too regret the consequences, but we could not see them coming back then. As others point out, the real decay in academic and social values began a generation later with Tony Blair. But it’s all part of a general and inevitable decline in the West. The worst of it is the loss of any understanding of the purpose and necessity of religion and the limits to the new god of science.
Religion. Voltaire said he didn’t believe in God but preferred it if his butler and cook did. Reminiscent of the WEF. Elitists wanting us to worship football, TV and fear covid and climate change.
We must also acknowledge that we Boomers – I am just 70 and therefore at the tail end of the generation – will live longer in retirement and that therefore our young will inherit less and, more to the point, much later in their lives. This goes beyond the conventional “SKI-ing” thing. The cars and holidays and college educations that were funded through massive property inflation which paid off our mortgages will in all likelihood be denied their own children. Yet that is something only few of them have clocked and that the limit on the credit card is not their money but someone else’s. They say it’s better to be lucky than good. We were lucky. They will have to be good. Not too many have appreciated that as they put a picture of every fancy cocktail they have drunk and every smart and creative meal they have eaten out on Instagram. I do not feel guilty but I also know that I happened to have lived in a sweet spot. Thank you.
The boomers, of which I am one, are only guilty of not making sure the following generations can all: sew a button on, grow something from seed, spell and use correct grammar, saw a piece of wood to fit in a space and, worst of all, not struggle to top up a screenwash bottle.
It is not only my generation who have inflated house prices, embraced the fallacy of climate change and CO2, stopped corporal punishment, positively discriminated against white hetero people and made pornography and gambling readily available on social media.
Nor introduced unaffordable electric cars with insufficient practical range. Life wasn’t so easy in the 50s, 60s and early 70s we grew up in, with factories making things instead of relying on poor people in China to provide tat for landfill.
It is mostly Gen X and millennials who’ve let it go to waste. They who’ve allowed the destructive Left hiding in the sheep’s clothing of liberalism into our institutions. Not built enough houses for Gen Z while encouraging immigrants to take advantage of our limited resources.
GenXerdämmerung, Millennerdämmerung, whining about the Triple Lock while England, along with its electric cars and buses, burns.
That don’t charge in Cold weather
That catch fire and burn for days
That cost an inordinate amount to repair – ie battery replacement
That use relative rare elements which are difficult to mine.
The most obvious solution in the short term was the hybrid car. This would have resolved many the above issues; It would have allowed us to determine whether climate change/warming was a hoax etc.
Most millennials couldn’t vote until the turn of the millennium, and have been outnumbered by boomers every election since. Stop trying to blame them for the decisions made my politicians the boomers voted in
Give it a name and you are half way there.
The passage of time. We who were once 16 (Gen Z), 36 (Gen Y), 56 (Gen X), are now approaching 76 (Boomers).
Of course the views of different generations are influenced by our eras, but it is unfair and unproductive to instil envy between them: each had its own advantages and problems. Parents feel responsible for the failures of their children, but no generation (1000s of different characters) is responsible for those of the next.
Circumstances in every country are unique, and in Canada respect for traditions has always been very strong. When I entered the University of Toronto in 1968 it was still possible for students to construe themselves as joining a tradition of scholarship that stretched all the way back to the founding of Oxford in the eleventh century. If it’s absurd to think of academia in those terms today, don’t blame boomers, and certainly not Canadian ones. It’s the generation following ours that dropped the ‘traditional standards’ ball in my country, and arguably in the U.K. and USA as well.
That time will eventually push boomers off the stage is, of course, inevitable. But there’s something artificial and arbitrary about imposing these kinds of narratives on an entire generation in the first place. Since generations overlap and interlink, with each generation looking back to the one before and ahead to the one newly arriving–coexisting with both and striving to accommodate both–the notion that responsibility for the state of the world could ever be other than an inter-generationally shared one is preposterous. Just as people always have, boomers arrived on the scene in the middle of an unfolding history they hadn’t originated, and set about doing what they could to adapt themselves to it. In important respects their historical circumstances have indeed been lucky (something for which they can be neither praised nor blamed–so resenting their good fortune is completely irrational, as well as mean-spirited), and the world has undeniably benefited from the many productive ways they’ve exploited their opportunities.
If those benefits remain incomplete and unevenly distributed, and if the boomers themselves display the defects of their virtues (and sometimes the virtues of their defects), well, this is the human condition, isn’t it? Besides being guilty of abstraction from an ontological point of view (there are no ‘generations,’ over and above the concrete individuals thus arbitrarily classified), any narrative attempting to pit one generation against another is incoherent at heart, and somewhat perverse. What purpose is served by manufacturing imaginary, abstract grievances in a world with more than enough real ones? The wars worth fighting pit all generations against the blights of ignorance, intolerance, poverty, injustice, corruption, etc.; going out of one’s way to forment inter-generational conflict as well is bizarrely polemical and counter-intuitive.
Boomers like me who bought houses in the 1980s, for example, did so to benefit the children they hoped to have, not because they were plotting to put similar houses beyond their children’s reach. In many instances, infusions of cash from their boomer parents are the only reason those children are in houses of their own today–infusions on a scale that vanishingly few boomers received from their own parents when struggling to meet mortgage payments. Such anomalies are the luck of the historical draw… and if you have a grievance against that, good luck finding a court to hear your case.
It’s not the fact boomers were financially lucky that upsets the generations that followed, it’s the fact they’ve hoarded that wealth and seemingly pulled up the ladder behind them. All the public services and utilities built up by the silent generation were sold off and the money pocketed. The council houses were sold and not replaced leaving the young at the mercy of unscrupulous private landlords. Immigration was turbo charged and house building slowed to push up property prices enriching those who already owned a home at the expense of those that followed. Despite being the wealthiest cohort they refuse to contribute towards their end of life care, awarding themselves triple lock pensions and burdening the struggling young with large tax takes. And despite all this they have the cheek to label the young entitled and undeserving
This essay reads like lyric poetry. Well done, sir.
I’m Reeling from the stats that “one in five young Americans don’t believe the holocaust ever happened”. That’s very disconcerting and one has to wonder what other truths else they don’t believe.
Excellent essay! Worth reading for the “boomerdammerung” neologism alone. I am by age (71) an American Boomer but not by culture. My mother was an immigrant to the US who never became a citizen. She had a sixth-grade education and no marketable skills. She never learned to drive a car. Her husband, my father, was murdered when I was one year old and we lived on public assistance beginning in the 1950’s.
I grew up surrounded by my fellow American Boomers who were immersed in Rock-and Roll, Mod fashion, the sexual revolution, and–most of all–prosperity. I was not. Albums and stereos were an extravagance we could not afford and would not have been tolerated by my paleolithic stepfather, who also tightly controlled what programs were watched on our B&W TV (none of which were the ones the Boomers watched with their enlightened, tolerant parents). My clothes were glaringly un-fashionable and often second-hand. Our dilapidated old chevy belched smelly plumes of thick smoke, had rusted-through fenders and torn upholstery. I kept my hair short because I always had to have a job in addition to school and could not risk offending my employers by appearing avant garde. Our family went on no holidays. The sexual revolution of the 60’s passed me by for a combination of reasons: my family’s values were incompatible with premarital sex, I was too busy for a teenage social life, and my glaringly un-cool coif and clothing and the whiff of poverty made me persona non grata with girls.
I spent most of my youthful energies fighting my way into the Boomer prosperity. After finally arriving–by then in my 30’s–I soon concluded that being a true Boomer mostly meant being a spoiled, narcissistic, a**hole. I prefer to spend time with people of any generation than my own and wince whenever I am forced to contemplate the Bidens and Trumps and Clintons and Bushes that epitomize “my” generation. Although I am politically conservative and find progressivism ominous, it is so very easy for me to see how the many groups (other immigrants, African-Americans, Hispanics, subsequent generations), who experienced the Boomer phenomenon in a way quite contrary to that of the prosperous whites that define it, would harbor deep resentments at the presumptuousness of Boomers.
The worst thing about your story is that if you’d had that upbringing now it’s very unlikely you’d escape it. Working hard simply wouldn’t be enough to be able to buy a home and live a (comparatively) normal life
Great article. Great writing. Trenchant and worthwhile take on our cultural woes in the span of history. Really good as always.