This Week: Top Five Ways The Baby Boomers Fucked Up Our Future

Image by Sky Thompson

by Ben Kritikos

“The world is what you make it,” they’re constantly telling us. At what point did I make a world where people listen to Michael Bolton?

Baby boomers seem to have a sense of entitlement to personal freedom. They’re like that kid standing next to his Dad who gestures the horizon with a swooping arm, saying, “One day, this will all be yours”.

In theory, there’s nothing wrong with this mentality of entitlement; but in combination with unparalleled wealth and freedom, it has produced a generation of spoiled brats.

My grandparents’ generation endured some of the most horrific events in human history, including the second World War, the Holocaust, the Great Depression, and the crushing of the American labour movement. I’d wager that millions of WWII veterans vowed to protect their kids from these kinds of horrors.

The generation known as the Baby Boom were the largest generation in the history of humankind. This massive blob of ego-positive kiddies grew up shielded from reality, being spoon-fed a narrative about reality that placed them squarely in the driver’s seat. The hitherto unknown postwar health and prosperity instilled the boomers a heightened sense of self-importance.

Just look at the 60s and the way people still talk about it as though it were the apex of human history. When did being young and self-indulgent — only to disavow principle in favour of a high income — count as a cultural achievement?

Now that the baby boomers are approaching pensionable age it is time we, so-called Generation Y, have to live in the aftermath of their unmitigated personal freedom. And they’ve left us with a disaster. World War III isn’t imminent, but ecological disaster could be. Housing and third-level education are all but unaffordable. It’s almost impossible to find a job, and when you do it will almost certainly be mind-numbing. Then, to add insult to injury, there’s Kenny G.

But apparently all of us are spoiled because we had Nintendo and iPhones. Yipee.

Housing

If you’re ever sitting in a “studio” flat (as in a modestly sized room with a cupboard, an electric ring on a piece of particle board shaped like a worktop, a toilet, and what looks like a miniaturised meat closet with a shower head in it) for which you pay almost half of your take-home pay, and the fuck nuts on the television start gabbing and percolating about the importance of getting house prices back up, you may (like me) want to go out into the street and beat yourself to death with a bag full of small change in the amount of your council tax.

Gone are the days when the agreed standard of rent prices was no more than a fifth of your income. In those golden days of yore, it was possible to buy a small fix-uppable flat if only you lived frugally and saved your pennies. Nowadays, not only do you have to pray to the gods of various religions to be graced with a mortgage at all, but you’ll most likely need an up-front down-payment of what a flat in London once cost. And you’ll be living frugally anyway.

The Baby Boomers have done a great job of benefiting from, dominating and disappearing a housing market they’ve subsequently used as a weapon to beat us all into tears of dogged frustration, running like molten rivers from our reddened, glassy peepers. Cry enough and you may create damp patches on the ceiling of your flat — if there aren’t damp patches there already. Will your landlord do anything about it? Maybe, if he doesn’t live in Spain on the savings he amassed skimming the cream off the top of our future.

Look on the bright side: they’re building “affordable” housing on the green belt.

Education

The Baby Boomers think they’re so clever. And they’re not wrong. After all, they benefited from free education, which may go far to explain why they haven’t spent their lives in crippling, unpayable debt to a bank who once upon a time provided them with a student loan that they’ll almost certainly never be able to pay off before they’re too old to remember anything they learned in university.

That doesn’t stop them from insinuating that we young’n's are a bunch of lazy retards who spend too much time on Facebook taking pictures of each other on our phones doing drugs that have names like a Japanese girl band, in gangs of hoods who walk like a broken pigeon with a knifing compulsion.

As clever as they are, they can’t seem to figure out why we’re so thick — so they present us with examinations which even teachers despise. Some teachers are willing to risk their jobs just to do away with excessive exams.

So, you smug Baby Booming bastards: if you’re so clever then why do you keep buying anti-ageing cream and electing a thumb for a prime minister?

Work

Nobody likes to work — that’s not the fault of the Baby Boomers. But we’re approaching a crisis in which there will be too many people on pensions for the workforce’s tax contributions to handle. Lovely horizons, that. Maybe they’ll just do away with state funded or subsidised pensions altogether for us wily young layabouts.

One must give credit where credit is due: if it weren’t for the Boomers’ fierce fight against doing things they didn’t want to do, we’d still have to wear ties to work.

On the whole, however, I’d rather go to work in uncomfortable clothes with the knowledge that when I’m older and my bones are tired, and I’ve wasted lots and lots of time doing something that doesn’t satisfy me as an individual in any way, I’ll at least get enough money from my pension to survive without having to resort to a life of crime, or beggary to ungrateful children who despise me and look on in disgust as I drink creamed spinach through a straw.

*Brrr*

Culture

I don’t what’s worse. There’s the fact that in the Boomers’ heyday the Beatles topped the charts, while I grew up under the onslaught of (largely Boomer-owned and controlled) corporate radio, which seemed only to projectile-vomit top tens of corporate homogeny like the Spice Girls and Creed. Though it’s equally offensive listening to some puffed-up marshmallow gobshite reflect on what my generation listens to with a smugness and self-satisfaction you could potentially expect from, say, an accomplished musician or inventor or Nelson Mandela, but seems deeply and face-shreddingly misplaced in a 60-year-old bank manager staggering at 3am in a bar where the music is too loud and his shirted is untucked enough to reveal a hairy fold hanging over his belt buckle, while he leers at younger women with eyes like painfully exposed dog erections.

Just as virtue is its own reward, Boomerness is its own punishment: I cite smooth jazz, Ryan Adams and Celine Dion as evidence of my point.

Climate

There is a general scientific consensus that the observable drastic climate change over the past 60 years is anthropogenic — that is to say, caused by human beings. This is no doubt in part due to the hugely increased number of people in the world thanks to the Baby Boom. It’s hardly surprising when you consider that the biggest boom took place in the parts of the world that consumed the most energy, and thus produce the most climate-effacing waste.

Again, in fairness to them, they weren’t born with knowledge of climate change and the danger it posed to the entire world. The world has only recently become concerned — concerned enough to do something, or at least talk about doing something.

That said, it’s largely the Baby Boom generation who are in power in the developed world. It is also this very same demographic that is doing the least, as a whole, to combat that change. Maybe it’s because they know they’ll probably be dead by the time it really makes life on Earth miserable for the rest of us. The Baby Boomers will probably never taste British wine, or work an allocated allotment, or queue for rationed fuel — whereas, we very well may.

The Copenhagen summit was an example of the Baby Boom generation’s failure to take climate change seriously. If it were their asses on the line, perhaps they’d be mobilising more support, showing more backbone, and keeping their fragile egos in tow long enough to reach an accord by which their children and grandchildren and grandchildren’s children have a chance to live on a planet much the same as the one they themselves lived and died on.

Afterword

The Baby Boomers are the largest generation humankind has ever known. On top of that, they’ve been the wealthiest, and they’ve had the highest expectations. Our generation are the first who can expect to have a reduced standard of living compared to that of our parents.

But they did give us the slinky, for which we’re all terrifically grateful.