How the baby boomers destroyed everything
As tempting as a purely generational hypothesis is, it&#x27;s challenging to point the finger at such a huge population as &quot;sociopaths&quot;. Many of the 60&#x27;s radicals and celebrities were born a little bit too early to be categorically Boomers(post-1945) and many within the generation faced new, unprecedented forms of market competition and technology displacements - white-collar temping&#x2F;freelancing rose with computerization and the end of the dedicated secretary, recorded music took over live music, multiple generations of automobile-only suburbs were built, and the onset of containerized shipping and the resulting new globalization spanned their entire lives. There&#x27;re plenty more examples like that - and lots of room for errors and untested new ethics in all of it. Some of them were inherited from consequences of pre-Boomer policies, others arose because of the marketplace or political clime.<p>And in many ways, the experience of the rich Boomers is functionally different from the rest of the group. At all levels, it seems, one can find a terror over &quot;losing what I have,&quot; but the elite group can leverage their finances and connections to vote themselves more, while the rest are political pawns in comparison, with a house and possibly some stocks as their only assets - too small to be a major voice, too big to be rolled over politically, so they mostly act to obstruct change. In that sense I find the Boomer dynamic kind of pitiful, because they really lost the idea of community in attempting to follow through on a world containing millions of tiny fiefdoms, even to the point where my own mom thinks appeals to &quot;community&quot; are basically &quot;Communism&quot;.<p>The Millennials - sample size, myself and my friend group - are more focused on a combination of daily survival, and where they get the breathing room, lifestyle fit. There are no expectations for stability. Career scripts are exceptional and tend to require being on a government job track. There&#x27;s a lot of fluidity, a lot of meeting different people and maybe only knowing them for a little while before things change again. You can fall out of touch with friends by accident - because they don&#x27;t play the same video game as you, or they stayed off a social network, or a thousand little things. There&#x27;s constant pressure to make it all work, but also a bountiful world of <i>stuff</i> to access - people, information, services - far more than was in the Yellow Pages, the local newspaper, or trade journals. There is no wise elder telling us how to navigate it, but it&#x27;s nowhere near as cold and lonely as those suburban streets and highways.