Baby Boomers and how we/they are perceived in today's world

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My bio-mom is a boomer and I was born in the summer of 1964.
I grew up with Sesame Street, MTV in my teenage years, and video games like Pong and hanging out at the Mall.I liked the arcades but the noise was too much.
I don’t identify as a Boomer, all the Boomers I know had different childhood and teenage experiences .
I was hanging out at latch key kids homes and smoking weed and watching MTV when I was a teenager.
Courtney Love, Mark Lanegan , Chris Cornell , Keanu Reeves were all born in 1964 and not considered Boomers.
I would roll the date back to 1960.
If you can’t recall Woodstock, the Kennedy assassinations ,or the Vietnam war I would say the beginning of Gen-X.

Baby boomers get a bad rap. They don’t understand current pregnancy trends or how millennials parent their babies (even though their own child-rearing habits were pretty out there), they’re ridiculed for their “Live, Laugh, Love” signs and their overuse of ellipses, and they’ve been blamed for everything from ignoring climate change to ransacking the country’s economy. But what is this generation really about? And is all this contempt truly fair? Here, we take a look at some of the most defining baby boomer characteristics to find out more about this mega cohort that is as frequently mocked as it is misunderstood.

1. they’re Optimistic
There’s a reason why your boomer parent is always telling you to look on the bright side (even when you lose your job and get dumped in the same week, thanks mom). This is the generation that was promised the American Dream and compared to subsequent generations, they largely achieved it. Thanks to factors like relatively high wages, less student debt and a high rate of home ownership, this generation is known for their hopefulness and “anything is possible” attitude. In fact, according to a recent study from the University of Michigan, Haver Analytics and Deutsche Bank Global Research, baby boomers are more optimistic than millennials, marking the first time that young Americans have less optimism than those aged 55 and older in the last six decades that the consumer sentiment of these two generations has been compared. And if you think that the pandemic could knock down a boomer’s confidence, think again.



2. they Work Hard…
Your dad doesn’t understand how you’ve had three jobs in the last six years, and don’t even get him started on the concept of “job fulfillment” or “work-life balance.” Boomers have a strong reputation for being hard workers who were/are loyal to their careers and employers. In fact, they even coined the term “workaholic” and are often credited with inventing the 50 hour work week (great, thanks a lot). As such, it’s perhaps no surprise that the baby boomer generation controls about the vast majority of all disposable income in the U.S. (estimated at 70 percent back in 2015). And they’re not slowing down—40 percent of boomers plan to “work until I drop” according to an AARP survey. This hard working and “can do” attitude extends beyond the workplace—while our DIY skills are shoddy at best, we haven’t met a boomer who doesn’t know how to fix a leaky tap or change a tire.


3. …but Aren’t Afraid To Call It Quits
Baby Boomers have the highest divorce rate in history and the highest rate of second marriages. This actually isn’t so surprising, considering that this generation is also known for resisting traditional social constructs and pushing boundaries (more on that below). Particularly when compared to their parents’ generation, boomers were no longer expected to put up with unhappy marriages and stick it out through irreconcilable differences. So, what brought this change in relationship expectations on? Well, some experts cite boomers’ individualistic attitude as a reason for the high divorce rate, while others point to The Family Law Act of 1969 which introduced the concept of no-fault divorce (i.e., ending a marriage just because you want to, without providing cause

4. they May Not Be As Conservative As You Think
Boomers get a bad rap for being close-minded, condescending and resistant to change (hence the “OK boomer” meme, a verbal eye roll that originated on Reddit in 2009 and went TikTok viral in 2019). And yes, in terms of political attitudes, they’re more conservative than younger adults, according to a 2010 Pew Research report. But the reality is that this was the generation that experienced enormous social change, including the women’s rights and civil rights movement, not to mention the anti-war movement and the sexual revolution.

5. they’re Super Competitive
Chances are your parents didn’t just want you to do well in school, they wanted you to be the best. And as stressful as that might’ve been for you growing up, it’s kind of not their fault. As the second-largest generation of all time (millennials only surpassed boomers in 2019), boomers had to compete for their place in the world. This is especially true in the workplace since hardworking boomers consider their jobs a central component of their identity. Which might explain the stereotype that boomers make fun of millennials who expect “participation trophies” for doing the bare minimum. Many boomers might not actually feel this way, but you can bet that they didn’t give out seventh place awards back in mom’s day.

Baby boomers are more likely to live with numerous chronic health conditions than earlier generations, according to new research from Penn State and Texas State University.

Study authors warn that the growing rate of multiple chronic health conditions (multimorbidity) among older Americans represents a real health threat to the nation. If it continues, this trend will almost certainly place increased strain on the well-being of older adults, medical infrastructures, and federal insurance systems. On a related note, the amount of Americans over 65 is projected to increase by an astounding 50 percent by 2050.

Researchers note that this isn’t the first study to indicate greater health deterioration among today’s older adults.

Study authors analyzed data on adults aged 51 years and older originally collected by the Health and Retirement Study, which is a a nationally representative survey of aging Americans. Multimorbidity was measured by looking out for nine chronic conditions: heart disease, hypertension, stroke, diabetes, arthritis, lung disease, cancer (excluding skin cancer), high depressive symptoms, and cognitive impairment. Variations in the specific conditions driving generational differences in multimorbidity were also investigated.

Notably, sociodemographic factors also appeared to affect the risk of multimorbidity among all generations. Examples include race and ethnicity, whether the person was born in the U.S., childhood socioeconomic situations, and childhood health.

The most common conditions seen in adults with multimorbidity (across all generations) were arthritis and hypertension. Additionally, some collected evidence suggests both high depressive symptoms and diabetes contributed to the observed generational multimorbidity risk differences.

Study authors say there are multiple potential explanations for these findings.

“Later-born generations have had access to more advanced modern medicine for a greater period of their lives, therefore we may expect them to enjoy better health than those born to prior generations,” concludes Nicholas Bishop, assistant professor at Texas State University. “Though this is partially true, advanced medical treatments may enable individuals to live with multiple chronic conditions that once would have proven fatal, potentially increasing the likelihood that any one person experiences multimorbidity.”

Prof. Bishops adds that today’s older adults have had “greater exposure” to health risk factors such as obesity. Also, health issues are more likely to be diagnosed in older adults nowadays thanks to improvements in medical technology.

I was born in 1957. I knew about all of that 60s stuff because my dad had the news on all the time. My neighborhood was a cop/firemen-type neighborhood so I remember "America Love It or Leave It" and "Only a good hippie is a dead hippie" and casual use of bigoted slurs both as hate and what was called "ethnic humor". By the time I was a teen in the 70s Watergate was the political event, "sex drugs and rock and roll" as well as long hair was mainstream. But everybody kept saying how apathetic we were. One day our professor was talking about the 60s on our campus and how the students took over the dining hall. The class broke out in laughter. The Dining hall meant bad food for us. We were too young for the 60s but old enough to be negatively affected by the hangover. There was that Disco hedonism but that was not us and certainly not me for obvious reasons. The 80s? I did not know any yuppies, anybody like the Darryl Hannah and Charlie Sheehan characters from the movie "Wall Street"

It has long been fashionable to hate baby boomers, “America’s noisiest if no longer largest living generation,” as the Times critic Alexandra Jacobs wrote recently. But I remain on the fence. I believe that you can appreciate the late David Crosby’s music, for instance, while not endorsing buckskin jackets, walrus mustaches, and lyrics that address women as “milady.”

What I most resent about baby boomers is that, technically, I am one. The baby boom is most often defined as encompassing everyone born from 1946 to 1964, but those nineteen years make for an awfully wide and experientially diverse cohort. I was born in 1958, three years past the generational midpoint of 1955. I graduated from high school in 1976, which means I came of age in a very different world from the earliest boomers, most of whom graduated in 1964. When the first boomers were toddlers, TV was a novelty. We, the late boomers, were weaned on “Captain Kangaroo” and “Romper Room.” They were old enough to freak out over the Sputnik; we were young enough to grow bored of moon landings. The soundtrack of their senior year in high school was the early Beatles and Motown; ours was “Frampton Comes Alive!” Rather than Freedom Summer, peace marches, and Woodstock, we second-half baby boomers enjoyed an adolescence of inflation, gas lines, and Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech. We grew up to the background noise of the previous decade, when being young was allegedly more thrilling in every way: the music, the drugs, the clothes, the sense of discovery and the possibility of change, the sense that being young mattered.

The idea of generations with well-defined beginnings and endings, like Presidential terms or seasons of “American Horror Story,” is inherently silly, of course. Generations are more like sequential schmears, overlapping and messy, and the idea that each one shares essential traits is perhaps a marketer’s version of astrology. Still, these divisions would be slightly less dubious if crafted more artfully, and, with that in mind, I have a proposal: let’s split the baby boom in half and dub those of us born between 1956 and 1964 the “Dazed and Confused” generation, after Richard Linklater’s quasi-autobiographical teen movie.

Teen movies, especially those made using a rearview mirror, have become essential to generational mythology. I can’t speak for how accurately George Lucas’s “American Graffiti” captured what it was like to be a teen-ager in the early sixties, nor can I fairly assess the portrait of an early-two-thousands high-school experience provided by Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird.” But I can vouch for “Dazed and Confused,” which not only nails the clothes, hair, music, and cars of the period but also the laissez-faire vibe—the way parents and other authority figures, who had divorce and EST to deal with, seemed checked out, and kids were left to stumble through adolescence on their own.

Linklater’s film takes place in 1976, on the last day of school in a small town in Texas. The narrative, such as it is, follows a couple dozen characters, rising seniors plus a few freshmen, through the afternoon and into the night. After some frosh hazing, the kids drive around, get high, look for something to do, hang out at a rec center, and eventually coalesce at a kegger out in the woods by an old light tower. Best embodying the mellow party-hearty ethos is the character played by Matthew McConaughey: Wooderson, a genial, if creepy, older guy with a loaded Chevelle, a Ted Nugent tee, and too-carefully coiffed hair. Treading water in life, he is happy to share his weed, beer, and philosophy with teen-agers. (“You just gotta keep livin’, man. L-i-v-i-n.”) As Anthony Lane put it, in his review for The New Yorker, the film has “scarcely any plot and no perceptible moral, apart from the injunction to ‘Eat More p****’ scrawled on a high-school wall.”

There’s a scene in the movie that perfectly captures my point about the generational divide. “It’s like the every-other-decade theory,” one of the film’s more thoughtful young characters says, during an evening spent not analyzing a new Bob Dylan album or plotting to levitate the Pentagon but mostly doing nothing. “The fifties were boring,” she says. “The sixties rocked, and the seventies—oh, my God, well, they obviously suck. Maybe the eighties will be radical.” That last line got a big laugh when the movie came out, in 1993. Maybe it still does. But the eighties are Gen X’s problem. For us second-half boomers, it often felt as if we had been seated at a restaurant that was fresh out of the menu’s best dishes. I’m not saying that we had it worse, exactly. I’m grateful that I never had to worry about the draft and that I came of age after Roe v. Wade was decided (and before it was repealed). I realize that I could have been listening to Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell instead of Peter Frampton. The point is—we had it different.

And, as it happens, Richard Linklater agrees with me—at least about the idea of shaving off a new generation, if not necessarily my chosen label for it. “I was born in ’60, graduated in 1979, so I never felt like much of a boomer,” he told me. “I feel a little offended being lumped in with someone who’s born in 1946. I’m, like, Wow, we grew up in a whole different world. What are you talking about?”

These days, boomer resentment is usually credited to Gen X-ers and millennials, but the ones who had to put up with older boomers first were their younger siblings—a burden that Linklater well remembers. “Weren’t you sick of hearing people that were college-age or whatever in the late sixties talking about how great it was?” he said. “It was, like, ‘O.K., you guys, no matter what you do, you’ll never top what we did’—you know, Woodstock and all that s**t. So I was, like, ‘Yeah, guess what? We don’t need to self-mythologize. We don’t even want to.’ ”

“Dazed and Confused” underscores this idea in a short scene in which a high-school social-studies teacher boasts that “the ’68 Democratic Convention in Chicago is probably the most bitchin’ time” she ever had, while her students struggle to stay awake. I remember a sixth-grade teacher bragging about having been at the March on Washington and getting to hear Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver the “I Have a Dream” speech, in person. Our generation naturally had no equivalent watershed events, no epochal gatherings worth lying about having attended. Linklater and I reminisced about what a corny, cynical dud the Bicentennial had been. “The Comet Kohoutek of holidays,” he called it, referencing yet another seventies disappointment.

Linklater cautioned that he hadn’t intended to lard “Dazed and Confused” with generational freight the way Lucas, for one, clearly meant to do with “American Graffiti,” arguably the quintessential baby-boomer teen movie (though its characters, like Lucas, who was born in 1944, are only on the cusp of boomerhood). Linklater’s film echoes, and even seems to comment on, Lucas’s in key ways: both follow large groups of teen-agers meandering their way through a single evening and into the morning. In “American Graffiti,” it’s not the first night of summer but the last. The setting is Modesto, the small city in California’s Central Valley where Lucas grew up, and the year is 1962, when Lucas graduated high school. Two characters, played by Ron Howard and Richard Dreyfuss, face a decision: Will they leave the next day for college back East or chicken out and stay home? In Linklater’s film, the stakes are suitably lower: Will Randall (Pink) Floyd, the stoner quarterback played by Jason London, sign a pledge not to do drugs, as his hard-ass football coach demands? The pledge is more or less a formality; actual abstention doesn’t seem to be on the table for the quarterback or anyone else on the team. In the end, he tells the coach to stick it, and the movie’s final scene has Pink, Wooderson, and a few other friends driving off into the morning sun to buy Aerosmith tickets.

Linklater told me that he had “American Graffiti” in mind only in the way that anyone making a teen movie in its wake would. “It’s kind of the air you’re breathing,” he said. “I love ‘American Graffiti,’ but I didn’t have any big statements I felt comfortable making like the way that movie does.” He mentioned its famous where-are-they-now ending, in which a title card explains that one character went missing in action in Vietnam, another was killed by a drunk driver, and a third ended up as “a writer living in Canada,” having presumably dodged the draft. That’s the moment when “American Graffiti” becomes the story of a generation and not just of some goofy, restless teen-agers in Modesto. (Telling, too, is the fact that Lucas gave updates only for his male characters.)

“That movie says so much,” Linklater continued. “It’s very poignant. It’s a perfect movie in a lot of ways. I just felt that for anything near what I considered my generation, we didn’t want generational statements so much. That’d be reason to roll our eyes. So it just never felt appropriate to say anything other than what it felt like to just be alive experientially, you know, moment to moment.

Linklater mentioned two other favorite teen movies of his: “If. . . . ,” from 1968, and “Over the Edge,” from 1979. Both films climax with kids waging violent insurrections and destroying their schools. “That’s pretty great and cathartic,” he said. “But my whole point was, like, nothing happens in my movie. That’s the difference between the generations. The other generation felt very comfortable making these big statements. They had bigger stakes, bigger things going on—I would say a war in Vietnam’s a pretty good one—where we didn’t have that. Going to get Aerosmith tickets—that felt pitched about right for people of our generation.” In an appropriately low-key way, Linklater’s ending has resonated over the years.

“Dazed and Confused” was a disappointment at the box office but found its audience on home video; a soundtrack CD, boasting bands such as Foghat and Deep Purple that had largely fallen off the cultural radar in the early nineties, went platinum. Linklater confessed surprise at the unironic affection with which younger audiences embraced the movie and its trappings. “You know the way ‘Graffiti’ did kick off a nostalgia for the fifties?” he said. “I was thinking, O.K., there’s no way this film will ever kick off a nostalgia for the seventies. I’m going to make a film to show how the seventies kind of sucked, believe it or not, how kind of repetitious and boring all of it was—even though I guess I made it look too fun.” He laughed. “It was funny to realize, Oh, s**t, people like this!” If that’s a sentiment any genuine honest-to-God baby boomers ever uttered about their own younger days, let me know".

If you have seen it what did you think?

I don't remember having a strong reaction. It mostly reminded me of how radically the lives of young people changed when alcohol suddenly became illegal for anyone under 21.

I also got the impression that what was depicted was more typical of Texas than Baltimore and later the Capital District where I spent my teens, although a few years prior.

My wife's Millennial nieces and nephews apparently loved the film as kids.

I don't know about generation Jones, but in the 70s my peer group called ourselves the Blank Generation.
Thank you Richard Hell and the Voidoids

I also have a huge problem with the disdain that young people have for boomers as if they were responsible for today's social and environmental problems. Just as many and probably more boomers were activists than there are in the current generation of young people. It's a widely diverse group of people. The fault lies with those in power, not with the people who actually tried to make the world better. And even today many activists are retirees.

Apparently we have a reputation for being cynical, apathetic slackers. But it looks like they way things are now, it's pretty well justified.

The stereotypes of Canadians down here are laid back, polite, and just plain nice.