NEWSWIRE: 8/28/20
- Millennial op-ed writer Jill Filipovic is out with a new book: OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind. Addressed to Boomers, it’s a point-by-point breakdown of how life is different (read: more difficult) for young people today in major areas like jobs, housing, technology, and health care. (Publishers Weekly)
- NH: This book is intended as a peace offering in the generational wars. OK Boomer, no more put-downs: Let me make the case for why my generation is so fed up so we can work together to make things better. But I’m guessing it will find more sympathetic readers among fellow Millennials than Boomers, since it’s basically a litany of how Boomers failed to fulfill their civic responsibilities to leave their children a better future.
- Filipovic isn’t out to harangue her elders, but to explain. The big topics she covers and the stats she cites will mostly be familiar to anyone who follows my work. Millennials have faced two major economic downturns. They’re the most overeducated and the most broke. Wages have stagnated. Housing, higher education, and health care are astronomically expensive, with few or no policy initiatives to remedy this in sight. They’re lonely, anxious about downward mobility, concerned about waiting too long to start families, fearful about climate change. And so on.
- Their struggles and fears, she says, make it all the more galling to hear older Americans rail against socialism while enjoying plenty of “socialism”--that is, public policy favoritism--themselves. (See “OK Boomers… Let’s Talk About Socialism.”)
- It’s not all negative. One highlight of the book is the disconnect Filipovic discovered when she interviewed Millennials and their parents: “Boomers think that most Millennials suck--except their own kids, who are phenomenal. And Millennials are quick to deride Boomers as selfish right-wingers, except our own parents, who are super-generous and bighearted.” Her own dedication reads: “For my favorite Boomers, Mom and Dad, who are pretty okay.” You could say that Boomers invested plenty into their kids on an individual basis, but that they haven’t applied that ethos to society at large.
- Filipovic's observation points to a fundamental difference between coming-of-age Millennials today and coming-of-age Boomers some forty or fifty years ago. All youth generations have some sort of conflict with the midlife (typically parent) generation in power. But the nature of the conflict depends upon the archetypes of the generations involved.
- When young Boomers (Prophet archetype) looked up to the G.I. Generation, they thought their parents did a good job--indeed, too good a job--running America's Establishment and making it bigger and stronger. But they felt they had a very poor personal connection to their parents. Boomers wanted their parents to throttle back on all their Great Society and Apollo 11 pyramid-building and learn to be empathic people, not just citizens.
- With young Millennials (Hero archetype), the reverse is closer to the truth. These young adults are personally very close to their Boomer parents, whom they often find, as individuals, to be inspiring exemplars. The problem for Millennials is that their parents, collectively, are a civic ship wreck. They seem to care almost nothing about the material public and institutional endowments they are leaving behind for future generations.
- When you see a generation in its twenties preach "live for today," it's cute. When you see a generation in its sixties preach the same thing, it's terrifying. Filipovic's peers do not hate their parents. They don't find older people so loathsome that (like the Who) they hope they "die before they get old." But they are terrified by where the nation is drifting, seemingly without a pilot.
