When I was growing up they started using the generational title of Baby Boomers to describe my parent's generation born in the post WW2 baby boom. Then my generation (my parents had us young) kind of got dubbed with the title generation X in order to differentiate. In my teens we had a new generation starting, so by default it went into alphabetical order and they were generation Y, later to become known as Millennials due to the fact that the new millennium would be when they hit adulthood.
Apart from these labels the generations weren't really discussed much until fairly recently when people started to describe the big difference in the lifestyles that the Boomers experienced compared to the Millennials. To be expected really, because circumstances have always changed over generations. It wasn't until my daughters, who were apparently generation Z rather than Y like my nephew, were in their teens that my eldest started to educate me on this new categorisation of generations.
To me generations were what you saw in families as the next generation of children were born, so moving back through time it went from the children to parents, grandparents, great grandparents and so forth. Apparently they are now labelling people depending on the decades they were born in, so it is a blanket label to cover whole populations rather than just families. Meaning that in one family you could have siblings close in age who fall under different generational labels.
But I digress. What really stands out to me is how these labels are being used in a divisive nature by some, especially with the rise of social media. Yet even mainstream media has been jumping onto this bandwagon lately. The biggest trend seems to be to blame all the current problems we face and even the current problems of the whole world on the Boomers, which is incredibly short sighted from my perspective. However, I can see where that myopic view comes in because younger millennials and generation Z never really knew the generations before the Boomers. They also never saw the positive changes that came in during the Boomers' prime nor do they have any inkling of what it was like growing up post world war. For generation X and even older Millennials we grew up with the stories from our grandparents who lived through the war.
Many things that younger generations see and envy from the Boomers' young adult years that benefited them would have been from policies implemented not by their generation, but by the generations who were adults after the war; so mostly the "Greatest Generation". I don't think anyone is going to put blame on a generation who went through what they went through, however, and would you even want to blame them for wanting to make a more prosperous, comfortable life for their children?
Sadly a system based on continuous growth and expansion was never going to be sustainable for long and as generation X reached adulthood this was starting to become apparent. For a little while it seemed like each generation after the war would prosper more than the one before, but there comes a point where you have to face reality and that is a plateau or a crash.
Life wasn't actually that easy for many Boomers growing up. While post war rationing only lasted until 1947 in the US, it continued until 1950 most other countries and the UK didn't see an end to it until 1954. My father even recalls rationing from his childhood. From a start at rock bottom like this, a life that could only improve seems idyllic. After all, as Boomers reached adulthood employment opportunities were abundant and job security was great. Jobs had been abundant since the end of the war anyway with the population at much lower levels and lots of rebuilding to be done.
Each generation faces different beginnings and different challenges and while we might not understand what the other generations face, it doesn't make their challenges any more or less valid. That said, we don't do ourselves any justice by blaming others for our situations and it's often helpful to take a step back to get better perspective. By looking at the situation from a more impartial viewpoint we can see that much of the complaints about what people see as the Boomers messing things up for future generations are actually aimed at political decisions made during their young adult years or at the wealthy elites of the generation. They also pertain mostly to the US and despite the fact that other countries didn't have those same experiences and policies, people there will still use the same arguments to blame them for the problems in their life.
When Boomers offer their advice that younger generations just need to work harder, they are trying to help from their own experiences of what worked for them. This, of course, comes across as ignorant and can be frustrating because things have changed and aren't as simple as that any more. This means that we need to find our own, new solutions to modern day problems. Complaining and blaming isn't going to help us find those solutions, we're just giving up our agency if we do that. It's better to take what we can learn from the past, leave behind what no longer works and move forward. The people who do that will be the ones who leave the rest behind.
We should be collaborating with all the generations and learning from one another rather than allowing ourselves to be divided. Next year the oldest Boomers will turn 80, if they are still alive. We don't have this generation for much longer, so why not learn what we can from them while we can? They'll leave behind what they've accumulated and they'll leave behind a story if we allow it.
