(upbeat music)
- Okay, boomer.
- [Narrator] Okay, boomer.
- Anytime a meme so profoundly captures
the collective imagination,
we here at Wisecrack have the impulse
to take out our detective's pipe and figure out why.
The phrase articulates
a prevailing sentiment amongst the youth.
The boomer generation ruined the world
and should kindly stop writing op eds
about how millennials are killing the Olive Garden.
The latest social media retort is employed by millennials
and Gen Zers in response to condescending insults,
political grandstanding,
and any other out of touch comment made by older folks.
The term has become one of the year's most salient memes
and earned a couple of industrious kids
highly profitable lines of merch.
So why all the intergenerational animosity?
Is society finally breaking down?
Are young people just a bunch of agist jerks?
To understand how we found ourselves in an okay boomer world
we first need to look at the origins
of intergenerational feuding
and why boomers in particular are so ripe
for online take downs.
Let's figure it out in his week's Wisecrack Edition
on okay boomer, why hating boomers is so hip.
But before we get into it,
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And now back to the show.
Intergenerational hating is a tale as old as reproduction.
Young people have always resented old people.
Ancient Roman poet and satirist, Juvenal,
called the old all alike and a disgusting sight.
While Geoffrey Chaucer's famous 14th century
Canterbury Tales, accuses old men of boasting,
fibbing, anger, and greed.
Conversely, adults have always been skeptical, cynical,
and downright disgusted by kids these days.
In 1695, author Robert Russel bemoaned,
children as they have played about the streets
have been heard to curse and swear
and call one another nicknames.
While in 1790, Reverend Enos Hitchcock
complained that romances, novels, and plays,
had poisoned the mind
and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth.
In 1927, a clergyman hilariously told
Atlanta college students
that modern girls were hell cats with muddy minds.
Another enemy in that same decade was jazz music,
with one doctor writing in The New York Times
that the blossoming art form was making young people
become absolutely bad and some criminal.
Of course in this case, railing against the young
often came with a dose of racism.
Still, whether the enemy is nicknames, novels, jazz,
hell cats or Tik Tok,
the olds have always thought the youngins
to be a lost cause.
Clearly throwing intergenerational shade
is as innate to the human condition
as unexpected flatulence.
(flatulance)
- An election.
- However, the way okay boomer took off
makes us think that there's something particularly salient
about the current generational divide.
Ironically, a look back across the decades suggests
that the one generational constant
has been hating on baby boomers.
To figure out what inspired the first wave of boomer hating,
we need to go back in time real quick to the medieval ages.
Youth culture, a brief history.
Profound generation gaps are a relatively recent invention.
That's because youth hasn't always been a protected time
for Frisbees, trick or treating,
or Saturday morning cartoons.
For most of history, children were essentially seen
as small adults and worked like them.
In medieval Europe, the average kid aged seven to nine
was sent away for seven long years
to take an apprenticeship
or become a servant for a different family
regardless of social class.
This continued until the end of the 18th century
when people became more concerned
with children's personalities
in large part thanks to philosopher John Locke
who wrote that children were innocent blank slates
worthy of protection.
This caught on and fortunate upper and middle class kids
were slowly freed from work
allowing them to play with dumb wooden toys
and be educated in a fledgling school system.
Still, for most kids work was primary
and social life was largely confined to the family.
And if these kids went to school at all,
they spent summer vacation working with their parents
on the farm rather than learning how to make out
at expensive sleep away camps.
After the industrial revolution,
not wealthy kids became valuable resources in factories
in what is either called child labor
or take your child to work day everyday.
Then in the mid 19th century,
our understanding of childhood began to shift further.
Increasingly, people saw adolescence
as a period of precarious moral development.
And industrialized nation states started making
government provided education mandatory
while collective religious schooling
became increasingly popular.
Around the late 19th century,
youth became increasingly idealized
as the western world's first modern wave
of obsession with health and vitality blossomed.
Young people, who seem to exemplify those qualities,
became the new ideal.
By the 1900s, advertisers began relying
on upper middle class youngsters
to model their fashionable wares
and advertise their expensive sporting goods.
By the late 1920s, a cult of youth was firmly established
in Hollywood and the popular press
which celebrated young adulthood
as the most privileged period of life
according to scholar, Heather Addison.
At the same time, childhood and adolescence
became increasingly protected.
In 1904, psychologist G. Stanley Hall
famously wrote about adolescence
and encouraged segregating children by age
and creating collected institutions
for educating and socializing.
By 1920, school was required for children aged 8 to 14.
And as young people went from being seen as workers
to being seen as students,
the first bricks of a budding youth culture were laid.
Historians typically mark the 1920s
as the first emergence of a detectable generation gap.
By this time the number of kids going to college
began to skyrocket.
And in absence of parental supervision,
youth culture was born on ivy covered campuses
in the form of dating, best friendships, social clubs,
and rampant consumption of films, novels,
magazines, music, and more.
As a result, middle class urban young people
began to model themselves
more on Hollywood stars and famous athletes
rather than grammy and grampy,
bobbing their hair, dancing the Charleston,
and generally having a grand old time.
Unsurprisingly, the youth culture they built
became an obsession with the wider culture at large
equally glamorized and reviled by their elders.
When high schoolers swelled in ranks
following the Great Depression,
influence became centralized in the 18 to 14 demographic
notably demonstrated by the arrival
of the magazine Seventeen.
The word teenager became a marketing buzzword
and mass popular culture
became increasingly centered around people without wrinkles.
Meanwhile, arguably the most consequential war
of modern times was being fought and won by the allies.
A baby boomer is born.
The war ends and the post war baby making commences,
like lots and lots of babies, 76 million in fact.
By the time the oldest post war baby was heading to college,
the baby boomer generation constituted
about 40% of the American population
rendering them an undeniable force
on the American economy and culture.
Born in an unrivaled swell of post war wealth,
baby boomers pretty universally
had better lives than their parents,
typically members of the Greatest Generation
who lived through the Great Depression
and fought in World War II.
By contrast, baby boomers largely grew up
in middle class plenty.
Maybe fairly, their lives were viewed by older generations
as easy and idyllic full of Leave It To Beaver antics
and largely absent things like starvation and polio.
They were also raised
with comparatively permissive parenting
thanks in large part to the writings of one Dr. Spock
who encouraged parents to view the world
from their kids' perspective.
As we've seen, wherever you find wealth,
coddling of children, and leisure time,
you're bound to find some brand of youth culture.
And indeed, the 1950s witnessed the true rise
of this culture as we know it today.
The toy industry exploded,
supplying boomers with all the train sets
and baby dolls their hearts desired.
Comic book sales hit the roof
while children's television flourished
absent the parental advisory concerns
kids today experience.
The teenager, technically invented in the 1940s,
really came into its own as a distinct sociological class
with the baby boom,
a lifestyle which came complete with rock and roll,
soda pop diners,
and increasingly affordable consumer automobiles
you could use to stupidly race your friends.
Their childhood also coincided
with fast, perpetual evolution in education, health,
civil justice, and technology,
as well as near constant increases in prosperity.
The generous GI Bill put former soldier dads to work
and the educational grants associated
allowed other parents to achieve wealth
some of which the boomers would then inherit.
America invested heartily in itself
from improving infrastructure to starting NASA.
As Bruce Gibney, venture capitalist and author
of the harsh sounding A Generation of Sociopaths,
notes the sheer breadth of this era of innovation
is literally still benefiting us today.
He writes that your iPhone is charged
by power distributed over a midcentury grid
and depends on government sponsored research on GPS,
the internet, and the integrated circuit
all dating back to investments made in the 1950s.
Boomers in general attended massively reformed
public school systems.
Less wealthy boomers saw their family incomes supplemented
by social programs while Medicare promised
boomers' grandparents and parents
the prospect of a comfortable retirement.
Massive taxes, the highest margin
being literally 92% in 1952,
allowed the boomers' parents to pay off our war time debt
promising them a bright and prosperous future.
Boomers rebel.
But then the generation that had it all
suddenly had something unexpected to say.
They didn't buy into their parents' hard one dream
of middle class comfort and unfettered patriotism.
Enter the rebellions of the 1960s
which saw the growth of the civil rights movement,
the feminist movement, and the antiwar movement.
See, while every generation somewhat embodies
their parents' worst fears,
boomers were a veritable nightmare for their elders
while seemingly ungrateful to boot.
Where their parents willingly banded together
to beat Nazi Germany,
boomers defiantly burned their Vietnam draft cards
and commandeered university buildings
in rage fueled uprisings.
Where their parents dutifully formed nuclear families,
boomers scandalously explored premarital sex,
drugs, and rock and roll.
Needless to say, this shocked their straight edged elders.
And the first wave of boomer loathing was born.
This time boomers were attacked for being too radical,
for rejecting authority,
for being supposedly destructive and nihilistic.
Older people increasingly took refuge
in more conservative political spheres.
As characters like Ronald Reagan rose to power
by contrasting their own morals
to those of the protesting college students
at Berkeley, Columbia, or Kent State
where several college students were gunned down
by the Ohio National Guard while protesting.
The sentiment of boomer hating traditionalist
was summed up by country musician Merle Haggard,
a member of the silent generation,
in his song "Okie from Muskogee"
which became an anti-boomer anthem.
We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee,
we don't take our trips on LSD,
we don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street,
we like livin' right and being free.
Essentially, kids in the 1960s raised hell
and frequently did so with the social cause in mind.
And to their parents,
their defiance was frequently interpreted
as the behavior of ungrateful hooligans.
It's more complicated though.
While the boomers are often celebrated
for all the social changes that came with the sixties,
there's one small caveat.
Harvard professor, Louis Menand,
argues that we shouldn't give the boomers too much credit
pointing out that basically every major activist figure
was actually a member of the Silent Generation
and a few were even members of the Greatest Generation.
He cites everyone form Malcolm X to Gloria Steinem
to the de facto leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement,
Mario Savio, to psychedelic drug advocate, Timothy Leary,
noting that all were born before 1946.
Further, he calls into question
the boomers' impact on culture,
pointing out that just about every prominent writer
and artist of the sixties
was decidedly older than boomers
including writers like Allen Ginsberg,
James Baldwin, and Ken Kesey,
as well as musicians like Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin,
and Jimi Hendrix.
The list goes on.
Menand argues that the boomers less revolutionized culture
and more absorbed a revolutionary culture
built by their elders.
While the older baby boomers
did participate in antiwar protests,
some were still in kindergarten
when the bulk of it went down.
So there's that.
The Me Generation.
Even if the boomers were all about flower power,
the seventies are typically located as a turning point
in which they evolve from dreamers into something else.
Fittingly, the roots for the recent wave
of baby boomer hating was also born
as they were accused of being self absorbed narcissists.
Somewhat ironically, boomers would eventually lob
that exact same criticism at their own millennial children.
They were accused of creating a Me Decade
by journalist Tom Wolfe and historian Christopher Lasch
who chronicled a 1970s rise
of the self and personal development.
Wolfe wrote that the new alchemical dream is
changing one's personality, remaking, remodeling,
elevating and polishing one's very self,
and observing, studying, and doting on it.
In his book, "Getting Loose
Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s"
scholar Sam Binkely notes that this decade marked
the emergence of a consumption oriented lifestyle ethic
centered on lived experience
and the immediacy of daily lifestyle choices.
Whereas the sixties' youth movements were preoccupied
with mobilizing the masses,
adult boomers in the seventies were more interested
in books on health, spirituality, and all natural food.
Binkely credits much of the shift
to the increase mainstreaming
of counter culture books and text
which advocated everything from cycling to gardening
to massage to recycling
all in search of a more authentic self.
But an increased focus on the self
almost inevitably necessitates a decreased focus on society.
According to Binkely, the 1970s consequently inspired
a culture of narcissism
and formed a new morality of self realization
through consumption, leisure,
experiential leaning and therapeutic release
particularly among white middle class folks.
The commercial potential of this new lifestyle
was not lost on marketers
and we saw the emergence of our modern lifestyle markets
in the form of exercise fads, diet fads,
and self help fads.
As boomers made more money and grew up,
they slowly became the establishment
against which they had raged.
By the early eighties, boomers constituted
the grand majority of the American electorate.
According to Gibney, by 1993 they controlled the presidency
and much of the House.
By the mid 2000s, that control increased to 79%.
What's the legacy of their economic reign over the US?
Well, it depends who you ask.
According to Gibney,
boomers inherited a rich, dynamic country
and have gradually bankrupted it.
The way he sees it, boomers raised in a time
of uncompromised prosperity,
simply assumed things would always be that easy,
that the economy would grow, wages would rise,
and the generation below them
would grow up to have a better quality of life.
A fact, which is for the first time
in recent American history no longer true.
The younger generations now hate them.
Ironically, the flower children of the 1960s
slowly became hated for everything they had reviled,
middle class conformity and mass consumerism.
In 1990, Time magazine wrote about the rise of Generation X.
Even then the intergenerational hatred seemed palpable.
With Gen Xers being defined in part
by their dislike of all things boomer.
They hate yuppies, hippies, and druggies.
They sneer at Range Rovers, Rolexes, and red suspenders.
Then came the millennials
who the media had a blast
pitting directly against their parents.
Millennials were derided by many a boomer penned editorial
for being selfish, lazy, entitled, whiny,
and a host of other unkind adjectives.
Since many millennials came of age
during the Great Recession,
they were left the most vulnerable.
Their financial lot has remained bleak.
Millennials now make 20% less
than boomers did at their age despite being better educated.
As if to add insult to injury,
baby boomers are comparatively flourishing
with their annual spending power of 7.1 trillion
estimated to hit 13.5 trillion by 2032.
In this climate, is it any wonder that articles
about millennials clapping back at their elders
provide reliable entertainment?
In this context, boomer hating starts to make sense.
Their parents resented them for being loud flower children
and now their children resent them for being buttoned up,
self absorbed corporate sellouts
who only stress
about whether their local Chili's will close.
The sad and funny thing is this.
It even seems like some baby boomers hate themselves.
And at recent commencement speeches,
grown up post war babies like New York Times columnist,
Tom Friedman, and Apple CEO, Tim Cook,
apologized for their generation's legacy.
As boomers increasingly reflect on the world their children
stand poised to inherit,
a world created largely by them,
one has to wonder just how okay they feel.
But what do you guys think?
Is hating on boomers more than just a fun internet fad?
Is the anti boomer sentiment justified?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
As always, a big thanks to all our awesome patrons
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And as always, peace.
(upbeat music)