Growing Pains at 40: As they approach mid-life, Baby Boomers

I will always be single. I have no hope. Goodbye.

>>134064004
>1986

kek

>The generation that wanted to stay forever young is entering middle age. This year [1986] the leading edge of the Baby Boom, the 76 million Americans born in the fecund years between 1946 and 1964, reaches mid-life. Former White House Wunderkind David Stockman and Actor Sylvester Stalone (Rocky, Rambo) turn 40 in 1986 So do ex-Mouseketeer Carl Disarmament Agency Director Kenneth Adelman, Real Estate Mogul Donald Trump and Comedian Gilda Radner. At the tail end of the boom, the last members of the vast litter are graduating from college this spring and stepping into a not notably waiting world. Members of a generation that has a made a pastime out of prolonged adolescence are being forced by the biological clock to face up to the responsibilities of adulthood—to their parents, to their children, to one another.

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>>134064290

w-what is wrong with that?

>>134064004
40 year olds are gen x

>>134064158

See ya.

>Middle age is only the latest milestone for a generation that has been relentlessly scrutinized, dissected and classified. The Baby Boomers were the Spock generation, the Now generation, the Woodstock generation, the Me generation. Nor were they exactly shy about all the attention. Through high times and hard times, no other group of Americans has ever been quite so noisily self-conscious.

>Better educated (twice as likely to go to college as their parents), idealistic and assertive, Baby Boomers were expected to remake the world. "We wanted to change it all, to do it our way," says Senator Albert Gore, 38, Democrat of Tennessee. In some ways the Baby Boomers have indeed turned old values upside down, revolutionizing the role of women and transforming American taste, music and sexual mores. "Because of their numbers and their approach to life, Baby Boomers are setting standards for the rest of us," says Jane Fitzgibbon, director of research development for the Ogilvy & Mather ad agency. But in other areas, a lot of shadows have fallen between the dream and the reality.

>Demographers somewhat inelegantly refer to the Baby Boom generation as "the pig in the python," a moving bulge that distorts and distends everything around it as it rumbles through the stages of life. Locked together in a crowded race, many Boomers have learned to use their elbows. The msot outspoken members retain a kind of generational arrogance epiromized by Stockman's egregious assertion in his newly published memoirs (The Triumph of Politics; Harper & Row) that the so-called Reagen Revolution was in fact not Reagan's: "It was mine."

>But the Baby Boomers' great expectations have been diminished by a series of rude social and economic shocks, from the Viet Nam War to double-digit inflation. Although the sheer size of the generation provided a sense of solidarity and power, it ultimately proved to be the Baby Boomers' bane. There were simply too many of them to maintain in the style to which millions became accustomed as affluent children of the '50s and '60s. Egalitarianism might have been the avowed ethic of their youth, but competition was, and still is, the harsh reality. Many bravely refuse to admit it, yet the fact is that many Baby Boomers do not live as well as their parents, and may never.

>>134064615
MCMLXXXVI = 1986 = 40 years after 1946

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>>134064747
>be TIME in 1986
>no national epidemic of virgins
>TIME runs this piece saying to take it easy on free spirits from baby boomers
>be TIME in 2016, 30 yrs later
>epidemic of virginfags
>worst economic situation in generations
>TIME calls millennials lazy, entitled, unemployable and autistic
>TIME demands more bbc, feminism, and traps that are not gay

>The generation idealized by Madison Avenue for its superior muscle tone and free-spending habits is ruefully discovering that, contrary to the promise of the as, it cannot have it all. Not only that, long absorbed in themselves, the Baby Boomers are a generation that has avoided or postponed commitment to others. Many have little loyalty to their employers and less to political leaders or ideas. Partly because of the economic squeeze, they get married later and have children later. They also divorce more than their parents. Quite a few, it seems, are destined for an awfully lonely old age.

>As they moodily listen to golden oldies, the members of the Big Chill generation sometimes seem to prefer looking back to looking forward. They often long for a simpler and dreamier time of dates at the drive-in, before real life intruded on their teenage idylls. Yet, as demonstrated in a poll for TIME by Yankelovich, Clancy, Shulman, Baby Boomers have not lost the American birthright of optimism about the future. While they may not live quite as well as their parents, a surprising number think they do, and most feel they have more freedom to choose their own lifestyles. In the mid-1980s, as interest rates drop back down to single digits and the work force expands to accommodate their vast numbers, the Boomers may in fact have renewed reason to hope.

>It is not quite fair to accuse them, as some have done, of betraying their youthful ideals. Though Boomers have shaken the institutions of family and work, in some ways society is better for the jolts. Women have struggled to end the condescending notion of "women's work," and they have succeeded in winning a measure of equality at home and on the job. Men have had to learn new jobs like diaper changing, and more fathers actually know their children. baby Boomers remain wary of institutions in general and Government in particular, and their reformist energy surfaces in grass-roots movements aimed at curing everything from drunken driving to the arms race. If some Boomers have resignedly become the organization men and women they once mocked, others have unleashed innovative and entrepreneurial energies that in the long run may provide enough growth and opportunity for them to realize their dreams after all.

>From the first, the Baby Boomers were accustomed to instant gratification. Often brought up in shiny new suburban enclaves of middle-class comfort, they were doted in by parents who were counseled by Dr. Spock to dispense with the rigidities of traditional child rearing. Their surrogate parents was the television set. Parked in front of the glowing blue tube for an average of four hours a day, a quarter of their waking life, Boomers became the first video generation. Bored? Just change the channel. Hopping from one instant fad to another—from Davy Crockett coonskin caps to Hula-Hoops—they moved as a single mass, conditioned to think alike and do alike. Trendiness became a generational hallmark; from pot to yoga to jogging, they embraced the In thing of the moment and then quickly chucked it for another.

so are we going to gas the boomers or what?

>>134066222
Trips don't lie. Is it time yet?

What is the point of this thread?

>>134066222
Fucking finally. Kill the boomers!

>>134066345
to discuss the logistics of a boomercide

>Maybe, like most other adolescents, they would have rebelled anyway. But the Viet Nam War—and, more precisely, the draft—guaranteed what was called, and what in some ways became a revolution. Behind the barricades on campus grew up youth ghettos, strange worlds where adult rules were suspended and whirl was king. In reaction to parental values deemed empty and materialistic, a flamboyant and vocal minority known as the Woodstock generation preached rock music, free love and heightened consciousness. Mostly they celebrated youth. "We ain't never, never gonna grow up," yelled Yippie Leader Jerry Rubin. "We're gonna be adolescents forever!"

>Rubin was already 30 when he was posturing as a Peter Pan of the left. By 1980 he was a $36,000-a-year securities analyst on Wall Street declaring that "Money is power." At least Rubin was able to land a well-paid job. In the harsh economic climate of the 1970s, Baby Boomers discovered that the prosperity many took for granted as teenagers was hardly a given in the grownup world. The shock was particularly tough for the silent majority of Baby Boomers who had quietly supported the war and, when drafted, dutifully gone off to fight. The Viet Nam veterans returned to find little gratitude or employment opportunity at home. "I learned how to fight while they learned how to make money," says Vet Stuart Briter winning a pair of Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart in the Army.

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>>134066345
To provide 4chan with desperately needed historical context

>>134066345
Consider it as comparison to GenX who will be coming up on their 40s here pretty soon.

>>134066222
Well let's get this going, about time those assholes died

>>134064004
Wonder why this guy
>doesn't own a house

Hmm...

>enviable view of the ocean
Oh, he's pissing it away on an apartment beyond his means

G T K R W N

>The Baby Boom, says Richard C. Michel of the Urban Institute, was hit by a quadruple whammy: inflation, fierce competition for jobs, exorbitant housing costs and the recessions of the '70s and early '80s. "They grew up with the expectation that they would live better than their parents no matter what they did," says Michel. "The 1970s ended that. It was a time of tremendous economic disillusionment for many people." Between 1973 and 1983 the median real income of a typical young family headed by a person ages 25-34 fell by 11.5%. In the 1970s, for the first time in history, the economic value of a college degree declined. An awful lot of physics majors found themselves driving cabs.

>There is, in the voices of Baby Boomers whose higher education was not rewarded with higher earnings, a certain bewilderment. "I certainly expected to live as well as my parents," says Audrey Burnam, 35, a research psychologist at UCLA who lives in a rented two-bedroom apartment while her father, who works at a copper smelter in Arizona and never graduated from high school, owns his own three-bedroom house. "I certainly expected to be able to afford a home. I am comforted," she sighs, "that this is happening to a whole generation."