According to a study recently released by the Pew Research Center, we Boomers are in a "collective funk." We are said to be more downbeat about our lives than the generations who came before and after us.
According to the Pew survey, Boomers rate their overall quality of life lower than their parents and believe it is harder to get ahead now than it was 10 years ago. We are also less likely to say our standard of living exceeds what our parents had at a similar age.
I don't know that this makes us more "gloomy." Perhaps it just makes us more realistic.
Consider that our parents reaped all the benefits of rapid American growth when the rest of the world was still recovering from all the wounds of war. The years surrounding our own birth were not only about a "boom" in babies; it was boom time everywhere in the States.The GI Bill provided college degrees that let our parents ride a wave that led to the largest middle class the US had ever known. There was low hanging fruit to be picked on almost every tree, from buying land and building things to a burgeoning service sector to an exploding market for all the new goods we were designing and making ourselves.
The largest mistake everyone made -- in retrospect -- was thinking that this prosperity would provide an endless ladder upward to more and more of the same.
What looked like a ladder was really more of a window of opportunity.
Diminishing Expectations and Shrinking Benefits
Pew indirectly confirms this sense of things when they go on to note that we Boomers
have generally been more downbeat for the last couple of decades.
Again, that's an "of course" to people my age. The last couple of decades is exactly when we had to start facing our own inconvenient truths and let go of a lot of the inflated dreams of our youth.
By the late '80s we Boomers were already finding there was less space at the top of the ladders after downsizing took so many management jobs away. At the same time, those who were working in industry were starting to see mass quantities of their steady jobs with generous pay outsourced or automated away.
These were also the years we faced the first obvious shrinkage in the fabric we thought would support us into our own old age, from S&L scandals to HMOs, and from shrinking benefits to vanishing pensions, against an ever-expanding gap between the rich and poor. (Watch for an upcoming story with some statistics on the shrinking dollar too.)
The Internet bubble, followed by the real estate boom, obscured and deferred some of those woes for awhile, but a good many Boomers found that what was supposed to be the peak of their own prosperity was instead marked with increasing challenge and change, all wrapped in increasing uncertainty.
Generational Sensibilities
Our kids are too young to have had the same sense of whiplash. They may not see a shrinking dream because they didn't dream of much else.
They might count themselves lucky compared to us because they are already accustomed to a hurry-up world filled with rapid change and have learned to think in less linear ways. They might even be feeling smug about getting hired faster than their graying parents these days. Meanwhile many of their grandparents in the Greatest Gen are still enjoying their more generous retirement benefits while living in homes or senior citizen condos that were paid off quite awhile ago.
Small surprise that those of us sandwiched in between should feel some added angst when we do.
Age or Circumstance?
"... their current sour ratings may be related to getting older, but they also may be related to the attitudes and expectations about life they formed when they were young," the Pew report continues.
With that remark I can agree, given what I said above about ladders and windows.
We get it now in a way that few people did when my peers were kids that the entire globe is both a biological and a cultural ecosystem in which everything cycles. The only question is "when?"
So while we were raised in a time when all expectations were rising, the reality has been much different. We have seen as many bears as bulls and as many busts as booms, and all of this world-shifting change has been happening at an accelerating rate.
Can I find an upside in any of this? The short answer is yes.
If you want to find an upside to all of this whiplash, consider that our greater need to adjust and cope may also turn out to be what also keeps us more resilient than ever before as we grow older ourselves.
If I were Mother Nature, I might be tempted to arrange things that way for just that reason, in the hope that it might teach us again that just about every downer turns out to have some benefit.
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To read the rest of this interesting report, use this link:
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/880/baby-boomers-the-gloomiest-generation
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