I occasionally permit myself to rant about the Baby Boomers. As a 20-something, I’m loudly unimpressed with their negatively-geared possession of our suburbs. I talk about how much they’ve squandered the world’s resources enjoying the fruits of modernity while deluding themselves that there’s no downside to the car fumes resulting from dismantled public transport infrastructure. I rage at their enjoyment of free education while my uni debt, indexing ever higher on an annual basis, casts a shadow over my fledging adulthood.
I allow myself to be part of the generation wars, but I know I need to temper the anger. After all, it’s fundamentally based on ignorance. Boomers aren’t people I know very well: my parents are too young and my grandparents are too old for the label. And rants made about those more vivid in your imagination than in reality are never valid.
In fact, the more I learn about the Baby Boomers, the more I make the surprising realisation: we aren’t so different.
Between 1962 and 1972 the Australian adult population grew by 3 million people as many Boomers celebrated their eighteenth birthdays. Although Gen Y are a smaller, sleeker cohort, the sheer amount of growth and change in the world was probably as stark for them as it is for us. For better or worse neither generation could expect the things their parents had.
Technology
Generation Y has come of age during a time of tremendous technological change. I use technologies gadgets and social media that never existed until a couple of years ago as a routine part of my job and social life. Adapting to change involves mental agility and a willingness to lean quickly, but it can also be fun.
When I reflect on how cool it is that I can just google the nearest café with a 4+ Yelp rating on my phone, I also get a taste of how the Baby Boomers must’ve felt with the introduction of the vinyl LP and the increasingly easy access to technologies such as the television and the car.
Sex and relationships
Gen Y follows in the footsteps of the Baby Boomers in redefining relationships. We’re hopefully experiencing what will soon be the introduction of marriage equality alongside the increasing average ages of marriage and childbirth, the higher likelihood of cohabitation before marriage, the frequent use of online dating, and the increasingly acceptable possibility of not marrying at all. Boomers were likewise pioneers of evolving relationships. They grew up in families which likely had far more children than their subsequent households. They implemented no-fault divorce, which made it easier to leave unhappy marriages. They enjoyed the invention of the contraceptive pill, which allowed them to take unprecedented levels of control over their reproductive health and sex lives. Life expectations, particularly around the family, was up for grabs.
Social justice
Both Boomers and Gen Ys have also been preoccupied with social justice. For Boomers, the focus was on civil rights, particularly gender and racial equality, with forms of discrimination being heavily interrogated with resulting legal reforms. The movement is different now, focusing on more systemic but subtle forms of injustice, such as a push to celebrate diversity and include a greater variety of voices in society and the media. As in the 60s and 70s, today’s social justice movements are met with considerable backlash and tension, but both generations have moved through criticism, and sometimes even violence, with tenacity.
As they were maligned for their idealism, the Boomer generation faced the spectre of war-time conscription. So too do today’s youth face a great deal of hostility, albeit nothing as dreadful as being forced into war. The last budget proposed that young people looking for a job should take on internships at $4 an hour, potentially displacing minimum wage opportunities. Additionally, as a response to the growing housing unaffordability for young people, Malcolm Turnbull suggested we borrow cash from our parents. Both Gen Y and Boomers know the sting of ageist stereotypes that allow governments to get away with reprehensible policy.
Wealth
Moreover, while it’s easy to scapegoat Baby Boomers today as land barons and high flying businesspeople who greedily refuse to retire, it isn’t quite true. While those over the age of 55 hold 58% of Australia’s wealth, poverty affects older people, particularly older women, after a lifetime of wage inequality, inequalities in the accumulation of superannuation, and ageism in the workforce.
On the front of ageism, and on the front of struggling to procure an adequate and stable standard of living, some Gen Ys and Baby Boomers could find unlikely allies in each other. If the generational tension ever clears, we may find we can galvanise our shared strengths of compassion and coping with change for a common cause.
