Millennials have played our part in maintaining intergenerational strife, too. Dismissing anyone over forty with “OK Boomer” is not exactly conducive to discussion. What’s striking, though, is how little power we actually have. Boomers may feel hurt by “OK Boomer,” but there’s not much Millennials can do to cause them harm in a country where they maintain near-total control over politics, entertainment, and the economy. And Boomers simply lived a materially different reality than Millennials. As a result, both groups have different priorities, desires, and perspectives. But Boomers’ dominance means they can enforce their will. And Millennials can do little more than mock them.
As Gen Zers come of age, we see these gaps between the young and the aging grow. Take the 2020 Democratic primary: Joe Biden cleaned up among voters over forty, while those under forty backed Bernie Sanders and, to a lesser but still significant extent, Elizabeth Warren. Older folks hang tight to a Republican Party the young have largely fled. These stark political differences don’t reflect the “identity politics” young people are often accused of having—all three of these politicians are older and white, and two of the three are male—but rather a profound shift in what each generation sees as the challenges ahead of us. For Boomers, familiarity and stability seem to be driving forces. As they came of age, one only had to look at the nightly news reports about the Soviet Union to see how much better we had it in America. America’s longstanding ethos of individualism took even deeper root among Baby Boomers, many of whom had tremendous assistance and yet still hit middle age convinced they had done it all for themselves. Many of those Boomers rode into the middle class on the backs of the same programs they later defunded; government investment is often invisible, and its benefits are easily confused with bootstraps.
Millennials, by contrast, grew up with the twin forces of technological innovation and deep trauma shaping our lives. The most pressing existential threat to our existence isn’t a cunning evil empire but rather climate change, a monster of our own making. Our parents were promised that hard work would pay off, and for a lot of them it did. But Millennials were promised that, too, and yet here we are, constantly hustling while our circumstances don’t seem to materially improve. Thanks to the internet, we can look across borders and see that young people in other prosperous nations may suffer from their own generational malaise and may also get hit by economic forces beyond their control. But they aren’t going bankrupt paying for health care; they aren’t wishing they could declare bankruptcy to wipe out their crushing student loan debt; they aren’t deciding between having a job they love or having children.
We can see that there’s a better way to do things. And since our lives haven’t felt stable, the prospect of significant upheaval—making big, substantive, systemic changes to the American health care and education systems, to our environmental policy, and to our economy—doesn’t appear quite as daunting as it does to our Boomer elders.
Boomers look at what they might lose if things change. Millennials look at what we will lose if things don’t.
There’s a lot more room for growth and understanding on both sides here. In so many ways, Millennials are Boomers’ cultural heirs, carrying forward a commitment to individuality, pleasure, and purpose. Many Boomers were the foot soldiers in the movements that demanded America to be a better version of itself. And like us, Boomers spent their young adulthood being derided and chided for being different, and therefore narcissistic and wrong. Yes, Millennials could do more to foster intergenerational understanding, and to be less reactive and more nuanced in how we approach our Baby Boomers elders.
But: Boomers, we really need you to do your part. And that means we need you to consider what the world looks like to us, and what kind of world you want to leave us with.
Life at thirty for your average Millennial looks close to nothing like life at thirty did for you. We are deeply in debt. We feel burned-out and behind. And for most of our adult lives, we’ve been doubting ourselves—it’s only very recently that we have collectively looked around, seen so many in our same boat, and started to conclude, Maybe it’s not just me. Yes, we know that in the grand scope of world history, we are phenomenally lucky. But we also don’t think it’s unreasonable to hope that, in the most prosperous nation in the history of the world, we have control over our own lives and a reasonable shot at a good future.
For that, we need you to make decisions with everyone’s interests in mind, not just your own. We need you to realize that we are rational adults with a different perspective, not indulged children who need reprimanding. We need you to vote with all of our futures in mind. We need you to lean into optimism for what could be. We need you to see that we will make this country, and this world, better if you’ll let us. Mostly, we need you to hand over, or at least share, the reins of power.
Give us a hand, Boomer—okay?