Why Old People Aren’t As Cool Anymore

What it says about the past and what it means for the future

I remember my history teacher in middle school reciting Plato’s famous quote on the youth of ancient Greece: “What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets, inflamed with wild notions.” The quote itself is dubious of source, but that’s beside the point. The idea is that the phenomenon of “generational welfare” isn’t anything new, and that the young have rebelled against established social norms and offended the elderly for time immemorial. To a degree, of course, that’s true, but in today’s world, I argue it actually masks two more pressing phenomenon defining generational relations and complicating the future. For one, social change in the industrial era has proven itself far faster than it had been in eras past; generations today experience more differences between them because the world changes faster now than it ever did before. For another, as I will argue further here, several generations through the 20th century, and the Baby Boomer generation especially, genuinely fucked up.

There is one generation, roughly corresponding to younger of the Silent Generation and older of the Baby Boomers, who have run American politics and international policy for decades now. At one time, their ascension to power was seen as natural, considering both that every generation has its moment and that this generation in particular was the…