Freedom from Boomers

Waiting isn't enough

Handmade drawing by Alessandra Bocchi, original copy for Founding Members

Both sides of the younger political spectrum share common ground. With a rise in nativist sentiments among nationalists, taking care of one’s own is becoming the new priority. Young progressives, despite aspiring for a different outcome, share a similar communitarian sentiment in principle. The societal schism is becoming less ideological and more age-based: The era of rootless, hedonistic individuality is over. We’re aspiring for more.

The soul of the Boomer is reflected in the hippie-rock aesthetic. Their revolt found expression in the counterculture movement of “free love”. The peace-preaching music of Bob Dylan, the Woodstock festivals, the anaesthetizing drug use, the concept of unbound, universal acceptance, of living in the present moment, and of the mantra, “I did my best”. It was, in essence, an inversion of the Silent Generation’s values of prudence, responsibility, and sacrifice.

While the Silent Generation built its politics around creating possibilities for the unborn generations, the Boomers grounded theirs in preserving privilege for themselves. They turned their gaze inwards. A Narcissus, fixated on their own reflection. In doing so, they managed to hoard not only wealth, assets, and power, but time.

The notion that Boomers are aging and fading from view is inaccurate. The last members of the Silent Generation are only now dying. With their passing, the Boomers have inherited more power and wealth. But a revolt is underway. The recent interview between Piers Morgan and Nick Fuentes pointed to a deeper, psychological fracture: Younger generations are responding with mockery to the Boomers’ hypocrisy of moral superiority. They’re no longer engaging with measured, reasonable responses, but with a form of defiance rooted in contempt. There is a reason for this sentiment, however disagreeable it may appear.

Boomers could climb the economic ladder in the span of a few years in their youth. A construction worker or a secretary in the 1980s for a small company could afford to buy a home worth 30k, a car to commute safely to work and take their children to school, maybe even a second holiday home with an upgrade. That world no longer exists. That same house is worth at least 600k today, and salaries have remained stagnant, while prices skyrocket with inflation, and it’s no longer safe to walk on the street alone in any major Western city.

Millennials and Generation Z studied and worked harder, more competitively, and longer than their parents to survive in a rigged, perilous system. Stagnant wages, student debt, lifelong mortgages, and unemployment, while competing with labor from a global market through open borders, as their own hometowns are becoming foreign to them. This makes the aspiration of a family increasingly elusive, not just spiritually, but on a practical level, so the birthrates continue to plummet. A recent comment on an online reel about our generation having fewer children was striking: “No one wants to raise a kid in an apartment, living check to check”. Children were indeed made in far poorer conditions, but not ones where the cost of living was proportionately so high, without ownership.

The most pressing sociological anomaly today is an aging population. The percentage of political representatives who are over the age of 70 across the Western world has skyrocketed to 25 times higher than in the past. A very young leader is now considered to be approaching 50. Examples are Emmanuel Macron, Giorgia Meloni, or Volodymyr Zelenskyy (and that is young for a leader, but not at the 70 benchmark). Pointing out this reality isn’t ageism. It’s confronting the truth that we live in a gerontocracy: A rule by the old. And it’s not just that we’re being ruled by the old, that wouldn’t necessarily be an issue per se, if it weren’t that this older generation is directly inhibiting younger generations from fulfilling their future.

More than half of Gen Z and Millennials, who are barely represented in their political systems, report that they’re depending on their inheritance to achieve any semblance of financial security. It’s perhaps no surprise that single women are turning to OnlyFans and young men are becoming crypto brokers. These are the few professions that offer quick ways to make a decent income to meet the purchasing needs of our time. But a civilization where the most promising prospects for the young are prostitution and scamming, while the old live comfortably from the proceeds of late-stage rentier capitalism, is hardly one with a promising future. For a society to flourish, it must produce and reward value.

The lack of creation in value, coupled with the increasing unaffordability of life, is a unique feature of our post-industrial, speculative era. It means that our society cannot sustain itself, and therefore that it cannot reproduce. By definition, that organism is struggling to stay alive.

Immigrants arriving from poorer, agrarian countries are simultaneously becoming stronger. They enjoy the backbone of united families, where costs are cut, and contributions are compounded because they are shared. They hold healthy pride and unapologetic self-love towards their ancestry. In contrast, the average Western individual is atomized, vilified, turned into the villain of his own story, and must be fully self-reliant in a society where such independence is made impossible by design.

To understand why we find ourselves at this impasse of precarious solitude, one needs to know where the source of the issue is: the Western Boomer. Their philosophy of life is the underlying reason for our civilizational collapse.

The Boomers’ dismissive attitude towards this grievance is part of a wider generational malaise: A lack of self-awareness, a blind selfishness to the concerns of the young. Their typical response falls into: “You’re owed nothing; you should make it on your own.” It is natural for youngsters to cherish their elders, to view them as sources of wisdom, and for these elders to offer some necessary constructive criticism. But the Boomers have managed to become uniquely resented by those who succeed them because their children are picking up the rubble from their poor choices. Instead of trying to make amends for their mistakes, Boomers continue to view respect from their descendants as a birthright while compromising the very opportunities their children need to succeed. The inter-generational chain of trust has been broken, and animosity towards them is growing.

Millennials and Gen Z are accused of acting like victims by Boomer philosophers like Jordan Peterson. The usual argument against victimhood is that it’s a dangerous mindset because it can lead to failure, and that self-responsibility is a virtue because it leads us to improve ourselves. That is true, but not always for the reasons implied. Failure can also come from refusing to stand up to a system that is sabotaging one’s opportunities to succeed, while self-responsibility means finding the courage to change it. “Fortune favors the bold,” Virgin once said - one of his most timeless quotes. Let’s look at that system.

Boomers have amassed $84.4 trillion, which is set to be inherited by their children through 2045, representing the largest generational wealth transfer in history. Boomers are, in fact, the wealthiest generation in all of recorded history. But what is concerning about these numbers is the level of comparative generational inequality they represent.

Earning wealth isn’t a zero-sum game. A person earning wealth for themselves doesn’t deny another to earn theirs. But for the first time in our civilization, the young earn and own drastically less than their parents, and they’re unable to compensate because the odds are stacked against them by the political economy they’ve inherited. They feel betrayed and sold out.

A characteristic of our aging society is a pension system that is becoming unaffordable. It is Millennials and Gen Z who, despite the large disparity in wealth compared to their parents, work to pay for Boomer pensions, which are becoming unsustainable because of demographic decline. The response by Boomers who still hold positions of power is to let in more migrants to compensate for a labor gap. But migration causes downward pressure on wages, uses limited welfare resources, and raises housing prices. These factors directly damage younger generations. Mass migration also erodes the social and cultural fabric that defines a people’s sense of identity. In its worst manifestations, it creates ethnic and religious strife - the likes we already routinely witness.

The Boomers are immune to this reality. Such concepts should be sacrificed at the altar of their material comfort, the only currency that is palatable to them. They use GDP as a tone-deaf metric to justify their self-indulgence. Living in a harmonious society was a given, and they won’t live long enough to see the consequences of their misguided dreams of inclusivity, the euphemism deployed to justify the import of cheap labor and the expansion, to breaking point, of their pension system.

They’re not concerned with how this contracted economy will make it prohibitively expensive for their children to own a home, have children of their own, to benefit from any remaining resources from a government they’re increasingly taxed by, or to use their talents for the betterment of society. Boomers are, by definition, a parasitic class that, instead of investing in the young, leeches off of their good nature. The bootstrap argument fails to address the reality that hides beneath their moral posturing. Boomers benefit from the system they’ve created, while the young generations lose from it. Necessarily, our interests are conflicting; not commensurate.

This goes some way to explaining why they have carved a unique place in history as the most hated generation. Entire books have been dedicated to their actions. A Generation of Sociopaths, How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future, and Why They Should Give It Back.

A photo of Boomers enjoying the Woodstock festival on X recently received a wave of hateful comments: “The most worthless generation, they took everything and gave nothing.” Another one wrote, “The most vile generation”. Charles Murray, a political scientist from the Boomer generation, posted a thread on social media trying to lecture young generations on how they could “make it” on their own. He was met with vitriol for the hypocrisy of his arguments. Recently, a user posted, “Boomers raped and pillaged all the good things life had to offer on their way up to the ivory tower, then pushed the ladder away when they got to the top.” These are not isolated comments; they are becoming viral. Some anonymous accounts are even threatening to end the lives of their parents in their retirement homes, a form of hatred that is unhealthy, symptomatic of exasperation.

That said, it’s important to analyze their own circumstances, not to justify their behavior but to understand it. Boomers are largely products of their environment. The Silent Generation, their parents, and our grandparents, were not the most outwardly affectionate or supportive. They carried the psychological fatigue from surviving the Second World War, a war that used the first weapons of mass destruction. It shouldn’t be surprising that they believed in a form of “tough love”. This was not arrogance. They were tough. As survivors of one of the most catastrophic wars in world history, their love could be nothing else.

But the Silent Generation made sure their children could live with the security and dignity they had been denied. With this mindset, the post-war economic “boom” was born. Hence, Boomers grew up with a lethal combination of an absence of personal love from their parents, coupled with unearned good fortune. Plagued by their perceived inadequacy relative to the accomplishments of their parents, insecure by the lack of any defining struggle of their own, the result was one of reckless indulgence. Boomer parents lacked presence with their children, just like the Silent Generation, but with the added feature of being unable to provide guidance or to leave behind a legacy their children could rely on. In contrast, Millennial parents are reported to be more present with their children, more willing to spend time and take care of them, and more active in wanting to redress the injustices they have suffered, whatever their political affiliation may be.

Assured by their own fantasy that old age can be a new adolescence, the Boomers have indefinitely prolonged their own childhood and passed on the costs to the young. This is the principle that explains some of their most devastating actions: Inflating market bubbles, clinging to seats of power long after the erosion of their cognitive faculties, letting their children be replaced in their only homelands, denying them opportunities to create families, or to contribute to the hallmarks of excellence that have characterized our civilization (instead of, say - having to work at an Amazon service to pay off a studio apartment mortgage).

As a result, we are having fewer children and are becoming less motivated and inspired. In fact, young generations are suffering from existential angst and depression. Boomers offer them therapy, the consolation of psychiatric numbness. But these are only nominal solutions that exacerbate the problem. They neutralize legitimate feelings into silence. Youngsters are seeing the intent behind this playbook, and a healthy rebellion is growing beneath the surface.

Boomers cannot be trusted with the levers of power. This isn’t a question of impatient princes and princesses demanding an early seat on the throne. It’s about the survival of something resembling the Western civilization our ancestors built. Power must be passed down to rest with those who will live with the consequences of how it is exercised. And if increased lifespans preclude this from occurring biologically, and Boomers refuse to do so willingly, it should be enacted in policy. It isn’t an act of revenge. It’s a restoration of the idea that society is held in trust for the future.

The pace of change requires leaders who understand the present domains. We cannot meet the challenges presented by AI from a generation that can’t remember their Yahoo password or convert a PDF file. New technologies represent revolutionary powers that need to be harnessed for the public good, and they necessarily require leadership from those who are aware of how they operate and whose horizons extend beyond the immediate future.

Asking Boomer parents to help their descendants might not be helpful: They’re not legally obliged, and most have already expressed their unwillingness to do so. Legislation, and social pressure, are our only options.

It is now beyond argument that the young do not enjoy meaningful political agency: We are outnumbered, as a voting bloc, by those older than us and by foreign-born voters who unite to advance narrow, culture-specific agendas. Meanwhile, the average age of elected representatives in Western democracies continues to climb, and candidates, for reasons of political self-interest, increasingly cater to the wishes of non-native voters and to the older generations who lobby and finance them. We need to restore power to the disaffected. The young natives whose voices have been voiceless for too long.

One can start with affirmative action, opening up positions of office for native Millennials and Gen Z, who find themselves destitute and unrepresented. This isn’t pettiness, nor is it rooted in the reparation of historical injustice, as race- or gender-based quotas are. It would be a pragmatic necessity to steer the wheels our society is headed towards through policymaking.

Addressing the underrepresentation of the young in political office will only solve part of the problem. Meaningful change requires redressing the imbalance of capital. Another policy would therefore be aimed at transferring a percentage of Boomer assets, 60 to 80 percent, depending on each case, to their successors. The prevailing hypersensitivity to “Marxism” makes any capital transfer seem tyrannical even to young conservatives today. “Redistribution” remains a terrifying word. But this policy wouldn’t risk providing resources to the government, because it would be transferred rather than taxed to heirs, while Boomers retain the residue of their assets and their entitlements to pension support. It would be immune, as a result, to inflationary pressure or the risk of government expansion.

The objection to this policy is familiar. That one’s accomplishments must be determined on merit alone. But a lack of meritocracy is precisely the issue at stake. The transfer is intended as an ad hoc measure to redress a historical anomaly that denies merit. When one generation has monopolized the very power and capital that create opportunities for younger generations, the notion of meritocracy becomes meaningless. To suggest that correcting a de facto generational class system based on age must be opposed on the grounds of “Marxism” is to internalize another of the Boomers’ arguments, a remnant of the Cold War era, that only two systems of government exist: Communism and Capitalism. But this restorative approach represents neither. It’s a corrective measure to address a failure of the Boomers’ making in the dysfunctional system they’ve created.

Bruce Cannon Gibney in his book against Boomers, observed that,

Even a plague of generational locusts like the Boomers can do only so much damage in a lifetime, however unduly prolonged that lifetime may be courtesy of benefits funded by the young.

I disagree. The damage will continue until the chain of succession between generations is re-established. The social contract that binds us as a civilization depends on the belief of the governed that those in power have a meaningful stake in the future. Instead of blaming Millennials and Gen Z, who voice their grievances and who are unable to create futures of their own, one should start to understand why those grievances exist and take matters into their own hands.

The recent uproar from our generation against Boomers isn’t a fantasy. It reflects the rage of children waking up to the betrayal of their parents. It should be enough to make Boomers recognize that their time is up, and that peaceful retirement is preferable to revolution.

Alessandra Bocchi is the founder of Alata Magazine and Rivista Alata.