The Luckiest, Most Selfish Generation

“The older generation of Vikings no doubt complained that the younger generation were getting soft and did not rape and pillage with the same dedication as in years gone by.” - C Peter Herman

I don’t know about you but I’m definitely ready to say goodbye to 2016. On a personal level it’s been a year of loss and the ramifications for my family were, and still are significant. People that have inspired and literally sustained me at crucial points of my life have left us – Ali, Prince, Bowie, Maurice White, Alan Rickman, Phife Dawg, even Fidel Castro – and my world feels poorer for it, particularly as my full list is in fact much longer. And of course, the world at large has decided that the truth doesn’t matter and populist leaders are going to save them from hordes of (insert-bad-guy-here). Populists have given the disenfranchised, the working class, the angry, the disaffected someone to blame. No, history has taught us nothing. Not the facist regimes. Not the Nazis. Not the countless dictatorships. Apparently, some mistakes are too much fun to only make once.

So in the spirit of hypocrisy that seems to be the rule nowadays as opposed to the exception, my contention is that the most privileged generation in history are also the most selfish; and their expectation and self-indulgence have left a legacy that the more dispassionate amongst them will surely recognise as shameful. Yeah, I’m a hypocrite for looking for someone or something to blame, whether it’s the year 2016 itself or the luckiest generation of all time, but bear with me. A general consensus exists that young people today are likely to be the first generation in modern history to expect to be poorer than their parents, and this was received wisdom prior to the shock of Brexit and the toxicity of Trump. This generation are of course the Millenials, those estimated to have been born between 1982 and 2004, and as such they’re the offspring of the Baby Boomers. They are understandably pissed and why shouldn’t they be. What have their parents have bequeathed them?

Well, despite inheriting the richest economy in the history of the world, they deluded their offspring in to pursuing higher education at all costs and to incur hideous amounts of debt to do so. Let’s face it, who else is going to pay for Boomers' life of excess and undeserved pensions at 55? Particularly as they spent like it was a sport while their kids were in university, buying new homes, furnishing them in the latest contemporary Ikea-inspired nightmare, buying new cars, going on holidays to ever-further destinations and other excesses; and all on credit. But the really selfish thing in this context was the fact that the Boomers used their political power to mortgage their children’s, grandchildren’s and possibly their great-grandchildren’s futures in order to keep themselves rich. The Baby Boomers were the first generation to genuinely be considered healthy and wealthy, with social care structures established to manage the general health and wellbeing of society. But they seem strangely ambivalent to the privatisation of the NHS or the destruction of Obamacare/Medicaid.

Lucky Generation investors who listened to the sage advice of property-porn television and got into buy-to-let schemes created an alternative method of taking money from the young and securing it for the old. And Millenials see the out-of-reach property ladder from a swamp of debt, because by the Nineties, the former student leader Boomers had made their way into the Labour Cabinet in the UK. And this Boomer government of quasi-liberals who were all beneficiaries of free education, initiated student top up fees. The hypocrisy is staggering and reminds me that some of us learn form the mistakes of others; and the rest of us have to be the others.

The economic consequences of the Luckiest Generation’s cosseted lifestyles are extensive but to catalogue them all would cause me to lose the will to live. Personally, my main issue with them is the other stuff. This generation literally developed divorce as a multi-national, multi-billion dollar industry, creating the birth of the single-parent family as a recognised demographic and the birth of a generation of “latchkey kids.” Boomers were at the vanguard of free love and sexual liberation of the 60’s, which turned in to the hook-up culture of the 70’s. As a result they had a complete inability to provide emotional support and instruction to their children and expected the education system to do their job for them. They placed high and often unreasonable expectations on their own children without any instruction as to how to achieve them. Love, patience and especially discipline, were forsaken at their altar of cowardly irresponsibility; better off telling their children how special they were and creating even greater expectations in their offspring than they had themselves. And every time Boomers felt guilty for not raising their kids they bought them useless baubles that reinforced their children’s feelings of privilege.

This entitlement, privilege, sexual and moral dysfunction of the Luckiest Generation gave us the society of the 70s in which it seems that paedophiles ran rampant. Cyril Smith and the Dolphin Square sex ring. Jimmy Saville in entertainment and media. Barry Bennell and other coaches in football. Paedophile priests. Numerous children’s homes nationwide in the UK. I know the Boomer generation are not universally evil and therefore responsible for all the ills of world. But they are happy to, if liberal, see out their remaining days off of the work and the entitlements created by their parents, and to demand the costs are borne by their children. And if they see themselves as conservative or right-leaning in philosophy they are likely to abdicate any responsibility for the chaos they’ve helped to create and vote Brexit or Trump. After all, it’s not their ****ing fault and the Sunburnt Stalin is one of their children.