My generation.

Boomers – baby boomers that is and although I loathe and detest the term there is something about the boomer generation that is a problem.

The TLDR or short version.

To sum up what I think is wrong with my generation is one short paragraph isn’t easy but i’ll do my best to keep it as short as possible so…….. The boomer generation, of which I am one, are now in our sixties or seventies and I think I have experienced the best that our generation can offer as well as seeing the opposite – not exactly the dark side although that in itself is part and parcel of our generation – what I want to get at today is the problem of us having grown up with life being easy, most things going our way much of the time and having never had a major crisis such as an actual war on home ground during our lifetimes. And yes….I know about the troubles as they were called and one time I had to sit through a lecture given by a home office pathologist and just one of his slides featured a row of black bin liners filled with body parts ; my memory has that as the Hyde Park bombing but anyway….

I can just imagine the howls when I assert that this (our) generation has had it (relatively) good and (relatively) easy and my arguments for that are : first that we had the chance of a good education – you would never believe that I was a Grammar school kid, that most of us got jobs quite quickly as and when we needed one, that we could indulge in most of our hobbies and interests, we had free and easy access to healthcare and when we came to retire many of my generation now benefit from an occupational pension as well as a state one.

Compare that with the situation today, and I take as an example my own profession as that’s the one I know most about : as many of my readers will know both of us here have been Nurses who trained in the same era and both of us have been ward or specialist ‘sisters’ (charge nurses) . Neither of us paid a jot to tuition fees in fact I was paid a very small salary when I was in training and I for one was able to take advantage of below market price hospital accommodation. When I finished my training I may have been dirt poor but at least I didn’t owe thousands in student ‘loans’ for tuition fees. Today, a young staff nurse, just trained, will complete their training with an average of £29.000 debt just for the ‘pleasure’ of then going into a job where they have no say about pay and conditions and neither will they get a final salary based pension. I would suggest also that their working conditions are worse and that. oddly, they have lower social status whereas being a State Registered Nurse was fairly highly regarded in my day.

Back to my main idea though……

I feel that my generation is very much the me generation where everything is ok as long as I am getting exactly what I want and that I have the freedom to be, or to express, whatever individuality that I chose to display as a persona. If you know your way around the 20th century philosophers then it’s almost entirely based on the work of Jean Paul Sartre with a bit of Karl Marx on the side.

Sartre’s philosophy (Wikipedia)………….. “Sartre’s primary idea is that people, as humans, are “condemned to be free”. He explained, “This may seem paradoxical because condemnation is normally an external judgment which constitutes the conclusion of a judgment. Here, it is not the human who has chosen to be like this. There is a contingency of human existence. It is a condemnation of their being. Their being is not determined, so it is up to everyone to create their own existence, for which they are then responsible. They cannot not be free, there is a form of necessity for freedom, which can never be given up.”^[

And goes on to say………Sartre maintained that the concepts of authenticity and individuality have to be earned but not learned. We need to experience “death consciousness” so as to wake up ourselves as to what is really important; the authentic in our lives which is life experience, not knowledge. Death draws the final point when we as beings cease to live for ourselves and permanently become objects that exist only for the outside world. In this way death emphasizes the burden of our free, individual existence. “We can oppose authenticity to an inauthentic way of being. Authenticity consists in experiencing the indeterminate character of existence in anguish. It is also to know how to face it by giving meaning to our actions and by recognizing ourselves as the author of this meaning. On the other hand, an inauthentic way of being consists in running away, in lying to oneself in order to escape this anguish and the responsibility for one’s own existence.”

In my own words, we are a generation that strives to be authentic and free while often falling into the trap of uniformity of thought – especially if it is the false ‘science’ of socialist utopian thinking. Once again, in my own words, this striving for individuality seems to come down to choosing only from a limited menu of options and in so doing becoming ultimately dull and uniform – like modern ‘popular’ music which largely now only uses the same beats and the same tropes – the so called millennial whoop in nearly every track being one of the worst examples.

If my generation starts to actively think about something it often starts with good intentions – we know how that usually goes – but quickly devolves and degrades into the questions : what is good, easy or maximally convenient to me and where that goes is into an existence based on ease, comfort and immediately gratified desires.

Another thing : another thing that my generation is very bad at, most of the time, is clearing up our own mess – my example is the small genre of leisure sailing and low quality GRP boats that their owners have abandoned and left to slowly rot in rivers and creeks all around the country because they (the boats) are too inconvenient to move and dispose of properly.

My generation, the boomers, are now running out of life-time, many already being in what Dr Attia calls their ‘terminal decade’ (I for example might be). Where that goes, in the more liberal west, is the desire for an easy exit – a comfortable and pain free death, hence the rise of suicides in the elderly in those countries supporting medically assisted dying. Time and place of death just becomes another choice made on ease, convenience and comfort.

Boomers eh ?……can’t live with them and can’t shoot them (yet)