Young Adults Admire Boomers - Sometimes

CHICAGO - Abby Lovett's friends would die laughing if they heard her. Here she is in her office at a Chicago ad agency, the place she spends many a night and weekend, loudly proclaiming that her generation needs to work less than their baby boomer parents have.

Sure, she's putting in more than 50 hours a week to establish her career. But in her heart of hearts, Lovett knows she'll end up miserable if she doesn't eventually find a little balance.

Forget the three-car garage and all the trappings those high-flying boomers hold so dear.

To her and many other young adults, "having it all" is fast becoming a myth, not the mantra it was for boomers who left behind their protest signs and tie-dye to climb the corporate ladder. And now, she says, many boomer parents are pressuring their kids to achieve even more.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051211/ap_on_re_us/boomer_backlash;_ylt=AiLZ3out0QGxcjY2n4u5I3Gs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MjBwMWtkBHNlYwM3MTg-

don't fall into the trap.

I'm 46 years old, which puts me at the trailing edge of the "baby boomers". At one point in my life, I became what's known as "house rich and cash poor". This nearly destroyed me. I'm not part of the ranks of "professionals". I am a highly skilled blue collar worker (machinist). Before that, I had a couple of other occupations. As for education, I never went past an associates degree. Lot's of self-education beyond that. Many people in my circle are professionals: legal, engineering, etc. Most of them are no better off than I am, outside of having been able to afford better vacations, cars, and toys. Salary-wise, I've never gotten near six figures. I currently earn $55,0000 per year, and that takes 10-20 hours of overtime per week to attain. I'm aware that many people live on much less than that, so don't take this as whining. I'm grateful for what I have. It also took a long time to reach that kind of salary. Many years of busting my ass for it. My first wife is a registered nurse, and she was always a "keep up with the Joneses-type". We lived in a home that we had no business buying. We were able to purchase the home, but had little money left after paying for it and maintaining it. All I saw was a money drain; all she saw was "the right house, in the right neighborhood, with the right kind of neighbors". This situation finally drove me nuts, and I laid it on the line. I told her we had to do the right thing, and get out from under this "house slavery". She didn't agree, so we split up. In the divorce, she couldn't afford to buy me out, so the house had to be sold. Luckily, the value of this home had risen to a point where a profit was turned by it's sale. I finally got to go back to being the real me. I enjoy a lot of things that most "blue collar" people don't: art, music, literature. I am not a NASCAR dude. Not that there's anything wrong with that! My point is, I now have the resources(time and MONEY) freed up to enjoy the life I want. My life is very simple now. I'm married to a wonderful woman who is just like me. We have a simple home in a small city on the outskirts of Chicagoland. We have great neighbors. We have energy efficient autos. We garden most of the vegetables we eat. We travel. We donate time and money to helpful social causes. Most importantly, even though we will probably never be extremely wealthy, we will probably never be broke! We are VERY HAPPY!

The whole point of my rant is this: it took me a long time to learn that this superficial "American Dream" that we are always being sold is not necessarily all it's cracked up to be. I say to you folks that are now in your twenties--create a life that is enjoyable. Don't get into a situation where your work day begins after you get home from work!

I'm glad that you are so happy with your life. Simplicity is a good thing.

I'm in my mid-20s. A friend my age has fallen into this trap of work-buy-work-buy-buy. He said that he put in 80hrs at work last week, and this is on top of his part-time schooling. He has extended himself so much -- new house, new car, new plasma TV, etc. -- that he almost has no choice but to work like that if he wants to keep everything. It's a very sad situation. He is miserable and so are his friends because work is all that he talks or complains about.

I've found through my college years that I can live happily (here in Albuquerque, at least) on about 20k/year. I don't buy extravagant things and, while I'd like to eventually buy a house, I'm happy renting for now. I'd like to try to live a "nomadic" life for a while -- traveling cheaply, backpacking, living for the moment. Why start a career and family now?

:toast:

when you are young, if you can. Especially now, while the interest rates are low. However, you don't have to buy the most expensive house you can afford.
You can never go wrong with real estate. It's like money in the bank for the future.

Hare Krsna! Hare Rama!

as the engine of social progress and the myth of 'choice' the credos of the self absorbed boomers.

Careerism

Nauseating

Never bought into the "have it all" myth. How many cars can you drive? How many rooms do you need? This idea of boomers+consumers gone wild is pretty much a myth itself. No boomers I know live in McMansions or drive BMWs. However, the generation AFTER us boomers, from those that I know, have this consumer consumption thing down pat. Just sayin.

I grew up thinking that a materialist ethic was something left over from the great depression, where people who grew up with economic insecurity ended up craving what they had to do without.

We boomers blamed materialism on our parent's generation.

Hippies and punkers were alike in rejecting a materialistic lifestyle

all have tricycles in the drive and they aren't grandparents. I think the Gen X is a bit more materialistic. They grew up with the whole "gotta have the alligator on your shirt" schtick and were neo-preppies. The Boomies I know are into downsizing and simplicity.

Hey, we weren't so bad a generation. Bill Gates is a boomer, so is Clinton and Gore. We brought you co-ed dorms and we were the first generation of women to work outside the home as a matter of course. And hey, what about Woodstock? Hendrix? The Doors? Joplin? The Internet?

tg

I don't like the standard definition of when a boomer was born which says it's from 1946 to 1964. Boomers were called that because they were supposedly born right after WWII when all the soldiers came home and started families. How can you say 1964 is "right after the war?" Anyway, I digress. I am not nor have I ever been materialistic and neither have my 6 siblings, most of whom were born in the 40's. I think the generation that is materialistic are the ones who are currently in their early 40's. Just my observation. When we were starting out our generation was happy just to have an apartment and one car and not an SUV either.

I practice voluntary simplicity, voluntary because my husband and I do have the means to live in the big McMansion and drive the expensive cars but I choose not to. We have a hefty savings account because of it and don't have to worry if something happens to our jobs.

Besides, I can't stand being like the rest of Americans with their shopping obsession. I like being different. It makes people uncomfortable because it causes some of them to question their materialism. Not everyone, but some. And that's a good thing. I never miss the opportunity to tell people I don't shop for unnecessary stuff.

meant DOING it all, so you're not the first to go down this particular road.

The boomers who climbed the corporate ladder weren't the committed boomers who marched against the war, by the way. There are two separate cohorts, the social justice cohort born 1946-1955 and the yuppie cohort born from 1955-1964. The first cohort caught the brunt of the Vietnam war and saw their heroes assassinated. The second cohort was too young for all that and grew up listening to their parents yell at the first cohort. They benefited from a lot of educational infrastructure which had simply not been built when the earliest boomers arrived at every stage of education.

I'm afraid the young folks today who are working those 50 hour weeks and wondering how they're going to survive if the job gets offshored have a lot in common with that first cohort of boomers, who also bore the brunt of the loss of manufacturing jobs, the destruction of unions, and the lowering of wages that have never recovered from the oil shock inflation of the 1970s. We've spent our lives falling farther behind every year, and now we're looking at a bleak retirement, full of a patchwork of dead end, meaningless jobs to supplement an inadequate social security check because our pensions have been looted.

I don't think admiration is exactly what is needed, though. I'd really prefer we join forces across generations and work for social and economic justice, something we've seen little of in the past 35 years.

Agree we should be working across generations.

Being one of the 46-55 boomers I have tried to put it into words but have failed.

Long article about many different things. To address just one I would like to ask, WHERE have you been?

You are just now thinking that you should do something to change the world? Damn kiddies, hurry up and get up to speed and join those of us who are the boomers who have been out here fighting as we age and age and age. I, for one, am getting tired and could use some extra help. To be fair, the things I am working on right now are mostly made up of you youngsters, I am flattered and honored to work with you.

I've seen the same age ranges before applied to boomers...what am I, then? I was born in 1943. I've always felt part of the 1946-1955 group, because I've never seen the year I was born, or 1940, when my oldest brother was born, being identified as anything.

Born in 1958: I remember JFK and Vietnam, and absorbed the values of the first cohort. Also, I was raised by my Depression-era grandparents, who valued the New Deal and supported the unions. I sadly have to agree with my grandfather, who before he died, had opined that he had lived through the best part of history (1898-1986). Diseases had been conquered, the world was free of fascism, there was a prosperous middle class, etc. I am so glad he did not live to see BushCo ruin everything in which he believed.

My grandparents valued self-sufficiency, not the Repug (I got mine, to hell with you) type, but the survival skills developed by being born on farms and living through the Depression and WWII. They believed in the self-sufficiency of growing and canning vegetables and fruit, composting, and reusing everything you can.

I dislike how they amplified the hold of capitalism.

To the extent that one can make any generalization about a generation (which is very very thin), the cynic in me has long felt the so-called Greatest Generation had as their highest goal ensuring their children were better off than they were ... and the Baby Boomers had as their highest goal ensuring that the previous generation's children were better off than their parents. :eyes:

But then I think about the people I grew up with, and I realize there's nothing especially bad about the Boomers. It's just that large numbers of people are scum, in every generation. And as it happens, scummy people benefit more from whatever material blessings are available in an era, because they're not held back by the rules of decency.

Why would someone pay one to write this meaningless contradictory drivel...

"having it all" is fast becoming a myth
well someone is fueling the gadget revolution and I don't think it's the boomers spending 2.7 billion a year on ringtones?


it was for boomers who left behind their protest signs and tie-dye to climb the corporate ladder <--- more mythology...all the boomers? My parents, like most, saw the 'hippies' on TV like everything else. Although I do remember distinctly making a tie-dyed T-Shirt at summer camp when I was 8.

The Boomer advantage came from the Boomers' parents who lived the Depression era and as such fought to bring in massive social programs that went a long long way in building a robust middle classes.

Of course, their idiot children, after receiving the advantages of those 'perks', dispense with them as they slavish followed the neo-con bandwagon and basically ripped up the social contract, so it couldn't be used to benefit any other class or generation, by providing them with subsidized education, new public infrastructures and stable world trade.

Social benefits came in with the Boomers and will go out with the Boomers.

I don't want everything in life. I don't need to own the biggest television, fastest car, etc. to be happy in life.

I just want to get a job that makes me happy and can put a roof over my head. That's all I'm looking for. Fuck climbing a corporate ladder.

are really fucked up. They had so much potential for good, yet, so incredibly many just became greedy, selfish little 'me and mine first' world destroyers.

How many "boomers" do you know? And how do you define "boomer?" Read this thread and see that many of us ARE boomers and we have been fighting for 40 years for social change and the environment and civil/equal rights. What's "fucked up" about that?

Again, I consider myself a "real" boomer - I'm 57 soon and we were instrumental in bringing about civil rights, women's rights, the end of the VietNam war and many other social changes because we put ourselves on the line.

I'm tired of the media boomer bashing.

These Generational Generalization stories are a waste of newsprint. Rather than critiquing what politicians are doing to us all, let's set the generations against each other!

There's a disconnect between the younger generation and anyone over 45 or so," says Steve Rubens, a 29-year-old businessman from Palo Alto, Calif. "Something happened; I don't know when.

"But they don't really listen as much as they think they do. They just go with their agenda."

It's an agenda that leaves him and other young adults — members of generations known as X and Y — wondering what will be left for them, especially as the cost of living rises, national debt increases, and as the huge population of aging boomers begins to devour Social Security and company pensions.

I'm doubly guilty--I also collected Social Security from my father's death to my college years. I began collecting at 4--lucky me! (Nope, not all Boomers lived a "Father Knows Best" lifestyle.)

If the older generation is now driven by corporate success--why is the 29 year old businessman complaining about a "disconnect"? I seem to recall a Generation Gap which involved more than differing styles of living the corporate life.

Not all Boomers carried protest signs & then climbed the corporate ladder. Some still live "alternate" lives. Others were on the corporate track from birth. And others did neither; they just got the best jobs they could & are still working hard--but not in a "corporate" setting. Why do writers of these stories only interview members of the White Upper Middle Class?

By the way--I also doubt that all members of Generation-Whatever are whining slackers.