Going back to the dawn of history, human civilization perpetuated itself in the form of knowledge handed down from one generation to the next. This statement may seem glaringly obvious–and in any other age it would be–but something unprecedented happened in the 1960s in the West.
The parents of generations X and Y collectively decided not to pass on the traditions they’d inherited from their forefathers.
It’s not that the generations born after the 60s were incurious, either. Just yesterday I was chatting about the GameStonk revolt with an early Y who said his dad never taught him about investing. This oversight is compounded by the fact that his dad is a CPA. Whenever his son came to him for financial advice, he’d give him short shrift and change the subject.
That’s just one example of many I could cite. Belaboring the point isn’t necessary, though, because we can see the effects of this cultural signal jamming everywhere. Baby Boomers love to give Millennials grief for not knowing how to cook a meal of change a tire. They seldom stop to ask why not.
It should go without saying, but if it comes to your attention that a younger member of your family lacks a basic skill that you possess, it is incumbent upon you to teach him.
Perhaps parents of the generations since the Silents have been so conditioned to pawn their child rearing duties off on the state, they figure the schools are teaching this stuff. That possibility itself speaks to a woeful ignorance of what goes on in schools these days.
Then again, the wholesale abdication of parental instruction started decades before little Timmy’s third-grade teacher conditioned him to check his privilege. This neglect has run up a cultural capital bill that is now coming due.
- The skilled tradesmen who maintain our crumbling infrastructure are ageing out, and no one is replacing them.
- On the high tech end, most of the architecture that daily digital life relies on was created by men who are now dead, retired, or nearing retirement. When the last of them go, there will be no one who knows how essential code and processes work.
- Most young men cannot find girlfriends who know how to microwave SpaghettiOs without burning them, much less prepare a home-cooked meal.
- Large swaths of Millennials and Zoomers are de facto heathens whose knowledge of Christ is limited to what they’ve picked up from fedora-tier memes and exorcism movies.
Government entitlements may force you to pay some people who hate you, but you can always learn how to curb your support for the others.
Why did the Boomers do this?
Hey man
Diabolical narcissism. They didn't want future generations to have the same opportunities or wealth because we're unworthy.
Boomers are the zenith. When they die off the future simply a letdown. So burn it to ash and leave absolutely nothing.
xavier
The really sick part as that a lot of them probably thought they were helping. They hated their inheritance so much they threw the baby out with the bathwater, then campaigned against bathing and babies, and now stand morally ascendant on a pile of human skulls, because they think what they did was just and virtuous.
They were put in front of a media complex that told them to reject everything their parents stood for because said parents were too shell-shocked to put their foot down.
Or denounced as cowardly collaborators in Europe. The soixantehuitards sure were emo.
xavier
Report from the field on exactly this subject.
Gen Y here. Doing a midlife career change, from office space to a skilled trade. I'm in a formal apprentice training program, been here 6 months, and it's still a challenge to get the old men to explain a routine or checklist of steps let alone fundamentals of how & why procedures are done the way they are. And they still frequently belly ache that young people don't want to learn this trade. It's all I can do to not reply "have you tried teaching it?"
Our experiences align, re: getting older folks to explain procedures. They just don't seem to think about _why_ things are done a certain way.
If they are as deeply and malignantly narcissistic as some suggest, they may not be able to step out of their expertise long enough to transmit it. If being a teacher of a technical trade has taught me anything, it is that working a problem at speed and working through it slowly and methodically enough to be useful as a teaching moment are very different things. It takes effort, patience, empathy, and no small amount of grace. I've learned a lot from my students.
It's not their job to grace you with their experience, you have to ask for it. Preferably on your knees while doing it.
At this point, Boomers are set in their ways. I still have to hear constantly about the orange man bad and how stupid his supporters are before we unironically talk about wearing two masks, all because Mr. TV Man says so.
You can pray for them, but they aren't going to get out of the way until they are either forcibly retired or kick the bucket.
It might be human nature. Apprentices, if you recall your histories from the 14th – 18th century indentured apprentices as near slaves to their masters, who were permitted this liberty to the sons of other craftsman upon the requirement of passing on their knowledge.
No Boomers anywhere in sight. So the problem is that we broke one thing (indentured apprentices) and lost the invisible unicorn poop* thing: Master craft and tradesmen who passed on their knowledge.
Funny how that works.
*Artifacts of civilization to most of the young lefties I know is a magical thing, pooped out by unicorns. It just *happens*
I mentioned in my SLC Punk review that it seemed so normal to me watching it back in the late '90s when it came out.
But if you look at the movie and what Boomers did to their children at face value, and try to watch it detached from the time, then the movie comes across as pure madness. There's no other way to describe the neglect that generation foisted on their children and the world it led to as anything less than one of the biggest disasters in all of civilized history.
I know we can roll this back and blame every generation for something it did wrong, but teaching the ones under you to hate everything that has come before and to look out for yourself because relationships just aren't important, thereby sabotaging both past and present, is one of the most sinister things done to a generation of people.
The other generations might have screwed up, but none of them did anything on that level.
That movie is full of red pills. It takes shots at almost every major cultural movement of the Reagan era and doesn't pull any of them.
Consider the character who gets everything he wants in a material sense, but at the cost of his family. By Libertarian standards, he should be living the dream: Property, more money than he can spend, and no obligations to weigh him down.
Yet this character is the most miserable in a cast of hopeless characters, and it's this character who vanishes from the movie, presumably to meet his fate a the hands of vengeful drug dealers.
Murnau was right: If it's not in frame, it doesn't exist.
This is the part that I struggle with the most. As a Gen Y, I am indeed a younger child of a Boomer father. But my father doesn't hit many of the classic Boomer notes: he is not at all self-centered, he is very conscious of debt and took great care not to have his children burdened by his actions, he doesn't take any pride in "developing" rock and roll or "sticking it to the man", etc.
But on this point he's 100% a Boomer. When I think back over my life and try to find examples of him teaching me anything and it's tough. I remember him giving me the basics on how to drive before I went to a behind the wheel class, and playing catch a few times before I joined a T-ball team. That's it. Certainly he did not teach me how to maintain a car, or cook a meal, or do my taxes (despite being an accountant), or do home repair, etc.
Looking back, it's hard to understand why. Certainly he wasn't malicious. When it came to support outside of teaching he was always available, and it was clear that he was very concerned with my success. So why not teach me anything?
The main guesses I have are:
-He trusted society to do his job for him.
-He wanted me to ask before he would teach me (I have asked him about some of these things in recent years and while he's still reluctant to explain when I persist he has actually shown me how to do a few things).
-Since his parents threw him into so many menial tasks from a young age, he associated teaching with doing excessive chores and so he thought he was doing a favor by not teaching me.
That's the weird thing many in this thread, including my friend, observed: They won't even teach you if you ask repeatedly.
When my buddy would ask his CPA father for investment advice, he'd grumble something like, "No sense discussing it until you've got at least $10K set aside to invest."
I work with enough young people who would rather I hand them the result (and say so) than learn how to do what I do. And I always start by showing "how it's done".
It would be easier and faster to just do it myself. And since the the time cost can be … problematic, I do not insist as I would for kids for whom I am personally responsible
How did parents get so confused about parental duties and authority?
(These comments do not obviate the other descriptions of the Boomers. They supplement them)
I wonder how well this maps onto non-American countries. I'm Irish and of roughly the correct age. I wasn't really taught basic life skills, but I'm not sure how much of that's down to my parents and how much is down to me being antisocial and having Aspergers. Of course, this being Ireland, being of the "Boomer generation" meant that my parents lived what would be considered extremely primitive lives by American standards. My mother lived on a farm in the countryside and remembers a time before indoor plumbing and television. Her family raised and slaughtered chickens and pigs. Honestly, I often feel like I'm…missing something I need to be fully mature, but I'm not sure what. I had a decent job before the Pandemic took it away, though, which was helping me a lot with self-confidence, even though I still wasn't self-reliant.
It depends.
In France, the soixantehuitards discovered some of their parents were either vichyois collaborators or communists layabout who sat out the war until the Soviet union was invaded and even then.
In Portugual,Spain it was resisting a pseufofascist corporatist regime. In Greece resisting the colonels.
So tl;dr the commies deflected their collaborationist role in WWII by convincing the youth their societies were still fascist and thus must be destroyed
xavier
First, "generations" don't DO anything. Individuals do.
Second, "…what could have possessed a whole generation to deny their children the cultural patrimony of millennia?"
A whole generation? ALL of them? Every single one?
You know, not ALL of us were CPA's. Some of us drove trucks, or worked in factories, or manned the military during an extremely unpopular war. Everyone *I* know did indeed teach their children well, or as well as they could. But, some of those children in their teen and young-adult years, revolted just like their parents, and their grandparents, and great grandparents… They became unteachable so like most, they have to learn by experience.
Just before I retired, I tried mightily to get the young replacements to come accompany me to job sites to learn from the "old curmudgeon". Nope. Couldn't be bothered.
There is bad and good in every group, but it seems to me that you are painting with an overbroad brush.
The only generation to always react in this way is the boomers. Everyone else can admit the failings of their generation and recognize that it is worthwhile to talk of general behaviors across an age group, even if everyone individual does not act in the same way.
A member of Gen X might be annoyed by the depiction of his generation in the media (when it isn't forgotten entirely), but he'll admit that his generation has had issues with being overly cynical. A member of Gen Y will be annoyed at being conflated with people nothing like him, but will admit to being naive and too attached to nostalgia. A Millennial might be annoyed at being the scapegoat of the dozenth media story, but will admit to being needy and a bit too quick to offense.
But every time Boomers are criticized they go straight to deflecting the blame and then talking about how every other generation ruined things.
What I hear you saying is that actions can only be attributed to individuals and never collectives, so we can never speak in general terms about the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, or socialism perpetrating evil.
Just like tens of millions of individuals who by sheer coincidence belonged to the Baby Boom generation and onward independently decided to become unteachable for no reason.
@Rudolph Harrier
BOOMERS: Our generation changed the world, man!
ALSO BOOMERS: Generations don't do things, you Millennial snowflakes. Individuals do!
"Just before I retired, I tried mightily to get the young replacements to come accompany me to job sites to learn from the "old curmudgeon". Nope. Couldn't be bothered."
Maybe they just didn't like you.
"The only generation to always react in this way is the boomers. " A simple perusal of the internet – indeed, of this very site – will show that that is not true.
"But every time Boomers are criticized they go straight to deflecting the blame and then talking about how every other generation ruined things." Please, point out to me where I said that, where I blamed "every other generation." I merely pointed out that other generations have the same issues that you ascribe to the boomers exclusively.
"…belonged to the Baby Boom generation and onward independently decided to become unteachable for no reason." Except that in my comment, speaking of my children's generation, I pointed out that teenage rebellion and "needing to learn by experience", has been a common factor throughout all generations.
"ALSO BOOMERS: Generations don't do things, you Millennial snowflakes. Individuals do!" Nice of you to add words I never said.
"Maybe they just didn't like you." Curmudgeon: "A crusty irascible cantankerous old person full of stubborn ideas" – So yeah, I suppose that's possible.
"A simple perusal of the internet – indeed, of this very site – will show that that is not true."
Would that be the posts criticizing his own generation on this blog, or the many jokes millennials constantly make of themselves other places online?
I must have missed all the self-criticism the boomers made about themselves when they weren't promoting art like Pleasantville or Piss Christ during their very natural, happens all the time, rebellious stage.
This comment – right here, is a great example.
"Except that in my comment, speaking of my children's generation, I pointed out that teenage rebellion and 'needing to learn by experience', has been a common factor throughout all generations."
That's false. Teenage rebellion on the scale we've seen since the 1960s is a historical aberration.
Look at the bellwether example of youth rejecting their parents' music. We know from music history that prior to the 20th century, the generation gap in popular music didn't exist.
Thank you for proving my point, Roy.
All you have to do is say "yes, my generation messed up and I am not immune from its flaws" and people will get off your case. THAT is what I've never seen from a boomer, despite more than a "simple" perusal of the internet. The closest I've seen is what you are doing here: say that you have problems, but they are the same problems everyone else has.
I'm a member of Generation Y and I can tell you about all sorts of issues particular to my generation, many of which I've struggled with. Why can't boomers do the same?