Sunday, July 13, 2014

Demise of the baby boomers

But things of which we have not had a direct intuition, which we have learned only through other people, we have no longer any opportunity, the time has passed in which we could inform our heart of them; its communications with reality are suspended; and so we cannot profit by the discovery, it is too late.
Marcel Proust - À la recherche du temps perdu

Recent deaths among my contemporaries yet again remind me that we baby boomers are on the way out. Not just in terms of mortality because there are a few decades to go yet, but in terms of influence.

So what have we achieved, we baby boomers?

For my part I prefer not to make a list. From the EU to windmills, from house prices to taxes to political liars it’s not likely to be a cheery one. Unfortunately, Proust was right about the value of direct experience too.

As genuine hardship becomes a distant memory, it isn’t easy to see where the vitality to change things will come from. If there is no real need to better oneself, then surely the vitality sags. We see many things in modern Britain, but vitality is not one of them.

So maybe that’s what we’ve done, we baby boomers. We’ve sucked the dear old place dry.

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2 comments:

Timbo614 said...

I remember a reply by George Harrison in an interview, when he was asked what he thought we had achieved, which was: "A few people have got longer hair".

Wolfie said...

The worst tragedy of the boomers is that they have bequeathed their children a housing problem that leaves them raising their children in homes not fit for rabbits whereas they were able to pick fine homes from the WW2 veterans. The bailouts of 2008 were the boomer pension bailout - few realize this.