Boomers ruined everything? This is no time to play the generational blame game | Oliver Burkeman

These judgments come with a large dollop of bias – we’re all motivated to believe that our age group is superiorAs a member of Generation X, I naturally derive much of my self-esteem from reflecting on the fact that I’m neither older nor younger than I am. On one hand, the baby boomers’ ruination of the planet (and the property market) was well under way before I’d even learned to ride a bike. On the other, not being a millennial or Z-er, at least I learned to ride a bike, rather than spending my childhood in a darkened room staring at a screen in preparation for a career writing articles explaining to my elders why the films they liked as teenagers were actually horribly problematic. In short, I have examined the evidence for the merits of each generation, and reached the dispassionate conclusion that mine is best.Perhaps you’ll object that this is a load of nonsense; my defence is that almost everything we think we know about the generations is nonsense. Partly, that’s just because there’s too much variation within generations to generalise very much, and the lines we draw between them are arbitrary. But it’s also because it’s all but impossible to pick apart what’s attributable to membership of a given generation, versus being a given age. For example, a phenomenon known as the “reminiscence bump” means older people retain more vivid memories of their youth than their middle years, and those memories are more likely to be positive, too. So as you age, and other memories fade, you’re more likely to conclude that life today, and young people, are much worse than in the past. Continue reading…
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