Time for the millennial takeover, at last

The best hope for the aging boomers lies in familial loyalty

Next year the last of the millennials will graduate from high schools and emerge, numerically as the dominant generation of adult Canadians.

Prepare to step aside, fellow boomers and accept that the waters around you have grown; your order is rapidly fading. Sorry Gen Xers, you’re in a tough spot, squeezed between a self-indulgent past and an inpatient future. Your best bet is to stay in shape and try to keep up or plan for early retirement.

Millennials, Canadians born between 1981 and 2000, already make up more of the national workforce than aging boomers or the inbetween generation ominously labelled with a simple X they wear with some pride.

Boomers will recoil from the accusation of self-indulgence, and their inability to get past it will prove the point. As a card-carrying member, I self-indulgently grant myself impunity to heap scorn on the first named generation in history. A generation that took to the streets to change the world and proceeded to make good on the promise, in reverse.

The best hope for the aging boomers lies in familial loyalty. Most of the millennials are our kids, so they may be disinclined to load us, en masse, on an ice flow. The second-best hope, is that our gluttonous energy consumption will have rendered ice flows extinct, so they’ll just have to let us fade away, and then write our history, if they have any free time after cleaning up our mess.

Yes, fellow boomers, the music was great, but so is theirs, and they’re open-minded enough to give ours both a listen and a chance.

Baby boomers will be remembered through time – if time survives the boomers – as the generation that knew it was bad for them and did it anyway. Sex and drugs and rock-and-roll, my aunt Fanny’s namesake.

The heavy drug phase ran its course for the boomers who survived it. The reality is most boomers didn’t stray far beyond copious booze intake and great clouds of smoke. We even left it up to a GenXer to legalize pot. Boomers lacked the hutzpah to own up to the hypocrisy.

Boomers smoked cigarettes after the evidence was in. Granted most have quit, but not before coughing up something that looked almost like a lifeform of its own. Sex became potentially lethal on the heels of the boomers’ sexual revolution turning condoms from contraception to life-preserver.

As a generation – and generalization is, by definition, unfair – boomers loved nature and the natural environment to death. In the final analysis they, we, liked a growing economy and lots of big gas guzzling toys more.

And yet, boomers have the unmitigated gall to malign the millennials.

Millennials do live at home longer, but that’s because their predecessor generations tilted economic opportunity against them. As for the “entitled” tag pinned on them, if they deserve it, it wasn’t earned, it was inherited.

Canadian millennials are getting a better deal than the American cohort, primarily because the recession didn’t decimate the economy here as completely as it did in the US, and because a far greater number of Canadian millennials got a post-secondary education.

The gig economy – the end of stable employment – is alive and well north of the border, however, and indentured servitude, “repurposed” and called unpaid internship, remains “a thing” in both

“Yes, fellow boomers, the music was great, but so is theirs, and they’re openminded enough to give ours both a listen and a chance.”

nations.

Canada’s kinder, gentler university fees save Canadians kids some of the debt load heaped on Americans, but millennials on both sides of the 49th will work, on average, 10 times longer to pay off their university debt than did their boomer parents.

Those unfortunate millennials who entered the workforce at the wrong time – at or near after the height of the recession in 2008/9 – are unlikely to ever make up their losses.

In 2007, more than 50 per cent of college graduates had a job lined up, but the number fell below 20 per cent for the class of 2009, according a recent Huff Post piece based on American statistics.

Economists calculate that a one per cent increase in unemployment means a six to eight per cent drop in starting salaries, so millennials who began work on the heels of the recession will earn $58,000 less over a 10-year period than those who started work before the big banks run by and for boomers put the global economy into a tailspin.

Millennials, your time has finally come. Boomers who recognized the first lift from Bob Dylan above, will understand the wheel’s still in spin, and “the old road is rapidly aging, (better) get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand.”

For the times are truly changing.