Millennials practising what boomers preach

Inter-generational resentment is as old as humankind, Robert Smol says.

Put two or more boomers like me together, add a little wine, and you will most likely get some angry rant about today’s lazy, self-serving tech-crazed millennials. Those 20-somethings today are actually taking time for themselves, don’t seem to be in any rush to settle down, won’t save to buy a house.

Inter-generational resentment is as old as humankind. Certainly other boomers reading this remember being told in the 1960s and ’70s that we were hopelessly lazy, had no morals, and would never know what a hard day’s work really meant. Oh, and this 20-plus-year veteran of the Canadian Forces’ all-time favourite: Boomers would never know what real military life and real war truly meant.

But what I find curiously unique about today’s aging, grumpy boomers’ mockery of millennials is the pure social and economic hypocrisy at the core of our resentment.

We may dislike millennials for the fact that they are pro-quality of life; that they are hyper-focused on technology; that they are freethinking and not bound by old-fashioned social mores. But who started those trends in the first place? We boomers turn ourselves into perennial workaholics while simultaneously talking anemically about the importance of “family time.” We pay lip service to fighting global warming and preserving the environment, but heap scorn on the Greta Thunbergs of the world for being “out of touch” with reality.

The one inescapable, and, increasingly irreversible reality that fellow boomers refuse, as of yet, to face is the fact that our parents passed on to us one of the most progressive and economically affluent periods of history and we failed, horribly, to carry the torch of progress forward. Futilely, we preach the same old progressive stuff ad nauseam, never really believing our collective society will seriously strive to do what we wish it to do.

So isn’t our resentment of millennials and their attitude really a profound jealousy? You know, the type of jealousy you feel when someone is actually accomplishing something you wanted to accomplish but did not have the guts to follow through on?

And whose reality are the millennials so out of touch with, if they are simply making for themselves the world we have been preaching? It seems all they are out of touch with is our boomer two-facedness. Good for them.

And just how much of a guarantee can we give to the millennials that they will not have to deal with the detritus of the broken society we left them? What kind of hard choices will millennials have to face when the ugly economic and political face of increasing social inequality, economic mismanagement, budget deficit, corporate greed, ongoing war and global warming rear their ugly faces in years to come?

As they will inevitably have to clean up our mess, it may be in boomers’ best interests, as we enter our twilight years and will require more public assistance and care, that millennials continue to hold on to all the progressive ideals we fumbled.

We pay lip service to fighting global warming …