I find myself saying ""I'm so glad I was born when I was born" so often! Although the sweet spot might have been 10-20 years earlier, I'm eternally grateful I had over a decade of adulthood before Social Media really set in, followed by the woke mania and now the slow march towards hell for our people.
Same. Remembering the pre-Internet world is like having a lifeline to a more innocent, better, more human time. Not that the 90s seemed all that great at the time. But in retrospect....
There definitely was still some "magic" left in the 90's and early to mid 2000's. I don't think the Internet itself ruined society, it just sped everything up.
Really interesting topic! “A collection of CD’s that signal your non-compliance”- brilliant!
We were born in late 1961, the tail end of the baby boom but increasingly lumped in with the next generation as maybe it should be. We graduated college into a recession with mortgage rates in the double digits, it wasn’t the best of times. Countercultural then was choosing to marry at 21 and start a family immediately with three children under four by 25. Homeschooling was counter cultural. We’ve lived out of step with society ever since, which is partially choice and planning and partially social ineptitude such that society wouldn’t have us on a silver platter.
The midlife crisis you address is really just another bit of evidence that boomers always believe they are the hero of the tale, the center of the universe. It is an entire generation with few exceptions of narcissists and that was before social media. They were catered to from their cradles and the entire world was remade according to their lights. The midlife crisis was their realizing that they didn’t get a chance to do it all over again, it was the first time they heard “no”, maybe from their bodies, their bosses, or their families. That we have so many corpses steering ships of state is a testament to their unwillingness to let go, the lack of statesmen a testament to their refusal to train replacements. They cling to life because they have no faith in an afterlife, their kingdom is very much of this world.
They are the first generation to have left their children and grandchildren worse off., not just financially but spiritually and morally as well. They communicated nothing of value. How much worse off we are seeing every day.
They confused material prosperity with goodness and deprived their descendants of a moral compass. They believed in nothing that they couldn’t touch, wear, or count, and they left generations without any idea what a truly good life might look like. They allowed their children to be raised by strangers and surrendered them early to the mercy of their peers. The internet couldn’t have so easily colonized the young if they already had a place to belong.
A young friend of mine described a recent encounter where they were effectively ambushed by a roving Boomer looking to dispense the odd pearl or two. The old woman was "full of life" and apparently had much advice for my struggling young friend - who has arrived at a critical stage in their own emotional and spiritual development.
By way of reply, I explained that I find the world of my generation has mutated into something so utterly alien, and so far removed from anything your average Boomer grew up in, that most of their "wisdom" simply isn't applicable.
And I'm always sceptical of advice from a generation who reaped all the rewards for their hard work and left only scraps for the rest of us to fight over - and taking precious little responsibility for the ensuing carnage.
Things have changed so much and life is so much harder than when I was a young adult, and having five children 24-40 I am very much aware of this. I agree with you that most people my age and older are completely clueless about the financial realities of most young people’s lives today. Either their own children got ahead with the help of their parents money and contacts or they aren’t very invested in their children’s lives.
In 1981 I had a minimum wage job, $3.35 hour. On that income I had a beautiful, big studio apartment in a very expensive area. I didn’t drive, but had a weekly bus pass. Imagine someone with a minimum wage job being able to afford their own nice apartment in a safe, upscale neighborhood.
We help our children out financially quite a lot, to the extent that my husband feels guilty about retiring in three years at 65. We used to pressure our middle son, who is an impulsive spender, about the need to save but with the recent jump in housing prices the fact is a couple are not going to be able to save for a down payment just by cutting out Starbucks, Door Dash, and Vineyard Vines. Without a substantial gift from parents it is impossible. With current interest rates even if you get into a house I don’t see how you make the payments without taking in a boarder. The old boarding house model for living may have to make a comeback.
I agree with you that most boomers really have no idea about the financial realities of life today and that their advice is probably not helpful. It does feel like many people older than me are not that invested in their children and grandchildren’s lives. We recently went on a once in a lifetime (for us, not the other passengers) cruise and the other passengers were mostly quite wealthy. Many of them bemoaned the literally distant relationships they have with their children and grandchildren, and were jealous that ours all live within an hour of us, but this is a mutual decision. I was surprised that people who can obviously afford to live anywhere are content being separated from their families, but this is the culture they created.
Twenty years ago I heard an interview with a young , aspiring corporate professional woman (20/30something?) in the days when I still listened to Radio 4.
In a segment about women in the workplace and after much emotion laden discussion talking past each other, she told the interviewer in plaintive tones she wanted nothing more from life than “…a small house with a small garden in a small town with a train station”. The statement and her voice were heavy with regret and longing for things unstated too.
By way of answer she was treated to a harangue by the woman interviewer about the opportunities afforded by the activism and sacrifices made by other women on her behalf that had ‘freed’ her and all women from such narrow confines.
For me as a male Boomer it was a real wake-up call. I knew at that moment we had all got it seriously, very seriously wrong.
Our homeschooling group in the late 80’s early 90’s was full of professional women who felt that they had been pushed into careers and away from homemaking and deeply resented it. Among them were lawyers, chemical engineers, and accountants. All gave up these careers to stay at home and raise and educate their children. The accountant continued to do taxes but only worked evenings from January through April.
The ones I stayed in touch with did not return to the workforce, even when their children grew up. There is nothing intrinsically boring or menial about running a household and caring for the people who mean the most to you.
Most women do not have meaningful, fulfilling careers. They work for a paycheck, the mores hours they work the more addicted they become to treating themselves for their misery. My husband regularly runs into young women when traveling on business who when hearing that he has five children and seven grandchildren talk about how many hours they work and how much they would love to be able to just marry, stay home, and raise a family. Educated, successful, attractive women with no idea how to escape the rat race feminists pushed them into. Betty Friedan has a lot to answer for.
Though semi-retired I still work in corporate finance, mot least because it gives me a front row seat to one of the roots of the dissolution of our society.
Many young women colleagues I knew thirty or forty years ago made it to ‘girl-boss’ status, sometimes by talent, more often though by a combination of luck and diversity hiring. They are childless, burned out, miserable and after a few drinks, suicidal husks of humans. They constantly self-medicate with consumerism, transactional relationships, endless foreign holidays and surprisingly often, hard drugs. If the public knew the resulting fragility of our complex financial and operational systems these people steward, there would be a revolution by morning (to borrow from Henry Ford).
In the last decade the men too among our business elites have collapsed into outright cuckery to ‘progressive’ causes at the expense of performance. Burnham was right; liberalism and these managerial classes are the suicide of the West.
We have seen a scurry to promote women into VP and higher visibility roles lately. These women are perfectly competent, but are so hard driven to justify their salaries that the ones with children know they are sacrificing precious time. Other moms they worked with either completely gave up work or negotiated part time, which militates against promotion. Life is expensive, sometimes the wife has the larger paycheck. But we all know lifestyle expands to gobble up any increase and it creates a cycle of consumption, especially when guilt drives spending money rather than time on children.
I don’t see a movement to return mothers to the home like there was in the 80’s and 90’s, and without a social phenomenon to support the decision it’s much harder to step back.
An interesting part of the male psyche is he will either wither away or purposefully sabotage his life if he is too comfortable. Comfort means there is no conflict to persevere through, or goal to attain. Sitting too much in this state will lead to the dull drones you witness in many middle-aged men. The only way out is to create artificial adversities in the form of some task he designates he needs to accomplish, even if it doesn't affect his station in life, or wreck the comforts he currently has.
I for one welcome the fact that, as you write, "the time for such indulgence is over and real life and struggle are finally re-entering the story of modernity". There is a sweet and profound joy, I dare even say happiness, to be found in our kind of dissidence. The phenomenon of the midlife-crisis conclusively showed that that joy was not to be had in whatever it was that the boomers were doing.
The grand arc of life as seen through several generations brilliantly summarised in the post WW2 narrative! As a young man of the 90's myself and my friends saw "Falling Down" as more of a dark comedy than the horror it really shows. I watched it again recently and shortly after, the story broke of an ordinary American in Panama shooting dead two deadbeat Greta Thunberg types blocking the road. How many Wlliam "D-Fens" Fosters are walking around today, reaching the end of their tether?
I was thinking that the disappearance of the “mid life crisis” was due to it affecting men, particularly white western men. And as a group, such men aren’t allowed to have problems that might garner public attention or sympathy? In contrast, across the anglosphere there is now a pervasive therapeutic state which attends to (and also confirms/nurtures) all forms of anxieties for everyone, except men. Instead for those wishing to raise issues that burden men such as the - far more serious - problem of male suicide, well that is a fast track to being ridiculed by polite society. So no wonder the concern about mid life crisis as been relegated to history just like Jack Nicholson’s mid life crisis films (The Passenger is worth a watch).
You've reminded me of a pub conversation I was having recently about the idea of the "teenage rebellion", it was something we were all supposed to have gone through but none of our group felt like they did. I started wondering how/when it was manufactured in to existence, surely post-War? I can't imagine kids growing up in little villages looking after the farm or family business with their parents went through it before then, must've been some kind of way of drawing kids to the big cities to work or something? I'm not well read enough about these things. Hmmm
I suspect that teenage rebellion has always been a thing. Young people.have more energy, their hormones are raging, they're healthier on average than everyone else. I've read history books on the Old.West here in America and it's shocking how young these frontiersman were when they first struck out into the wilderness. I think what happened was it was perverted by cultural termites so that these young people didn't just strike out on their own and try new things, they rebelled against society itself and embraced foreign concepts and ways of living. Like much of the cultural revolution we're living through, it is the result of some very nefarious people subverting what would otherwise be healthy and natural.
“The poem begins on the night of Maundy Thursday on March 24 (or April 7), 1300, shortly before the dawn of Good Friday.[3][4] The narrator, Dante himself, is 35 years old, and thus "midway in the journey of our life" (Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita[5]) – half of the biblical lifespan of 70 (Psalm 89:10, Vulgate; Psalm 90:10, KJV). The poet finds himself lost in a dark wood (selva oscura[6]), astray from the "straight way" (diritta via,[7] also translatable as "right way") of salvation.”
I think you nailed the difference, Morgoth. The crisis exists only because those were men that owned everything and they found it meant little in taking the next step. But we, in the current age, see what the downgrade meant and it brings into sharp contrast how much "better" that was. Great article, sir, as always!
Stefan Molyneux used to call it the "no life crisis," which I thought was an accurate term. Maybe absence of an adversary feels like the absence of life.
The mid life crisis definitely seems to have faded from online discourse but I can assure you it is alive and well. My ex wife went through the most stereotypical midlife crisis that I have ever seen and we are squarely in the middle of Generation X. I wouldn't think it was a real thing if I hadn't seen it myself.
Our kids were young st the time: 4 and 6. We both had stable jobs and owned a home. Within six months she quit her job, went back to school, quit school, moved to another state, moved back, sold her car and bought an impractical little red car, had an affair, etc. It lasted years and completely broke our family. She came out of it on the other side as a completely different person, one that had essentially nothing in common with me even though we'd known each other for half of our lives.
This article is a cool dissection of it though. I've never considered it being a Boomer thing but it actually makes total sense. It's such a selfish, destructive, and inexplicably childish thing to do that it seems appropriate that the worst generation in history would come to define it.
Interesting, I find myself (1998 birth) no longer yearning for what my predecessors had but holding it in complete contempt (this being post war to now).
I'm reading (and listening to) 'Generations' (1991) by William Strauss and Neil Howe at the moment so this essay is a timely companion piece to their theory of recurring generational cycles. An inexhaustible topic for research and discussion.
The possibility that these generational cycles, if they exist in other nations, do not synchronise with those of the current hegemon, is especially intriguing.
A brilliant insight. It's so sad that the boomers, on the cusp of realising that everything they believed in was fake, reacted with such shallow and selfish indulgences as sports cars and extra marital affairs. Never once did it occur to them that these things helped nothing and often caused more hurt and suffering to those around them. And so they just continued the fatuousness and pointlessness of their existence.
I think the midlife crises of Vince Gilligan and Robert Chase through their avatars Walter White and Tony Soprano gave us the best 2 TV shows ever so at least great art resulted from them!
I dont know if you like subtitled films much but I saw a pretty hilarious German movie called 'Es ist nur eine Fase Hase' last year
in English 'its just a phase honey'
all squarely about the midlife crisis but involving the wife as much as the husband
she gives him the big E and flirts with a much younger guy
the writing is very clever and its apparent at one stage that all of the Gen Xers of Germany are being critiqued for their relative laziness and over indulgence
In France Houllebecq puts the blame firmly on his Boomer hippy mother and her generation for the cultural implosion he calls 'Atomized' - but although Boomers led the charge, other generations eagerly followed them into 'the permissive society'.
Thank you for your insights again- that pub in Tynemouth doesnt know what they're missing! ;-)
For every generation after the boomers, there's no midlife crisis, because life is just one long extended crisis.
I find myself saying ""I'm so glad I was born when I was born" so often! Although the sweet spot might have been 10-20 years earlier, I'm eternally grateful I had over a decade of adulthood before Social Media really set in, followed by the woke mania and now the slow march towards hell for our people.
Same. Remembering the pre-Internet world is like having a lifeline to a more innocent, better, more human time. Not that the 90s seemed all that great at the time. But in retrospect....
There definitely was still some "magic" left in the 90's and early to mid 2000's. I don't think the Internet itself ruined society, it just sped everything up.
Really interesting topic! “A collection of CD’s that signal your non-compliance”- brilliant!
We were born in late 1961, the tail end of the baby boom but increasingly lumped in with the next generation as maybe it should be. We graduated college into a recession with mortgage rates in the double digits, it wasn’t the best of times. Countercultural then was choosing to marry at 21 and start a family immediately with three children under four by 25. Homeschooling was counter cultural. We’ve lived out of step with society ever since, which is partially choice and planning and partially social ineptitude such that society wouldn’t have us on a silver platter.
The midlife crisis you address is really just another bit of evidence that boomers always believe they are the hero of the tale, the center of the universe. It is an entire generation with few exceptions of narcissists and that was before social media. They were catered to from their cradles and the entire world was remade according to their lights. The midlife crisis was their realizing that they didn’t get a chance to do it all over again, it was the first time they heard “no”, maybe from their bodies, their bosses, or their families. That we have so many corpses steering ships of state is a testament to their unwillingness to let go, the lack of statesmen a testament to their refusal to train replacements. They cling to life because they have no faith in an afterlife, their kingdom is very much of this world.
They are the first generation to have left their children and grandchildren worse off., not just financially but spiritually and morally as well. They communicated nothing of value. How much worse off we are seeing every day.
A damning indictment, and probably justified.
They confused material prosperity with goodness and deprived their descendants of a moral compass. They believed in nothing that they couldn’t touch, wear, or count, and they left generations without any idea what a truly good life might look like. They allowed their children to be raised by strangers and surrendered them early to the mercy of their peers. The internet couldn’t have so easily colonized the young if they already had a place to belong.
A young friend of mine described a recent encounter where they were effectively ambushed by a roving Boomer looking to dispense the odd pearl or two. The old woman was "full of life" and apparently had much advice for my struggling young friend - who has arrived at a critical stage in their own emotional and spiritual development.
By way of reply, I explained that I find the world of my generation has mutated into something so utterly alien, and so far removed from anything your average Boomer grew up in, that most of their "wisdom" simply isn't applicable.
And I'm always sceptical of advice from a generation who reaped all the rewards for their hard work and left only scraps for the rest of us to fight over - and taking precious little responsibility for the ensuing carnage.
Things have changed so much and life is so much harder than when I was a young adult, and having five children 24-40 I am very much aware of this. I agree with you that most people my age and older are completely clueless about the financial realities of most young people’s lives today. Either their own children got ahead with the help of their parents money and contacts or they aren’t very invested in their children’s lives.
In 1981 I had a minimum wage job, $3.35 hour. On that income I had a beautiful, big studio apartment in a very expensive area. I didn’t drive, but had a weekly bus pass. Imagine someone with a minimum wage job being able to afford their own nice apartment in a safe, upscale neighborhood.
We help our children out financially quite a lot, to the extent that my husband feels guilty about retiring in three years at 65. We used to pressure our middle son, who is an impulsive spender, about the need to save but with the recent jump in housing prices the fact is a couple are not going to be able to save for a down payment just by cutting out Starbucks, Door Dash, and Vineyard Vines. Without a substantial gift from parents it is impossible. With current interest rates even if you get into a house I don’t see how you make the payments without taking in a boarder. The old boarding house model for living may have to make a comeback.
I agree with you that most boomers really have no idea about the financial realities of life today and that their advice is probably not helpful. It does feel like many people older than me are not that invested in their children and grandchildren’s lives. We recently went on a once in a lifetime (for us, not the other passengers) cruise and the other passengers were mostly quite wealthy. Many of them bemoaned the literally distant relationships they have with their children and grandchildren, and were jealous that ours all live within an hour of us, but this is a mutual decision. I was surprised that people who can obviously afford to live anywhere are content being separated from their families, but this is the culture they created.
Twenty years ago I heard an interview with a young , aspiring corporate professional woman (20/30something?) in the days when I still listened to Radio 4.
In a segment about women in the workplace and after much emotion laden discussion talking past each other, she told the interviewer in plaintive tones she wanted nothing more from life than “…a small house with a small garden in a small town with a train station”. The statement and her voice were heavy with regret and longing for things unstated too.
By way of answer she was treated to a harangue by the woman interviewer about the opportunities afforded by the activism and sacrifices made by other women on her behalf that had ‘freed’ her and all women from such narrow confines.
For me as a male Boomer it was a real wake-up call. I knew at that moment we had all got it seriously, very seriously wrong.
Our homeschooling group in the late 80’s early 90’s was full of professional women who felt that they had been pushed into careers and away from homemaking and deeply resented it. Among them were lawyers, chemical engineers, and accountants. All gave up these careers to stay at home and raise and educate their children. The accountant continued to do taxes but only worked evenings from January through April.
The ones I stayed in touch with did not return to the workforce, even when their children grew up. There is nothing intrinsically boring or menial about running a household and caring for the people who mean the most to you.
Most women do not have meaningful, fulfilling careers. They work for a paycheck, the mores hours they work the more addicted they become to treating themselves for their misery. My husband regularly runs into young women when traveling on business who when hearing that he has five children and seven grandchildren talk about how many hours they work and how much they would love to be able to just marry, stay home, and raise a family. Educated, successful, attractive women with no idea how to escape the rat race feminists pushed them into. Betty Friedan has a lot to answer for.
Though semi-retired I still work in corporate finance, mot least because it gives me a front row seat to one of the roots of the dissolution of our society.
Many young women colleagues I knew thirty or forty years ago made it to ‘girl-boss’ status, sometimes by talent, more often though by a combination of luck and diversity hiring. They are childless, burned out, miserable and after a few drinks, suicidal husks of humans. They constantly self-medicate with consumerism, transactional relationships, endless foreign holidays and surprisingly often, hard drugs. If the public knew the resulting fragility of our complex financial and operational systems these people steward, there would be a revolution by morning (to borrow from Henry Ford).
In the last decade the men too among our business elites have collapsed into outright cuckery to ‘progressive’ causes at the expense of performance. Burnham was right; liberalism and these managerial classes are the suicide of the West.
We have seen a scurry to promote women into VP and higher visibility roles lately. These women are perfectly competent, but are so hard driven to justify their salaries that the ones with children know they are sacrificing precious time. Other moms they worked with either completely gave up work or negotiated part time, which militates against promotion. Life is expensive, sometimes the wife has the larger paycheck. But we all know lifestyle expands to gobble up any increase and it creates a cycle of consumption, especially when guilt drives spending money rather than time on children.
I don’t see a movement to return mothers to the home like there was in the 80’s and 90’s, and without a social phenomenon to support the decision it’s much harder to step back.
Very true, I see everywhere these days, especially on the Internet how submissive and cucked men have become. It's sickening
An interesting part of the male psyche is he will either wither away or purposefully sabotage his life if he is too comfortable. Comfort means there is no conflict to persevere through, or goal to attain. Sitting too much in this state will lead to the dull drones you witness in many middle-aged men. The only way out is to create artificial adversities in the form of some task he designates he needs to accomplish, even if it doesn't affect his station in life, or wreck the comforts he currently has.
I think this is why I became addicted to growing vegetables and trying to become as self reliant as possible.
I think it will prove useful. No practical skill mastered is wasted.
I for one welcome the fact that, as you write, "the time for such indulgence is over and real life and struggle are finally re-entering the story of modernity". There is a sweet and profound joy, I dare even say happiness, to be found in our kind of dissidence. The phenomenon of the midlife-crisis conclusively showed that that joy was not to be had in whatever it was that the boomers were doing.
Few things are as life confirming as having a great enemy, and our enemy is monstrous.
We couldn´t have asked for a more worthy cause or enemies more deserving of being fought.
The grand arc of life as seen through several generations brilliantly summarised in the post WW2 narrative! As a young man of the 90's myself and my friends saw "Falling Down" as more of a dark comedy than the horror it really shows. I watched it again recently and shortly after, the story broke of an ordinary American in Panama shooting dead two deadbeat Greta Thunberg types blocking the road. How many Wlliam "D-Fens" Fosters are walking around today, reaching the end of their tether?
Probably quite a few. That is why I tend to shy away from ''Everything is a fed op'' explanations of mass shooters etc.
I was thinking that the disappearance of the “mid life crisis” was due to it affecting men, particularly white western men. And as a group, such men aren’t allowed to have problems that might garner public attention or sympathy? In contrast, across the anglosphere there is now a pervasive therapeutic state which attends to (and also confirms/nurtures) all forms of anxieties for everyone, except men. Instead for those wishing to raise issues that burden men such as the - far more serious - problem of male suicide, well that is a fast track to being ridiculed by polite society. So no wonder the concern about mid life crisis as been relegated to history just like Jack Nicholson’s mid life crisis films (The Passenger is worth a watch).
Very very interesting, thank you as always.
You've reminded me of a pub conversation I was having recently about the idea of the "teenage rebellion", it was something we were all supposed to have gone through but none of our group felt like they did. I started wondering how/when it was manufactured in to existence, surely post-War? I can't imagine kids growing up in little villages looking after the farm or family business with their parents went through it before then, must've been some kind of way of drawing kids to the big cities to work or something? I'm not well read enough about these things. Hmmm
I actually have a video called ''Whatever happened to teenage rebellion'' which covers some of the stuff I mention here
https://youtu.be/txkipz6SNQA?si=9e82ERZ5fgzNRvBK
Wait, what?! How did I miss that? Thank you
I suspect that teenage rebellion has always been a thing. Young people.have more energy, their hormones are raging, they're healthier on average than everyone else. I've read history books on the Old.West here in America and it's shocking how young these frontiersman were when they first struck out into the wilderness. I think what happened was it was perverted by cultural termites so that these young people didn't just strike out on their own and try new things, they rebelled against society itself and embraced foreign concepts and ways of living. Like much of the cultural revolution we're living through, it is the result of some very nefarious people subverting what would otherwise be healthy and natural.
Dante had a mid life crisis:
“The poem begins on the night of Maundy Thursday on March 24 (or April 7), 1300, shortly before the dawn of Good Friday.[3][4] The narrator, Dante himself, is 35 years old, and thus "midway in the journey of our life" (Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita[5]) – half of the biblical lifespan of 70 (Psalm 89:10, Vulgate; Psalm 90:10, KJV). The poet finds himself lost in a dark wood (selva oscura[6]), astray from the "straight way" (diritta via,[7] also translatable as "right way") of salvation.”
I think you nailed the difference, Morgoth. The crisis exists only because those were men that owned everything and they found it meant little in taking the next step. But we, in the current age, see what the downgrade meant and it brings into sharp contrast how much "better" that was. Great article, sir, as always!
Stefan Molyneux used to call it the "no life crisis," which I thought was an accurate term. Maybe absence of an adversary feels like the absence of life.
The mid life crisis definitely seems to have faded from online discourse but I can assure you it is alive and well. My ex wife went through the most stereotypical midlife crisis that I have ever seen and we are squarely in the middle of Generation X. I wouldn't think it was a real thing if I hadn't seen it myself.
Our kids were young st the time: 4 and 6. We both had stable jobs and owned a home. Within six months she quit her job, went back to school, quit school, moved to another state, moved back, sold her car and bought an impractical little red car, had an affair, etc. It lasted years and completely broke our family. She came out of it on the other side as a completely different person, one that had essentially nothing in common with me even though we'd known each other for half of our lives.
This article is a cool dissection of it though. I've never considered it being a Boomer thing but it actually makes total sense. It's such a selfish, destructive, and inexplicably childish thing to do that it seems appropriate that the worst generation in history would come to define it.
Interesting, I find myself (1998 birth) no longer yearning for what my predecessors had but holding it in complete contempt (this being post war to now).
I'm reading (and listening to) 'Generations' (1991) by William Strauss and Neil Howe at the moment so this essay is a timely companion piece to their theory of recurring generational cycles. An inexhaustible topic for research and discussion.
It's very interesting. I refer to it a lot but I don't think I ever did a full post on it.
The possibility that these generational cycles, if they exist in other nations, do not synchronise with those of the current hegemon, is especially intriguing.
A brilliant insight. It's so sad that the boomers, on the cusp of realising that everything they believed in was fake, reacted with such shallow and selfish indulgences as sports cars and extra marital affairs. Never once did it occur to them that these things helped nothing and often caused more hurt and suffering to those around them. And so they just continued the fatuousness and pointlessness of their existence.
great article once again Morgoth
I think the midlife crises of Vince Gilligan and Robert Chase through their avatars Walter White and Tony Soprano gave us the best 2 TV shows ever so at least great art resulted from them!
I dont know if you like subtitled films much but I saw a pretty hilarious German movie called 'Es ist nur eine Fase Hase' last year
in English 'its just a phase honey'
all squarely about the midlife crisis but involving the wife as much as the husband
she gives him the big E and flirts with a much younger guy
the writing is very clever and its apparent at one stage that all of the Gen Xers of Germany are being critiqued for their relative laziness and over indulgence
In France Houllebecq puts the blame firmly on his Boomer hippy mother and her generation for the cultural implosion he calls 'Atomized' - but although Boomers led the charge, other generations eagerly followed them into 'the permissive society'.
Thank you for your insights again- that pub in Tynemouth doesnt know what they're missing! ;-)