...who is actually a decade younger than I am. I was a "late onset" father. My wife were married for almost a decade before we agreed with each other to become parents.
Your "millennial" is slightly older than my first son; your two "Gen Z's" are slightly younger than my youngest son, an MS level materials scientist working on his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering.
My oldest son majored in art, and is working in art, his career is beginning finally to gel; but he lives at home with us; we don't charge him rent so he can sock money away, which he is in fact doing.
Anyway, about me, for some autobiography, I therefore am a (gasp) boomer, and my wife is on the border of being a "boomer" and whatever comes after "boomer," "X," I think.
The worst generation in my view is the one to which I belong, but I would include the "X's" - I believe these distinctions "booms," Xs, Millennials..., will vanish in history - with some responsibility for the wrecking of the planet. We will all wear the stain on wrecking the planet by obliviousness.
We will all be remembered in my opinion to have partied and consumed our way into a planetary disaster and history will not forgive us.
I first caught a glimpse of this somewhere about 1978, when I flew in to my old home from California, and my friends bought tickets to see "Jefferson Starship" in my honor as their guest. It was a few days after Solzhenitsyn gave his speech at Harvard condemning Western "Civilization" for it shallowness, as it were.
Look, it's not like I agreed with Solzhenitsyn that a "spiritual" component is necessary for morality and decency. I'd even argue that his own "morals" and "decency" were distinctly questionable. I'm distinctly aspiritual myself, and whether my "ethics" and level of "decency" are themselves suspect is not for me to say. I'm no philosopher. Still, seeing a bored Grace Slick sing "White Rabbit" for the zillionth time, with a huge American flag hanging from the roof of the Coliseum, with fist fights outside in the hallway and stoners being chased by undercover cops, drunks laying in their own vomit in the parking lot, I was struck with a kind of dystopian horror, a feeling that something was wrong with us, specifically my generation.
I remember that well.
I wasn't even aware of climate change then, and my environmental views were, at that time, nonsensical rote tripe albeit filled with an inflated sense of self righteousness that only weakly masked stupidity and ignorance, the same as what one still sees around, all too commonly.
I decided to change, and awkwardly I moved to do so, in fits and starts. Then by sheer accident, I met my wife, through ogling her with a bunch of other men. Despite all of that, she let me in her life, and she shrugged off my hormonal fascination to tell me who she was, and who she was was something beyond the inspiration of all those male hormones that followed her around, mine and others, moths, flames, all that stuff. She was a human being, a profound human being.
It was pure luck that she stood by me.
Now I'm looking at the end of my life, and my heart is breaking because I could have been, should have been, more but in the end what I did manage, under the general rubric of "too little, too late," sort of makes up for my boomerism, of which, I confess, in the end, I am not entirely cured.
My son in nuclear engineering has led a charmed life, I think, embraced by people with the power to offer him huge opportunities. He works hard, but is quickly rewarded for his efforts. I think he doesn't know of hard work that is not rewarded. The opportunities just keep coming to him and I do my best to remind him of his responsibilities to act nobly with what he's been given.
(I also argue technical points with him, so maybe they'll emerge back in his mind after I am dead.)
I know that many, maybe most, young people are struggling, and the weight on them, financial and otherwise may stem from the fact that their parents abrogated responsibility for leaving a better world than the one they themselves found. Struggle though can be good for one's "soul" whatever a "soul" might be. (My biggest worry for my youngest son is that he has not struggled all that much; a failure to struggle can lead to "asshole disease." He doesn't have it, but he could develop it.)
I nevertheless expect a great generation is rising, and they will find a way to be worthy of their being, even if "we" - the generations of oblivious consumers - were not. Let us not regret their lives, but instead limit any regrets to our own lives, such as they were.
Thanks for asking.
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