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And then—just like that—the Boomers went from hippies to yuppies in the 1980s. The diminutive form of the acronym for Young Urban Professionals, yuppies were the educated Boomers of the 1980s, moving up the ranks at law firms and advertising agencies.
Along with the power suits and big careers, yuppies carried a dose of conservative Republicanism along with them—and as went Boomers, so went the country.
This wasn’t necessarily because Boomers wanted to roll back the progressive changes they fought for in their younger years—instead, now that they were raising families and moving up in their careers, many seemed to decide that the world had changed enough.
Thus Boomers are more Republican than previous generations were at the same age. It’s a stunning evolution for a generation that was very liberal in their youth, and it creates a sizable generation gap between Boomers and the more liberal Millennials and Gen Z’ers.
For their entire life cycle, Boomers have been less happy, have had more days of poor mental health, were more likely to suffer from mental distress, and were more likely to be depressed than Silents at the same ages.
After going down during the Silent birth years, the suicide rate began to tick up again for those born in the 1940s. Then it skyrocketed during the rest of the Boomer generation
The causes of these excess deaths, Case and Deaton found, were “deaths of despair”: suicide, drug overdoses, and liver disease (which is often caused by alcohol abuse).
After 2016, things improved: The death rate for 45- to 54-year-olds declined both overall and among Whites, reversing the worrying trend. Why? Did things suddenly get better for middle-aged Whites? It’s more likely a generational story: Boomers exited the age group at that time, and Gen X’ers entered it.
As Boomers aged, the problem Case and Deaton identified among White Americans spread to affect all racial and ethnic groups.
Something about being born between 1946 and 1964 was not good for mental health, and being born between 1955 and 1964 was especially bad. The question is: What was it?
In traditional cultures, including hunter-gatherer tribes as well as traditional agricultural societies such as the Amish, depression is extremely rare.
perhaps because Boomers were more comfortable with drugs, since they used them when they were young, they may have been more susceptible to using drugs to excess in middle age and overdosing.
Boomers grew to adulthood during an unprecedented acceleration in individualism, a time when a new focus on the self jettisoned the stability of the past. One result was unrealistically high expectations.
Boomers were the first generation to grow up with TV, and from early on they saw a wider world—often one with more stuff they were told they should buy.
More and more during the Boomers’ lifetime, cars and everything else could be personalized and made “just as unique as you are.” Consumer culture and individualism worked hand in hand, exalting individual choice above all, fueled by money.
Jobs were no longer expected to just pay the bills but to be fulfilling, inspiring, and high-paying. Marriages were now expected to go beyond duty to satisfy the highest of expectations for sexual pleasure as well as companionship.
The high divorce rate among Boomers, another by-product of individualism, might also have triggered depression. On average, married people are happier and less likely to be depressed than those who are single, widowed, or divorced.
Beginning around 1980, income inequality began to increase, and around the mid-2010s it reached all-time highs. This was partially due to tax law, and partially due to shifts in the economy.
Millions of well-paying jobs in manufacturing disappeared in the 1980s and 1990s, exemplified by the thousands of laid-off steelworkers and the autoworkers who lost their jobs as auto assembly plants moved overseas.
Many of those laid-off steelworkers and other laborers were Boomers, and many others found that good working-class jobs became scarce as they moved through adulthood, with the rules of the game changing as they played it.
The link between income and happiness had grown steadily stronger over the years. This created a large happiness gap by income level.
The increase in unhappiness among Boomers was almost solely due to those without a college degree.
The happiness of lower-income Black adults stayed steady, and the happiness of higher-income Blacks increased. Thus the happiness gap also widened among Blacks.
Knowing this helps explain a good deal of recent history, from Trump’s election in 2016 to the insurrection of January 6, 2021. Because unhappiness breeds mistrust, these trends also help explain many White lower-income Americans’ resistance to vaccines and mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Thus one reason Boomers are more depressed than Silents overall might be the impact of income inequality during their lifetimes, which squeezed less-educated Boomers in ways that Silents didn’t experience.
In recent years, mortality differences by race have narrowed, but differences by education have grown larger.
Instead of Boomers pulling the ladder up after them, leaving Millennials fighting for scraps, a large portion of Boomers never climbed the ladder in the first place. Some are paying with their mental health and, eventually, their lives.
Most of the people who died on 9/11 were in the prime of their lives, in their 20s, 30s, and 40s; nearly 90% were Gen X’ers and Boomers, including the firefighters and police officers who died in the line of duty.
There was one positive aftereffect: Perhaps due to a feeling of unity against a common enemy, people were nicer to each other in public places in the months after 9/11; Americans had seemingly collectively decided not to sweat the small stuff.
Generation X is slippery and hard to define. As a small generation sandwiched between two larger ones, Gen X often defines itself not by what it is but by the ways it is not like Boomers—or not like Millennials.
Gen X’ers are the generation of after—at least from the Boomers’ perspective: after Woodstock, after Vietnam War protests, and after the civil rights and feminist movements.
They were also the first generation to enter young adulthood in the age of the internet and the last to experience an analog childhood, with all of the cassette tapes, playing outside, paper books, and boredom that implies.
Yet Gen X grew up at the peak of the Cold War, with the near-constant fear of nuclear war—and, unlike Boomers, they had no illusions that hiding under their desks would do any good at all.
Early 1990s portrayals of the generation focused on Gen X’s pessimistic streak and their young adult uncertainty, but it would have been just as accurate to focus on their brightly colored, Reagan-era, Material Girl, self-confident 1980s upbringing.
Like every generation, Gen X contains multitudes, and changes with the times, but its identity is more unfocused than that of other generations.
At the other end, the later Gen X birth years bleed into early Millennials, inspiring a label (“Xennials”) and a persistent debate about the last year of the generation: Anywhere from 1977 to 1983 has been suggested.
Gen X parents were left to half wonder if their kids should instead be getting into real-world trouble like they did.
Gen X’ers came to adolescence early and hardened, thus experiencing a shortened childhood and a fast-life strategy early in life, but later living the slow life as they extended adolescence and young adulthood far beyond other generations’ limits.
For the last ten years of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st, your generation often dictated how you communicated: Silents and Boomers wanted to see you in person or call you on the phone, Gen X’ers wanted to email you, Millennials wanted to text you, and Gen Z wanted to send you their resume as a TikTok video.
Gen X might have been first to email, but the culture of online interaction in the age of social media and cancel culture has severed Gen X from Millennials.
Gen X and later-born Boomers grew up in a unique time in media history, when TV was ubiquitous but had not yet splintered into the millions of viewing options that would come later, especially with online and streaming video.
The result was a more unified pop culture experience than has existed since, and a trove of pop culture touchstones experienced by most Gen X’ers.
The shows Gen X’ers watched reflected their upbringing in a time when adults were trying and often failing to make the rules-optional culture of the ’70s a friendly place for kids, forming a key part of the Gen X ethos of independence, cynicism, and wholehearted love for popular culture.
Children’s television in the 1970s was downright psychedelic. It appeared to have been written by Boomers high on acid—or who’d snuck some weed in the employee bathroom before sitting down at their typewriters.
In between the Saturday morning shows, Gen X learned about history, government, and grammar through snappy cartoon segments with catchy tunes known as Schoolhouse Rock.
There were, arguably, two quintessential Gen X kids’ shows: Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! and The Brady Bunch. Both were uniquely Gen X in the way they watered down Silent and Boomer problems for a child audience.
Arcades made games into a social outing; friends could help each other scrounge for quarters to play Pac-Man, Dig Dug, and Frogger.
Gen X was the first generation where having divorced parents was considered normal, the first generation where a sizable minority would experience Dad (or Mom) moving out.
If you were a kid in the 1970s or 1980s who returned to an empty house after school, you’d let yourself in and a parentless late afternoon would stretch before you.
In their 1991 book, Generations, William Strauss and Neil Howe argued that Gen X was a neglected generation, left to their own devices by divorced parents and working mothers, in contrast to the carefully nurtured Baby Boomers in the 1950s and 1960s.
