The Baby Boomer Blues
We baby boomers are in a pickle. We love our electronic devices but they cause us major angst because unlike the millennials, we weren’t born with an iPhone in our hands. I call us the “in betweeners,” late to the party and a little bit slow on the uptake when it comes to technological savvy. And then, when we finally figure it out, we’re leery about using Facetime and Zoom because we think we look wizened on the screen. When we called ourselves “hippies,” we vowed to never get old and we actually believed that was possible. Now, the constant look of surprise on our faces is more than bad Botox. We’re stunned to be aging, as if we had the power to do anything else. As if it were a choice.
We seem to be suffering from a strange epidemic that I call “the Baby Boomer Blues,” a disappointment about how things turned out. But when you consider how my generation imagined the future when we were coming of age and compare it with what we actually got, it’s a wonder any of us can function at all:
• When we were young and carefree, we vowed never to trust anyone over thirty and here we are, in our sixties and seventies.
• We judged anyone who didn’t have long hair. Today a lot of us are going bald.
• We believed that “love is all you need.” These days, we get Botox and face lifts because we obviously believe that love is not enough.
• We can’t reduce our stress by “turning on, tuning in and dropping out” like we did before, a la Timothy Leary, because our aging bodies can’t handle the drugs.
• We used to take LSD and psylocibin mushrooms to uplift our moods and feel better about our world. Now we take Prozac and Xanax.
• We touted psychedelics as mind expanding. Now we do everything we can to stop our children from using them.
• We prided ourselves for being racially color-blind. Now we wear glasses.
• We women grew the hair under our arms and on our legs because we wanted to be “natural.” Now we’re having it waxed and lasered off, all over our bodies.
• We used to live in communes with friends we considered extended family. Now we isolate in private rooms with our heads perpetually stuck in our electronic devices.
• We used to drop by unannounced to visit the people we loved. Now we text each other to make an appointment to talk on the phone.
• We used to fall in love by gazing into each other’s eyes. Now we have technological romances with people we’ve never met.
• The parents we rebelled against are living into their nineties and we’re caring for them and helping them die with dignity, painfully aware that we are next in line.
Back then, we had the naive notion that if we were good people and treated each other with kindness, we’d have peace and love and everything would be alright. We’d get our happily ever after. But it doesn’t work that way. Our maturity shows us that bad things happen to good people and we have to learn to accept what is right here, right now, no matter what it is, and manage it as best we can. None of us expected it to look like this. When we were high on psychedelics, we saw a world without boundaries. A world of love and compassion. But eventually, we had to come down and face the truth. The baby boomer’s dilemma.
According to Buddhist teachings about “The Four Noble Truths,” the first one is the acknowledgment that there is suffering in the world. We distract ourselves from it by chasing excitement and instant gratification, but when we slow down and stop running, we see that our suffering is still there, waiting for us. We’re slowly discovering that the only way out of it is to adopt what Buddhists call “the Middle Way,” the path between the extremes of high and low. The path of acceptance. This creates a predicament because for me, the idea of accepting suffering as a reality, causes me suffering. And the only method of deliverance is the arduous task of practicing constant awareness and mindfulness. I keep on trying.
Statistics tell us that there are 205 million baby boomers in the world right now between the ages of 60 to 78. Back in the day, most of us meant well. Our hearts were pure. We cared about the world and we rejected and redefined traditional values with activism, social change and freedom from a rigid past. We wanted to make a difference and leave our world a little bit better than when we got here. We believed in the American Dream and we were willing to work hard to achieve it. We focused on personal growth and when someone passed, we introduced the concept of celebrating a person’s life with a memorial service instead of wearing black at a funeral. We immersed ourselves in creating beauty and our motto was and still is: Everything and anything is possible.
But no matter how we lived and what we believed, in the words of rock and roll idol and poet, Jim Morrison, “No one gets out of here alive.” Whether it happens with a loud bang or a dull thud, whether we go out like a lion or a lamb, the time will come, circa 2024, when all of us boomers have left the building. While society will define our treasured objects like typewriters, answering machines and ice cube trays as “quaint,” I hope that our philosophies and rituals will be seen as meaningful and worth hanging onto. It would be nice to be remembered for leaving behind something that matters, for bringing light into a world gone mad. That’s how it looks to me, but maybe it was always this way. Maybe planet earth has always been a battlefield and our job has always been to embrace our small piece of the puzzle and leave an impression that will bring a smile to a loved one’s face and help them navigate the choppy waters after we step off the boat.
In my years of seeking truth and compassion, I’ve come to understand that after I’m gone, I’ll have no control over how people remember me and my musings. I can’t take my money, my friends or my beliefs with me. I can only hope that when I’m no longer here, people will think for a moment and say, “She didn’t have any answers but she sure had some interesting questions.”