Wither Balding Boomers

From MaClean's*an interesting discourse on Baby Boomers, the suicide of one David Gillmor and his brother's odyssey to understand why:

The suicide rate for Baby Boomers is 60 per cent higher than for their parents’ generation, and higher, so far, than the generations after their own. Historically, adolescence and old age were suicide’s fertile times, and mid-life its lull. Not anymore. For the past decade, experts have explored the spiking suicide rate among middle-aged Boomers. Socio-economic explanations dominate their discourse: Boomers have high divorce, family breakdown and substance abuse rates; a high incidence of depression (or perhaps a willingness to talk about it, an openness not shared with their parents’ cohort, the aptly named Silent Generation); and an intense sense of entitlement that many experts believe results in feelings of comparative disadvantage. 

The world was handed to the Baby Boom. They had a childhood unimaginable to any generation before. It seemed fantastical to us Gen Xr's, a utopia.

The 60's were filled with such promise. But youth and hope turned into the drudgery and decline of the 70's. By the late 80's the Boomers were work-a-day folks just like their fathers. By the 90's they were careerist hacks.

Mark Steyn once reviewed a Quebecois movie, Les Barbarian Invasions about a Baby Boomer on his death bed looking back at a life that followed every trend of his generation but at the end seemed shockingly empty. He was an adjunct professor at a community college. Trust us, those in the know...let's just say academics shouldn't be teaching US I at the end of their careers.

The article concludes:

If David Gillmor was, in the words of his brother, “a quintessential Boomer” in his flight from difficulties and his dedication to sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll—that is, to dragging his youth as far into middle age as he could—then perhaps he was also emblematic in his readiness to choose his exit to suit himself. It’s impossible to say with certainty. 

The Balding Boomer in perpetual arrested development who always had a way out. His Generation X son is indifferent, his Millennial son hates his guts.**

No wonder the present seems pretty bleak.


*We subscribed during the Mark Steyn free speech battle a decade ago
**Metaphorically.