OK, Millennial: The world will change on you, too
Stephen H. Provost
OK, Millennial.
My first point: There should be a comma after “OK” in “OK, Boomer.” Otherwise, you’re saying Boomers are OK, which is not what I think you mean to suggest.
If I’ve got this straight, you’re trying to say we’re out of touch, that our ideals are flawed, that we don’t know what the hell we’re talking about. Right?
Fine. Now, get off my lawn!
Wait. Hold on a minute. Let’s start again.
I said “we” with a couple of caveats. First, I’m what you might call a Barely Boomer. I was born in 1963, a year before the arbitrary generational cutoff that would have sorted me (just as arbitrarily) into Generation X. I was born to late for malt shops and even for the hippie movement. But too soon for the “me” generation of the Reagan ’80s.
So, I don’t really fit into your neat little categories. And that’s the point of my second caveat: Most of us don’t. Neither do most of you, if you’re honest with yourself, because stereotypes are a crutch, and a rather poor one, at that. Some “Boomers” really are OK by your standards: We agree with you on a lot of things; and some of you probably agree with us more often than you’d care to admit.
The wheel turns
But one thing all generations seem to have in common is the way we age. When we’re young — say in our teens to our early 30s — we soak up stuff and make it ours. Our music. Our fads. Our pop culture. Our slang. We use it to help define who we are.
Then, however, the world moves on and we feel a little less at home. That’s normal. Imagine growing up on one place, calling it home for most of your life, then moving all the way across the country in your 40s. You may appreciate your new surroundings; they may even be objectively more comfortable and better suited to your needs. But you’ll always have a certain wistfulness about where you grew up (assuming you had a halfway decent childhood).
When our fads and music and lingo and culture gives way to the next generation’s, that’s how we feel. It’s how our parents felt, and it’s how you’ll feel, too. We feel a little out of place. That’s not generational. It’s human. You’ll feel the same way when you find the next generation creating its own distinct place in the world.
My parents’ tastes
I got to thinking about all this listening to a satellite radio station today. It was playing “oldies” from different generations: I remembered some fondly from my childhood, but I remembered others just as fondly because my parents had enjoyed them and shared them with me.
Now, when I was a kid, I’d close the door to my room and crank up KISS or Aerosmith, bands my parents had no affinity for whatsoever. My dad was into the Limeliters and the Kingston Trio. My mom liked big band stuff. They both enjoyed Perry Como and Bing Crosby. I didn’t listen to that stuff in my room, but when Christmas specials came on TV featuring crooners from an earlier generation, I watched. And I enjoyed them.
Because my parents found something to like there, I may have decided, subconsciously, that it was worth at least giving it a chance. Or maybe, because I grew up in a stable, loving home, I came to associate my parents’ tastes with that feeling of stability and comfort. A lot of kids who came from broken or abusive homes probably don’t want anything to do with their parents’ culture, because to them, it represents pain and struggle. That’s understandable.
Still, it doesn’t mean you ought to dismiss that entire generation, any more than an older generation should dismiss you. It would be easy for me to hold you responsible for the “death of rock and roll” at the hands of hip-hop and boy bands, because I miss what I grew up with, what made me feel at home when I was forming my own identity.
But that doesn’t mean I get to act dismissive of your culture, to the extent that it appears, on the surface to be different than mine. Because, guess what? Each of us has just as much right to our cultural comfort level as the other. And we that has to be OK. Otherwise, we’ll ignore what we have in common: the desire to create, cultivate and celebrate our own identities – and cling to them as we grow older. You’ll do that, too.
Duets
So did my parents.
They’re gone now, unfortunately. And I miss them both. When Moon River comes on the radio these days, I don’t roll my eyes and complain about their generation’s pathetic taste in music. I think about how great it was that they could enjoy something that was uniquely theirs. It isn’t uniquely mine, but because they loved it, I can at least appreciate it. Because I loved them. I also realized I could learn something from them — and I can learn something from the younger generation, too.
I may never love hip-hop, and you may never get Aerosmith. Still, hip-hop pioneers Run-DMC had a monster hit with a remake of an Aerosmith song called Walk This Way that actually featured members of Aerosmith. It wasn’t the first time something like that had happened, either. Back in the early 1970s, Bing Crosby and David Bowie sang a duet of The Little Drummer Boy. If anything, that was even more improbable.
So maybe, instead of me shouting, “Get off my lawn,” and you scoffing, “OK, Boomer,” we should try singing a metaphorical duet. Neither one of us has to give up our identity to appreciate a different perspective. And each of us might find there’s a lot more to the other than the stereotypes we’ve created in our own heads.
OK, Millennial?