Placeholder for a possible new essay on baby boomers. I don't know if this will actually develop into something that is worth "officially" publishing, but it was an anecdote I wanted to have stored.

I recently heard a Baby Boomer talk about his father in his last days. He talked about how his father lived through the Great Depression, and so was always focused on saving. When he was near the end of his life, he would tell the boomer "Your mother and I have saved quite a lot for you for after we're gone." The boomer would respond "thank you dad, but I don't care about money, I would rather have you here." His father got angry at this, and it was clear that the baby boomer did not understand why. He said that he repeated what he said several times, and every time his father got more angry and stressed the importance of the inheritance that he had saved for his children. This anecdote was part of a larger speech, where the boomer used his father as an object lesson about how we shouldn't get so attached to money that we lose track of the personal relationships that really matter.

Several things struck me about this immediately. First, the boomer got the inheritance (since he confirmed that his father died), but he never once expressed gratitude for it. Second, I wondered why he couldn't have just said "thank you dad. I know how hard this was for you and mom to save, and I know that it will be a big help in the future." I think that his father just wanted his son to appreciate the importance of being financially secure. But the boomer had to stress that he loved his father more than the money every time. As if there was a contradiction between being grateful to your father and loving him! Third, in order to make his point, the baby boomer had to paint his father as overly materialistic. The message was: he was a good guy, but he got blinded by money and didn't appreciate his family enough. But his father specifically saved that money for his children, not for his own benefit, so that can hardly be called greedy. And note that in return he gets his good named smeared by his son, who doesn't show gratitude for his father's sacrifices.

Now I'm not just bringing this up to rag on baby boomers, but because I think it gives an insight into boomer psychology. In fact, I'm not even trying to paint the baby boomer as a bad person. That is, I don't think that he even fully realized how his actions would come across. If you've dealt with boomers, you've probably noticed that the things that come to them are treated like they are just part of the natural order of things. "I was able to pay for college with a part time job, not because tuition was cheaper and the economy was good, but because any reasonable person could do the same at any point in history." A boomer may get a nice house because he buys it from an uncle who cuts him a deal beyond what he would have to pay in an already buyer friendly market. But the boomer won't view that as him getting lucky, he will view the price he paid as the normal price for a house. Thus if anyone else struggles to buy a house, that obviously means that the other person has some sort of financial defect. In the same way the boomer from the anecdote may have viewed his inheritance from his father as just something that happens, and thus not something to be particularly grateful about. And I'm sure that he did genuinely love his father, and wanted to express that. But he couldn't comprehend the disconnect between this and showing ingratitude because you aren't grateful for the normal state of the universe. Few people get up and say "I'm glad that it's light out because the sun hasn't burnt out."

Now the boomer in question didn't say anything about how he or his siblings plan to prepare for their children or other younger relatives. So it may very well be that he is planning to pass along a sizeable inheritance to help their own children. I don't want to make assumptions about him, but I can say that I have dealt with other boomers who do not care at all about leaving behind an inheritance, despite receiving a sizeable inheritance themselves. This again is because they view how they were treated as just part of the natural course of the world, which would then mean that if they were obligated to leave behind an inheritance themselves something in the universe would force them to do it. Since that doesn't happen, clearly they don't need to, and things will take care of themselves for the next generation.

Another thing that struck me from the anecdote was that the boomer was being childish. By that I mean that he was stressing to his father that he would rather have his father around than have the money. But that was never an option: it's not like his father would live forever if he burned all his money. He was going to die someday, and the only question for him was how well things would be for his children when he was gone. The phrase the boomer always gave was the father saying "We've saved quite a lot for you when we are gone." That is, he wasn't saying "you're going to get a lot of money, so it doesn't matter if you love us or not" but rather "we're not going to be around forever, but we've done what we can to help you out even after we are gone." This is a mature response that accepts the finality of death, but the boomer couldn't view things that way.

This in turn reminds me a bit of the movie Folks. In this movie Tom Selleck (born 1945, so baby boomer) is a yuppie who has to take care of his parents after his senile father accidentally sets their house on fire. This is enough of a hassle, but becomes worse when Selleck's character runs into all sorts of personal difficulties. Then his mother volunteers that she and his father could kill themselves to make his life easier. Selleck's greedy sister is thrilled by the idea, though Selleck stresses how much he loves his parents, but he eventually agrees to go along with things since his parents are so dead set on the idea. Much of the movie is then a series of farces where despite everyone's best efforts his parents end up alive by chance, only for Selleck to eventually talk them out of it for everyone to live happily together. It is then revealed that the father had a secret fortune which fixes everyhthing, though the sappy ending tries to make this sound like an afterhought.