20 August

Gen X is realising that the boomer model, where retirement is a permanent travelling gap year, flush with cash and free of most responsibilities, is not going to be afforded to anybody else. The countercultural revolution - the boomer revolution - is still a wrecking ball through our culture. The one that transformed adult life into eternal adolescence, permanently at war with the ‘establishment’. All adult responsibility seen as oppression, as being ‘grounded’ by the ‘system’. And part of that revolution will be people taking this as some personal sleight. Everything is personal in kidult culture. But this shift was the entire culture. It happened by accident. It’s now crushing the boomers too. We left them to die, with Covid. Aged care is a disaster. Etc. The world wars demolished the old adult world, and created a huge flush of new babies. As those babies came of age, they took the only culture they knew - high school, where they had all grown up - and used it to transform adult life. Now we have no adult life left. No circle of life, where different generations complement each other with specific roles. Just an eternal ‘living your best life’ adolescence. We build nothing, there are no grand visions or projects to create a new world for following generations. Just a social media-driven pile-on against any change. Every attempted progress used as a platform to express our absent identities with, identities that used to be defined by social roles. Now you try to make one yourself, and sustain it in the giant digital high school - social media.