26 December

This is the cultural shift that’s almost impossible to talk about without people of that age taking great offence. (People identify themselves individually with demographic groups, but these are cultural rather than individual psychology questions.) The Woodstock generation arrived at the time not long after the world had sustained 4 major catastrophes: two world wars, a horrifying pandemic, and the Great Depression. Those catastrophes suppressed or destroyed society’s status hierarchies, and created ‘the public’ as an idea to help rebuild after those catastrophes, with a focus on the collective good of all (because without that, nothing was going to keep running). Just as that rebuilding had really started to pay off, the massive wave of young people born in the euphoria after the last war began to enter adult life. They’d never known those 4 catastrophes, their parents had wanted to spare them that world. But what this did was give them an idea of life as an endless set of opportunities. What I call the shift from life, to lifestyles. They hadn’t known real tragedy, so they invented their own baddies, overwhelmingly ‘the establishment’. Counter-cultural movements, looking to upend the very fabric of societies. Society began to eat itself. That fabric *was* the delicately re-built world post the 4 catastrophes. They were going to war with the most basic institutions and habits that keep societies running. They still are, to this day the dominant politics that emerged from the Woodstock era is small government, anti-establishment ‘freedom’ politics. And wafty idealisms about love and unity that never produce either. And musical acts became not just entertainment, but the organising principle of these new lifestyle tribes. Singing of revolution while accumulating vast fortunes, becoming the organising principle for adult life (Woodstock did alert us to the fact music was going to play this political role, for this generation). Those same acts are still occupying centre stage in modern popular culture, that lifestyle generation will never go quietly into the night to make way for the young. The young are being smashed on every measure of modern adult life, from education to housing. The old still see themselves as the young. There is no circle of life now, we reach adolescence and that’s where we stay, until we’re dead, ‘living our best life’. Not just boomers, that shift is now all of us. Not because individual boomers are horrible people, but because they were caught up in a cultural shift that decoupled social life from the brutal realities of what maintains peace and prosperity.