boomersomething

coming to terms with being boomer-adjacent in a boomer hating world.

Homage to an Amish Housekeeper, 1983 ©Bonnie Hawthorne

My sister, Sue, who’s three years older than I am, has a new ally in the culture wars: “Dr. Rick” from the Progressive Insurance commercials. A parody of TV’s Dr. Phil, Dr. Rick is a “Parental Life Coach” who helps people not turn into their parents. He steers his Gen X and millennial clients away from such hazards as puns, cheesy décor, and being overly chatty with strangers. A reference to one of his cringey lessons comes up in every conversation with my sister lately.

I don’t have a TV, so I’ve only seen one or two of these spots, but the formula is easy to grasp: boomers suck. Don’t be a boomer.

Sue takes these lessons to heart, though their message isn’t always clear.

“I get the thing about paper boarding passes, but why shouldn’t you bring snacks on an airplane?” I tell her I don’t know; I also travel with snacks (and print out boarding passes). But that’s the thing: though I’m Gen X identified, I’m technically a boomersomething.

When Barack Obama was President, there was a half-hearted attempt to revive a shoulder generation created by a guy named Jonathan Pontell in the 1980s. Pontell asserted that this cohort—born between 1955 and 1964—was too young to have experienced the hallmarks of the baby boom generation: Woodstock, Vietnam, the Watusi, but too old to have fully embraced The Princess Bride and Tamagotchies. He called it “Generation Jones,” a terrible name made worse by the explanation that this group spent their lives “jonesing” to find their own identity. They—we—are truly a lost generation, according to Pontell—the baby of the family forever tagging along with the older kids, getting in the way, not keeping up, wearing their hand-me-downs.

Though it was probably the same for every preceding generation, this age gap seemed extreme for my siblings and me. I watched the Kennedy assassination coverage on TV for hours before they and my parents came home in shock and tears. To me, it was like any other news broadcast (longer, maybe) because, at five, I didn’t understand the ramifications of our President being shot in a public motorcade. (Interesting side note: we lived in Ohio then and had Amish housekeepers. Katie and Martha lived on a farm with no electricity or telephone. Their bearded, hatted father delivered one or the other to our house via horse and buggy every morning. The minute that buggy cleared frame, the radio, TV, and telephone sprang into use. They spent hours talking to other Amish maids while they did chores. On that November day, Katie and I were in the family room with the TV on. She was ironing—with an electric iron, of course—while I sat on the floor watching TV. She was so horrified by what she saw that she unplugged the iron and got down on her knees to pray—where she stayed until my family came home.)

TV was a much bigger part of my childhood than my siblings’. I jumped off the school bus every afternoon and ran home to watch Dark Shadows followed by Gilligan’s Island and Batman, while the older kids were out leading almost adult lives in an era that turned out to be extremely influential in American history, for better or worse. I was home alone with the “electronic babysitter” for years before the term latchkey kid came along to describe my Gen X pals.

So, I agree that there should be a generation between baby boom and Gen X. It’s ironic and somehow fitting that the attempt to create one was saddled with such failed branding that it never gained traction—despite having a poster child like Barack Obama—and was ignored into oblivion. Nobody cared about the generational sub-genre that nobody cared about. So my lost generation and I remain boomer-adjacent, though we know we’re not “them.”

My sister and her husband have never been on social media. This is something I’ve come to admire, though I haven’t always felt that way. For years, I’ve performed some of Dr. Rick’s services, gently (I hope), guiding my sister away from social faux pas that she doesn’t understand because she isn’t constantly being chided and corrected by (younger) groupthink. Additionally, many features of the Internet age require explanation. It was surprisingly difficult to describe what a meme was the first time I quoted one to her. (”See, the woman is irate and being restrained by another woman, and the cat—who’s seated at a dinner table—always has a comeback that bitchslaps her. No, the pictures stay the same, just the text changes.”)

I recently asked, “Do the words ‘OK boomer’ mean anything to you?”

“Nope,” she said brightly. “I guess that’s a thing, right?”

Yes, it’s a thing.

The truth is, all generational designations are made up and mostly bogus. Many young people can’t even tell you whether they are millennial or Gen X or Gen Z. But everyone knows boomers. And these days, it’s fair game to hate on them.

The upshot of this is that some friends my age have confided a sense of feeling like their lives have jumped the shark; they feel washed-up and useless, even though they’re still making art or music or working in their chosen careers. (“Did Georgia O’Keefe feel like this at 60?!”) Dr. Rick and others reinforce this message of obsolescence.

“On We Go,” was inspired by these conversations with friends. (The original title was “Ennui Go,” but Dr. Rick says no puns, so…) This newsletter will feature stories, essays, photographs, old journal entries, and the occasional interview: some looking back, some looking forward, some just looking around. And you can be sure I will never refer to any of it as “content.”

OK, boomer.

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