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Buying a car for an adult grandchild, when one does not have any retirement funds, is beyond foolish. This is an example of something I've seen with some older adults.
Yeah that's nuts. I guess I assume most of them who do that have money and a secure retirement. I'm surprised how many kids get new cars.
When it comes to genralizations about the generations one size doesn't fit all. As a boomer I was a latchkey kid in the 1950's and 1960's. My parents split up when I was in kindergarten. By the late 1960's the name of the game was to make money. Most people of my generation were into drugs, alcohol, sex and rock and roll, but they weren't hippies or idealists. The guys wanted a decent job and a car and the girls were looking for a guy with a job. Without money you couldn't buy decent clothes, date, go out to concerts or restaurants or clubs or live in a decent place that you could take girls back to. The early 70's was way more like "Staying Alive" than "Woodstock". Corporate jobs were coveted, because they paid well and most likely gave you a future where you could marry, have kids, and live the American dream. I never met anyone in a corporate job that felt they were in any way selling out. They were just "Staying Alive". As boomers got married and started having families in the 70's and 80's, women generally didn't go back to work until the kids were in school. (My wife went back to work when our youngest started jr. high, not because she had to but because she was bored being a housewife.) And it's true that they had the housewife and mother job at home and the work job during the day. But most wives salaries were less than their husbands. Most women couldn't earn a man's wage and so the primary focus was on the husband's job. I think if anything, the GENX attitudes were molded by teachers in their schools, peers, music, drugs and alcohol, TV, not by what their parents did or didn't do. Most of what the kids thought and did was unknown by their parents, in the boomer generation and GENX. I think it's possible that their teachers gave GENX kids unrealistic expectations that pretty much shattered when they left school and entered the job market.
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Originally Posted by nobodysbusiness
Boomers were very unsophisticated and unaware.
After the sixties were over, many of them felt they had to "sell out," and work for corporations to survive.
Their kids were not coddled.
As someone else mentioned, the roles were very confusing - women were urged to work, needed to work, and many wanted to stay home with kids, but were guilted into working.
Work roles in the home were not equal, so many women had two jobs (one all day off site and the other home at night cooking and cleaning).
I think the biggest thing I blame the Boomers for is this notion that divorce and single parent families wouldn't screw up the kids. The research, even from liberal researchers, proves all of that to be untrue.
Of course, I do understand at this point that this kind of crap was pushed on the Boomers as one of many attempts to destabilize society. It worked. Not coincidentally, the 'spend every dime you make and then some' mantra that began in the 1980s was yet another lie perpetuated on them to destabilize society. It worked, too.
We have to start getting wise to this stuff. We have to start understanding the mainstream media and the entertainment industry are vehicles of a small elite which are used to get us to act against our own interests.
I'm not sure what you're referring to, here. I think Boomer parents, and their parents before them, felt terrible about divorce, and worried about how it would affect their kids. But in many cases, divorce is better than having kids grow up with contentious parents, constant fighting, or a fake, loveless marriage.
That, too, negatively affects kids; it's bad modeling for what relationships should be like. We see the results of kids raised in marriages like that on the Relationships board all the time. Tons of kids grow up very cynical or disillusioned about marriage, or aren't able to partner and bond.
I'm not aware that anyone said that kids aren't affected by divorce, but maybe I missed something. Could you clarify that?
When it comes to genralizations about the generations one size doesn't fit all. As a boomer I was a latchkey kid in the 1950's and 1960's. My parents split up when I was in kindergarten. By the late 1960's the name of the game was to make money. Most people of my generation were into drugs, alcohol, sex and rock and roll, but they weren't hippies or idealists. The guys wanted a decent job and a car and the girls were looking for a guy with a job. Without money you couldn't buy decent clothes, date, go out to concerts or restaurants or clubs or live in a decent place that you could take girls back to. The early 70's was way more like "Staying Alive" then "Woodstock". Corporate jobs were coveted, because they paid well and most likely gave you a future where you could marry, have kids, and live the American dream. I never met anyone in a corporate job that felt they were in any way selling out. They were just "Staying Alive". As boomers got married and started having families in the 70's and 80's, women generally didn't go back to work until the kids were in school. And it's true that they had the housewife and mother job at home and the work job during the day. But most wives salaries were less than their husbands. Most women couldn't earn a man's wage and so the primary focus was on the husband's job. I think if anything, the GENX attitudes were molded by teachers in their schools, peers, music, drugs and alcohol, politics and the news, not by what their parents did or didn't do. I think it's possible that their teachers gave GENX kids unrealistic expectations that pretty much shattered when they left school and entered the job market.
Where did you grow up, bob? There was a large contingent of Boomers, who shunned corporate jobs and government jobs. The Boomer generation is the one that caused the non-profit sector to expand exponentially, devoted to a variety of causes. Others went into teaching, some favoring "alternative" schools. Still others managed to make a basic living through creative endeavors. It was the Boomer generation that popularized communal living ("communes"), which allowed people to get by on minimal income, when encountering economic recessions after college. And let's not forget all the Boomers, who went into "alternative" religions, and became Zen monks, and the like, later becoming writers and lecturers, or Buddhist priests. Who knew you could make a decent living at that? Some made cushy careers out of it.
I've also noticed, that it was the Boomer generation, where the trend began for women to pursue careers in academia and elsewhere, getting higher levels of schooling than their male friends. Sometimes the men would catch up later in life, sometimes not. But it was a time for women to be career-driven, while some men were stuck in the backwater of the hippie lifestyle, with no ambition. Women looking around for a guy with a job sounds more like the 50's and maybe the 60's.
But a lot of this depended on the individual, and sometimes also on regional culture. I know two brothers, one that went to law school and the corporate route, the other remained a long-haired hippie his whole life. We can't generalize to a whole generation, or even one family. But the Boomers were the generation to popularize "alternative" lifestyles of various sorts.
I was born and went to Catholic school in NYC in the 50's through the 8th grade. There was no coddling of kids by teachers or parents. Corporal punishment was dished out and accepted as a just part of life. And behind the facade of the 50's there was a lot of brutality, fistfights, crime, etc. Men could beat their wives or each other and there were generally no consequences even if the police were called. Fist fights at school and after school were just a part of life and ignored by the teachers. Kids had a lot of freedom to roam with their friends, as long as they were home for dinner and by curfew. Kids had pocket knives and played games like mumbly peg and split. It was a rough and tumble life, but was great training for the future world of work and adulthood.
When I started high school in 1959, my Mom relocated us to California. I spent my high school and college years in LA and San Francisco, with the exception of a year in Washington state. I got a Political Science degree from UCLA. The majority of kids sympathized with the hippies, were against the war, enjoyed the drugs and concerts and the paisly and tie-died clothes, and the start of the sexual revolution, but were still grounded in getting ahead in the world. The majority of the boomer kids were tourists, not real hippies. We read about alternative religions, EST, chanting, meditation, bhuddism, taoism, but didn't join those religions or drop out of society to join a commune or an ashram. We used many of those ideas to cope with the pressures of school and work, but alcohol and pot and pills were the main pressure valves.
By the early 70's I returned to NYC because I couldn't get a corporate job in LA. I dove into the corporate world while still enjoying drugs, sex and rock and roll on my off time. If the truth were known, most people my age were stoned in their off time and weekends with pot and or booze and or pills and frequently at work too. Most of the married guys at work dressed sharp had nice cars and had girlfriends on the side. If a young girl at work was exceptionally attractive, it was said "she could be a vice president's girlfriend".
A lot of ideas from the 50's were still in full force in the 70's. Guys were looked upon as "marriage material" or not. Girls had jobs in offices or shops and a college degree among women was rare. Many girls lived at home until they were married. When we got married, my wife earned more than I did. But it was expected that when kids came along she would be staying at home for at least a decade. From what I have seen and read, all of the above was pretty much the case throught the country, city or rural.
At 25 I met my wife, got engaged and married and settled down to raise a family and live the American dream. I always kept my eye on the future and only got jobs with a pension, knowing that retirement without it would be difficult. My wife and I have been married more than 45 years, and retired more than 10 years. Most of my boomer friends from NYC had very similar lives. My friends and relatives in LA were much less grounded or ambitious, but also lacked opportunity. They pretty much just drifted their whole lives, no kids, no spouse, no American dream.
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Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth
Where did you grow up, bob? There was a large contingent of Boomers, who shunned corporate jobs and government jobs. The Boomer generation is the one that caused the non-profit sector to expand exponentially, devoted to a variety of causes. Others went into teaching, some favoring "alternative" schools. Still others managed to make a basic living through creative endeavors. It was the Boomer generation that popularized communal living ("communes"), which allowed people to get by on minimal income, when encountering economic recessions after college. And let's not forget all the Boomers, who went into "alternative" religions, and became Zen monks, and the like, later becoming writers and lecturers, or Buddhist priests. Who knew you could make a decent living at that? Some made cushy careers out of it.
I've also noticed, that it was the Boomer generation, where the trend began for women to pursue careers in academia and elsewhere, getting higher levels of schooling than their male friends. Sometimes the men would catch up later in life, sometimes not. But it was a time for women to be career-driven, while some men were stuck in the backwater of the hippie lifestyle, with no ambition. Women looking around for a guy with a job sounds more like the 50's and maybe the 60's.
But a lot of this depended on the individual, and sometimes also on regional culture. I know two brothers, one that went to law school and the corporate route, the other remained a long-haired hippie his whole life. We can't generalize to a whole generation, or even one family.
To the OP, I think the Baby Boomers did perpetuate narcissism, but they were victims of larger forces they didn't understand as well as perpetrators of it.
I think our society has been deliberately guided in this direction for a long time. If you were an elite who wanted to control people, you certainly wouldn't want people cooperating with each other. You'd want them divided against each other every which way. That's exactly what we have now. And no, I don't think it's just political conservatives who perpetuate it. The left perpetuates it in lots of ways, especially with identity politics and getting offended by any slightly non-PC comments, etc.
You said it well! It's what I wanted to say but I'm always the weird one who starts yammering about propaganda ... so this time I just said: "Yes" but this ... "they were victims of larger forces they didn't understand as well as perpetrators of it." ...said it better. Now I can't resist.
Hey Boomers; Your Social Revolution was de-evolutionary & it wasn't even your Great Idea. You were played. The elites were literally horrified at your mass, at your mothers' fertility rates & they were not about to let you perpetuate the idyllic American Dream at the same rate. Globalization of industry, finance & resources can't occur between first-world countries & third-world countries. First; there has to be a shift towards equality:
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How does one make the nations of the world more nearly equal? ... a two-prong approach was needed; use American money and know-how to build up your competitors, while at the same time use every devious strategy you can devise to weaken and impoverish this country.
The plan is not to bring the standard of living in less developed countries up to our level, but to bring ours down to meet theirs coming up.. It is your standard of living which must be sacrificed on the altar of the New World Order." - Gary Allen in his book "The Rockefeller File"
The opposite of strong families that make for a strong country is weak families for a weak country. Narcissistic ideals make for weak families. You had to self-cull & it was an easy, easy sell.
A good example of how propaganda was used is with Feminism. Propaganda works best not when introducing a new idea; but in reinforcing an already existing minority one, until it becomes the majority idea. The propaganda didn't have to "make you" demand equality for women; it had to convince you that women were not equal in the first place.
God forbid women would have had as many babies as their mothers' generation did; that would have encumbered globalization by making America too strong to equalize.
Enter the Narcissistic ideals of feminism: "Women have been treated as second-class citizens ... need to reach their full potential ... beyond the "drudgery" of husbands & children ... It's our turn ... anything men can do we can do better ... we demand ... & demand ... & demand ..." The "women's rights" legislation was already drafted before ya'll went marching & protested. You were played & it worked:
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We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years.
It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government.
The supra-national sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries." David Rockefeller - Council on Foreign Relations, June 1991
That was in 1991; just as the crack epidemic was pushing crime rates through the roof, divorce rates were at an all-time high & single-parent families were becoming the norm. The 1990s would give rise to an era of competition, materialism & consumerism. All born from Narcissistic ideals of; ME, ME, ME FIRST!
The loss of 5 million manufacturing jobs since 2000 has sealed the deal, as has the plummeting fertility rates spawned by the self-culling. We are now weak ... enough.
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Some believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as "internationalists" and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will.
If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it." David Rockefeller in his "Memoirs"
When it comes to genralizations about the generations one size doesn't fit all. As a boomer I was a latchkey kid in the 1950's and 1960's. My parents split up when I was in kindergarten. By the late 1960's the name of the game was to make money. Most people of my generation were into drugs, alcohol, sex and rock and roll, but they weren't hippies or idealists. The guys wanted a decent job and a car and the girls were looking for a guy with a job. Without money you couldn't buy decent clothes, date, go out to concerts or restaurants or clubs or live in a decent place that you could take girls back to. The early 70's was way more like "Staying Alive" than "Woodstock". Corporate jobs were coveted, because they paid well and most likely gave you a future where you could marry, have kids, and live the American dream. I never met anyone in a corporate job that felt they were in any way selling out. They were just "Staying Alive". As boomers got married and started having families in the 70's and 80's, women generally didn't go back to work until the kids were in school. (My wife went back to work when our youngest started jr. high, not because she had to but because she was bored being a housewife.) And it's true that they had the housewife and mother job at home and the work job during the day. But most wives salaries were less than their husbands. Most women couldn't earn a man's wage and so the primary focus was on the husband's job. I think if anything, the GENX attitudes were molded by teachers in their schools, peers, music, drugs and alcohol, TV, not by what their parents did or didn't do. Most of what the kids thought and did was unknown by their parents, in the boomer generation and GENX. I think it's possible that their teachers gave GENX kids unrealistic expectations that pretty much shattered when they left school and entered the job market.
My point was that the idealism of the sixties did not carry over into the seventies and beyond. We realized we had to SURVIVE - and survival meant a corporate job - and corporate jobs deaden the soul - so while we WANTED to SURVIVE - working a corporate job was selling out the artistic/hippie/renaissance ideas of life that many of us had in the sixties.
I was a "pseudo hippie." Loved the art and culture, but not the dirtiness and lack of structure.
A lot of today's generation, particularly those active in politics, or entertainment, have been labelled "narcissistic". Twitter is considered a "breeding ground for trolls", and we all know the mantra on the internet "don't feed the trolls". This ties into something narcissists crave: attention and validation. Do we feed a narcissist attention? No. It adds fuel to their fire. Look at Trump, the more attention he gets, the larger he looms.
So where does this rampant rise in 21st century narcissism come from?
I remember a Newsweek or New York Times cover story from the 1970s. On the cover, it referred to the "ME Decade", aimed squarely at Baby Boomers. Most of the millennials of today have been raised by Baby Boomers, many of which are divorced or separated.
Could this lack of tradition, or tenacity, or robustness in relationships/personal life mirror the current obsession with projecting success, even while your personal life is in tatters? Many of the narcissistic people in positions of power covet their success/power more than they covet intimate, long lasting and meaningful relationships.
In short: are we in a narcissism epidemic? What will reverse it? Does the rise in conservatism have a relationship with the narcissism?
Yes. Lay it all at the feet of the latter half of the baby boom generation. We are ALL a bunch of conceited, self serving narcissists.
A lot of today's generation, particularly those active in politics, or entertainment, have been labelled "narcissistic". Twitter is considered a "breeding ground for trolls", and we all know the mantra on the internet "don't feed the trolls". This ties into something narcissists crave: attention and validation. Do we feed a narcissist attention? No. It adds fuel to their fire. Look at Trump, the more attention he gets, the larger he looms.
So where does this rampant rise in 21st century narcissism come from?
I remember a Newsweek or New York Times cover story from the 1970s. On the cover, it referred to the "ME Decade", aimed squarely at Baby Boomers. Most of the millennials of today have been raised by Baby Boomers, many of which are divorced or separated.
Could this lack of tradition, or tenacity, or robustness in relationships/personal life mirror the current obsession with projecting success, even while your personal life is in tatters? Many of the narcissistic people in positions of power covet their success/power more than they covet intimate, long lasting and meaningful relationships.
In short: are we in a narcissism epidemic? What will reverse it? Does the rise in conservatism have a relationship with the narcissism?
First of all, I don't equate narcissists to trolls. I am sure some trolls are narcissists and vice versa but I don't think all trolls are narcissists, nor all narcissists are trolls.
Second, we might well have no more narcissists in present day society than before. We might have gotten better at spotting them, or certainly better at getting them diagnosed. And, many people we might label today as narcissists might be labeled wrongly, especially if done by a non professional. So, I cannot agree that there is a "rampant rise in 21st Century narcissism." I have no way to know this.
People who had symptoms of narcissism 40 years ago, might have had a different label then. Perhaps they were "ruthless businessmen," or "top surgeons," or "extremely successful artists." Likely their personal relationships were fraught. But they would not likely have been labeled narcissists. People did not know that term the way we know it today.
In many cases the "me generation" did prove to be involved, caring parents. Of course, no one generation has all the answers, but I believe we did better than our parents did with us. Perhaps I'm prejudiced, but that is what I believe.
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