( Before you begin, scroll down and do some extra reading about the OK boomer trend for some context. If you live on the Internet, like me, start reading!)
I am unsatisfied with my job. You hear this a lot in the social chatter these days. People who are not just feeling the passion for their work are willing to drop their jobs, take risks, and take up jobs, start businesses from scratch just because they strongly feel it. 30 years ago, if my father had this feeling, my grandpa would have asked him to dig a hole, bury that feeling and get back to work on time. Because most of our parents were probably baby boomers.
They were born after the World war and the great depression. During the world war and depression, a lot of couples stopped having babies because they could not raise them in the current economic situation. In India too, the effects of the great depression and World war sprung up as famines. So when peace and prosperity began to slowly return, a lot of babies were born across the world. This was later coined as the baby boomer age. They were born in a world where they had to shoulder their families and the economy and bring them up. And they really did. So they could simply not say, this job pays well but my passion is in stand-up comedy, so I will quit my well-paying job and start from scratch at 35.
But baby boomers are also probably the least flexible generation ideology wise. Their personality gaps were permanently closed before the 21st century was born and they simply could not grasp how much the world has evolved since then. This is why you see trends like OK Boomer catching on in the social media world. Millennials hate anybody who gives them a reality check. We were the kids who were born for the dreamy 21st century.
Has your father ever told you how he sweated it out without fans and you forget to even switch off the fan while leaving the room. ( Is he even your father, if he hasn’t told you this at least a 1000 times). This is because everything they got through a long drawn struggle, we were handed in a silver plate. We learned things faster, got things faster, wasted them faster too, and wanted more.
Of course the millenial and the generations that followed are more evolved that makes them question patriarchy, racism, casteism, and everything else that is wrong with the world. But the boomer is upholding these things not because they want to, but because they were raised that way. So as a grown-up, if you now realize that you are nothing like your parents. It is probably true. As Millenials, we were all born with an extra ounce of a rebel in our blood and that is why we question and disrupt so much. We cause so much chaos wherever we go. But we will also definitely be the ones to find long term, sustainable solutions to the problems that plague our society.
The boomer vs millennial war isn’t going away anytime soon too. We all have a few boomers in our family. And say what you will, those hard-earned jobs, that we can so easily call as boring today put you through school, expensive tuition centers, college, branded clothing, vehicles, gadgets, and pretty much every luxury you owned. Even now when your new-fangled job fails, your boomer’s safety net waits to catch you. But only after saying, I told you so, at least a hundred times!
EXTRA READING :
Baby Boomers: Born 1946-1964 (54-72 years old)
Generation X: Born 1965-1980 (38-53 years old)
Millennials: Born 1981-1996 (22-37 years old)
Post-Millennials: Born 1997-Present (0-21 years old)
OK boomer is a viral internet slang phrase used, often in a humorous or ironic manner, to call out or dismiss out-of-touch or close-minded opinions associated with the baby boomer generation and older people more generally.
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