Why I don't want to be tarred with the Baby Boomer brush

Personally, I find it hard to summon the requisite rage to properly resent "Boomers", because I'm too busy being angered by millennials and their constant whining about how hard their lives are, but I can tell you that I don't like being bundled in with them.

Blaming Boomers for the ills of the world, and for having it too good, has been popular for a long while, but mocking them for being ignorant and too dozy to be a-woke-n is a more recent trend.

Unfortunately, the habit of saying "Ok, Boomer" spilled over its ill-defined borders, particularly in my house, where my resident teen seemed to find it amusing to use the phrase on me, every time I dared to question his boundless youthful wisdom.

It is at times like this that I truly mourn the absence of World Book encyclopaedias in the modern home, as I would have joyfully opened one at the page bearing a definition of "Baby Boomers" and then firmly closed said volume around each of his ears.

We'll get to that definition shortly, but what I've wondered is whether we are all being a little hard on Boomers. Did they really have it so good? Are the financial benefits they've grown up with, apparently accumulating great riches with no effort whatsoever, their fault?

And are they to blame, specifically, if the generations that followed them will not be as well off as they are, because they've somehow overseen, or even caused, a rise in property prices and the cost of living generally that's so steep that little snowflake millennials melt from the effort of climbing it before they're even off the ground?

You certainly don't have to look far to find people throwing bricks - or at least heavy books - at Boomers for ruining everything. As Helen Andrews - author of the cheery tome, Boomers, The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster, puts it: "Baby Boomers have been responsible for the most dramatic sundering of western civilisation since the Protestant Reformation."

She slams them for being "institution destroyers" who found the traditional family "too constraining" and "decided that churches could no longer put moral constraints on their parishioners".

Then there's Jill Filipovic's OK Boomer, Let's Talk About How My Generation Got Left Behind (there's that phrase again, even being used to sell books). Described as a "very nice encapsulation of the economic case for millennial rage", Filipovic's book blames Boomers for climate change and, more generally, being rapaciously greedy.

So who are these Boomers, and how awful are they? Helpfully, the internet seems to agree to a very specific definition - Boomers are those people born from 1946 to 1964, although that can be broken into two Boomer "cohorts".

The lucky ones seem to have been born between 1946 and 1955, and thus got to relish the riotous good times of the 1960s, while those born in the second half of the strictly defined time period came of age in the 'malaise' years of the 1970s.

Now look, it's easy to be jealous of anyone who lived through a revolution with the word "sexual" in it, but I feel genuine sympathy for those 70s Boomers who "eschewed anything that women traditionally wore to make themselves attractive" and "preferred love to money, feelings to facts, and natural things to manufactured items".

All that and being forced to endure the rise of disco music? It's a wonder they survived at all.

Yes, I'd agree that it's mildly absurd to splash so many billions of people with the same brush as regards their behaviour and attitudes, but there are clear themes that leap out of the internet, some of them entirely contradictory. They were lazy hippies who could diss capitalism because they didn't need it, but they were also greedy pigs with their noses in the trough for too long.

Without doubt the most scathing line on the internet for Boomers is this mocking-toned classic: Boomers "grew up genuinely expecting the world to improve with time".

What fools.

The sense that life was not only cheaper but easier in the 1960s is perhaps some source of the resentment towards Boomers today. At a more micro level, younger generations seem to hate the fact that they're all effortlessly rich because they bought their houses for $10,000, paid them off by the age of 30 and are now sitting so pretty it's as if their couches are made out of Emma Stones or Ryan Goslings.

Mind you, they didn't get to give iPhones to their kids and ignore them for most of each day.

Boomers will argue that they had higher interest rates, millennials will point out that they didn't have to come up with $200,000 in cash as a deposit on their first homes.

It's the kind of argument that can go on forever, and, as someone who was born after the Boom, I get the ill feeling, I really do. But I still don't think I'd want to be a Boomer, okay?

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