Daddy, What’d Ya Leave Behind for Me?

How baby boomers did everything they could to leave behind a dystopia.

All in all, they just made us bricks in their walls.

I have a friend, let us call him Ian. Recently, Ian and I came to talk about money, the future, and the usual stuff. Eventually, he told me how his father, let us call him Peter, decided to use the wealth he had accumulated over his many working years.

Now Peter, a corpulent man in his late fifties, has no education. He made his livelihood selling washing machines and other appliances. A hard-working man, for sure, and a charming one. His reward is a more than comfortable house, a second house on the Croatian coast, a second wife — divorces, eh? Such a boomer thing — two oversized cars, comfortable vacations in distant lands, and other clear signs of materialistic success.

Ian, my friend, told me how Peter, my friend’s father, told him to not expect any inheritance. He told him, so Ian tells me, quite clearly, that there will be nothing left by the time he dies. Peter intends to spend it all, Ian continues, up to the last cent. On vacations, cars, luxuries, whatever else he can find. If push comes to shove, he will eat the fucking money. Ian is quite certain of this.

Peter’s attitude, while appearing perhaps a bit adverse or curious at first glance, quite fittingly suits the prevailing consumerist Zeitgeist and the myth of the ‘self-made man.’ Why should he leave (parts of) his money for his son? He had earned it all, by the toil of his bare hands, hadn’t he? Let Ian build his own fortune.

Well, Peter is in clear breach of the generational contract. You see, Peter is not only an egotistic and self-absorbed man — I’ve met him, yes — no, Peter is also the incarnation of the boomers’ scorched-earth attitude.

Breaking the generational contract

The generational contract is a fancy word for summarizing a set of implicit expectations younger generations, i.e. children, place upon their parents and vice versa. In the simplest of terms, parents take care of their young children and children take care of their old parents. But that’s not where it ends, of course.

For generations upon generations, parents have strived to make the earth a better place for their offspring. They have built, worked, cooperated, taken care of their environment and the surrounding nature, nurtured and taught their children the ways things are and the potential ways things could be. The most basic premise of the generational contract is to leave behind a good place to live.

Now, that generational contract has been irredeemably breached.

Baby boomers truly had it all. The post-World War II Western World, particularly in the US empire, was one of easy opportunity, easier money, and never-before-seen materialistic progress. Born just after the fighting and reaping the benefits of their parents’ rebuilding efforts — in Europe, that is — boomers enjoyed a comparably comfortable existence upon which they soon impressed their own ideology.

Most of it had to do with a lack of basic human decency.

A legacy of collapse — Cyberpunk Now

I will not bore you with endless numbers and statistics about wealth and consumption discrepancies between generations, and how an average (uneducated) single-income family from a few decades ago could comfortably afford a relatively luxurious house with a yard and multiple children.

I will not draw particular emphasis on the effects of lead or asbestos poisoning, acid rain, massive air pollution, and other environmental factors upon the human brain, particularly empathy and reasoning capabilities.

I feel no need to highlight, over and over, the disgusting economic class inequality that is such a hallmark of our times of late-stage capitalism, or the looming, fatal threat the climate catastrophe poses, itself born of unrelenting, unbounded greed. I could go on about spiraling national debts, the death of entire ecosystems, social unrest, cities built for cars, wars, soulless bullshit jobs, endless cubicles, plastic, inflation, and so on, but… you know all this. It’s not new. It’s normal. Just another day on planet Earth.

I know, I know, generational warfare and antagonism are ultimately useless endeavors and we have far too many culture conflicts already, but hear me out. This is fun, at least.

There are clear discrepancies between what we — and here I talk of younger generations (perhaps we could draw an arbitrary line at everyone up to forty?) — and our parents deem important.

Instead of passing on their (materialistic) privileges to their children and grandchildren, baby boomers continue to squander them in a frenzy of consumerism and selfishness. They spend more than they earn, borrow more than they can repay, and consume more than they — and we — can sustain. They have ignored, and continue to do so, the looming threats of climate change, inequality, and debt, and are leaving behind a legacy of environmental degradation, social unrest, and economic instability. Not to speak of that general sense of apathy and resignation. You know exactly what I mean.

We live in a Cyberpunk dystopia of our parents’ making. (And it will get much worse before it gets better.)

An experiment gone wrong (feat. generational trauma)

Ask any service worker, barkeeper, waiter, nurse, teacher (including me), anyone who is forced, for better or worse, to interact with ‘customers’ on a regular basis. They will pretty much all tell you the same: boomers are the worst kind of clients.

They are entitled, demanding, take things far too seriously, and will hate you for no particular reason other than their temporary, miniscule power over you. The ‘Karen meme,’ is a pop-culture caricature of this observation.

Now, every time I say ‘they’ what I truly mean, of course, is ‘many of them.’ Like with any other thing, generalizations can be inaccurate and misleading. Not all boomers are the same. It’s more about averages and tendencies, really. Statistics.

Another meme: the absent father. Ah, yes, that’s where it gets real. That constant, can’t-quite-put-my-finger-on-it emotional trauma of neglect and the ever-present drive to prove oneself to a person one does not even like. Add to that a healthy dose of right-wing-ultra-nationalism, toxic masculinity, and an Andrew Tate-ish hate toward all that is different, and you arrive at the prototype of a Balkan father (trust me on this).

Why are they like this? Are they a product of their environment? An experiment-gone-wrong that involved a touch too many chemicals and toxic substances? Too much ultra-processed food?

Difficult to say, really. I hope we can do better, and I’m pretty sure Gen Z and those who come after can’t do much worse.

A conclusion of sorts (and a call for change)

What is there left to say, eh?

The baby boomer generation has broken the holy generational contract, the unwritten agreement that each generation should leave the world better than they found it. They have betrayed the trust and expectations of their descendants, us, who now face an uncertain and bleak future. They have failed to uphold their moral and civic responsibilities, and instead have pursued their own narrow interests at the expense of the common good.

Individualism, consumerism, narcissism, and greed are their credos. Summarize it under capitalism.

Not all were and are like this. (Why do I feel the need to point this out? It should be self-evident.) Some have contributed positively to society and the planet, and some have suffered hardships and injustices. But as a whole, the baby boomer generation has been a terrible disappointment and disaster.

It is time for them to acknowledge their mistakes and take responsibility for their actions. It is time for them to stop blaming others for their problems and start making amends for the damage they have caused. It is time for them to share their wealth and power with the younger generations, and to support our efforts to create a more sustainable and equitable world. It is time for them to step aside and let new leaders take charge. (Looking at you old-as-fuck American politicians. How much more do you want? How much longer must you reign? Enough!)

The baby boomer generation has had its chance and wasted it spectacularly. As Roy Batty in Blade Runner said: All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to die. (metaphorically, of course).

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I’m author, writer, and activist Antonio Melonio, the creator of Beneath the Pavement. If you enjoyed this edgy-as-fuck essay, please consider becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack or over on Patreon. It’s the best way to support Beneath the Pavement and help me put out more and higher-quality content.

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🕧 The After Hours: Some private matters 🤫

Get in, subscribers.

In this section, I want to share with you my motivation for writing this essay-of-sorts.

As you may know, I come from the Balkans, that great refuge of conservatism, religion, and ‘traditional family values.’ Those values act as a prison of sorts, for they severely restrict people’s freedom to just fucking divorce. (For God’s sake, why didn’t my parents separate earlier; why did I have to suffer so much trauma and bullshit?)

This prison, in my humble opinion, drives many of the Balkan’s good people insane. They are unhappy, discontent with their lives — be it in the West or back home — and have no avenues of blowing off steam, particularly those who’ve emigrated to foreign nations where no social network can ameliorate the worst of it.

As a result, inherent baby boomer attitudes, which we’ve discussed above, are further exacerbated and promoted, leading to a situation in which nobody wants to live in those countries anymore. They are literally losing hundreds of thousands inhabitants every single year (particularly Bosnia, oh dear homeland). But, rest assured, those who remain, all drive flashy Mercedes cars that will take a mere couple of decades to pay off.

So thank you, dear parents, for showing me how not to do it. That level of self-absorption, self-pity, and outright sociopathy is truly remarkable.