Boomers
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Brent Green, author of books and articles about Baby Boomers and business, explores how "Generation Reinvention" today is changing business, marketing, aging and the future. A Trip Into the Heart of the Baby Boomer Generation he covers Commentary about Media, Marketing, Advertising, Sociology, Culture, Politics, Aging, and the Future.
Boomers
4M ago
The Strange Similarities Between 55 Years Ago and Today
In front of the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., on a statue by Robert Aiken, a young woman gazes into the distance, contemplating things to come. Engraved on the base of the statue is an inspirational quote by William Shakespeare from his play, The Tempest, Act 2, scene 1: What is past is prologue. The phrase conveys the idea that history creates a context for understanding and shaping current events.
Never in American history have social, political, and cultural challenges from the recent past had such eerie similarity ..read more
Boomers
11M ago
Louis Menand, a staff writer at The New Yorker and professor with Harvard University, wrote a combative article entitled: It’s Time to Stop Talking About “Generations.” His subtitle then draws a line in the sand: From Boomers to Zoomers, the concept gets social history all wrong.
His op-ed piece denouncing the construct of “generation” mirrors articles by other pundits and social critics, including anti-ageism author and activist Ashton Applewhite and sociology professor Philip Cohen for The Washington Post.
Menand may be a brilliant writer and Harvard professor — even the recipient of a Puli ..read more
Boomers
1y ago
Never before in the history of this nation have so many men entered the 70+ life stage. A Boomer male turns 70 about every 15 seconds. This inexorable march to 70+ will continue until 2034, and then this generation’s longevity dash continues forward toward the ninth and tenth decades of life. Someday, millions of Boomer men will survive beyond the average life expectancy achieved by their grandfathers and fathers.
Demography by itself does not fully predict the future course for this generation. Values inspired by the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960’s and 1970’s add dimension to fu ..read more
Boomers
1y ago
Do younger generations understand the events leading up to the unusual happenings of the 60s and 70s?
A good question, inviting a rhetorical question.
How much do you understand about the U.S. Civil War?
Do you recall the significant battles, major turning points, and the commanding personalities who influenced the outcome? Probably you know a lot if you’re a history buff, but you’ll never understand that war the same way that those who lived through it did.
This is an underlying thesis of generational sociology. Concerning major historical events occurring before our youth and maturation, we ..read more
Boomers
1y ago
Generational Sociology and Boomers
Karl Mannheim (1893 — 1947), a founding father of the field of sociology, conceived the essence of generational theory through a seminal 1923 essay entitled "The Problem of Generations." Mannheim insisted that when a youth cohort faces substantial turmoil during its formative years between ages 12 and 25, a sense of generational identification strengthens.
ERA march in 1976 is a precursor to the Women's Marches of 2017 and 2018
The leading-edge of the Boomer generation came of age between 1964 and 1975, an intense era of social, political, and t ..read more
Boomers
1y ago
The Woodstock Music and Art Fair has been described as a watershed, seminal, formative, game changing, and with dozens of superlatives. Those who’ve attempted to contain the Baby Boomer generation in a tidy sociological package have pointed at Woodstock in summary, sometimes with derision for the Bacchanalian overtones this word can represent.
Scheduled over three days on a dairy farm in New York from August 15 to 17, 1969, Woodstock means little until you place it in larger context of a society unraveling around the newest generation of young adults, a dominant and dominating cohort of malco ..read more
Boomers
1y ago
Back in 1969 over half-a-million Baby Boomers traveled to Europe, sometimes for extended expeditions through exotic cultures and other times in search of new identities. That was the beginning of a tidal wave of Boomers traveling to Europe that grew throughout the 1970s.
I predict that Boomers, especially Americans, will now travel in accelerating numbers to and through a mystifying land of fire and ice. The next chapter of the generation’s zeitgeist includes Iceland as a leading travel attraction.
Here’s why:
We are standing on a viewing platform four stories ..read more
Boomers
2y ago
Some of us are intimately familiar with every outdated technical skills demonstrated in a classic TV ad from Apple.
The spot follows an unassuming archivist working in an ancient building. Shelves bulge with film reels, photos and negatives. With a gentle gaze, the stooping man orchestrates his antique tools to bring celluloid memories alive. The final result, a short documentary film called “Together,” appears miraculously on a young mother’s iPhone somewhere else in the world. Images of her young family fly by as Lykke Li’s moving interpretation of "Unchained Melody" calls to our memories of ..read more
Boomers
2y ago
When we depart this life, must the stories of our existence fade within the passing of a few years? That has been the fate of billions of mortals who have preceded today’s living.
Since the beginning of human history around 50,000 B.C., 108 billion humans have been born. Just over seven billion are living now, or 6.5 percent of all those ever born are still breathing—a tiny fraction when we consider the meteoric growth of world population today.
How much do we know of the 101 billion humans who have preceded us? The majority are nameless, forgotten as if they never lived, merely dust in the w ..read more
Boomers
2y ago
In a one-sided editorial argument lambasting “old-age benefits,” Denver Post editorial writer Chuck Plunkett employed the metaphor of a sinking Titanic. The ship’s designer recognized that too many watertight chambers had been breached by an iceberg and that the ship would sink: “a mathematical certainty.” This vivid analogy buttressed Plunkett’s argument that with similar certainty, old-age entitlement programs, a.k.a. Social Security and Medicare, will “bring down the world’s greatest economy.”
Generational accounting, the iceberg of this argument, tends to be one-dimensional: it’s about th ..read more