Whose Social Mores are you ? vol22

If mangoes sound like a great investment idea and a workable diet, you must be a Boomer !

Welcome back to the Boomers – wtf ! blog, presenting a different view of our future as currently programmed. We are changing as we grow, and will continue to evolve. The questions is what will we become when we grow up ?
Our growth has to be different than what we have gone through in the past. You just have to look at the social mores, and how they have evolved over time. Consider the growing break-up of the family, with single people on the rise, and marriage on the decline. These mores are changing our world, and not planning for them is a folly we need to fix. Just consider that grey divorce has increased 50% in the last decade.
One of the great things about the holiday season was the chance to sit in your family pod, and share stories – parental stories about the past, intertwined with their beliefs, memories with no present day relevance. Your kids, probably in the late teens or early twenties, have very few stories, and really just comment on your myths with their own perspective. What comes out are the changing social mores as they pass down from generation to generation. For example, the percentage of people getting married and having kids continues to drop. Drug use is gaining more acceptance, and is now legal in many states and countries. Same for gay marriage and gay rights. Bullying and other social activities we all grew up with, dealt with, and moved on, are now call to actions with the young. Discrimination and multi-ethnic issues are fading. Financial queries grow, sometimes to very personal levels.
This is important because these changing social mores affect our society, and change us in sometimes scary ways. Make no mistake, this discussion is with the Boomers, not our parents. They, our parents, don‘t have any worries. In their cocoon, they have all the money they need, have great health care, and generally realize that they will not get abused by their kids, us Boomers, because our kids are watching. They are set-up very well, and will miss the changes to come.
Our kids are too far away from worrying about the debt issues we face, the discussions about the choices we have to make about our future, and accept all the social changes that are occurring. When asked, they bespeak of their times, one we can remember like looking in a foggy rear view mirror. It’s not their turn yet. So, over the next 40 years, how do we make decisions that will help us ?

There is no question that Boomers are not like their parents, and while we might think we are like our kids, we are nowhere near having the social mores of either group. Our parents had a world view that barely gave women the vote, believed gayness was a disease, and held developing peoples as makers of their own destiny. Really, Boomers were able to ignore our parents opinions and change our social filters. We were able to view all people as equal, to understand and appreciate that some of us needed a helping hand, and that responsibility for society was shared. This was best expressed in the phrase “it takes a village to raise a child”.
Why we then expected our children to completely share our beliefs is comical. It’s a sign of the normal blindness of parents to not appreciate that change is expected.
Really, the social mores of our kids have something to teach us, if we listen. While our parents cocooned when presented with old age, Boomers need to embrace our young spirit as embodied by our kids, without trying to occupy their space. An example of this difference is the physicality of the generations, and how we all feel 10 years younger that our legal age. Our parents, at 55, did not do the level of sports or working out that we Boomers have done. With modern medicine and our search for the perfect waistline, we are in much better shape than our predecessors. Our children, on the other hand, may be healthier, what with lower smoking and better nutrition information, but they are not as active as we have been. Maybe that means that they will need fewer knee replacements, but will counter with needing new thumbs, from all their game playing.
This Boomer energy is what we need to change our lifestyle. We sit, we watch TV, we don’t know our neighbours, and we live with stress. Navel-glazing is becoming a Boomer sport. One only has to see the governments we vote for to see that we want everything to stay the same as they re today. Since hopefully you realize that this is impossible, that our society is going to change whether we like it or not, so lets influence our surroundings, before they influence us. Managing change should be fun, so lets start. Send me your ideas.

Next time, on the Boomers – wtf blog, why Capitalism is considered perfect, but is not perfect for us.