Note: I’m pushing hard to create more content for subscribers as Substack becomes a key source of my income. Please consider upgrading to paid to support Contra. Thanks for reading!
People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.
―Chuck Palahniuk
Baby boomers get a lot of hate, often because they’re perceived as entitled and out of touch. They tell others to yank themselves up by the bootstraps in a way they never had to, having purchased their homes without a credit score and a firm handshake after working a lemonade stand for a summer.
However, what we can say in praise of boomers is that they are apparently the most psychologically stout social generation left standing. New data from the Skeptic Research Center Team found that among Generation Z, 72 percent of women and 67 percent of men agreed that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.” In contrast, those numbers among boomer women and men are 27 percent and 34 percent.
My generation, millennials, aren’t doing so hot either, and there is a noticeable jump between men from Generation X (though 47 percent isn’t great) and those of my cohort in this respect. As an aside, try to imagine how people in an office setting would react to this speech from Glengarry Glen Ross today:
Anyway, what’s going on? I think the problem starts with millennials, who romanticized and commercialized psychic suffering as the first social media generation.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Contra to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.