Happy Birthday OK Boomer

Let's talk about how Millennials got left behind

What I’m Writing

A book! And it’s out today! You can order OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind from Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, or your local bookshop (give ‘em a call). I promise won’t constantly spam you with book stuff after this.

I’m so very excited about this book. OK Boomer, Let’s Talk isn’t about a meme; it’s about how Baby Boomers are the most prosperous generation in American history, but their kids are screwed. Millennials spend twice as much on health care as Boomers did when they were our age. Student loan debt has grown 500 percent. We are less likely to own homes than our parents and our grandparents, and we pay close to twice as much in rent (yes, even adjusting for inflation). More Millennial women are in the workplace than women of any other generation, and yet the Boomer politicians who dominate Congress have done squat to make it possible for women (and men!) to work and parent — which is one reason a significant number of young women say they either don’t have children, or have fewer than they’d like.

If not for the (badly tattered) social safety net, Millennials would be the most impoverished young adults since the Great Depression.

You probably know some of the reasons — Millennials were entering the workforce just as the Great Recession of 2008 hit, leaving many of us unemployed, under-employed, and under-paid; our earnings took a hit, and our incomes will likely remain depressed for the rest of our working lives. But you may not fully appreciate others. One reason Millennial life is so precarious is that Millennials are the most racially diverse adult generation in American history. Centuries of racist laws and policies and a concerted effort to concentrate wealth and power in white hands has produced a tiny group of overwhelmingly white have-a-lots and a much larger pool of have-not-muches — and most Millennials are in the latter category. This isn’t something that just happened; Millennial lives weren’t just blown in the wrong direction by unlucky economic winds. Baby Boomers (or at least the white ones) were given a sturdy ladder to climb, with newly accessible higher education opportunities, affordable housing that allowed white families to build their wealth, rapidly improving health care, and workplaces that generally took care of their employees for the long haul. Boomers thrived. They went to college and bought homes in record numbers. They steadily built their wealth. They are set to be the longest-living Americans in history.

And then they elected politicians who pulled the ladder up behind them.

OK Boomer, Let’s Talk is a hard look at all the challenges Millennials face, a dive into how we got here (conservative white Boomers made devastating political choices, but it was definitely #NotAll Boomers who are to blame), and a roadmap for what needs to change if we want to leave a better world for Gen Z and those behind them.

If you want to know what the book is all about, you can read an excerpt from the introduction here. A little taste:

Generational warfare is nothing new. When today’s boomers were college-aged hippies, they were warning each other not to trust anyone over 30. Soon enough, millennials will be shaking our fists at the youngsters, demanding they get off our environmentally friendly, succulent-speckled rock lawns.

What’s different now, though, is that there is a moneyed system interested in sowing generational discord and stoking fear. Call it the Boomer Anxiety Industrial Complex. It’s a largely right-wing machine targeted at older Americans, encouraging a nearly manic obsession with the alleged wrongdoings of younger, more liberal people. Shocking stories about college students encroaching on free speech are a staple. So are more pedestrian narratives about college students being too sensitive, too emotional, or too “politically correct.” This didn’t start with millennials; the seeds of the anti-PC/“college students versus free speech” propaganda were planted in the ’90s, part of a backlash against Bill Clinton, the first boomer president.

Today, Fox News is the primary anti-millennial television outlet, but there’s also generationally tailored content on websites like Breitbart and Townhall, and hackneyed memes that circulate among the over-50 set on Facebook and Twitter. Boomers are more likely to watch Fox News than almost any other network, and close to half of them told Pew that in the previous week, they’d gotten political news from Fox.

That’s bad news. As part of this right-wing political project, the higher-ups at Fox have also learned that nothing fires up their boomer audience like fear: fear of immigrants, fear of Islamic extremism, fear of a changing world, and even fear of mainstream media sources. As one character in the movie Bombshell put it, “You have to adopt the mentality of an Irish street cop. The world is a bad place. People are lazy morons. Minorities are criminals. Sex is sick but interesting. Ask yourself, ‘What would scare my grandmother or piss off my grandfather?’ And that’s a Fox story.”

One of the more important parts of the book, about Millennials as the incarceration generation, is also adapted in the Atlantic today. One under-appreciated reason Millennial lives are so stymied: Policing and prisons. As kids, far too many Millennials had their parents ripped out of their lives and put behind bars — and then Millennial kids were incarcerated in record numbers, too. As adults, we are now the most incarcerated generation. And while incarceration rates are declining, the decrease is much slower than the increase was, meaning Millennials may wind up the most incarcerated generation on planet earth.

And if you still want more, I did a Q&A with Publisher’s Weekly that lays out many of the book’s themes, as does this review in the New York Post (they didn’t hate it!). And I talked to the incredible Dan Savage for his Savage Lovecast, out today.

Please do check it out. And if you are kind enough to want to support OK Boomer, here are a few things you can do:

• Buy the book! And then tell a friend.

• Share on social media (I’m @jillfilipovic on Twitter and Instagram)

• Leave a review on Amazon

• Join for a virtual event

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Tune In

Lots of good OK Boomer events coming up! The full list of events, including radio shows etc, is all here and updated regularly. But there are a few this week that I want to highlight:

• TOMORROW, Wednesday Aug. 12, at 12noon EST, in conversation with two brilliant women I profoundly admire, Josie Duffy Rice of the Justice Collaborative (and a New America fellow) and Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: Work, Life and Play When No One Has The Time, and director of the Better Life Lab at New America. Register and watch online.

• THURSDAY Aug. 13 at 8pm EST / 5pm PST, in conversation with my dear friend Baratunde Thurston, a comedian, culture critic, and author of How To Be Black, at Politics & Prose. Watch online.

• SATURDAY Aug. 15 at 6pm EST I’ll be on MSNBC with host Alicia Menendez on her fantastic new show.

Hope to see some of you (virtually) there.

And as I said, I won’t constantly spam you with book stuff. But I am really proud of this project, and frankly shocked by what I found. I thought I knew the general story of Millennial precarity; the reality was so much worse, and so much more shocking, than I could have imagined. I hope you’ll pick up OK Boomer, Let’s Talk, and I hope it’s one step toward a better future for all of us.

xx Jill