The Vacant Generation
Boomer-bashing is back on the menu this week all over the internet. Tragically, "selfish" barely scratches the surface.
Baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, occupy a peculiar place in American history, often cast as the villains in a narrative of national decline. The charge leveled against them—selfishness—feels too simplistic, a surface-level barb that doesn’t quite capture the depth of their pathology. It’s not just greed or ego; it’s a profound vacancy, a generational absence of belief in anything beyond the self. This hollowness, more than any single act, defines their legacy and explains why so many of their children, myself included, wrestle with a mix of love and disillusionment when we look at them.
What forged this generation of meaningless men? That question is too vast for this piece, but the symptoms are stark. Boomers once proudly declared, “I am a capitalist,” as if it were a creed, a faith, an identity. Two decades ago, you’d hear it daily from those who didn’t toil with their hands—a mantra mistaken for philosophy, a religion without transcendence, a banner without a nation. Capitalism isn’t a homeland; it’s a mechanism. Yet for boomers, it became a shallow substitute for meaning, a way to fill the void where deeper convictions might have resided.
They speak, too, of cowering under desks, trembling at the specter of Soviet annihilation. They offer this with earnestness to younger generations who grew up navigating school shootings, terrorist attacks, hormonal collapse, and a world of unfamiliar faces. The boomers’ fear, real or exaggerated, feels quaint by comparison, a relic of a simpler dread. Their nostalgia for their own anxieties reveals a disconnect, a failure to grasp the weight of what came after and because of them.
Religiosity exposes the fissure most brutally. Their parents, the Silent Generation, clung to faith—80% identified as Christian, with half attending church regularly. Boomers, by contrast, saw church attendance plummet to half that, even as 72% still claimed the Christian label. This is peak boomer: adopting the veneer of identity without its substance, mouthing the words while abandoning the practice. They wear belief like a costume, discarded when inconvenient.
Curiosity, skepticism, the thirst for knowledge—hallmarks of the American spirit—withered under their watch. Boomers were the first generation to forsake self-education, content to consume truth as filtered through newspapers or Tom Brokaw’s soothing baritone. They didn’t seek; they received. Truth became what the screen told them, a passive acceptance that left them unmoored from any deeper grounding.
Vietnam looms large in their story, a shadow of cowardice. Only 8% of draft-eligible boomers served, and while many were too young or escaped the draft’s net, millions let others take their place. They dodged not just war but the moral weight of choice, leaving a legacy of evasion. Meanwhile, their rebellion—“fuck the man”—rings hollow now, as they kneel more slavishly to power than any generation before them. The irony stings.
What about the catastrophe of feminism and “civil rights?” Boomers didn’t pass the Civil Rights Act, but their women and many of their men stretched its framework to encompass women and all of the other unfortunates, reshaping society in ways that we now recognize as entirely negative. They romanticize their struggles, insisting their lives were hard, despite data showing otherwise. The “work hard” mantra, wielded like a cudgel, feels like a lecture from a generation that coasted on unprecedented prosperity.
And then there’s Social Security / Medicare. “I’ll never get it,” they moaned all their lives, decade after decade, only to be the last generation to fully collect its benefits. A neat trick: predict sacrifice, dodge making it, and profit anyway. This pattern—consuming, hollowing out, then deflecting—defines them. They devoured the nation’s resources, gutted its institutions, and now buy their children houses, not out of generosity but guilt and necessity. It’s a transaction, not a gift, a way to extend control, demand gratitude, and absolve them of destroying our society. In many cases they literally got rich at the expense of their children’s future.
The other day I strolled through a cemetery, and I saw “patriot” etched on countless headstones of earlier generations. For boomers, that word will appear only if they carve it themselves. They aren’t bad people—my own parents, boomers both, are loving, decent, even extraordinary in their own way. But as both individuals and a cohort, they lack belief in anything larger than themselves or their immediate kin. Not God, not country, not community—nothing beyond the personal. This generational vacancy birthed a nation adrift, made us into a husk of what we once were.
Their sons, the millennials, bear the cost. We’re the first Americans to face downward mobility, inheriting a country strip-mined by its stewards. Boomers cling to the few upwardly mobile among us, often through business, as if proximity to millennial success stories can shield them from reckoning with what they have sewn. They sneer at the young who dare to believe in something greater—faith, nation, purpose—as if such ideals are childish distractions. To them, Viking River cruises and a tiny family scattered to the winds is enough. It’s not. It’s empty, and we see it.
The collapse of our country, accelerating under their watch, reflects their rootlessness. They offer penance—down payments, full-blown houses, and other assistance—but refuse the confessional. They talk down to us, as if our hunger for meaning lacks seriousness. But meaning is the antidote to their failure. Their only accomplishment was us, their sons, and yet they left us a fractured land. Men earn respect through agency, through shaping the world. Boomers, for all their personal drive, observed the world passively, like spectators, not builders. Unable even to preserve that which was bequeathed to them.
When they hear “will,” they think of trusts and estates, not human resolve. That’s the tragedy. They didn’t just lack belief; they lacked the will to forge something enduring. Selfish? Perhaps. But more than that, they’re fools—men who surrendered their nation, their posterity, and left their sons a shadow of a home. Respecting them as fathers, husbands, providers comes easily. But as stewards of the nation? It’s hard to meet their eyes. It’s hard to take them seriously as men.
After the Sacklers got rich selling addiction to America, they spent some of their plunder building museums emblazoned with their names. Boomers helping their sons with the down payment on a house after destroying their home (this country) feels eerily similar and manages to be MORE sinister in some ways.
But they just can’t hear it, it’s too painful for them, too shameful, and worst of all, it’s fully determined, they’re too old now to change it. And THAT is the real reason they cling to power as much as they do. And THAT is why they fear death so much. Because deep down they know exactly what will be written about them when they are gone. They know what word will not be said at their funeral.
The Baby Boomers are the Vacant Generation. They don’t believe in anything. And, really it’s quite sad. John Adams said:
“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.”
The baby boomers parents, the Silent Generation, persevered through unspeakably hard times. And their sons went on to become hollow “capitalists,” who believe in nothing. They broke the chain John Adams describes. And in so doing they broke our country.
We love you, in many cases you were legitimately great parents, mine certainly were. But we are older now, and the world has already rendered its final judgement upon you, you are not serious people. And it’s hard to have a genuine connection with people who demand we believe their delusions, you’re getting a bit old for that. It’s time to stop pretending you are or ever were wise, courageous, or virtuous. These are the traits accessible only to the man who actually believes in something. You are a bland mishmash of followers. Good little Eichmann. As such you are distinctly un-American.
Baby Boomers are not “reasonable moderates,” sensible men, or any of the other copes they tell themselves. You’re just empty vessels. You sat in the cuck chair and watched America get her back blown out like some freaky Gen X swinger. That is your legacy. Take a swig of the Blue Label, look at the Campbells Soup Cans, and enjoy the front of the plane while you can because I can assure you, there is no priority boarding where we’re all going.
The one true gift you have given us is that because of your meaningless lives, we are shaping up to be a generation who truly believes in something. The chaos you’ve wrought upon this earth has given us rich interior lives. And even if we fail to fix what you have broken, no one will credibly accuse us of being the vacant generation. That title belongs to you forever.
Love the boomers in your life, but know them for who they truly are. They don’t mind being called “selfish” because it serves to obscure the shame we all know they feel deep down, even if they expertly hide it from themselves.