Jeremiah

I'm just surprised not to see it referenced when it, to me, seems like a large part of the discourse.

The second is that boomers engaged in a lot of social transformations that were very good for them and had really bad effects on subsequent generations, and the boomers refused any limiting factor.

The best example is probably dating and sexual liberation, in quotes.

The best of all dating worlds is to grow up in the 1950s when everyone is strongly habituated to forming stable marriages, then be given the opportunity to defect out and have tons of free love, in quotes, in your 20s, then settle down in your late 20s into a stable relationship because, well, all your peers came from stable families with strong marriage norms and three to seven years of free love, in quotes, isn't going to overcome that cultural background.

Once the next generation rolls around and gets raised in a free love culture though, rather than the stable marriage norms of the 1950s, marriage starts to break down.

It doesn't take much to notice how horrific modern dating is, yet it's worth noting that even by the 1980s it was obvious that something was wrong.

Divorce was skyrocketing and Gen X got hit hard.

Scott writes, Here's a graph showing divorce rates over time.

There's a big peak in the early 1940s at the end of World War II.

So the period where it climbs up begins with the Great Depression and ends with the end of World War II.

Then it drops down to about the previous trend level.

Then there's a point marked No Fault Divorce Laws, which causes it to skyrocket.

And that upward swing starts in the 1970s.

Scott writes, people tend to imagine the divorce trend as being about hedonist swingers trying lots of free love, but I think this is imaginary.

My impression is that it's more about moving from a regime of naively or romantically marrying your high school sweetheart, discovering later that he was emotionally unavailable and abusive and you hated him, but sticking around anyway for the children, in quotes, to a new regime of unromantically optimising for a compatible partner no matter how long it takes.

Boomers ended up right in the middle of the regime change.

They married their high school sweethearts, then were told it was unacceptable to have an unhappy marriage, and so suffered very high divorce rates during the transition period.

Everyone after them got the new regime from the beginning and never married their high school sweetheart in the first place, unless their high school sweetheart was unusually compatible with them.

I think that the people scorning the boomers for their hedonistic free love ways wouldn't like being married to an emotionally unavailable and abusive partner who they hated any more than the boomers did.

An alternative framing of this, not exactly correct, but I don't think the anti-boomer one is exactly correct either, is that we should be grateful to the boomers for ripping off the band-aid in their generation and suffering the negative consequences, rather than kicking the can down the road and leaving us to be the ones who got the explosion of divorce.