The last baby boomer will pass away sometime around 2085, give or take a few years. However, their tale ultimately has little to do with aging.
It tells the story of a capitalist system at its most self-assured, expansive, and self-mythologizing stage.
The children and heroes of that story, who were born into a period when growth was paramount and history seemed to have a purpose, were the ones who wrote it, not the baby boomers.
The boomers came of age during the postwar decades, which served as capitalism's grand truce.
Western nations made an uncomfortable agreement from 1945 and the middle of the 1970s: labor would be rewarded, markets would be controlled, and governments would ensure employment, housing, and improving living conditions.
Capital and community seemed to be in sync for a short while.
Under such arrangement, the boomers prospered. They purchased inexpensive homes, enrolled in reasonably priced universities, and secured steady employment in growing sectors.
Public spending on infrastructure, health care, and education fostered a feeling of shared success. After the devastation of war, the welfare state was viewed as a shared platform and a means for societies to grow together rather than as a safety blanket.
This age embodied a spirit of defiance and creativity in terms of culture. From civil rights and feminism to anti-war movements and ecology, they pushed the moral limits of the modern world.
The idea that better societies could be created, not just found, and that change could be both political and personal flourished in the 1960s and 1970s.
The extraction's age
Then somewhere between to oil shocks and the Reagan Thatcher revolutions the promise broke.
The problem was not that boomers changed to world around them did.
Capital revolted in the 1970s as profit rates declined. Deregulation, privatization, and the importance of the market were the new dogma. In the guise of efficiency, collective institutions were dissolved, and citizens were rebranded as customers.
The boomers, who were now in their middle years, were in a prime position to profit from this tremendous reinvention of capitalism. An asset economy that prioritized ownership over labor replaced the social compact of their youth.
Property values skyrocketed while wages remained stagnant. Pensions and unions were replaced with superannuation and stock portfolios. Governments now pledged security through involvement in private markets rather than through public provision.
Instead of elevating many, the system started to stratify them. Once commonplace, home ownership has evolved into the new class divide.
The massive wealth disparity that ensued was caused by a restructured capitalism that made scarcity profitable rather than by self-centered baby boomers. Health care, education, and housing were all financed. The richest generation in history was produced by policy rather than hard work or frugal living.
The generational myth
The term "boomer issue" has become popular to characterize these events. However, the distinction between those who live from wealth and those who live from labor is what really counts, not between generations.
One of capitalism's most effective diversionary strategies is the boomer-millennial and other fake-age distinctions, which obscure the underlying struggle between justice and profit.
Indeed, the average boomer is wealthier than any previous generation. However, inequality in their generation is widespread.
While asset inflation enriches a small minority, millions of elderly people struggle, rent, or survive on meager pensions. The system's beneficiaries are a class rather than a year of birth.
The era of accountability
The paradoxes of late capitalism are now unfolding in slow motion as the boomers enter their 70s and 80s.
Soon, the wealth amassed during decades of financialization will start to be transferred, making it the largest in human history. Some will be absorbed by overburdened care systems, while others will flow to families, maintaining privilege. As life expectancy increases and real estate markets cool, some will just vanish.
In the meantime, delayed responsibility is becoming more expensive.
The unpaid debts of a growth-addicted era include climate instability, biodiversity collapse, social isolation, and financial weariness.
The fundamental tenet of capitalism—that growth equates to advancement—is crumbling on a finite world.
Every policy discussion in Australia, as in most of the developed world, reflects this assessment.
How can elder care be financed without starving childcare? How can homes be constructed without encouraging speculation? How can the economy be expanded without frying the continent? Every query reveals the same reality: a model, not a generation, is failing.
The age following
The world will shut a chapter of civilization when the final baby boomer passes away, not just lose a population.
The boomer generation will be seen as the pinnacle of capitalist modernity, the intersection of planetary limits and material affluence. Throughout their lives, they experienced everything from ration books to cellphones, from the space race to the algorithmic era, from the Cold War to climate battles.
There has never been a generation that has seen or absorbed so much.
However, condemnation will not be the end of history. In many respects, the boomers were idealists ensnared in an extractive society that prioritized conformity over morality. They normalized the transition of capitalism, but they did not create it. They made common sense out of its privileges.
The burden of completing the revolution that their youth once promised now rests with their successors and the civilization that survives them. should prioritize sufficiency over development, community over competitiveness, and life over profit.
The boomer generation's obituary should conclude with clarity rather than blame: capitalism, not aging, was the real creator of our era of luxury.
And maybe when that system eventually reaches its limits, too, people will recall what the Boomers saw for a moment when they were young: that a different world was always possible.
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