Young adults challenge boomers’ ideas of success

CHICAGO – Abby Lovett’s friends would die laughing if they heard her.

Here she is in her office at a Chicago ad agency, the place she spends many a night and weekend, loudly proclaiming that her generation needs to work less than their baby boomer parents have.

Sure, she’s putting in more than 50 hours a week to establish her career. But in her heart of hearts, Lovett knows she’ll end up miserable if she doesn’t eventually find a little balance.

Forget the three-car garage and all the trappings those high-flying boomers hold so dear.

To her and many other young adults, “having it all” is fast becoming a myth, not the mantra it was for boomers who left behind their protest signs and tie-dye to climb the corporate ladder. And now, she says, many boomer parents are pressuring their kids to achieve even more.

“No one is happy. Everyone is overworked, over-stressed. No one’s spending the kind of time that they want with their kids or their spouses or partners. And I think part of that can be attributed to the boomers,” says Lovett, who’s 27. “I wish they would’ve paid more attention to our lifestyles.

“I feel like it’s tougher now because of that.”

You could call it “boomer backlash” or just high anxiety. But as the first of the baby boomers approach 60 next year, it’s one of many ways that young adults are feeling conflicted about their graying elders.

They love boomers – and they love to hate them. They see a talented, successful and outspoken generation that also can be hopelessly dismissive and self-absorbed.

They are awed and sometimes intimidated by baby boomers’ accomplishments and a generation so larger-than-life that some of its most famous members are known by only one name – Madonna, Oprah, Bono – or nicknames such as “W” and “The Donald.”

But at times, they also see boomers as a bunch of hypocrites who were challenged to “ask what you can do for your country” and ended up focusing on what was in it for them.

“There’s a disconnect between the younger generation and anyone over 45 or so,” says Steve Rubens, a 29-year-old businessman from Palo Alto, Calif. “Something happened. I don’t know when.

“But they don’t really listen as much as they think they do. They just go with their agenda.”

It’s an agenda that leaves him and other young adults – members of generations known as X and Y – wondering what will be left for them, especially as the cost of living rises, national debt increases, and as the huge population of aging boomers begins to devour Social Security and company pensions.

“A lot of people are disappointed with big corporate America and just how ineffective it is and the fact that the decision-makers – a lot of them are baby boomers who can’t even get you a raise that’s going to match inflation these days,” says Geoff Persell, a 26-year-old construction manager in Tampa, Fla.

He and others his age are ready to revamp the system, to create a new workplace that embraces flexible hours and new technology, improving efficiency and giving workers more time for life off the job.

That restlessness isn’t limited to the corporate world.

Young adults also are ready to wrestle away their piece of the pie from boomer politicians, from “helicopter parents” who hover over their adult kids, and even from aging rockers who have yet to give up the stage.

The question: Will boomers let them – and recognize they can’t rule forever?

“I feel like that whole generation is coming into that space where you’d think that they would be getting ready to give up. But it doesn’t feel that way at all,” says Marcos Najera, a 33-year-old former teacher in Phoenix who now works as station manager and host for the city’s youth and education cable television network.

He wishes more boomers were willing to be mentors, to collaborate and inspire a group of young adults who he worries have become apathetic in part because they feel powerless. Others, he says, have simply gotten used to boomers speaking for them.

“They have no idea that they’ve left us in their dust,” says Najera, who’s also an actor, playwright and director in his off hours. “So we’re either going to have to run and catch up and poke them on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, you guys, don’t forget us!’ or it’s not going to happen.”

Boomers’ life experience, he says, is invaluable. They were at the forefront of the women’s and civil rights movements. They questioned authority and produced art and music about their protests.

It’s a legacy that can be difficult to live up to – and one that has left some unwilling to try.

“We can change the world, rearrange the world,” Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sang to young boomers who came of age amid passionate Vietnam War protests, free love and more casual drug use.

Najera and other Gen Xers, meanwhile, grew up in the final chill of the Cold War, witnessed the start of the AIDS epidemic and were told to “just say no” to drugs.

Skeptical of boomer idealism, they were pegged as “slackers” and represented by darker icons such as suicidal rocker Kurt Cobain, who declared bleakly: “Here we are now, entertain us. / I feel stupid, and contagious.”

Now some young adults are embracing a more conservative political agenda as a direct reaction to the boomers’ more raucous youthful legacy.

“We’ve had a large undermining of our traditional values in this country. And I think that was a repercussion of the hippies in the ‘60s and their ‘anything goes’ attitude,” says Patrick McHenry, a North Carolina Republican who, at 30, is the youngest member of Congress. “Our generation has a realistic approach. We’re not sort of pie-in-the-sky people.”

Others admire the young boomers’ daring but wonder what happened to it.

“Now it’s like ‘Women shouldn’t have the right to choose’ and ‘Gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry.’ Where did all that freedom of individuality and freedom of expression go? Now that they’re older, we can’t have that?” asks Elizabeth King, a 26-year-old graduate student at Northwestern University.

She says many boomers who’ve achieved material success have just become fixated on helping their children do the same.

“I definitely think they want you to achieve and they’re not going to put up – like my parents would not put up with nonsense like with being lazy, with not trying hard enough, with second best,” King says. “That’s not OK.”

Many other young adults also talk about feeling that pressure to achieve and wish boomers would lighten up.

“I think baby boomers have this fear that if we don’t take the traditional steps, we’re going to mess up,” says Jessica Coen, the 25-year-old co-editor of Gawker.com, a media and pop culture blog, based in Manhattan. After graduation from college, she worked in a Hollywood studio, taught school in a tough Los Angeles neighborhood and then, rather than going to Columbia University for graduate school, became a blogger.

At first, it wasn’t a well-received decision with her parents, with whom she is very close. But her success has shown them and other boomers that there could just be a new way to do things.

Coen is among young adults who also want to forge a new take on family life and how material success fits into it.

“Obviously, I someday want to raise a family and do those traditionally important things,” she says. “But also I don’t have some image in my head that it’s going to be this perfect, green-mowed lawn – because that doesn’t work. And we’ve seen that it doesn’t work. You can have it all on the outside, but that doesn’t mean your family is going to be healthy or happy.”

For her part, Lovett, in Chicago, competed in a triathlon last summer and has taken up oil painting, steps aimed at achieving that balance she’s looking for.

It’s something she learned, in part, by watching her boomer father, who worked 14-hour days much of his life only to collapse from a stroke in a boardroom at age 50.

He survived. “But suddenly, it turned our lives upside down,” says Lovett, whose parents still live in Denver, where she grew up. “Sure, they moved into a smaller house, and they’re probably not having the same middle adulthood that they thought they would.

“But they’re together and they’re alive and they’re now enjoying the things that are the essential life qualities,” including the pending arrival of their first grandchild.

Lovett, too, plans to put a new spin on the notion of having it all.

“It’s a different sort of investment,” she says. “It may cost me a lot of money. But ultimately, when I’m 80 years old, hopefully I’ll have some kids coming to play shuffleboard with me, you know?

“And a bigger retirement account I don’t think can replace that.”