There was plenty that was wrong with the Baby Boomer generation, but I’ve noticed that they frequently get blamed for all sorts of things that were not their fault. Many of the things I’ve seen like this are related to things that happened while they were children (e.g. no fault divorce was first signed into law in the USA by Ronald Reagan when the oldest Baby Boomers were 23 and most weren’t even adults). But some of them either didn’t happen or happened a long time before the Baby Boomers were even born. In that latter category is the complaint that the Baby Boomers had smooth lives on a script that worked beautifully then either didn’t give their children that script or dismantled it so they wouldn’t need to give up their own privileges. There’s plenty that the baby boomers did wrong, but this is just ahistorical nonsense. The script for life stopped working before their own parents were born and the Baby Boomers had a rough start in adulthood.

There was a time, long ago, when parents could (basically) hand their children a script for how to live a decently successful life, in terms of reliably providing for the physical necessities of life, assuming that no disasters like famines, plagues, floods, earthquakes, massive storms, forest fires, or invading armies intervened. And in the pre-industrial world where those life scripts were possible, those things often did intervene to mess up the script. But, in spite of the relative prevalence of disasters, there was a script you could follow and do about as well as anyone else born to a similar station in life.

But then the industrial revolution hit and the world started changing rapidly. Entire professions got wiped out because industry could make the same things vastly cheaper (and as time went on, often better). This was even true of farming—the standard script for most people in most of recorded history. Between farming machinery like tractors and the availability of large quantities of fertilizer (originally bird guano transported from tropical islands, then after world war 1, synthetic fertilizers) it became possible for a small fraction of the population to make more food than everyone needed. This created tons of opportunities, but it also destroyed the script. Even if you did the job your father did, you couldn’t do it the way he did it.

Trying to follow an economic life script became a major liability in the 1800s and a great deal of literature of the plight of the working man is about trying to construct new life scripts in a rapidly changing world. Interestingly, another genre of literature from the same time was looking at the most outstanding successes of the men who threw away the script and constantly adapted to the circumstances in front of them. The hagiographies of men like Andrew Carnegie (who started as a bobbin boy in a factory and constantly adapted to circumstances so well he became one of the richest men in the world) have largely become historical relics, as far as I can tell, but they were popular in their day. And they were popular precisely because they inspired people to throw away the script and adapt to the changing world. It’s both difficult and scary to do that.

By the time of the Baby Boomers, their parents didn’t try to give them an economic life script because it was obvious it wouldn’t be useful. Instead, they tried to give them the tools to adapt to rapid change: education and discipline.

These are the tools to adapt to a rapidly changing world because there is a universal truth:

Discipline creates opportunities.

They are rarely the opportunities you expect.

Discipline consists of the ability to control oneself; when you cannot rely on the rest of the world the only thing left in the world you can rely on is yourself. If the ground is unstable, you can only stand upright through your own balance; when the ground shakes your ability to keep your torso over your legs is what keeps you from falling. But that only works if you have the discipline to make yourself reliable. If you do, then the changing world becomes full of opportunities, just as geological upheaval is why paleontology can be done with picks and shovels rather than tunnel boring equipment. (Though, ironically, plenty of paleontology takes advantage of the tunnels that other people bore.)

Now, if you want to talk about the actual faults of the Baby Boomers, it turned out that many of them really didn’t like self-discipline. Even the ones who did were often hesitant to teach it to their own children. Their children, in turn, were (often) even more reluctant to teach it to their children. And young people now are often the victims of this; they were not raised to view society as a bewildering mess of opportunities if they’re bold enough, knowledgeable enough, and disciplined enough to identify the opportunities and grab them.

Young people these days were neither given a script nor were they trained to be able to live without one. Or, worse, they were handed a script that only works for a lucky few.

If you really want to blame the Baby Boomers for something, blame them for thinking that childhood is supposed to be happy instead of a difficult preparation for being able to survive a challenging and chaotic world. Blame them for letting people think that authorities can be trusted and comfort is normal. Blame them for letting you think that security is possible in this harsh world where the best case is that you grow old and frail and eventually die from a heart attack or cancer if something else doesn’t get you first. Blame them for thinking religion is dangerous because of religious wars without considering that the world has many more secular wars.

Because the only way this world makes any sense is as a preparation for eternity. It doesn’t work on its own, and it fundamentally can’t. The only way to be happy in this world is to be constantly looking for what will work for now, and whether that buys you enough time to figure out the next thing that will work.

If you really want to blame the Baby Boomers for something, don’t blame them for not passing on an economic life script. There wasn’t one for them to give you. Blame them for not prominently mounting a skull in the living room and for not frequently telling you:

Remember, O man, you are dust, and to dust you shall return.