The baby- boomers who won't grow up

Middle-agers have grown up in years, but not in behaviour, writes Brian Boyd.They are just as difficult to pin downas they were in their teens

Why can't the middle-aged grow up? The first baby-boomers turn 60 this year - not that you'd know it from their behaviour. The boomer demographic - people born between 1946 and 1962 - are causing all sorts of social and cultural problems. If once they were stardust and golden, now they are irritating and perplexing sociologists and economic analysts who simply cannot comprehend or predict their behaviour.

They were the generation to have it all: they not only got Lady Chatterly's Lover and the Beatles, they had access to third-level education, vastly improved healthcare, global travel, full pension rights and lifetime job security. They have dominated, and continue to dominate, the top layers of political, industrial, academic and cultural life.

Why, then, are they downloading Arctic Monkeys albums to their iPods and racking out lines of cocaine at dinner-parties? They're squeezing themselves into their Levis and backpacking and snowboarding as if they were a generation younger. And that's not all: figures in the US show baby-boomers are more prone than ever to violence, sexually transmitted diseases, drug abuse and weight problems. And you thought their only worry was the price of a Rolling Stones concert ticket.

Californian sociologist Mike Males has been studying the behaviour of baby-boomers for the past few decades. He has now amassed enough data to feel confident calling his upcoming book Boomergeddon.

"We're having a lot of problems with the middle-aged," he says.

"Middle-agers now have the highest violent death rate of any age group. The typical drug addict today is a middle-aged white opiate addict. But the focus has stayed on teenagers and twentysomethings, who, by the way, at least have economic explanations - they're poorer than ever, and poorer groups have higher rates of problems. But what's the excuse for middle-agers? They're the richest group in society."

Mike Males finds it richly ironic that fiftysomething politicians fixate so much on the problems caused by youth. Despite the new figures for acts of violence/drug abuse/Aids and obesity for baby-boomers, crime is still considered as "a young person's game", Aids is viewed as "a disease of young people", drug abuse as "the scourge of teenagers" and obesity is not regarded as a problem in the middle-aged, only when it is prefixed by the term "childhood".

In other words, if you are a fat 50-year-old who occasionally punches people, drinks too much and may have a sexually transmitted disease, you're unlikely to end up in a "why, oh why" newspaper article bemoaning diminishing societal standards.

"Baby-boomers are supposed to be the premier navel-gazers of our time, and yet when it comes to the big things, there's this reaction against self-examination," says Males. "Meanwhile, the attitude now seems so much angrier and more punitive: We're going to take money out of our schools; we're going to elect anti-tax politicians; we're going to institute government controls to manage kids instead of leaving it up to families; we're going to be perfectly comfortable with the fact that kids are going to be massively in debt and far poorer than we were."

It is because boomers dominate the government, corporations, academia and the media that they also reign over so-called conventional wisdom. It has been observed that boomers view their careers as "something akin to a gated community - closed to anyone of the wrong birth year".

SIMPLY BECAUSE OF their longevity, the baby-boomer generation is the most widely studied cohort. When they were younger, boomers were easy to corral into neat psychographic diagrams. This was the liberal, progressive, anti-authoritarian generation who were indelibly marked by such events as the JFK assassination, the Vietnam war, the birth control pill and women's liberation. Their lives were soundtracked by Woodstock-era bands/The Doors; they smoked joints, they "tuned in and dropped out".

When they came to in the 1970s, they morphed into classic liberals and the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll were replaced by yoga, balsamic vinegar and a weird form of self-absorption - which was later to manifest itself fully in crackpot "New Age" theories. The 1960s, they reminded anyone who would give them the time of day, were of pivotal importance to how they now lived their lives.

As they developed, though, they branched into two sub-sections. Sometimes these are simplistically known as the "Clinton" and the "Bush" boomers.

Both Bill Clinton and George W Bush were born in 1946. The former is used to refer to those boomers who still believe themselves to be a "bit rock 'n' roll": they download from iTunes, buy the same albums their children are buying and are now taking "mini gap years" where they slum it backpacking in south-east Asia for a few months on their American Express card.

The "Bush" boomers have forsworn their alcohol/cocaine past. They are now obsessed with regulating personal behaviour (as in alcohol and drug use) among younger generations and can be more critical of lifestyle choices than their "square" elders ever were of theirs. A further subset of these boomers see some form of Christianity/spiritual belief system as a solution to what they regard as the present social malaise.

It is because of their political journeys that social historians are now reassessing the 1960s not as a time of revolutionary ferment but as a decade that spawned today's red state/blue state divide in the US.

With so many shifts and changes within the cohort, the only constant, it seems, with boomers is how they are perceived by the cultural generations that came after them (see panel). That, and the fact that as they hit their 60s, they're as truculent and as difficult to pin down as they were in their teens.