I think one of the reasons for the extreme selfishness and antipathy of the Boomer generation to the future and toward their own children and grandchildren is that they are the first generation ever to be told to live as if they’d never die.

This debilitating doctrine of feigned immortality is now having pernicious psychological effects as many Boomers believe not in the future or the past, but rather the eternal shimmering present effulgent with the gleam of a time and place that never existed at all.

Over the past few years I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to understand why Boomers are so supportive of policies that directly and demonstrably harm their own children and grandchildren while hardly making their own lives better at all. The immortality cognitive maladaptation is a large part of this, I think. They aren’t concerned with a bequest to the future in the form of money or good deeds because in their heart of hearts they believe against all evidence they’ll be present for that future (really the eternal present), and they care not for harming their own children because they see them as the competition not as emblems of a future time they will not in fact experience.

The Boomer generation enjoyed all the benefits of consumerism and “choice” feminism while being told to live as if they’d never die. We’re now paying for allowing that sort of avarice and solipsism to fester for so long.