Millennials hit Middle Age ... kind of ... and Boomers get old

 I am a believer in generations and generational tendencies. And, so I found it rather amusing that when I opened the Denver Post this morning, I found an article on the oldest Baby Boomers turning 80 this year. And that article followed a piece in the New York Times yesterday from a thirtysomething writer lamenting how she and her fellow Millennials "are officially old now." --  Opinion | Millennials Are Officially Old Now - The New York Times. 

And, the Gen Xers just sit in the middle watching the two groups gripe.

Being part of a generation means at its most basic the idea of shared experience from a similar or common point on life's spectrum. Experiencing something defining like, say the Challenger Disaster in 1986, is a different when it hits at age 16, as opposed to 46, or even 86. And Gen X writer Douglas Coupland was always insistent that the "Generation X" designation wasn't about a specific age group, as much as it was about a "class of people" who by choice live outside of the norm. This concept -- which was rooted in a sort of contemporary bohemia -- came from the book Class by Paul Fussell.

So, the Millennials are getting older:

The moment crystallized a sentiment many millennials have been feeling recently: that 2025 is the year we officially got old. This reality has been creeping up for a while now, but it’s become impossible to deny it any longer. The youngest of our cohort are about to turn 30, and the oldest are pushing 45, meaning that we’re all now inhabitants of the life phase that the psychologist Clare Mehta has called “established adulthood,” a demanding period that can involve juggling careers while caring for kids and aging parents.

Our generational avatars are doing corny, middle-aged things: Lena Dunham wrote a “Why I Broke Up With New York” essay; Taylor Swift got engaged and wrote a song about her fiancé’s reliable penis; Ryan from “The O.C.” made a documentary about the dangers of crypto. If one of our generation’s athletes is still dominant, he’s considered a medical marvel. We are old enough to experience a type of millennial entropy in which our icons collapse in on themselves. (See: Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry’s relationship.) We were the generation that first embraced mining every aspect of our inner lives for content, but we don’t even enjoy posting on social media anymore. Thanks to medical miracles like Botox and Mounjaro (and Solidcore reformers), millennials are still physically hot, but culturally, our goings-on provoke less fascination, less hand-wringing, less societal anxiety. When they talk about young people, they aren’t talking about us anymore.

And the Boomers are just flat out old:

The oldest baby boomers — once the vanguard of an American youth that revolutionized U.S. culture and politics — turn 80 in 2026. The generation that twirled the first plastic hula hoops and dressed up the first Barbie dolls, embraced the TV age, blissed out at Woodstock and protested the Vietnam War — the cohort that didn’t trust anyone over age 30 — now is contributing to the overall aging of America.
Boomers becoming octogenarians in 2026 include actor Henry Winkler and baseball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson, singers Cher and Dolly Parton and presidents Donald Trump, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

And, there are, of course, many economic and sociological considerations related to the generations and their individual needs. For example, the latest projections on Social Security are that it won't be able to meet its payouts in 2036. And that is suddenly seeming pretty close. All the while, the economy appears to be just rolling along with all its perplexing contradictions.