Is It Too Late for the Baby Boom Generation?

In the early days of working on this project – the call for a New Age revival -- I assumed that I would be addressing the demographic group that makes up the “New Age market” -- which is comprised largely of women of a certain age and income level who are interested in spirituality and a holistic lifestyle.

But as I talked to different “spiritual” people of the Baby Boom generation, I discovered that most of them wanted nothing to do with any kind of movement or the creation of a community. Even those who most fit the New Age profile would literally make faces at the mention of the term New Age. They would then reaffirm their commitment to their own path, their own needs. It seemed clear that Baby Boomers have been operating on the individualistic terms of uncommitted “seeker” for so long, and this role has become so well rationalized in their minds, that I would find no receptive audience there.

To be frank, I felt some anger after such conversations, and a big sense of betrayal. After all, I was raised by one of the first Baby Boomers – my mother was born in 1945 and she was an open-hearted, peace-loving flower child. I absorbed the communal values of the young Baby Boomers, and strongly believed in their call to create a better world. And when the most hopeful of them forged the New Age movement in the 1980s, I eagerly hopped on board, and was bereft when it dissolved away to nothing but a consumer category a few decades later.

To find such clear evidence in my conversations that those who once inspired me had not merely been accidentally lost on the way to community, but decisively turned their back on it, was painful. And in that pain, I decided that it was “too late” for the Baby Boom generation. I decided that so many of them had clearly chosen interminable mirror-gazing and self-soothing as their spiritual path that it was useless to talk to them anymore. I began thinking of them as the “dead weight” generation, well-intentioned but completely unable to get out of their own way, and ours.

I also began to understand why Ken Wilber half-jokingly wrote in Boomeritis that “the knowledge quest proceeds funeral by funeral,” and that Baby Boomers “might have to die” before the narcissism that blocks the spiral of development can be breached. And I began to address all my writing to newer generations who -- with futures threatened by the catastrophe of rampant individualism -- would be better able to grasp the need for spirit-based community.

It was Marianne Williamson who changed my mind and changed it big. She spoke in Phoenix in November 2008 about the New Mid-Life and the opportunity those of a certain age now have to “get it right.” I listened with tears streaming down my face as she convinced me it is never too late for any of us, no matter how old we are, to finally get to work on the vital business of saving the world.

In her book, The Age of Miracles, Williamson describes an “epiphany” now pressing in on Baby Boomers “that in many ways we wasted our youth—not in that we lived it frivolously, but in that, in far too many cases, we lived it only for ourselves.” She then goes on to say:

We haven’t lived through what we’ve lived through, bled the way we’ve bled, and been humbled the way we’ve been humbled to have it just be over now. In fact, we owe too much to the world to get off that easily. We were all born carrying a promise – a promise to make the world better – and there’s a yearning to make good on that promise that none of us can suppress forever. There’s a silent question blaring loudly in our hearts: What will I do with the time I have left?”

Even Wilber, the world’s most outspoken critic of the Boomers, says that “profound transformation often occurs in the second half of life.” As they age, the Baby Boom generation increasingly faces their own mortality, “which marvelously concentrates the mind and releases it from things of this world. The finite self becomes more and more transparent, more easily let go of, and a certain spiritual perfume fills the air.”

Our so-called prime adult years, Wilber adds, keep us so preoccupied with the demands of career and family that growth into higher stages is rare. (Looking back at my own life, I can certainly say that’s been true for me.) But once we pass through mid-life, and reach our 50s and 60s, we may suddenly found ourselves “ready to pop,” and feel ourselves becoming “deeply, deeply open” to transformation from Stage Four individualism to the Stage Five integralism that deeply, deeply understands the value of community.

I had read Wilber’s words years ago, but did not much believe them until I heard Williamson give her speech on that warm November night in Phoenix. She said the year 1968 and the assassinations of King and Kennedy was the symbolic point at which the idealistic dream of a new age of harmony began to die, and now, 40 years later, the election of Barack Obama served as the symbolic point at which it is time to resurrect the dream of a better world. On that night, she called specifically to the Baby Boom generation to take their hard won wisdom and “align with the creative pulse of the universe,” and “prepare the ground for a glorious future.” It is time, she said, “to accomplish what we came here to do.” And on that night, 2,000 people jumped to their feet and applauded wildly.

“Each of us has gone through our own private dramas,” she adds in her book, “taken our own individual journeys; now we meet as though at a predestined point, to pool our resources of talent and intelligence, faith and hope. Ultimately, we are individually glorified as we find our place within a collective heartbeat. We have journeyed alone, and now we’ll journey together… It is time for us to become elders and caretakers of this precious planet, not just in name but in passionate practice.”

Amen.