We put a person on the moon

I’m a baby-boomer, and I’m not a demographic.

Just like space travel, I was born in the same era. Many in my generation didn’t “seem to have adopted a reputation for disrupting modern civilization,” we actually did.

We were like the space age, helpful and inspiring, forward thinking and disruptive, go-getters and not self-entitled.

Let me add that I have an extreme amount of respect for those who have come before me — and after me. I would be incredibly naive to think that I, in my 60s, have somehow surpassed any other people.

This is by no means an attempt to dethrone or condemn Millennials, but instead, to shed some light on baby boomers.

We were born and raised in a different time.

1. We grew up in a world where anything and everything was possible.

What you are exposed to as a child shapes so much of who you ultimately become.

Imagine being a 7-year-old and sitting in front of a TV and watch people land on the moon. To older generations, that was magic. To us, it was science. We were making incredible advances in medicine.

We had just found a way to cure polio, a disease that crippled someone for life… we all were vaccinated and polio was completely eradicated. We weren’t anti-vaxxers. We believed in science.

We wiped out polio

Please do not misconstrue our wild imaginations. It’s what we strived for.

2. We actually really do appreciate time away from technology.

We loved nature

As much as it’s believed that baby boomers were TV screen addicts, trust that we were as worried about the next generation as you are. Maybe even more so.

At least for us, there was a back-to-nature movement in our early years between TV and computers, when having fun consisted of, you know, going outside and playing in the grass.

We are not as distant from the present as you might think — and many of us hope to find ways to help our kids, and other grown-ups, find a balance between the real and the digital.

3. We are not narcissistic. We just know what works.

We fought for social chenge

Since our modern-day world is ruled by digital social tools, we understand the rules of the game based on decades of experience. And how to successfully break them.

Our generation was not about doing things just for ourselves. We started the civil rights movement, the war on poverty, the women’s’ rights movement, the environmental movement. And we fought for social change that would make things better for everyone. We really did want to save the whales.

We know that people want to see people. And yet, when we post about ourselves, we are sometimes slaughtered for being old and out of touch. Go look up the definition of narcissism. It doesn’t fit us at all.

We know doing things for others helps make the world a better place. Respect.

4. You need us, just like we need you.

We started the personal computer revolution

The generation gap is fascinating. Each new generation seems to rebel against the previous one, yet in many cases, the previous generation was just as rebellious.

The most prized spending demographics lean younger, however, and to capture their attention you need to speak their language. Younger generations, the ones who own the big unicorns, need Baby Boomers because we built the foundational technologies the unicorns are built on.

We created the computer revolution, evolved Fortran, Cobol, and computer punch cards that ran on mainframes that only elite corporations could afford into microcomputers that had modern programming languages and digital storage that could run on personal computers that anyone could afford.

In 1965 Ted Nelson created the concept of hyperlinks. In 1972 Lee Felsenstein launched the Community Memory project that was a vision for what would become the internet. Those people were very influential to early tech Baby Boomers. In the late 1970s, we hosted Bulletin Board Systems on our Apple II and CP/M computers to foster social conversations and social media.

In turn, we, as Baby Boomers, need the younger generations to help support our wild ideas and bring them into reality. And, statistically speaking, the older generations are the ones that face widespread discrimination in the tech industry.

Can’t we stop fighting and just work together, whatever age we may be?

5. We faced a very different set of challenges. Not easier or harder — different.

The universe was expanding

We grew up in a time when we had access to not only the earth, but the moon and beyond — the body of world knowledge was doubling every few years, and our parents had the feeling of “I remember when things were simple.” We never wanted simple; we wanted to go where no person had ever gone before.

We laid trans-oceanic cables and launched satellites to bring the world closer together when you could talk to people all over the world. We sent people to the moon and launched space probes to bring the universe closer to us and us closer to the universe.

You, on the other hand, grew up in an era when anything and everything we pioneered and built was taken for granted, all the time. Our issue was not “the world used to be simple, and now it’s expanding.” Our issue was that the universe and was expanding so fast, human knowledge was expanding so fast, and humanity was expanding so fast that we had no idea where it would all go.

We will never know what it was like to grow up in your time period, and you will never know what it is like growing up in ours. One is not better or worse.

They are different — and it’s on both parties to seek to understand each other.

6. We are trying to teach you. Do not put us down for doing so.

We rebelled against the American Dream

Whenever studies come out saying that Millennials would rather work fewer hours per week, would rather make less if it meant more personal time, etc., that’s actually what we wanted, too. We are also highly skeptical of studies.

But what a lot of people don’t consider is that we have watched our own mothers and fathers work their entire lives, slaving away for the American dream, only to obtain the house with the picket fence and still be unhappy. That was the 1960’s.

We rebelled against the American Dream. We screamed at our parents, wake up! We knew American Dream was a myth created by the military-industrial complex to enforce conformity and produce a labor force that was more easy to manipulate.

Instead of walking the same path and expecting a different result, we were activists who protested the status quo at a level never seen since. Millions of us regularly protested against the war and for the civil rights of all people. Some of us were students who were brutally beaten and killed by the police, like the student war protesters at Kent State.

7. Social media aren’t good or bad. They just “are.”

Community Memory, 1973 “read and add messages, exchange information, make a connection”

Social and digital media are here — and they are only going to continue growing and dominate more areas of life. We know because we helped create it.

When people say “It’s ruining society” or “Life was better before,” that’s just what people were saying about TV in the 60s. It’s what people were saying about personal computers in the 70s. Video games in the 80s. And even the internet in the 90s.

Just like some days when I’m glad I wasn’t 9 again when our president was assassinated. When his brother was assassinated, and when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. When blacks were being lynched by the KKK, and their homes and churches were being burned to the ground. When the media showed us that American soldiers brutally killed most of the people, women, children and old men, in defenseless villages like My Lei.

All we can do is continue to adapt and learn as we go.

8. We were vocal about who we were and whatever challenges we have gone through because we want to help others do the same.

We stood for peace and love

Back in the 60s and 70s we had a cultural revolution. We were for peace, civil rights, women’s’ rights and environmental protection. We opened up to each other about our emotions, and searched for our inner-selves and confronted some brutal truths.

Many Baby Boomers used psychedelics to strip away the artifice of their edifice and surface deep truths about themselves they might never have had the strength to deal with.

Back then, you couldn’t find a person under 30 who wasn’t proud of what they and the rest of their generation were struggling with. We not only had enormous protests and fought “the system,” we also had the Summer of Love.

Many older people looked at it as if it was a bad thing. As if our protests were too vocal. As if our mission to question authority was too disruptive.

Personally, I didn’t see this as a negative at all — I saw it as an overwhelming positive. In some sense, I experienced my elders as supporting a society that was intolerant, authoritative, and out of touch with reality.

I was sickened by friends who were drafted against their will, forced to fight for a cause they didn’t believe in, and lost their lives for nothing.

Now?

You search online for whatever is happening in the world, and you’ll come across information showing our country is still going through something similar. We don’t have a war in Vietnam; we have continuous war. We’re involved in 7 wars just in the middle east: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Pakistan.

The war on drugs is a racist war that takes most of its toll on people of color. We now have the prison industrial complex. Racism in America is alive and well, and millennials aren’t fighting for civil rights with the scale, determination, and effectiveness of our generation.

You’d think if enough people are going through it, someone (or the community as a whole) would work harder to stand up to the rest of society and provide solutions.

My generation protested the war, and the war ended. We protested for civil rights, and we had success in changing how inhumane people of color were being treated. Today we have lost ground in many of those areas, and no-one is fighting the fight as hard as we did.

That’s incredible.

9. We were motivated by things that were emotionally satisfying.

We joined the Peace Corps

It felt good to see our massive protesting lead to real change. The Summer of Love, the sexual revolution, using drugs for self-insight and mind-expansion, and fighting the establishment and the rigid roles it had defined for us. It was all driven by our desire for personal and societal wellness.

We fought against capitalism to have lives that had more meaning and emotional wellbeing. We explored new types of spirituality and sexuality. We started the environmental movement and the desire to get back to nature. We started the back-to-the-land movement where people gave up large cities in favor of rural communities. We dropped out of the military-industrial complex and rigid societal stereotypes.

More and more, younger people, too, are making career changes not geared around making more money but focused on personal health, well-being, and fulfillment.

Some are motivated by money, sure, but in general, most Millennials are motivated by being part of something that is meaningful. Something that speaks to the life they strive to lead, and what they believe to be fulfilling. Just like we were.

I am glad to see Millennials starting to hew to the values my generation has been fighting for all our lives. It’s the first generation since ours to start to share our values.

If you can cater to that, we will work endlessly to continue to support our part of it.

10. We have an incredible work ethic.

We worked really hard

Speaking to #9 here, when we find something we love, and that connects with us emotionally, our work ethic is unrivaled. Many of us took jobs in low-paying jobs social services, and have spent our careers working tirelessly to help those less fortunate than ourselves. Others worked long hard hours fighting for environmental causes. We gave up higher paying jobs to become teachers. We joined the Peace Corp. Our commitment to things we believed in was incredibly motivating.

We were not the “clock in and clocked out” type. We would much rather (and often did) make what were are doing part of our lifestyle, instead of seeing it as a segmented portion of our day.

I’ve dedicated my life to using technology to help make positive changes in our lives, our society, and the world. I started programming in basic in 1966 when I was 11. I stayed up all night many nights writing programs and discovering the many possibilities of computing.

I bought an Apple II in 1978 and was convinced they would change the world for the better. I worked tirelessly to make that happen, as did others of my generation like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Lee Felsenstein, and a legion of other personal computer pioneers.

We considered ourselves radical revolutionaries… and that’s how most of society thought of us, even if they thought we were crazy and working on something with little value to the general public.

Our generation started the trend to “Follow your heart and live the life of your dreams.” Every message around us in the 1960s spoke to living life on your own terms.

We didn’t wish for that to be true instead of putting in the hard work. We put in that hard work and many of us have devoted our lives to that work. But it’s also important that we learn what motivates Millennials and give them a sense of purpose to wish for what we have wished for so long.

11. Our intentions were genuine.

Our beliefs were strong

Our intentions were genuine. We truly believed that fighting war, poverty, civil and social justice, authority, pollution, greed, etc. really would and will continue to make a difference.

The number of young people back then who wanted to make a difference in the world and do something positive, create a solution, solve a problem, bring people together, and help those in need was astounding.

We might be have been misdirected sometimes, and we might not think in the same neo-conventional ways that you would, but that’s kind of the point. We were the original non-conformists. We were the first generation that questioned authority. We were pro-science (unlike today’s society). We sent people into outer space.

We had radical new ideas that we believed in with all our heart. We had an intense curiosity about the society, the universe, science, and so many other things. We still do.

Otherwise, how else would we keep stumbling upon anything new?