What are you if you don’t know and never cared? Can I be one and still resent us? Can I be willing for my generation in general, not every person in it, to be at fault for something? I also don’t think the Jazz Age generation (not the war vets, the ones who were just young enough to have escaped that but still took on the cynicism for their own purposes) were nothing to write home about, though they didn’t have the same technological advances (I fault the pill, or rather the way it was used to fuel the “sexual revolution”) the boomers had (though the Jazz Age had other ones). Still, that generation managed to raise the kids who answered the call of WWII. I am not a historian and could never explain why it seems as though every age has had ots generation of rebellious youth, it all seems to have gone off the rails for good, in the Sixties. Maybe because for the first time, the advances were available to every class, not just the elite. A society can handle its elite having a small decadent element-it can’t handle every class opting out of responsibility. I know that sounds unfair, but life ain’t fair.
Lots has been written about supposed cycles of generations through history, and I think you’re right about the Sexual Revolution in a sense sending the working and underclass off the rails—while the middle and upper-middle classes have survived it quite fine, thank you. Charles Murray has written along that theme.
I think younger generations now are more dependent upon their helicopter parents, which is just how their helicopter parents want it. But because they thus can’t afford to rebel against those parents in any meaningful way they both miss out on full adulthood and transfer that unvented resentment to their parents’ supposed ‘generation’ instead.