The first generation to grow up with TV.

Aging hippies, revolutionary activists, sworn enemies of the X-generation, formidable force.  However you choose to describe them, the much talked about baby boomers have been the ruling demographic for the past half-century. Every generation alive today, whether they came before or after, has watched with keen interest as the boomers have gone through every stage of life.

The boomers were the first generation to grow up with television and the first to watch themselves develop on TV.  Some claim the cultural impact of their highly documented journey through life, coupled with their economic impact and sheer numbers, have left the rest of us in the dust.  As they age, their influence continues to be felt, ironically, at a time when youth still rule the media.

What does staying young and growing old mean to this powerful group?  And who are they really?  Are they just a bunch of jerks that refuse to retire as to not let others have a turn at running the world?  Or are they the revolutionary trailblazers to whom we owe thanks for the free and liberal society in which we live?  To television producer and baby boomer Barry Gray, boomers are much like any generation – testing their boundaries and finding their identities – but this time, there are a lot of them!  They are also fortunate enough to have been born after the worst part of the century was over.

Barry was born in Sydney, Nova Scotia at the start of the baby boom and has seen it all and put much of it on TV.  I sit with Barry at the Starbucks near his office at Insight Film Studios and ask him if he has ever imagined what it was like for his parents’ generation as they shook their heads at “kids today”, and saw their own children come of age.

“My parents would have been enjoying another kind of renaissance going through the ‘50s post-war period where you could have things…after going through war and depression and going without…the economy was booming and it was very possible to be middle class…suddenly they had all this stuff, everything was modern and convenient, you had appliances that did things on their own as well as television and it was all mirrored in shows like Father Knows Best…so nuclear family created a set of values that, when you’re a kid of ten or twelve, seems pretty cool.”

Watching yourself grow up in front of millions

As nuclear family values took hold in the peaceful and affluent post-war North American society, ten-year-old Barry and many others like him literally watched their idyllic childhoods reflected back at them on television in a way no other generation had before.  This possibly marked not only the beginning of what would later be called the boomer “sense of entitlement”, but also the collective navel gazing that potentially led to many of the social changes we now enjoy.

Whether narcissistic or not, the effects of watching yourself grow up in front of millions of others cannot be underestimated. Yet it is something that subsequent generations largely take for granted.  When the moment finally came to recognize that father did not know best, the revolution and its twenty-something-year-old revolutionaries were being fully televised.  Already aware of the power of the image, young boomers set themselves apart from their parents and their values in grand gestures such as festivals, concerts, and alternative communities.

Barry observes that this cleft between the generations didn’t come as a result of any kind of antagonism or because boomers hated their parents. Rather it demonstrated a need to establish a sense of self as an adult as well counter the values that were a direct offshoot of the previous generation having gone without.

“It’s not so much that you don’t want to be like them, it’s that you are still striving to find an identity for yourself.  It wasn’t so much a historical moment so much as it just seemed like a revelation. We started to look at those values and say I don’t want your shit, I don’t want plastic on my couch, I don’t want a rec room, I reject all of that…A huge catch phrase of my generation was individualism…everyone wanted to be an individual, which is of course, not true at all!  No one wanted to be an individual, you wanted to be part of a larger movement.”

As boomers grew up, their concerns and the roots of their youth rebellion became popularized, giving their cultural icons such as Bob Dylan and John Lennon heroic and almost god-like images.  Statements like John Lennon’s “We’re more poplar than Jesus” quote illustrates that the concept of youth culture was a prevalent one.  During that time, the civil rights, environmental and feminist movements all took hold and gained incredible momentum as teens and twenty-something “individuals” rallied to stand up and stand apart from their parents. Youth-driven movements and the political life of the young found its way into living rooms throughout the industrialized world and the world changed as the television set became more ubiquitous.

Life and priorities change

Eventually things would change yet again and attitudes along with incomes shifted to the places reserved for the privileged.  What happens when a vast number of these individuals do start to want rec rooms?

“Well basically, the point is we all became educated…we all had an opportunity to go to school.  We were much better educated, I think, than most of our parents were,” observes Barry,  “With going to school came certain privileges.”

Suddenly life and priorities change. The need to set out on your own diminishes as young professionals groove into the ‘70s and begin their transition from hippies to yuppies.   By the time the ‘80s arrive consumerism has found its way back into the hearts and lives of the previously non-materialistic generation.  Television continues existing as a kind of mirror to this mutating society as nostalgia begins to play a role in the now grown-up boomer collective consciousness.

Shows like Happy Days and The Wonder Years, along with the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles in the mid ‘80s, all tug at memories of childhood and early adolescence for the increasingly affluent boomer demographic. This creates a recapitulation of youth at a time when youth culture has been firmly established as the ruling cultural paradigm.  Marketers, understanding the significance of this, aim their advertising efforts at re-living the ‘50s and ‘60s up to the ‘80s when the poodle skirts and rockabilly enjoy a revival at ‘50s themed high school dances.

Hollywood blockbuster films like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Oliver Stone’s Born On The Fourth Of July made Vietnam a more prominent a social commodity among young people then the Iran-Iraq war that spanned most of that decade.  As television became a permanent member of the North American family, consumerist fetishism grew up around it and the images that came through it.  TV no longer mirrored society’s values as much as dictated it all the while referencing much of its significance to major historical moments witnessed by the boomer generation. It seems apt that on August 1st 1981 at 12:01 a.m. MTV was born to the sound of crunching guitar played over a montage of the Apollo 11 moon landing footage; the American flag replaced by the lime green MTV logo on a neon pink background.

“That’s why things like music and pop culture sort of bind people together because it’s like a totem for people to go [to]. I think television had a much more profound visceral original effect in the sense that we didn’t know how powerful it was, we didn’t know what it was doing and we just sort of sat there and just adored it,” says Barry.

Idealizing the past

We worship at the altar of television and our gospel, along with consumerism, has been youth culture.  For baby boomers, idealizing the past may have been a natural response to maturing.  While the boomers grew and matured, the images of their childhoods and adolescence became iconic and firmly ensconced in our cultural vernacular.  Even as the styles, slang and music of old give way to the new, old has always remained young and the legacy of boomer youth remains connected to representations of youth as a power signifier.  This enduring paradigm coupled with modern day longevity make it so that the presence of baby boomers as major players in the world endure and remain as strong as ever.

“I don’t think we so much changed society as much as society always evolves, but the thing that didn’t change is that your peer group, that great mass of people, continued…and because we were privileged to not have really been brought up in any kind of poverty or deprivation that our parents were, we, to a certain extent, had a sense of entitlement, because we thought, well, it’s always going to be like that… and now that wave has reached a point where everybody is now in their sixties and to a large extent still have that sense of entitlement.  Now, I’m not saying that it’s right or wrong, but people of that era tend to think that they can still continue to make the rules and that they are the demographic that matters.”

But even Barry seems to think there is more to this phenomenon than simple boomer entitlement.  Advances in medicine and better health make baby boomers a vital group who plan to be around for a long time.  Just as they brought new meaning to the concept of youth, they are now radically challenging the notion of what it means to age.  With 50 being the new 40 and 60 being the new 50, boomers are hitting the gym, working out and being in the workforce far longer than the previous generation.

Phenomenal privilege

At 62 Barry works harder than most producers half his age, flying all over the world, interviewing everyone from Mamie Van Doren to Meatloaf.  Barry is keeping up with the fast pace of the television industry and showing no sign of slowing down. I ask Barry about his thoughts on retirement. He feels fortunate to be doing what he loves, but also offers insight as to why retirement may not hold the same appeal to his generation as it did the previous one.

“We did a story on ‘50 Up’ on university professors who wouldn’t retire…We live to be 75 or 80 and expect to be fairly healthy.  That is not the case in most parts of the world…in certain parts of the world, like if you’re in Africa, if you’re 35 you’re old…we benefit from being in a part of the world that’s got all the marbles.  I just finished reading a book about Africa by Paul Theroux.  He was turning 60 when he wrote the book, going through African and recognizing the phenomenal privilege that he had of being able to do what he was doing… so in that sense we’re redefining age by virtue [having an economic advantage], so it’s not a universal concept.”

Living longer, healthier, prosperous and peaceful lives with the ability and desire to remain productive well in to one’s later years is a new concept in North America. Many generation X-ers hungrily stalk the key positions of power currently occupied by relentless boomers. Barry believes the concept of retirement is relatively new and is perhaps specific to his parent’s generation of resilient fighters and survivors.

“The concept of retirement is [not appealing] to a lot of people.  They don’t want to retire, they don’t want to retire from doing things anyway…because what happens with the previous generation is that they went through a lot of shit, they went through depression, they went through war and they were exhausted!  And then they had all that good stuff happen [in the ‘50s] and the concept of retirement was a new one!  So ‘retirement’ in that sense didn’t last that long.”

So what is Barry doing after work?

“My idea of retirement would be to continue to do what I love to do in some way, shape or form…or to teach it…I’ve always thought, eventually if I do retire that I’d go be part of some teaching organization, both [my wife] Purcell and I have both talked about that a lot.”

Leave something enduring behind

Boomers have been setting the bar for the past fifty years, with the help of the most powerful medium since the printing press.  As they age with the advent of perhaps an even more powerful medium – the Internet – I am compelled to think of their specific role as elders in our society.  As young people they set themselves apart with strength and exuberance.  As elders, many continue to remain active and engaged as productive citizens.

Perhaps it is not only this basic genuine human need to contribute that keeps so many boomers going, but also the desire to leave something enduring of value behind.  For me, it makes me re-examine age and value in general, not just theirs, but mine as well.  When so much of what we do and make nowadays seems transient and disposable and obsolete in the blink of an eye, it is perhaps more important than ever to learn from those who persevere, achieve and re-shape—no matter how old or how young.