Even with the economy souring, the Greatest-built world suited Boomers no more in the 1970s than it had in the heyday of Vietnam, and many Boomer post-antiwarriors found new reasons why money making was beneath them. "I have made no plans because I have found no plans worth making," declared the Dartmouth valedictorian in 1971 to the cheers of his peers. "All too many people are just waiting for life rather than living," observed the Berkeley Daily Californian in that same year.68
Like Mitch Snyder, who abandoned his own children before leading a crusade for the homeless, many a Boomer spent the 1970s believing "if it doesn't work, I just kind of move on." This manifested itself in a sudden sharp resistance against permanent attachments. In politics and family lives, Boomers in their twenties remained detached--yet in the smaller strokes of their day-to-day existence, they began testing what they found within on the world without. Many began showing an emotional intensity older generations found strange, even compulsive. As exercise faddists searched for the "runner's high," backpackers with graduate degrees sparked a back-to-nature movement unlike anything seen since the beginning of the Twentieth Century, and meditative diet faddists looking for alpha waves triggered what historian Harvey Levenstein termed "the century's Second Golden Age of Food Quackery."69
Through the 1970s, people of all ages still looked to Boomers for values guidance, and Boom trends soon blossomed into national attitudes--for example, as consumer brand loyalties weakened and "Made in the U.S.A." became passé among the cognoscenti. By the early 1980s, Times-Mirror surveys developed a new "Values and Life Styles" typology to help advertisers reach such new Boomer types as the "I-Am-Me" consumer. But the biggest news came in the workplace. In athletics, the first occupation over which they gained leverage, the likes of Andy Messersmith, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Reggie Jackson, and Joe Namath introduced the inner athlete and proclaimed "free agency"--and an era of declining loyalties among athletes, teams, cities, and fans.70
A few years later, a growing flood of late-starting Boomers began to spread these same traits throughout the economy. They insisted on having "meaningful" (read: un-Greatest-like) careers, and by the mid-1970s, America's postwar, decades-long productivity surge came to an abrupt end. Boomers had little desire to produce or purchase the cars or furniture that looked like their neighbor's. Not drawn to industrial or service jobs, cutting-edge Boomers preferred smallish, eclectic businesses. Their homes began bristling with offices, neighborhoods with support services--an infrastructure around which, piece by piece, the economy was retooling to match the Boom's personality.71
Thirtyish first-wavers were actively designing a new concept of self-religion. The Boom heralded the "New Age" with the "Manifesto of the Person," asserting "our sovereign right of self-discovery." In this "Human Potential Movement," self-described as a "reaction to industrialized, mechanized thinking," large numbers of Boomers began dabbling in psychic phenomena and experiments with communal living. Whether immersed in Tai Chi, Zen, beta waves, or other New Age mind states, Boomers built churches in the privacy of their own heads. Wanda Urbanska termed this "Sheilaism," naming it after a friend named Sheila who had "this little voice inside" saying "God is whatever I feel."72
In the 1980s, seven Boomers in ten believed in psychic phenomena (versus five in ten among older generations). Within the generation, polls showed that first-wave Boomers believed more in meditation and reincarnation, last-wavers more in "born-again" conversion, mealtime grace, and the inherent conflict between religion and science. Conversions to "born-again" fundamentalism became more common than at any time in living memory. Boom religion returned the Calvinist notion of "calling" to its original emphasis on the immediate and subjective, on the inspirational rebirth. A rising adult did not have to spend a lifetime preparing Greatest "works" to achieve salvation. Boomers viewed spiritual life the way Richard Darman later described their consumption: They wanted it all--"NOWWWWW!"73
During the 1980s, rising-adult Boomers migrated out of mainline "established" churches, but surged into evangelical sects. Through the decade, overall Boom church attendance rose by nearly 30 percent. America's fastest-growing church was the Assembly of God (whose membership quadrupled in the 1980s), its largest branch of Protestantism was the fundamentalist Southern Baptist church, and the number of "charismatic" or "pentecostal" Catholics quintupled. America how has more Muslims than Episcopalians.74
When Boomers began reaching the higher councils of governance, they immediately asserted a new inner-world agenda. Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell helped equip Jimmy Carter with a revivalist's vocabulary, and David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's principled budgetary executioner, was the first of many Boomers to enter public life after a stint in seminary or theology school. In the 1988 Presidential primaries, Boomers gave the greatest generational support to the two reverends in the race: Pat Robertson and Jesse Jackson. (The Greatest gave them the least support.)75
Rock promoter Bill Graham once recollected that, among the young radicals of his era, "there was very little doing," Instead of building or improving things, as the Greatest and the Silent had done at like age, Boomers pursued more of an expressive agenda. Like Hillary Rodham Clinton in her Wellesley valedictory speech, they were intent on "choosing a way to live that will demonstrate the way we feel and the way we know." Or, as the Beatles put it, Boomers were content to "say" that they "want a revolution." If inside their heads they had already succeeded, outside they had barely started.76
When the tempest of the Boom Awakening began to calm, aspects of life Boomers had once deemed spiritually empty--consumption, careerism, family formation--were now temptingly available, having at last been resacralized by their new values. Older and younger generations guffawed at their pick-and-choose idealism, but Boomers were too focused on their own drummer to notice what others thought. Where Snoopy and Woodstock had once plumbed the inner life of youth, they now were captioned, "Get Met, It Pays." Todd Gitlin recalls how, as the Awakening neared its end, "it was time to go straight, . . . from marijuana to white wine, from hip communes to summers on Cape Cod." Boomers couldn't forever linger in a state of suspended animation. By now, this generation had come to believe in the credo of The Whole Earth Catalog: "We are as gods, and might as well get good at it."77
Going straight was not as economically rewarding as it once had been, however. Were it not for employed women (and dual-income households), Boomer family incomes would be well below what the Silent had earned at like age. Married Boomer couples in the 1980s were doing slightly better than their next-elders did, single women much better. But the individual Boomer man was not. A 40-year-old first-waver earned about 15 percent more than his Greatest father had at like age, whereas a 30-year-old last-waver had fallen about 10 percent behind his Silent father. Between age 30 and 40, where the typical full-time Greatest worker had enjoyed a 63-percent inflation-adjusted rise in income, the first-wave Boom worker suffered a net 1-percent decline.78
The children of the Boom Generation were either the reactive Generation X, who were nurtured in an underprotective way, or the civic-minded Millennial Generation, who were nurtured in a tightening way.
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