Note: The following predictive (and perceptive) description on this page was published by Strauss and Howe in 1991 under the heading "Entering Elderhood in an Inner-Driven Era (1991-2003)." Even though that timespan has already elapsed, I have resisted altering their future tense to tenses perhaps more appropriate. Later I will revise this page to describe what actually happened during the Clinton years, with the expansion of the Internet and the Web, the bursting of the tech stock bubble, the election of 2000, the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, and the neoconservative agenda we are currently living under. In the meantime, regard the following text as an interesting time capsule from the beginning of the 1990s.64
As the 1990s proceed, a new breed of American elder will emerge: the "high-tech" senior, running his MacIntosh with software on investments, leisure opportunities, and eligibility rules for this and that special benefit. No American generation has ever entered old age better equipped than the Silent. Today's sixtyish men and women stand at the wealthiest edge of America's wealthiest-ever generation, poised to take full advantage of the generous Greatest-built old-age entitlement programs.
Armies of merchandisers and seniors-only condo salesmen will pounce on these new young-oldsters as they complete a stunning two-generation rags-to-riches transformation of American elderhood. Where the 1950s-era elder Lost Generation watched their offspring whiz past them in economic life, the 1990s-era elder Silent will tower over the living standards of their children. In 1960, 35-year-olds typically lived in bigger houses and drove better cars than their 65-year-old parents. In the year 2000, the opposite will be the case.
Were this to happen to any other living generation, it would feel like a triumph. But not for the Silent. In old age, as always, the Silent will carry what Benita Eisler calls that "corpse in the trunk." Anxiety. Guilt. The capacity to see drought in sunny weather, flood the minute it starts to shower. No generation has more difficulty enjoying a good thing--or has such keen antennae for sensing the needs of others. Once the Silent perceive that their affluence is generational and is unlikely to be exceeded by their own Generation X children, they will feel a genuine hurt.
As these high-tech seniors stare at their amber monitors, they will wonder whether they deserve such a long list of late-in-life rewards. The Silent weren't denied jobs in the Great Depression (new toys and second helpings, maybe). The Silent didn't win any war (they tied one). The Silent didn't build grand endowments (they handled the details). The very word entitlement, so comfortably uttered by the Greatest, will have a newly embarrassing ring. The Silents' core achievements--civil rights, sexual liberation, mainstreaming for the handicapped--are not the sort to make them feel entitled to pecuniary reward. From their perspective, the mere acceptance of reward would call into question the sincerity of the original undertaking. Any Silent doubts will be reinforced by Boomers, who will find ways of saying "No, you're not entitled!" if the question is ever asked.
The ascendance of Silent into the "young old" age category will begin a fateful erosion of the political consensus on federal retirement policy--a consensus that has warded off all challenges since the mid-1960s. Throughout their lives, the Silent have been easy target for scandals. That will not change in the 1990s, as the media begin to expose a growing number of Silent retirees (and ex-officeholders) for alleged abuses of public generosity--stories the media would never attempt (and the public never accept) about Greatest retirees.
Meanwhile, long-term forecasts for retirement and health-care programs will become decidedly less sanguine. Old-age benefits will then become negotiable, "on the budget table" in ways unthinkable back in the 1970s and 1980s. Cast on the defensive and equipped with a libertarian sense of equity, the Silent will suggest some sort of compromise--for example, that their nonpoor members get back the Social Security and Medicare money they once paid into the trust funds, maybe with a little interest, but nothing more. Entitlement programs will thus begin moving toward "means testing," targeting benefits on the needy.
State and Fortune-500 pension plans that had once looked so attractive to early retirees will begin eroding in purchasing power. Subsidized health care will be subject to new triage regulations disfavoring the old. Civil service and military retirees who can lay no claim to Greatest-style heroism will face new challenges against "double dipping," automatic COLAs (cost-of-living adjustments), and veterans' benefits for non-service-related illnesses. Private pension plans will face public pressure to reduce their enormous (and largely unfunded) retiree health-care liabilities. Gifts and estates will be subject to higher taxes by legislators who will consider Silent wealth less "earned" than the Greatest facsimile.
All this will meet with little effective resistance from Silent-run elder organizations, which will back away from aggressive, Greatest-style lobbying and take a conciliatory new line on young-to-old transfers (except those involving the very old Greatest, which will still be stoutly defended). Like the Silent themselves, their elder lobbies will become more self-doubting, pluralist, other-directed, and compromising.
Silent elders will not share the Greatest instinct for peer-group collegiality. Instead, they will look for social activities that bring them in contact with youth and adventure. An unprecedented number will use their time, money, and talent to help others, at home and overseas. Recalling their Peace Corps days, the Silent will assemble a variety of public-spirited "Senior Corps" to channel elder talent and expertise toward solving social problems. Their generous gifts and bequests will usher in a golden age of private philanthropy. Redirecting Social Security income to charity (or to their own Generation X children) will become a popular trend among the wealthy. The Silent will look upon automatic "senior citizen" discounts as unnecessary, even unfair--and younger generations will agree. The Silent will be more reluctant than Greatest elders to say "Read my lips--no new taxes" when private sacrifice is asked to meet a heartfelt public need. This most affluent of living generations may well lead the call for greater progressivity in the tax structure.
Reversing the Greatest trend toward collective separation, these new-breed elders will want to stay actively engaged in an increasingly Boom-dominated society. The postwar trend toward ever-earlier retirement will backtrack. The Silent will insist on the right of 70-year-olds to participate in the world of younger people--to remain useful, help others, and stay employed if they wish. Many early retirees will feel guiltily idle and rejoin the workplace in people-oriented service jobs--whether they need the money or not. The visual and print media will see an increase in the number of old columnists and news anchors, bravely resisting the weakening of their generation's pluralist message. "Seniors Only" living communities will become more uncommon and controversial, perhaps even the objects of legislative or judicial attack. Boomers who were perfectly happy when the Greatest chose to separate will see reprehensible antichild (and anti-Millennial) attitudes in similar Silent behavior. Most Silent will agree.
That powerful, collegial Greatest name "senior citizen" will fit the Silent peer personality awkwardly at best. While perhaps continuing to use the term, the Silent will look for ways to humanize it, to make it more personal and accessible. The Silent will feel less the senior citizen than the senior partner; they may be attracted to the simple noun "senior," a more modest term when standing alone, one that evokes the image of the sympathetic upperclassman. Their nicknames will be quaintly hip, evoking memories of the 1950s and making gentle fun of themselves--perhaps something like "Oldster," "Granddaddio," or "Old Bopper." They will camouflage their new phase-of-life uncertainty in a rich smile of irony, unconcerned about juniors taking over the mantle of power--and powerless to stop it, anyway.
The "Old Bopper" mind-set will combine a denial of age with a better-late-than-never search for catharsis. So far, the Silent have seen a millstone in every age milestone--and around the year 2000, sociologists will discover an unsettling new lifestyle "passage" in the mid-sixties. New-breed elders try thinking, acting, and looking young. To guard against appearing old, the Silent will keep their wardrobes within mainstream fashions, and will undergo many a face-lift and tummy tuck. Seniors-only tours will fall sharply in popularity, supplanted by those catering to grandparents with grandchildren. In the company of younger people, Silent elders will scale mountains, ride rapids, hack through jungles, backpack through deserts, parachute from planes--anything with a little tingle of death-defying risk.
Many will keep ambitious checklists of everything they still want to do--for example, to see every great Broadway musical, visit every national park, or traverse every continent. "Senior circuits" of aging Silent athletes will gain in popularity. This nostalgia for youth and romance will extend to music and film as well; Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe will remain powerful Silent icons. Aging performers such as the Everly Brothers or Peter, Paul, and Mary will stay popular well into their old age, with rock and roll replacing the Greatest fox-trot at senior sock hops. "Wake up Little Susie, Wake up!" will reverberate in even the most formal of ballroom settings.
The elder Silent will be wealthy enough to provide a gold mine for targeted products and services. Marketers will tap into them by appealing to their sense of irony, their earnest sentimentality, and (especially) their thirst for catharsis. Old Boppers will feel an unquenchable yearning to be true individuals, to feel alive, to dabble in slightly juvenile adventures in risk and defiance--even while retaining their lifelong confidence in expertise and attention to detail. They will continue to emulate whatever Boomers happen to be doing or feeling. In electoral politics, the Silent will be slow to make up their minds, and more swayed than others by candidates with high name recognition, impressive credentials, and proven management skills. On the surface they will delight in zany, iconoclastic rhetoric, yet underneath they will insist on genial, flexible temperaments.
The aging Silent will usher in a renaissance of the American extended family. More than at any other time in American history, 65-year-olds will have parents still living. Nor can the Silent count on their own children to leave home once and for all. Run the Generation X "boomerang" child syndrome on fast-forward, and picture a continuing stream of young adults abandoning small urban apartments and returning to the large homes of their Silent parents. Sooner or later, many a Generation X live-in child will drop the hint, the parent will relent, and the master-bedroom coup d'état will occur. The typical Greatest parent, who scrimped long years to afford household comfort, would never give in so easily. But the Silent are a softer touch. Having been empty-nesters rather early, they will attach less value to the privilege of living alone in a big home. Besides, the Silent will be culturally compatible with their children in ways the Greatest were not. Around the turn of the century, these 65-year-old rock-and-rollers will get along just fine with their 35-year-old post-punk children. Grandparents will welcome the chance to help nurture a new generation of children--a task they realize they performed too young the first time around. Silent authors will do to the "art" of grandparenthood what they once did to the "art" of sex: They will scrutinize it endlessly, making it the subject of countless books, films, plays, songs, and paintings. And they will professionalize it with consultants, seminars, and global conferences.
The Silent will see in extended family life a certain measure of atonement for the damage they did to the family (individually or collectively) back in the years of the Boom Awakening. Many will come to regret the hurried and unprotected upbringing they gave Generation X. But while the Silent confess easily to mistakes, they are loath to admit that any mistake is final. Like old John Crittenden or John Dewey, they will never quit trying to set things right. In the 1990s and beyond, generous help to their adult children will offer the Silent another chance to do just that.
The personal lives of Old Boppers will be more complicated than what we have associated with the Greatest. Their "swinging" will occasionally infuriate their juniors. Like William Byrd II of the Enlightenment Generation, the Silent will still "play the fool" in their late sixties and beyond, still succumb to sexual dalliances and experimental urges. They will always be drawn to the emotional complexity of life and interested in the daily lives of younger people. Even when their health fails, they will be reluctant to enter a long-term-care facility. Their physical decline will bring a surge in at-home elder care, mostly financed by the Silent themselves. Whatever long-term-care subsidies the Greatest win in the early 1990s will not be extended to Silent elders above the poverty line.
The Silent spent a lifetime taking cues by looking up and down the age ladder. In youth, they looked entirely up. In old age, they will look entirely down. In government, aging Silent leaders will offer the grayer hues of public administration, deferring rather than solving core problems and only occasionally taking a breakaway risk. Hobbled by locked-in Greatest artifacts--budget deficits, low marginal tax rates, uncancelable defense projects, entitlements programs running on autopilot--the Silent will blame their political indecisiveness on circumstances supposedly beyond their control. Like the Compromiser "Great Triumvirate," they will prefer to ameliorate old policies rather than start over again from scratch. Whatever the problem, their approach will focus on better process (a new budget amendment, a new incentive tax scheme, a new blue-ribbon commission) rather than on the ultimate desired outcome. To Boom critics, Silent leaders will reply that the world is complicated and that aggressive solutions are premature--admitting, at the same time, that all points of view must be considered.
The Silent seem fated to pass from national power with the shortest and weakest tenure since the Enlightenment days of Alexander Spotswood. In 1990 already leapfrogged by Boomers in the White House and House Republican lines of succession, their zero for six in Presidential campaigns (dating back to 1968) eventually ended zero for nine by the election of 2000.65 History suggests that an adaptive generation gets its best chance to produce a charismatic leader (an Andrew Jackson, a Theodore Roosevelt, a Robert Kennedy, or a Martin Luther King, Jr.) while entering midlife, not while entering elderhood. To win the Presidency, a Silent would have to forget the old Greatest-style New Deal coalition and replace the cult of expertise with the more values-laden campaign style of the Boom--for example, by showing interest in religion, demanding stern punishment for moral miscreants, displaying anger in public, and projecting an empathetic sense of community. Silent women may do better than their male peers in presenting such themes. Yet regardless of sex, a Silent candidate's best chance may arise if the American political system feels either "on hold" or deadlocked. The more quickly a sense of social or economic emergency arises, the less likely the Silent will be able to slow their slide from power.
Their slide has already begun. The Silent share of congressmen and governors peaked at 68 percent in 1983 and has been declining gradually ever since, to 65 percent in 1989. Following the usual pattern, this decline will accelerate during the early to middle 1990s and leave the Silent with no more than a 35-percent share after the year-2000 election. At some point in the 1990s, Silent officeholders may well fall victim to Boomer attacks on professionalism, an alienated Generation X mood, or their own self-doubts--marking an abrupt end to the enormous electoral success Silent incumbents have enjoyed in recent years.
Silent elders will be of mixed mind about Boom-led social and political trends. They will complain about Boomers and Generation X dismantling their procedural solutions for civil rights, and they will fear for the wounded egos of heavily chaperoned Millennial children. They will try to calm the inner passion of the Boomers and lend sensitivity to Boomer crusades. They may assert new virtue in the word liberal to younger generations--who, in turn, will find Silent sentimentality and technobabble increasingly rococo.
Like aging Enlighteners, the seventyish Silent elite will dislike the rising trend toward mean-spirited public life. Like aging Compromisers, they will prefer conciliation over crisis. Like aging Progressives, they will trust electoral or judicial or legislative process over principle. And like all three, they will be mostly ignored. As the Inner-Driven era ends (about 2003), the Silent will age into America's biggest worriers about the future--not exactly pessimists (the Silent believe there's always a second chance), just worriers.
The Silent have never been and never will be collectively powerful, but will continue enriching others with a gentler kind of endowment. Until the next adaptive generation (the New Adaptive Generation) comes of age--in the 2030s--no other generation will press the case for other-directed social compassion, pluralism, sympathy for the underdog, and procedural fairness. Nor will any other have the Silent capacity for intergenerational understanding. The Silent can mediate the upcoming cultural clash between Boom and Generation X. So too can they set the underlying "rules of the game" for the Crisis of 2020. Their success at these tasks will hinge on their ability to separate the fundamental from the aesthetic, to know when to join (and how to mentor) the Boomers, and to realize that the Millennials, unlike Generation X, require a protective nurture to thrive.
Past the year 2000, as the ranks of the Silent begin to thin, other generations will come to miss the politeness, tolerance, and niceness that Americans now associate with people in their fifties and early sixties.
This page was last modified on 08/16/2025 02:06:16