As you say, the complaints of the elderly are harder to parse than those of the youth. But I think it's largely about a society running on systems which they don't understand, that they are yesterday's men. It is true that boomers have a seeming vicegrip on the direction of government, but society is not just the state, and everywhere else - business, culture, "the discourse" - the boomer worldview is totally marginalised as some weird woke-capital chimera rules with an iron fist.
One thing that interests me about your nostalgia poem is that very few people still living can really relate to it in the sense of having direct memories of the era it evokes. I'm 63: I was a child in the 1960s. I did playbon the street, but my mother worked outside the home, we had certainly heard of diets (anorexia too, by the time I was a teenager), and corned beef was something my grandparents ate. It's like care homes playing residents Vera Lynn records when they actually grew up with rock and roll: it's as if English nostalgia is stuck in and just after WW2, which older people are imagined as having lived through (see yesterday's dumb comment by Lord Somebody on why the heatwave won't faze them), though boomers, by definition, weren't born until after it, and you would have to be at least 90 to remember it. It's a strange concertina-ing of historical time, and I suspect it's more about national mythology than nostalgia for one's own formative years.
As you say, the complaints of the elderly are harder to parse than those of the youth. But I think it's largely about a society running on systems which they don't understand, that they are yesterday's men. It is true that boomers have a seeming vicegrip on the direction of government, but society is not just the state, and everywhere else - business, culture, "the discourse" - the boomer worldview is totally marginalised as some weird woke-capital chimera rules with an iron fist.
One thing that interests me about your nostalgia poem is that very few people still living can really relate to it in the sense of having direct memories of the era it evokes. I'm 63: I was a child in the 1960s. I did playbon the street, but my mother worked outside the home, we had certainly heard of diets (anorexia too, by the time I was a teenager), and corned beef was something my grandparents ate. It's like care homes playing residents Vera Lynn records when they actually grew up with rock and roll: it's as if English nostalgia is stuck in and just after WW2, which older people are imagined as having lived through (see yesterday's dumb comment by Lord Somebody on why the heatwave won't faze them), though boomers, by definition, weren't born until after it, and you would have to be at least 90 to remember it. It's a strange concertina-ing of historical time, and I suspect it's more about national mythology than nostalgia for one's own formative years.