Who Are You Taking for Granted?

A Considered Insight

I really, truly resist reading bleats among the aging or elderly about their aches and pains. Toddlers, teenagers, twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, everyone has issues.

But I have recently and conclusively understood the phenomenon that those of us born in the 1940s and 1950s (and now even the 1960s) are enduring: Being taken for granted — or worse, blamed.

This comes in two forms:

The Boomers Blew It and You Are So Done (Forget “Baby,” As the Oldest Are Turning Eighty This Year)

The author Marc J. Dunkelman (sorry, Marc) published a widely discussed book last year called Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — And How to Bring It Back. Because PublicAffairs, the imprint I founded thirty years ago, was the publisher, he asked me to lunch.

His opener was along the line that the vast Boomer generation, broadly speaking, is responsible for the situation he was describing, chapter and verse. I won’t do him the disrespect of summarizing his argument. For that, read the book. I bristled but I think I paid for the lunch at an Upper West Side diner.

The Boomer canard has taken hold, even among many Boomers themselves. An accomplished friend’s new book opens this way: “Well, we are now on the front stoop of old age. And good Lord, what a fuck up of a generation we’ve turned out to be. . . . A nation that used to be young and scrappy has gotten old and cranky. We’re aggrieved, tribal, stuck.” And on and on.

But ask yourself whether the rights of women, minorities, the disabled, the poor, and the disadvantaged are being ignored, as they were for so for very long. Living standards and healthy life spans in developed countries have increased markedly, and global poverty has dropped.

The process of change reached its most intense in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Boomers were in college, or in the streets.

Have the movements for civil rights, human rights, global environment solved those problems? No. Did we or our predecessor generations solve the bigotry, inequality, and injustice that are the underside of progress? No. But we did recognize the scale of these problems and have made headway, at least, in understanding them and doing what we can — yes, through regulations, affirmative action, and protests — to deal with civilization’s eternal failings.

The Boomers in power (Bill Clinton et al.), as in all political eras, coped with the political realities of the time, and with the fact that their, well, fallibilities were now exposed by a feisty media. FDR and JFK, among others, were spared the public embarrassments of infidelity.

Heroism is hard to maintain when then the main public themes are cynical and even despairing.

If you don’t want more of this, stop reading, now.

Being Taken for Granted, Superannuated, or Retired

I started to realize this in my seventies. The emails and phone calls I received from my generational cohort were about not being published, finding an agent, and feeling generally sidelined (except, it seems, in top-tier politics). The general sense among this broad circle of formers and has-beens was, depending on their personalities, a degree of ironic amusement at their predicament, chagrin, indignation, or fury.

“How dare they?” Well, they could and did.

Being taken for granted showed in different ways, from the routine to the existential. Dealing with doctors whose attention tended to be cursory until you stepped up for concierge service, the condescension of younger colleagues whom you had mentored and now were offering to support further, or a dismissive attitude from the staff at various places, especially when dealing with tech.

So how to manage this?

A seemingly trivial episode recently provided my forward strategy. While I was exercising one morning in our apartment building gym, a manager approached me, with a photographer in tow, and told me that pictures were to be taken for advertising. He asked me to wait outside while that was being done.

I paused to absorb the affront, smiled, and with brio declared, “No.” The photographer, to his credit, got the point and waited.

What was my valuable takeaway?

In dealing with the various forms of being taken for granted and blamed, instead of reacting with indignation and even (on occasion) anger, stand on your good-natured ground. Be distinguished to the extent possible, rather than demeaned.

If they are fortunate enough, everyone dispensing such an attitude and criticism will get to be older or even elderly.

But by then they will also be experienced and seasoned — and definitely not to be taken for granted.

*****

Paul Taylor’s book, quoted above, is This Is Getting Old: Two Boomers and Their Generation at Dusk. Paul and his wife, Stefanie, “have been together since childhood,” he writes. They have three children and five grandchildren. Paul had a great run at the Washington Post, where we met. He then served as executive vice president at the Pew Research Center. About herself, Stefanie writes: “Paul has written a lot of cool things about me. Take them with a grain of salt.”

Paul’s take on our mutual stage of life is different in many respects from mine as expressed above. Read his book and decide for yourself. That is our privilege.