Click here for past issues of the Globe Magazine, dating back to June 22, 1997

Letters to the Magazine editor:
Mail can be sent to Letters to the Editor, The Boston Globe, P.O. Box 2378, Boston, MA 02107-2378. The email address is [email protected] or use our form.

Boomer knows best

For a generation that was beginning to feel obsolete, the dot-com crash isn't all bad news.

At the risk of sounding Gen Xenophobic, let me offer a confession. For a lot of baby boomers I know, the dizzying dot-com crash, though casting a distinct cloud over our 401(k)s, has had a silver lining.

Like the lawmaker who observed that the longer he stayed in Washington, the more sense the seniority system made, the older we get, the more we find comfort in the natural generational order of things. The natural order implicitly holds that, outside of the youth-obsessed world of pop stars, actors, and athletes, the workaday world values maturity over youth.

The vertiginous Internet-driven economy had threatened to turn that order on its ear. With new dot-coms sprouting like so many entrepreneurial mushrooms after a venture-capital shower, computer-savvy college dropouts were commanding starting salaries that MBAs and law school graduates would have been pleased with only a few short years ago.

Boomers, meanwhile, had to embark on a vexing effort to acquire the skills necessary even to thrash about in the technological jungle - and they were always at risk of wounding themselves with their own microelectronic machete.

You know that impotent sense of awe and envy that floods over you as your company's 27-year-old systems wizard fixes a problem that had hopelessly bollixed your PC? For the last several years, that feeling, writ large, seemed to define the generational split.

It wasn't just a matter of a digital divide, however. Less tied down by obligations of mortgage and family, Gen Xers could also take the risks their older co-workers no longer dared.

Just a year ago, seemingly every boomer I know had a rueful story about a colleague 10 or 15 years his junior who had left to take a $100,000-plus job, complete with stock options, at a dot-com. (Flush with a heady sense of their own worth, some of those exiting Xers offered snide parting shots about their erstwhile old-economy employers.)

Rendering it all the more confusing was that the new online world seemed to mock the work and investment values that had (finally) tamed the late-blooming boomers. You could only look on in disbelief at the newest start-up whose IPO had made instant millionaires of a group of 30-year-olds with an idea that, in other eras, would have had to strain to qualify as harebrained.

For those grown accustomed to price-to-earnings ratios, deucing out the Nasdaq was as hard as fathoming the appeal of the Gen X greeting du jour (or year, actually): "Whassup?"

"Whyssitup?" was more the question. Who knew? When the market reacted as positively to a loss as to a profit, how could you tell? It seemed as if the old rules had simply ceased to apply, and we didn't understand the new ones.

But they did. For a while, every young prospector seemed to hit career pay dirt, while the boomers, made cautious by midlife limitations, watched wistfully, too timid to join the great rush e-ward in search of Internet glitter.

Not that some didn't try. Last summer, I encountered an old friend, another 40-something type, whom I hadn't seen for more than a decade. He had left his old job to join an Internet start-up, he said.

What was it like to work for a dot-com? I wanted to know.

He shook his head and smiled wryly. "My boss is a 29-year-old," he replied. He imparted it not bitterly, or enviously even, but with the baffled face of a person who wakes one day to find that workplace power has leapfrogged his generation almost overnight.

Those of us who stayed were left to gaze with a mixture of fascination and envy after those who had run away to join the cyber circus, and it couldn't help but make you wonder about your own place in a changing economy.

Visiting Budapest a few years ago, I was shocked to see the glaring generational differences. Hungary's economy was improving, its bars and bistros full of confident young people, chattering away on their ubiquitous cell phones. But those old enough to have come of age not under the market system but under the old communist command economy seemed gray, slumped, and broken trying to make their way in a world suddenly turned upside down.

Was that how we boomers were destined to end up? Let's be honest. When two boomers met for lunch, one question chewed over before the check arrived was this: Has our generation lost its assumed place in the economic order?

Maybe not. With the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the market flight back to value investing, the old norms are resurgent. It now looks as though the Internet will prove less the central organizing principle of modern life its starry-eyed idolaters thought than the more modest information-and-convenience catalyst that skeptics had long insisted was its more likely role.

Once again, it doesn't seem so absurd to wonder about a start-up's path to profitability. And it does seem absurd that Priceline.com's market capitalization was once worth more than the nation's three biggest airlines.

Which is to say, it now looks as though the rules haven't changed after all. Economic gravity still holds, and there's no magic generational carpet that promises to float one generation ahead of the next. So, though boomers may have begun the year with their portfolios down, their spirits are up.

As for our dot-comrades, I wish them all a soft landing. Really. If it were up to me, I'd even take the tart-tongued deserters back. With one condition: They would have to stop saying "Whassup?"