oh, one more thing before I sign off:

check in on the Boomers in your life

(short thread)

Over the holidays I was talking to a Boomer relative, and she mentioned missing a restaurant she loves and hoping it stays open for the rest of her life.

*nod nod* Well and good.

Then she was like, "they only have to make it another ten years or so."

And I was like "what?"

She's 70. Almost all of the women on her side have lived into their late 90s, or even early hundreds.

So I was like, "given your genes, more like 30 years, right?"

And she said, "No, I'm not like them. I'll tell you, I was feeling pretty good, but in the last year, I've just started feeling my age. I'm tired all the time and I just don't feel like I have much life left in me."

And I was like, "uh, it's 2020. We ALL feel like that. I'm continually shocked to discover I'm still in my 30s. We're living through a pandemic and upheaval and we don't even have a name or diagnosis for the sort of *societal* depression and anxiety everyone's dealing with."

And for all her joking about how terrible 2020 was, she had never considered that she might be tired and sad and lifeless and hopeless because of what was going on. That it wasn't necessarily a *her* thing, but an *everyone* thing.

And that was when I started thinking about Boomer social circles and social media circles, and Boomers coming from a generation that doesn't necessarily talk openly about mental health stuff.

And if you're an extremely online Gen Xer, millennial, or Zoomer, it's OBVIOUS that there's some sort of societal mental health thing happening due to the pandemic and everything else. We all talk pretty openly about how miserable we are all the time.

But while a lot of Boomer circles have their own memes about 2020 and are complaining about the pandemic and all that, I don't know that they're actually talking about the communal mental health fallout from it.

The flipside

~which is *infuriating* trust me I know~

is that a lot of them seem to think they're *uniquely* and *individually* stir-crazy/bored/inconvenienced/missing their friends/etc. because of the pandemic

and it's easy to get distracted by that

and be like YES DAD I KNOW YOU ARE FRUSTRATED BECAUSE YOU CAN'T GO TO OLIVE GARDEN

LITERALLY ALL OF US ARE IN THE SAME POSITION

but the mirror of that is that some of them are also seeing the very real, non-selfish, non-entitled, desperate dark dreary feelings as uniquely theirs, as individual

and look, I don't want to armchair diagnose

I don't know if societal malaise is actually depression

but it's real and it's serious

and for those of us who *talk* and *hear* about it with a ton of people who are open about it on social media, knowing that it's not just us helps A LOT

because it shows us that it's actually sort of external to us, if that makes sense? and that we know the cause and that while we don't know when the pandemic is going to end, at some point we will socialize and travel and whatever again and we'll feel better

versus if you just feel tired and sad and lifeless all the time and you aren't doing that self-examination and getting external feedback and perspective about how this is something we're all going through together, you don't have that hope and patience

and on top of that, the coup has to be really hard for people who really grew up with and internalized the idea of America as a land of safety and stability

(and I'm not just talking about white Boomers here--I know a LOT of people with immigrant parents who cling to that)

So anyway, check in on them, and even if they don't want to talk about how they're feeling, point out to them that there is a societal malaise and exhaustion and hopelessness going on and if they're feeling that way, it's not just them

ESPECIALLY male Boomers because if women aren't self-aware about this, men from a generation that pretty much wasn't allowed to talk about mental health and feelings definitely aren't