You speak as though change moves in one direction, and that there is a mainly additive "correct" one. That speaks of the over-confidence of youth, sorry. I will

You speak as though change moves in one direction, and that there is a mainly additive "correct" one. That speaks of the over-confidence of youth, sorry. I will try and answer as an enthusiastic reader of history rather than as of a particular generation as frankly, I see that as utterly irrelevant. Both your comments assign blame to boomers in a way that implies no other generation before or since has ever made an insulting denigration of those that follow. "Kid's these days" has probably been a universal comment of the parental generation of the kids, and "parents just don't get it" the comment of their kids since the stone age. The only thing that marks boomers as different is the technological leverage available to them. Meaning each and every succeeding generation since the industrial revolution can do more good and vastly more harm, than the one that went before. WW1 was so much worse than the Napoleonic war as technological leverage brought industrial slaughter. Similar comments were heard in Dickens day, in pre-WW1 Edwardian era, and I have no doubt will continue to be heard in 30 when it'll be the ageing Millennials being denigrated, and 300 years, etc. Just to put your "only divisive because boomers" issues into context, ALL of them were divisive in the eras they were restricted, except the pendulum was swinging the other way. There were moral panics and outrages over all these in Elizabethan, Victorian, Edwardian times and still today. So that's 400 years. You'll find similar going back to ancient Rome and Greece. We are going through a pendulum swing of relaxing attitudes to all of these, and decline of regulation. Regulation declines due to the rise of the cargo cult of neoliberalism 1980 on, attitudes due to the rise of individual consumerism 1960 on. Give it fifty or a hundred years and there will be a "universal" clamour for greater restriction, perhaps with a new spin, perhaps in forms of regulation commonly tried across the millennia. Perhaps religion or abstinence will see a revival. Perhaps something completely new, whether environmentalism or something we can't yet conceive. At some point in the swing to relaxed, low regulation, rebelling against parents will necessarily spawn a more community, collective, or restrictive reaction.