Accurate.
Boomers were first all about the experiences as well. It was basically the hippie mantra. But something happened to them- likely middle age- that turned them into something else. Or did it?
First, it depends on what aspect of baby boomers you're talking about. They've had a pretty dynamic history, so I was talking about the sum of their history, not necessarily a particular point. I was talking about baby boomers once they hit their careers and discovered the evils of credit and a monetary system no longer based on the gold standard.
If you're talking about the early period of baby boomers who were driving the counter-cultural movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, then yes, you're correct, they were experience-driven. It's also why they were happy, and have generally good memories of the time.
What happened to make them change?
It wasn't any
thing. It's actually a really sad story. I guess it's the INFP in me, but I grew up loving hippie stuff, and studied the time period pretty extensively. Basically, the entire countercultural movement was built on naivety that was unsustainable, and ultimately collapsed in a wreckage of broken hopes and dreams.
Think of it as a balloon trip. They had an impetus -- the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Korean War, the Cold War, etc -- that led them to look for change. That change created an atmosphere where free love was possible, and everyone could get along. But it was a suspended disbelief that drove them, not a sustainable ideology. What started with love, freedom, and recreational marijuana and LSD used turned to STDs and progressively harder drugs. As those took hold, the love at the beginning gave way to drug addiction and drug-induced abberant behaviors, deaths of movement figures (the 27 club, MLK, etc), and wore away at the suspension of disbelief. If Woodstock was the peak of the balloon ride,
Altamont Free Concert - Wikipedia was the landing: Hell's Angels bikers stabbed a man on drugs to death as a Rolling Stones concert lost control due to drugs and poor design (something hippies didn't take into account very much).
No
thing happened to turn the Baby Boomers away from their experiences or beliefs. The movement itself was an unsustainable bubble that ultimately popped. But it didn't just end. The Baby Boomers gave us Civil Rights and many other things that still make our society better.
Perhaps something is off in your theory- perhaps living for experiences always turns into living for things. If one lives to acquire- first experiences, then once the body is unable to continue, objects- how can one be at peace with what one has? If experiences are only to be experienced, and not collected, why seek any out and simply experience the one in which you're in?
That would be called mindfulness, which is an element of happiness. You have to enjoy the moment you're in to actually
experience anything. In fact, mindfulness enhances any experience, even if it's everyday life.
The meaning of an experience is what you assign it. Even now when I talk about experiences, you're talking about the culturally-expected ones like a vacation to Hawaii. I'm talking about anything that makes you happy. For me it's playing video games with friends, for my mom it's petting the horses. If you have Netflix, check out the movie "Happy". For a poor rickshaw driver in India whose house doesn't even have four walls, it's coming home each day and having his children happy to see him. For a poor man in Brazil, it's getting to surf everyday and rescue baby birds that have fallen out of their nest. For a man in Louisiana, it's riding his boat through the swamp and looking at the animals.
Those are all experiences. The problem is that we don't recognize them as sources of happiness. We're so busy looking forward to where we expect happiness to come -- cruises, expensive vacations on islands, shopping sprees, unrealistically perfect holidays with families -- we're forgetting that the moment we're in can be a happy moment, even if it's as typical as waking up each morning. So yes, we don't have to seek moments out for experiential happiness. But we
do have to recognize them and be mindful of our presence.
And as far as "living to acquire", that's not an attitude to have. That's again positing that happiness is an earned result. Experience-derived happiness comes from having experienced, not about how many experiences or how high "quality" they are. You should live to live, and you live by experiencing.
Experiences create a barometer of feeling by imbuing depth of feeling relative to the sum of those experiences, but I think happiness like our own lives is a fleeting experience disguised as something layered and complicated disguised as something simple. It's true we can
synthesize it ourselves by limiting our choices, and that behavior that is conduicve to our most fundamental natures and faculties- what I believe you more or less called the ideal activities of 'intrinsic motivation'- better allows us to navigate our lives with peace and fulfillment. But at the end of the day no one can know happiness without sorrow, nor the direct heights of one without the depths of the other, so the chick in the video's 'more happiness' angle is ripe for logic failings in my opinion. At least as a main cornerstone to her traditionalism argument, which it is.
You're correct to an extent, about 95%. The nature of happiness is defined by the alternative possibilites and experiences of unhappiness. Stars are brightest on a dark night, shadows can't exist without light, etc. I'm a huge believe that you can't have just black or white, good or evil. You have to have both.
But resilience is a big thing in positive psychology. It's well-founded that the ability to successfully overcome obstacles creates a network of coping strategies that further enhance the stability of future happiness and the ability to rebound from negative experiences. Happiness is not the absence of bad experiences, but the ability to be less unhappy than you would have been, and the ability to be happy again faster.
The 5% you're wrong is the implication that because sadness must exist for happiness to have meaning, it must be an acceptable alternative. Contrary to popular belief, sadness is not the alternative to happiness.
Stress is the alternative to happiness. What causes stress? Sadness, anger, fear, the environment, etc. Stress is not an acceptable alternative because it has lifelong (and genetic) health implications. Blood pressure, weight, psychological wellbeing, and the health of your offspring are all negatively impacted by stress on a physiological, biochemical level.
Which goes back to resilience. The goal of happiness isn't to avoid bad things, but to recover from them constructively. It's also not to
limit your behaviors, like you mentioned. That's actually the opposite of how happiness works. The broaden-and-build theory says that as someone becomes happier, their behavioral repertoire (the things they do or are willing to do) expands, leading them to discover novel activities and therefor novel sources of happiness, where as unhappiness causes a person to limit their behaviors. To sum up, you're not going to go to a new yoga class when you're sad, you're going to want to lay in bed all day. You're also not going to want to lay in bed all day when you're happy.
But if you have poor resilience, losing your job is more likely to make you so unhappy you stay in bed all day for months (which can lead to depression), whereas good resilience means you're more likely to only lay around in bed for a week before you decide to look for a new job.
There's also the concept of happiness setpoint, which is that each of us has a biological level of happiness that we return to when we're both happier and sadder than normal, which is why some people truly are unhappy in general. But the setpoint is changeable through conscious effort, so that's not an excuse.
I rambled at the end, but wanted to slip that in.
.
