Somewhere around 2085, give or take a few years, the last baby boomer will die. But their story is not, in the end, a story about age.

It is the biography of a system of capitalism in its most confident, expansive and self-mythologising phase. The Boomers were not the authors of that story so much as its children and its protagonists, born into a time when growth was god and history appeared to have direction.

The age of promise

The post-war decades, in which the Boomers came of age, were capitalism’s great truce. Between 1945 and the mid-1970s, Western societies forged an uneasy compact: labour would be rewarded, markets would be managed and governments would guarantee jobs, housing and rising living standards. For a brief period, capital and community appeared aligned.

The Boomers thrived under that arrangement. They entered affordable universities, bought cheap houses and found stable work in expanding industries. Public investment in education, health and infrastructure created a sense of collective ascent. The welfare state was not seen as a safety net but as a shared platform and a way for societies to rise together after the devastation of war.

In cultural terms, this generation carried the spirit of rebellion and imagination. From civil rights and feminism to anti-war movements and environmentalism, they pushed the moral frontiers of the modern world. The 1960s and 70s glowed with the belief that change could be both personal and political and that better societies could be designed, not just discovered.

The age of extraction

Then, somewhere between the oil shocks and the Reagan-Thatcher revolutions, the promise broke. The problem was not that Boomers changed; the world around them did. When profit rates fell in the 1970s, capital revolted. The new gospel was deregulation, privatisation and the primacy of the market. Collective institutions were dismantled in the name of efficiency; citizens were rebranded as consumers.

This was capitalism’s great reinvention and the Boomers, now in mid-life, were ideally placed to benefit. The social contract of their youth gave way to an asset economy that rewarded ownership over work. Wages stagnated, but property values soared. Superannuation and stock portfolios replaced pensions and unions. Governments no longer promised security through public provision, but through participation in private markets.

The system that had once lifted many began to stratify them instead. Home ownership, once universal, became the new class divide. The great intergenerational wealth gap that followed was not a product of selfish Boomers, but of a restructured capitalism that made scarcity profitable. Housing, education and even health were financialised. The world’s richest generation was created not by thrift or toil, but by policy.

The myth of generations

It has become fashionable to describe these developments as a “Boomer problem". But the line that truly matters is not between generations it is between those who live from capital and those who live from labour. The Boomer-Millennial and other fake-age divides have become one of capitalism’s most useful distractions, masking the deeper conflict between profit and justice.

Yes, the average Boomer holds more wealth than any cohort before them. Yet, within their generation, inequality yawns wide. Millions of older people rent, struggle or live on meagre pensions while watching asset inflation enrich a minority. The beneficiaries of the system are a class, not a birth year.

The age of reckoning

Now, as the Boomers move into their 70s and 80s, the contradictions of late capitalism are playing out in slow motion. The wealth accumulated through decades of financialisation will soon begin its transfer to be the largest in human history. Some will flow to families, perpetuating privilege; some will be absorbed by care systems stretched beyond capacity; some will simply evaporate as property markets cool and life expectancies rise.

Meanwhile, the costs of deferred responsibility mount. Climate instability, biodiversity collapse, social disconnection and fiscal exhaustion are the unpaid bills of a growth-addicted era. Capitalism’s core logic that expansion equals progress is faltering on a finite planet.

In Australia, as in much of the developed world, this reckoning is visible in every policy debate. How to fund aged care without starving childcare? How to build houses without fuelling speculation? How to grow the economy without cooking the continent? Each question exposes the same truth: what is failing is not a generation, but a model.

The age after

When the last Boomer dies, the world will not simply lose a demographic; it will close a chapter of civilisation. The Boomer era will be remembered as the apogee of capitalist modernity, the point at which material abundance and planetary limits collided. Their lifetime spanned from ration books to smartphones, from the Cold War to climate wars, from the space race to the algorithmic age. No generation has seen so much or consumed so much.

But history will not rest with condemnation. The Boomers were, in many ways, idealists trapped in an extractive system that rewarded conformity over conscience. They did not design capitalism’s transformation, but they normalised it. They turned its privileges into common sense.

The task now falls to their descendants, and to the society that survives them, to complete the revolution that their youth once promised: to place life before profit, community before competition and sufficiency before growth. The obituary of the Boomers should not end with blame but with clarity: capitalism, not age, was the true architect of our age of excess.

And when that system, too, finally meets its limits, perhaps humanity will remember what the Boomers briefly glimpsed in their youth: that another world was always possible.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.