Arthur Brooks: Why Won’t the Boomers Grow Up?

The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, believed that a lot of our mental problems are related to sex. Take, for example, a child’s discovery of the “primal scene”: sex between its parents. The child greets this realization, per Freud, with a mixture of incomprehension and revulsion, and the dire revelation leaves a traumatic mark.

Well, to all my Gen Z and millennial readers, I offer a new Freudian insight that might traumatize you even as an adult. To wit: The baby boomers—people close in age to, or just a bit older than, your parents—are the fastest-growing demographic group among those infected by sexually transmitted diseases. Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a 2024 analysis from the University of Southern California found that between 2012 and 2022, the number of cases of gonorrhea increased fivefold among those over 55, chlamydia tripled, and syphilis surged by a factor of seven. And lest you think the reprobate behavior behind these data is an isolated one-off, boomers also registered as the fastest-growing demographic of cannabis users, with a 46 percent increase in usership from 2021 to 2023. Since then, both trends have only continued.

That’s right, my young friends, it might very well be the case that your 75-year-old dad relaxing down in Boca is smoking weed right now and just caught the clap from one of his lady friends. Let that sink in (after you finish throwing up).

Now, before I move on to what all of this means, please note that boomers may be showing the fastest growth in these forms of degeneracy, but they are still well behind Gen Z, which is starting from a much higher base. For example, adults ages 18 to 25 are more than three times as likely as boomers to have used marijuana in the past month. According to my analysis of CDC data, Gen Zers are a whopping 58 times more likely to report a chlamydia infection. The point is not that the oldsters are more debauched than the youngsters—but they are catching up.