The answer was here all the time.

 

Middle-age has always been problematic.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché la diritta via era smarrita.

 

This opening line of Dante’s Inferno, before he descends through the gates and rings of Hell, is the poet’s articulation of a life moment which has neither the carefree arrogance of youth, nor the cynical inevitability of old age. The straight-forward path has indeed been lost.

Poets and artists always see the truth earlier, in better focus, and their work has often dominated my own writing. They will again today as, of course, we are all just plagiarists.

It may be something, or nothing, but when Grant Williams asked me to write this essay, it wasn’t really such a surprise. Because I know him and, in some way, we are all now in that same forest dark, like Alighieri, at the scary doorway. We all need a Virgil; a guide, a sherpa, a code, a point of reference, to make sense of it all. Someone or something to tell us that it’s all going to be fine, comforting us that we are worrying too much.

No one lives in a vacuum, and each individual is really just a minestrone of what is around them every day. In this, life has blessed me (the very last of the Boomers) with an eclectic and cross-cultural network of family, friends and colleagues, from every corner of our Blue Planet. I’m continually exposed to myriad diverse ideas, beliefs and convictions, often diametrically opposed. Like Dante, many of the people around me, playing the second half of their innings in a mixture of defence and attack, seem to carry a heavy load of despair and depression, fuelling a combination of anger and resignation.

 

To matters at hand.

“Blue” therefore is exactly today’s matter at hand, and Grant’s request wasn’t a surprise at all!

Mid-life crisis, menopause, call it whatever you want, but the fact is that the 50+ demographic (of intelligent people) has reached the stage in their lives where the fruits of their work can be seen easily on both sides of the ledger. The full double-entry of achievements. We should all be happy, because this is the Cheers, West Wing and Friends generation; animal spirits who benefited from the deregulation of the 80s, progressed through the Goldilocks 90s, reaching a very comfortable cruise control, until the dotcom bust and 9/11. We have also by now gone through the hard yards of building a career, a family, a home, and as nests empty, we have time on our hands to just reflect.

 

But we are not happy.

One can see so many of the children of Reagan, Thatcher, Blair and Clinton all in a bit of a funk.

Why?

Are we guilty about how poorly we managed those economic boom times? Are we ashamed of how difficult a life, how ugly a world, we have left for our children?

Both of these would be very valid reasons for the Boomer Blues.

If we listen to our children, their memes will describe (too) well the legacy of who we have been, and what we have done, explaining uncomfortably how we have had it very easy. All we needed was a decent education to walk into a well-paying job, to buy a very affordable home, and just climb the career ladder on the universal rising tide of globalisation and the start of the Internet. They instead have a slightly(sic) more difficult wall to climb, where only the globally-excellent human resources need apply, and, even then, after multiple unpaid internships, their remuneration will hardly cover travel, rent, and the Pret at lunch. Tragically, savings and home ownership are already seen by our children as delusional and unapproachable goals. Whisper it, these kids think we ran away with their futures, and in many ways they are not wrong. We paid ourselves too much, financed on the never-never, on debt, and have left it all on their backs, as we holiday in the Maldives.

Is that why we are all feeling bad? We had the most benevolent economy of all, and we absolutely blew it for our kids?

 

Guilt, that most Catholic of pain, is a bitch.

The answer to this thesis is however a hard “no”.

Many of us for sure have had to hustle really hard to get where we are today. It wasn’t the slam dunk it may appear with hindsight. And, in fact, my generation often has nothing but disdain for the soft underbelly of those who have come after us, thinking that the world owes them a living.

No, guilt is not the reason.

Is it then more simply explained by man’s eternal resistance to change? The passage into inevitable irrelevance? Where, as a Welsh poet suggests, we will all be damned if we go quietly.

So we won’t.

Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Another Dylan expressed an opinion on all that, in the month of my birth in 1964, but it could have been penned yesterday.

 

Change is inevitable.

Robert Zimmerman, the “jester wearing a coat he borrowed from James Dean”, laid the problem out very plainly 60 years ago. Change is inevitable, but will always be rejected as unacceptable and inappropriate by the older generations leaving the stage.

Come mothers and fathers throughout the land

And don’t criticize what you can’t understand

Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command

Your old road is rapidly agin’

Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand

For the times they are a-changin’

Maybe what is really bothering us is just the relentless hiss of the clessidra running out of sand, which we obviously explain away as a general drop in morals and values?

Maybe in reality we are all blue because we just no longer understand?  It wouldn’t be the first time this has happened; but now it’s our turn, and we don’t like it.

The past however is always prologue, and perhaps we should remind ourselves of the vitriol directed at the arrival of Elvis, the flower power hippies, punk rock, the androgynous David Bowie. Or more seriously, the British Reform Act, Emily Pankhurst, MLK, Mandela, and Oscar Wilde. Societal and cultural evolution in the main has been a positive, so one must always resist the facile trope of it all having been so much better in our day. Because it wasn’t. Women were repressed, gays were seen as diseased, minorities were disadvantaged, and class divisions were ceilings of glass. We mustn’t ever lose ourselves in this foam bath of nostalgia.

We are better than that. Much better!  And we are charged today to come up with superior explanations. Maybe they do exist.

 

The Fourth Turning.

The building-block DNA of the West, from Athens, Rome, Florence, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, no longer seems to be there, and this, de facto, is the literal definition of the Fourth Turning.

Generational archetypes attack and weaken institutions in the name of autonomy and individualism, which eventually creates a tumultuous political environment that ripens conditions for another crisis.

– Wikipedia

In short, we are seeing the collapse (perhaps desecration) of those basic fundamental structures and standards that have formed us all, certainly since the War. But, in truth, for a lot, lot longer. Since forever, in fact.

For some of us, this decay is well illustrated by the imagery of sexualised drag-queens “teaching” in children’s classrooms. Or the disrespect of the Last Supper at the Paris Olympics.

Or even in the crass inability to honour war veterans for at least one day a year. All this lack of decorum and basic dignity seems to test new lows every day. A young girl of today’s generation will not surprise anyone if she publicly debates a better financial future for herself via online-pornography or sugar-daddy prostitution. Whilst in the past, the percentage of people even complementing that option would have been utterly negligible, today it is seen by way too many as a very acceptable and valid lifestyle choice. One needs only look at the OnlyFans numbers. We are even shown girls on social media walking down the road, laughing and joking. They boast that the glow on their face is from the semen of the 100 men who have “run them thru” that night. They may actually be in competition with rivals in this endeavour, in what seems a race to break the 24-hour “bodycount” record, like some tragic metaphor of the Coe/Ovett glory days.

 

“Shame” is at all time lows, if even still in the vocabulary.

Many instead trace their blues to the apparent lack of meritocracy in anything, where audience, fame, popularity, ethnicity, gender, sexuality all seem more important to success than actual ability, substance and hard work. Popular culture and sport are dominated by the Kardashians and the Paul brothers, rather than Prince, Scorsese and Michael Jordan. Writing is no longer called authorship or journalism; it’s now only a piece of content that either works or doesn’t for the algorithm. Clickbait can be worth more in this world than a Norman Mailer, and similarly our education systems seem to have completely collapsed. Long-form learning and critique is seen as “too difficult”, and therefore dumbed down to allow our storied universities to be filled with snackable didactic and meaningless degrees, to make the intellectually-average feel smart and qualified. Enabling and empowering them to become a Pretorian Guard of woke political advisers and DEI experts who will zealously continue this vicious circle of mediocrity.

Add in the permanently offended, triggered by what we all consider as trivia. Our generation has had the physical proximity and soft touch of parents and grandparents with genuine first-hand experience of the horrors of war, totalitarianism, and apartheid. We have heard these stories with their voices, so we won’t pretend to empathise with people upset about pronouns and gender labels.

 

The insanity of financial markets.

For others, the hole in the pit of the stomach may be more from the insanity of financial markets and money, consistently rewarding the wrong companies and the wrong people. We all know that markets can always remain irrational longer than we can remain solvent, but we all believed that, at some point, real fundamental value would win out. Now many of us are just not so sure, and we have been beaten down to not even attempt to fight the Fed. Capital markets actually are now so distorted and manipulated that they comfortably celebrate fundamentally unsound assets and valuations like GameStop and Tesla, where speculation and laziness trump basic due diligence. The blame for this lies as much with passive index investing, misaligned incentives, and short-termism, as it does with Roaring Kitty and Crypto Bros. Nonetheless, DOGE to the moon does seem to be the smart trade. What an utterly unacceptable state of affairs, where today the biggest conundrum for serious financial operators is asking if central bankers are really that stupid, or if we are all being played in their dystopian Ponzi scheme? Neither possible answer is uplifting.

 

The fall of leadership.

Indeed, in this Fourth Turning, the most painful ache of all comes of course from observing each day the desperately low quality of our leaders. They are just no longer the best of us, nowhere near, and to twist that dagger, we tragically have to note that Nancy Pelosi still remains the greatest investor of our times. They are a bloody disgrace. Jimmy Carter may or may not have been a great President, but he was for sure a great man, and there is no-one like that around today. Politicians have never been saints, but at least they used to have some sense of duty and responsibility.  Now they no longer even feel obliged to fall on their swords if caught red-handed. We see no concept of statesmanship and honour, merely a cynical assessment of whether they can survive intact through the next news cycle.

 

And the family?

In Italy they have a wonderful phrase, also used in legalese, “to apply a duty of care, like a father of the family”.

Pater familias. Come un padre di famiglia.

Such beauty of expression reminding us of a simpler time.

Find a girl settle down, if you want you can marry; look at me, I am old but I am happy.

– Cat Stevens

Whatever happened to all that? Birth rates have collapsed, as the very idea of creating the traditional family unit seems in the modern world rather quaint. Patriotism and pride in your community offend, individual responsibility and hard professional ethics are old fashioned concepts, a father’s discipline even a recipe for a possible prison sentence. This isn’t how we were brought up, and how sad is it that so many of us secretly are glad that our grandparents didn’t see any of it. They stormed the beach for this?

 

The monetisation of lost values.

These themes all overlap in the horrendously depressing Venn diagram of the Hawk Tuah girl. This very normal working class kid from Tennessee is randomly asked on the street, by a “content creator” seeking audience, to describe her technique for oral sex. In itself a damning indictment of where we are today as a society. So popular is her graphic explanation that it “goes viral”, making her celebrity currency rise exponentially. Her handlers, to take advantage and “monetise”, decide to literally mint that currency and pump a crypto coin in her honour. It obviously rises for a brief moment, making fortunes for the insiders, before the rug is pulled, just in time for the sap bag-holders.

One isn’t sure where to even start with Caveat Emptor in this case study, but of course the leader of the free world and his First Lady both decide to get behind this winning playbook with their own shit-coins. Not once does anyone feel obliged to note that it is maybe “inelegant” for the glory of a Presidential Inauguration to be so sullied in this way. Truly devastating!

So, in summary, the rings of hell for us are not so different to Dante. The personalities in each one of them may be different in 2025, but the sins are all there. To observe it all kills your soul, and, to quote Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction,

Naw man, I’m pretty fucking far from ok.

…and if we are honest, behind all the fake Instagram happy-clappy photos, most people are similarly far from ok. They just won’t or can’t admit it.

We are indeed at a Turning, but not one of those described by Strauss and Howe. Personally, for me, the real reason for the Boomer Blues is another, and, once again, the lyricist artists say it best.

And as for fortune, and as for fame

I never invited them in

Though it seemed to the world they were all I desired

They are illusions, they’re not the solutions they promised to be

The answer was here all the time…..

…..It won’t be easy, you’ll think it strange

When I try to explain how I feel

That I still need your love after all that I’ve done.

– Tim Rice

 

What answer? Whose love?

We, as a society over the last 80 years, over a saeculum, have convinced ourselves that we didn’t need the one person who has dominated the entirety of Western culture, and whose institution is the oldest of them all. At 2000 years and counting. We have convinced ourselves that it was all only a fairytale racket for the stupid and uneducated, because those poor souls needed something to stay sane. We pitied them.

God is a concept, by which we measure our pain.

– John Lennon.

Well, here we are. The undeniable regression of the West, which we all feel so profoundly, is, to use the language of finance, a chart perfectly correlated with the decline in Christianity, and very simply, we have arrived at the final candlestick of the trendline. At a place someone else called Sodom and Gomorrah. The optics of Los Angeles ablaze may for some be blamed on climate change and inclusive “firemen”, but one could equally make a credible case that it is Old Testament payback for Weinstein, Epstein, and P Diddy.

Either way, nihilism has run its course. It clearly leads to absolutely nowhere and this penny is suddenly dropping for a lot of very clever people. Hardened atheists, artists and intellectuals, in a steady stream, now all seem to have ended up on a road near Damascus.

The first phase was that as a historian I realised no society had been successfully organised on the basis of atheism. All attempts to do that have been catastrophic. That was an insight that came from studying 18th, 19th and 20th-century history. But then the next stage was realising that no individual can in fact be fully formed or ethically secure without religious faith.

– Niall Ferguson, historian, economist and previously convinced atheist.

 

In search of a new code.

Even in sport, the NFL and American college football seem more dedicated to God than ever before, and all of these datapoints are obviously signals of people simply in search of a new code.

Which is just the old code, right?

The real Turning is in the return of Religion, and even The Telegraph and the Financial Times have noticed.

 

 

The answer was indeed here all the time, and we do still need His love, after all we have done.

People shouldn’t be afraid by any of this, maybe thinking back fearfully at all of the blood historically spilt in the name of one God or another. Because you don’t even need to “believe”, if truth be told. Faith is a gift not given to everyone at the same time. If at all.

 

The greatest story ever told.

The Parables of a man called Jesus Christ are in fact as valuable in a secular world as in the spiritual. They are profound stories of work, family, readiness, love, compassion, grace and forgiveness, all of which can very convincingly claim to be the entire basis of the “decency” of the West; our best available proxy of right and wrong. Divine or not.

What in fact is the best compliment any of us can ever receive?

“He is a good man!”

We all know what that means. So few words, yet so fulsome a verdict.

In marketing terms, the mistake around promoting Christianity is that it has always sold itself as binary and dogmatic, only as a take-it-or-leave it story of deity and the spiritual. And this understandably alienates many, who just can’t get there, yet. When it is really so much more.

 

Christianity: the foundation of our entire Western civilisation.

The Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37), The Sower (Matthew 13:3-9), The Mustard Seed (Matthew 13:31-32), and so many more, compromise a body of work in their totality that arguably represents the greatest life manual ever written.

It has all just been lost. Certainly forgotten.

The word “gospel” is derived from the Greek “euangelion”, meaning “good news”. And the really good news for us all is in The Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), and The Lost Sheep (Luke 15:3-7), where we realise that He won’t hesitate a minute to take us all back. No questions asked.

A proper padre di famiglia.

In closing, as most appropriate for a financial newsletter readership, special mention must go to another Parable. That of the Talents (Luke 19:11–27)

A master puts his servants in charge of his goods while he is away on a trip. Upon his return, the master assesses the stewardship of his servants. He evaluates them according to how faithful each was in making wise investments of his goods to obtain a profit. It is clear that the master sought some profit from the servants’ oversight. A gain indicated faithfulness on the part of the servants. The master rewards his servants according to how each has handled his stewardship. He judges two servants as having been “faithful” and gives them a positive reward. To the single “unfaithful” servant, who avoided even the safe profit of bank interest, a negative compensation is given.

– Wikipedia.

A better manifesto for capitalism and risk management you will not find. It is The Wealth of Nations, written centuries before Adam Smith. And more succinctly.

So anyone feeling the Boomer Blues should read perhaps only four newsletters, that aren’t even behind a paywall. Those of Matthew, Mark, Luca and John. Treat them as secular if you will, but be very careful.

The Lord moves in mysterious ways.

…

This article forms part of a five-piece compendium authored for the Grant Williams TTMYGH newsletter, titled Fin De Siècle.

Five friends asked to explain how they saw this crazy world of ours in 2025.

Due to the overwhelming response, Grant has made this available to all, in front of his usual paywall.

Link to Grant’s newsletter.

 

​