Being more than ten years your senior, I think this a great and relevant post and bears on things that I think about a lot. It seems like one of the things that is different about generations following the boomers is a cultural bias toward thinking about thinking, and in particular how the progression of thinking processes through life and spanning generations changes, degrades, evolves, and so forth. I'm not sure the "greatest generation" did that much, so far at the common man was concerned.

I'm also not saying it's a new phenomenon. There's a very old tradition of wisdom traditions where you see a lot of old dudes in robes lecturing about the inner workings of the mind, but I don't think North Americans (especially us in the US) have spent a lot of time on that. I think now, especially Millennials are having this crisis moment of needing to look back over generations to try and figure out how things got so fucked up, how the thinking of the past has led to that and therefore doesn't serve the present or the future, and to benefit from what has come before without continuing to adopt the same cancerous ideologies that appears to have things crumbling at the seams.

It's also the reason why I think so many generation-x and millennials are looking at things like self-development, brain health, fasting, meditation, etc. There seems to be an appreciation for a new mandate to face what we have ahead of us with a more sober mind and less traditionally dogmatic thinking.

I don't know. None of this is easy and I can relate to the onset of the cynicism, but I think there's a need to analyze it and try to make decisions as to whether those thought patterns are useful to yourself, your family, and for the purposes of the greater good moving forward. If you've read (or watched) Cormack McCarthy's The Road, you might get a sense of what I'm talking about. How older generations can feed the younger all their fears while forgetting to pass on the wisdom part. I think the fear part comes from being too exclusively vested in self-preservation without considering the impact of that kind of thinking on a planet inhabited by upwards of 7.2 billion people.

Maybe overcoming the cynicism, at some age, requires forcing yourself out of left-brain thinking -- being more creative, spontaneous, abstract, and less linear, logical, dogmatic. If you don't like some element of the mind you've spent a lifetime creating, only you have the power to change it, but you'll have to adopt a different set of tools to do so.