I got the news on New Year’s Day. Dan Grossman was dead at 81.
Dan was a longtime friend and mentor, the man I jokingly called my “Jewish dad.” I’d known him since my early 20s, when we met at a political event in Washington. Over three decades of lunches, always with dessert, he coached me through building a business, navigating personal crises, and thinking seriously about the world. A few days before Christmas, we met one last time at his usual table in the back of his usual restaurant. We caught up, joked around, and swapped advice.
“How do I get people to stop nagging me about my health?” he asked.
I didn’t know that would be our last conversation. Or maybe, deep down, I did.
Dan was born in 1944, on the outer edge of the baby boomer generation, part of a cohort now entering its 80s. His death was personal, but it felt epochal. The Long Boomer Farewell, I realized, had begun.
That’s what I’ve come to call it: the roughly 20-year period, from now through the mid-2040s, during which the boomer generation will pass from dominance into history.
Sleepwalk into this era and we’re looking at decades of gerontocratic drift, fiscal implosion, and a younger generation that inherits a country stripped of the investments it needed. Get ahead of it and we have a genuine shot at renewal. Almost no one is treating it as the civilizational reckoning it is.
To understand why this generation’s passage will be different—harder, slower, more disorienting—it helps to remember the last one.
