I never stopped to think about it, but apparently the baby boomer generation has been labeled as more “authentic” in how we relate to our world.

Really? Yes, we are more real. Okay, I can think of worse things that we’ve been labeled but how did psychologists come to this conclusion?

First off, we grew up with fewer distractions. No social media, no digital anything really. Without all that chatter we had to focus on real interactions. That won’t be the last time you see the word real. We listened to each other and had to communicate face-to-face.

Next, we grew up without Google. That meant we had to look things up and learned a lot of things by trial and error. So add self-reliance to how we are more authentic.

We also grew up with a lot more face to face contacts than later generations. That was how we played and socialized and it helped us entertain ourselves.

We never had to experience the performance pressure that later generations felt. The absence of social media meant we could figure out who we were and who we wanted to be without excessive external pressures.

Another major factor in our world view were the major societal changes that affected our maturation. Womens’ liberation, the civil rights movement, and the war in Vietnam all had an impact on our world view. These events helped us clarify our values and world view.

In the absence of social media, we were able to develop a sense of self that didn’t rely on some curated views. We modeled ourselves on people we knew and admired in real life. It helped us remain true to ourselves and gave us a sense of security.

There wasn’t much oversharing as we grew up. We kept a lot more of our lives private than generations do now. We were a lot more measured when it came to deciding what we would share and what would remain private.

The last factor cited for boomer authenticity is trust. We met and encountered people for many years and really got to know them. Because we stayed in the same neighborhoods or with the same company/organization, the bonds formed could run very deep.

Ultimately, many boomers sense that they are more authentic because we are less filtered – less influenced by digital distractions. Boomers can’t claim to be the most authentic generation, but being nurtured in a world without social media and digital diversions certainly helped. As someone observed, the lesson we can take from the way we grew up is that being genuine means being present.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

Guess what? We can solve the housing crisis. Seriously. Millions of single-family homes (and boomers own most of them) are underused and on spacious lots. If they were retrofitted they could be converted into “roommate houses” and accommodate backyard cottages.

A developer in Dallas converted his 2,400 square foot home into four studio apartments, each with an outside entrance. Each has connecting doors to the rest of the house that remain unused. He didn’t do it for the income. His purpose was to allow him to claim he lives in a single-family home and is in accordance with local zoning. He calls it a suburban retrofit.

America needs between four and eight million more homes. Meeting that need by building new homes and apartment complexes is too slow and ponderous. But we have 145 million homes that already exist and two-thirds of them are single-family. The loophole then, is to allow the single-family homes to become multifamily.

It’s not clear how many of these single-family homes are owned and occupied by baby boomers, but if they started renting out their empty rooms – voila – big problem solved. Many boomers are already living with one or more of their offspring who are unable to buy homes of their own. How much difference would it make to take in boarders the way people did post-depression?

I’m looking at you baby boomer living in 3,000 sf 4-bedroom house. Why not take in one or more renters? The space is going unused and the extra income can go a long way to reducing your property tax burden. Co-habitation a little to crowded for you? At least consider an accessory dwelling unit out back. More and more communities are altering zoning to accommodate this trend.

Boomers have often been tagged with the bad rap of being selfish, but if we opened up our homes to renters, it might prove to everyone that we can be part of the solution rather than the problem. Just saying.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

There was a creek behind our house. Looking back, it was more of a drainage ditch that has since been covered in cement and turned into a culvert. But for us, it was a natural wonder. This was not a group of kids who got to visit Yellowstone or Glacier National Park each summer! It was a place to ice skate and play a very linear form of ice hockey in the winter, a place to build tree forts along the banks, and a place to dream of starting adventures that would lead to faraway places.

In that creek lived many wonderful creatures. Among them, and probably largely limited to only these, were snakes and crabs. I really don’t know if they were officially crabs, but they had pincers, and that’s what we called them. A lot of people near the Texas Gulf Coast where I live now eat creatures that look a lot like these did. This is probably not only a better use for them than described below but may, in fact, even be more humane.

About the same time that we were in the early stages of experimenting with launching ourselves off structures in attempts to parachute to the earth, we were also using the handkerchiefs our moms forced us to carry in our pockets as parachutes for smaller, non-human items, like toy lead soldiers we made in our basements. In retrospect, this creative work with lead may explain some of our behavior. These parachutes were very simple to construct. The handkerchief would have light strings tied to each corner, and then the lead toy soldier would be fastened to the free end of each of the four strings. The strings would be wrapped loosely around the toy and the handkerchief, and the whole thing would be thrown high in the air or dropped from a tree. With practice, these worked pretty well.

It occurred to us that with slightly larger pieces of cloth, like those cut from an old sheet, we could conduct transitional experiments between the proven results already obtained with the toy soldiers and our dreams of parachuting ourselves—much like NASA would eventually use chimps in the space program. Sadly, there were no chimps living by the creek behind our homes, but it seemed to us that the small crabs we were pulling out of the creek were just the right size.

Surprisingly, it’s not that easy tying four strings around an unwilling crab without getting pinched, and the snapping of the crab on your fingers severely limits the quality of the toss. While the personal sacrifices were great, there were some limited technical successes in that, on the very best combinations of throws and perfect wrapping of the strings around the cloth, some crabs would fall back to the ground noticeably slower than others.

After the experiments, the crabs were all released back into the creek, where the stories of their bravery and historical significance are probably still repeated by their descendants, living much less exciting lives under the cement culvert covering their creek.

Bob Marksteiner was born in Chicago and grew up in Franklin Park, Illinois