From Vanity Fair.The philosophy of the boomers, their general outlook and disposition, which became our culture, is based on a misunderstanding. In the boomers, those born after World War II but before the Kennedy assassination—some of this is less about dates, which are in dispute, than about sensibility—you’re seeing a rebellion. They’d say it was against Richard Nixon, or the Vietnam War, or the conformity of the 1950s, or disco, but it was really against their parents, specifically their fathers. It was a rejection of bourgeois life, the man in his gray flannel suit, his suburbs and corporate hierarchy and commute, the simple pleasures of his seemingly unadventurous life. But the old man did not settle beneath the elms because he was boring or empty or plastic. He did it because, 10 years before you were born, he killed a German soldier with his bare hands in the woods. Many of the boomers I know believe their parents hid themselves from the action. In truth, those World War II fathers were neither hiding nor settling. They were seeking. Peace. Tranquility. They wanted to give their children a fantasy of stability not because they knew too little but because they’d seen too much. Their children read this quest as emptiness and went away before the fathers could transmute the secret wisdom, the ancient knowledge that allows a society to persist and a person to get through a Wednesday afternoon.
I think this guy understands Generation Dynamics without even have heard of it. I would call your theory 'common sense', even though I think you are wrong about gold.