The Perennials are theoretically free from these rigid tracks, able to return to previous stages at no detriment to their security and stability. Guillén’s recurring example is someone seeking higher education: Perennials wouldn’t need to rush into additional schooling immediately and could “pursue not just one career, occupation, or profession but several,” which would lead to a “a new reality in which interns in their sixties can work together with managers in their twenties.”

To make higher education more accessible, tuition-free college and student-loan cancellation might be the obvious first steps. But like the business professor that he is, Guillén opts for a quick fix: artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and “merging online teaching with the blockchain.” He claims that “once we learn how to use it effectively, the metaverse will open an entire array of new possibilities to immerse students in a learning experience hitherto impossible.” Initially a skeptic, Guillén claims to have been convinced of its pedagogical applications after holding his own lecture in virtual reality to promote his last book, 2030: How Today’s Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything. Unfortunately for Guillén, Perennials arrived after the metaverse was revealed as a hollow marketing trick. The crypto-based metaverse platform Decentraland, launched in 2020 and eventually valued at over $1.3 billion, had just a few dozen active daily users by October 2022. “Far from being worth trillions of dollars, the Metaverse turned out to be worth absolutely bupkus,” wrote Kate Wagner in The Nation.

Turning from higher education to the kinds of jobs available to workers, Guillén favorably notes that “before the decade of the 2020s is over, there will be more gig workers…above the age of sixty than below the age of thirty.” For him, “the gig economy has the potential of utterly transforming life for seniors.” He’s correct, but not in the way he imagines. Gig workers are exempt from many federal labor standards; their daily lives, as exposé after exposé has revealed, are transient and difficult. Guillén marvels that older gig workers are also often the ones performing the most backbreaking tasks. “You would think that they’re picking the administrative, customer service work that doesn’t require the physical work,” says an executive at a tech company that places short-term workers with companies, “but they actually do a lot of physical work like fulfillment warehousing and general labor.”

While the common culture between generations has largely eroded, our common concerns remain. More than 8 million student-loan borrowers—often stereotyped as millennials—are 50 and older, owing a combined $400 billion in debt. That same age group now makes up half of homeless single adults, and those over 65 were the only demographic to see an increase in poverty in 2022. The majority of baby boomers and older believe that climate change should be a top priority and that abortion should be legal.

If anything were to have led to the widespread intergenerational conflict Guillén imagines, it might have been the recent wave of student protests in support of Palestinians in Gaza. In April, thousands began occupying their campus lawns and buildings across the country, calling on their universities to divest from Israel. It’s easy to frame these protests as a fight between the young and the old, but it wouldn’t be correct. Students cited the tactics and lessons of anti-Vietnam War organizers in 1968 and the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980’s, and were often joined and defended by their much older professors. Faculty at The New School, for example, even set up an encampment of their own after student protesters were arrested. While mainstream media coverage describes Palestine as a solely youth issue, a permanent ceasefire is supported by young and old voters alike.

Yet every argument in The Perennials also rests on Guillén’s prediction of a “seemingly never-ending increase in life expectancy,” which has steadily declined in the United States, hitting its lowest point in almost 20 years. “Among wealthy nations, the United States in recent decades went from the middle of the pack to being an outlier,” notes an October examination of the subject in The Washington Post. “And it continues to fall further and further behind.”

It’s especially curious that, amid all his prescriptions, Guillén fails to mention Medicare for All—arguably the ultimate postgenerational proposal in contemporary politics—even while attributing the high life expectancy in Italy and Spain to their “widely available primary healthcare.” It’s no coincidence that Medicare for All was the signature policy of octogenarian Bernie Sanders, whose strong cross-generational appeal made him the twice-favorite candidate of voters between 18 and 29. In a society of Perennials, surely everyone—not just those over 65—should have guaranteed healthcare?

The structures that have come to organize and dominate modern life are far from compatible with self-fulfillment and security, but Guillén’s fantasy only entrenches them. Whereas Karl Marx imagined liberated individuals able “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner,” Guillén’s Perennials are software developers as adolescents, college students in middle age, and Uber drivers as senior citizens. For someone comparing intergenerational conflict to the two world wars, Guillén also betrays a curious lack of urgency, reminding readers to “be pragmatic.” Why propose a profound reordering of society and then tell your readers to hold their horses?

“The trouble with the existing system of retirement is that it makes people rely on some combination of Social Security, employer pensions, and personal savings or assets,” Guillén writes, “as opposed to empowering them to be in control of the last two decades of their lives.” Through the warped lens of business-school-speak, gig work is seen as liberation. In this way, “elderly empowerment” follows the pattern of many right-wing projects—the anti-abortion movement, the “right to work,” school choice—by providing a positive patina to a questionable agenda. The underlying austerity—in this case, privatizing Social Security and raising the retirement age—is much more unpopular. By equating the end of retirement with freedom, Guillén paints a stick orange and pretends it’s a carrot. But the trick works better on a willing audience, such as marketing firms and corporate executives. For everyone else, it might not prove so attractive.