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No generation in the history of humankind has ever been so powerful, so rich, so healthy, so long-lived. Ours contains the greatest cluster of 65-year-olds that have ever existed in human history. The term "late-life crisis" is being invented just for us. We are fit. We use our bus passes to go to the gym. The law was changed so that we can keep working.

True, the silver pound adds billions to the economy and we have property and savings. Of course, there are those among us who are poor and ill. But as a demographic, we ain't doing too badly. In short, we boomers are not about to go gentle into that good night. But unless we find and make ourselves a new space, the next generations will be out in the cold, unable to get started.

The ongoing row about the absence of older women on TV, which has enveloped everybody from Selina Scott and Joan Bakewell to Anne Robinson and David Dimbleby, is yet another baby boomer cri de coeur.

We boomers don't want to take on the fact that humans are hard-wired to prefer a young female face. It's cruel and unfair and unequal, but this preference is a hangover from harder times; times when it was all about survival of the species; times when women did not get old because we died first – in childbirth, from starvation, as a result of war and general brutality. Our species is still evolving a brain template that takes in the older female face. Of course, it's right to kick ageism and sexism out of the 21st century. But boomers are left with one dilemma: there isn't enough room at the inn.

When I asked a prominent political journalist recently why pollsters aren't interested in the views of under-40s on immigration, the economy, the NHS, crime, Europe, issues that will affect them, his reply was simple: "They don't vote."

So, instead of encouraging the future to get involved, we boomers are out there doing what we've always done since we were old enough to talk: busily and noisily shaping the agenda. An agenda for a future – let's be frank here – in which we will have little or no part to play.

It's the young who know which way the world is headed, because they are shaping it. I see David Cameron, under 50, trying to hammer home the reality that if the Conservative Party doesn't speak to the next generations, then it'll be out of power for another 20 years. Barack Obama understood this in 2008, and again in 2012. That's one of the reasons he won.

I see far too many young people, bright, eager, aware of how the world is moving forward, knowing how it will be, simply unable to earn a good living. Boomers are, in many instances, still in place, unwilling to make way for the succession. And yet, here we are, right in the midst of a digital revolution as profound as the invention of the printing press. Like that revolution, the new technology is dividing the world into the "natives" and "colonists", the ones who know the terrain and those who don't. Social networking, in particular, is creating new realities, new ways of thinking.

A boy of 15 has created an app to detect various cancers. We boomers should be asking: how can we best aid him; help him grow, mature, produce? And how can we encourage those that we cannot understand?

Why can't we give students a 21st- century education system, one designed around talents, capabilities, interests, passions, entrepreneurship, to replace the 20th-century one –whose roots lie largely in the 19th century – that educated us? The world is moving on.

We can think that it's all about the "college kids" running things, as a Ukip ad stated. But "college kids" are too busy trying to pay back their university fees while working for free in order to enter their chosen professions. They borrow money from the Bank of Mum and Dad, which most will never repay, and continue to sleep in their childhood beds while they wait, wait to become grown-ups. The term "generational theft" is usually applied to the economy, but its deeper meaning is us. We boomers are the thieves, the stealers of the future.

I'm not talking about throwing away the middle-aged, the elderly. Our human potential, the possibilities for us boomers, is still vast, still necessary. But now we must begin to Do Something Else. For a start, we can begin to relay our values to the next generation. They might not buy them, but we can try. We need to mentor more; we need to make pathways; we need to ask; and we need to listen.

There is no guarantee that the best of the West – human freedom itself; freedom of speech; the rule of law; equality for all; free trade; freedom of and from religion – will continue. But they may continue if we, through our example, embody them. Just as our parents did. When in the aftermath of what must have seemed the end of the world to many of them, they chose the future. They made us.

Now we must choose the future, too. We can do this by continuing to be the pioneers we have always been: by showing how our increasingly long-lived species can be old and still be of use. The first step towards this will happen when we, with the courage we have always shown, begin to step aside.