Generation X is sick of your bullsh*t.
emptyage.com
emptyage.com
We live in a very interesting time. Photography has now been around for over 150 years. Sound movies are close to 100. Videos of average Joe and his family are coming up on 40 or 50 years.
What does that mean? It means that instead of just hearing stories from dad and gradnpop, we have pretty immediate access to several generations -- and we can hear them in their own words, when they were young. Not some kind of age-filtered reminiscence.
And guess what? All of them felt like they were the first to discover sex, or drugs, or protesting, or making a world a better place, or empowering the common man -- the list of commonalities goes on and on. Each one whined about how terrible things were when they came of age, each one had crazy ideas that were based a lot more in emotion than reality, and each one managed somehow to grow up and make their way anyway.
I think it's pretty cool, but it also kind of has to suck to be in your 20s, 'cause a lot of it has all been done before. So when I look at the Occupy folks, I think it's awesome, even though I have no idea what they want aside from some kind of fuzzy vision of a Utopian world that's probably impossible. That's fine with me -- the hippies didn't really make much sense either, but they were mostly some really nice folks.
I wonder if each generation will now feel an obligation to "out do" the previous ones, now that they can see and hear the previous ones protest. And I wonder how the older folks will react. Will it all be "get off my lawn!" like this guy? Or will they just smile and pat the 20-somethings on the head (which is probably a more enraging reaction, really)
200 years from now we'll be able to "talk" to a dozen generations. This experiment will just keep getting neater and neater.
Basic infrastructure investment (high speed rail, broadband, healthcare, education) as economic stimulus, paying down deficits by raising the taxes on the wealthiest, a reintroduction of Glass-Steagall and other investment/banking regulations, a scaling back of militarism and empire, a crackdown on corruption and collusion between corporations and government (ie, hiring agribusiness ceo's to head government watchdog agencies), and a broadening of the debate.
I realize that the media has not done a great job of making these demands known. These are not my demands (I'd choose something considerably more sweeping and radical), but I have a hard time considering them utopian or fuzzy. In fact, they're all so immediately doable, some countries have been at it for half a century.
So, I get a little defensive when I hear that the Occupy movement is all pie-in-the-sky. It's actually a movement based almost entirely on low hanging fruit.
Sure, some of them want more sane things like banking reform. And so do I. And I can empathize with that. But the group is larger than just that, and crazyier. So I get what the author means when he says he doesn't know what they want other than some utopic thing, because as a whole, it's pretty schizophrenic and nonsensical and impractical.
There are too many people out there for too many reasons for it to be a clear and coherant movement. Which is it's strength and weakness. With no clear solid one true path/plan it can continue to draw people from all over the place and amass a much larger group of protesters than otherwise might be possible, which is good in so much as more people is more attention getting, but it's bad in that there is no clear voice or opinion. It means something different to everyone. So it's going to be hard to accomplish too much.
Is this really that hard to understand?
Ironically, this also happens to be the underlying theme of the Tea Party movement.
Or rather, that's what you get if you ask a sufficiently clever member of either movement to strip down their movement into the most universally-popular motherhood statement they can think of.
Succinct, unburdened, and who really could disagree (aside from corporations and the media appendages who love them).
Politics aside, though I may agree, I share the same sentiments as Honan. As an X'er, I've grown quite annoyed with the baby-boomer generation and their unending selfishness and gluttony. If the WWII generation was the greatest generation, as Brokaw put it, then the baby-boomers are the worst since the Dark Ages. For all their high-minded idealism they've created a society, at least in US, that is more divisive than it's ever been.
I'm not saying that good things were not accomplished and I'm not saying that they didn't push the world forward in some ways. They have. They've also managed to destroy the world's economy and leave it in debt for at least another two generations.
Regarding Millenials, I'm starting to get the same feelings. I'm reminded of the hilarious segment of Louis C.K. on Conan regarding technology: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LkusicUL2s
I've been waiting for a substantial book to come out on this subject. Browsing through Amazon.com I don't see much that really nails it. It's a cultural thing too- for instance I see the whole Leno/Conan debacle as a generational conflict that the Baby Boomers won because of sheer numbers and technological dispositions.
Instead there are a lot of books about how the Baby Boomers "are changing everything...again" in retirement.
EDIT TO ADD: Obviously the Occupy Wall Street protests are another manifestation of this with BBs' refrain of "what are they protesting?"
Note: remember your history. There was this little jungle war thingie in Vietnam (started by the Boomer parents) that sorta pissed people off and divided the country. The 2006 election showed that in full glory, leading many to comment that post-Nam people should run. And, for the most part, they did.
Boomers were the hippies, but their time spawned Quebec nationalism here in Canada, and probably had a little to do with the Prague Spring, ...
But y'see, this is the problem with these sorts of generalizations. The vast majority of boomers weren't hippies. The vast majority of them were sensible people who finished their education, got jobs, got married, raised families, and lived like people have always lived.
Similarly, the so-called Generations X and Y and the millenials and however you want to divide us up. Most of us have been doing the same thing. We all grow up, we all get jobs, we all have children. Half of us wind up voting one way, half of us wind up voting the other way.
That's not to deny that there are certainly cultural changes over the years, these are obvious to everybody. But a few thousand people making a lot of noise in the direct sight of some TV cameras isn't a cultural movement, it's just Al Capone dancing the Charleston on top of a flagpole.
Ehh, the current unsustainable debt binge goes back a lot further than the Baby Boomers. Remember, the first baby boomer president was Clinton.
I'd blame it largely on FDR (born 1882) and Lyndon Johnson (born 1908) and their contemporaries. They created the unsustainable welfare state in the US.
If human beings had a mating season once a decade, then this "generation X/Y/$foo" shit would make sense.
If we can't make sense of the past, how can we reasonably believe we have a chance of making sense of our own lives?
Of course in actuality, we can do neither of these things. The problem is if everyone sincerely believed this, we wouldn't get anything done. This is a big part of why religion continues to be so popular.
History has always been a constant stream, but you're ability to sample it with a certain frequency diminishes as you "look" back into the past. The historical, archaeological/material, and memorial, if you will, records all become less preserved, and your relatively flawless memory of the time you've lived will of course lead you to see the the time you've lived in as happening more quickly.
Disclosure: my background is in archaeology/anthropology.
Sorry for the rant, but this is a meme that I see all the time and really bothers me.
As far as the OP goes, this article is asinine and meaningless. As a "millenial," I honestly don't give a shit about whether I have it worse or better than some X'er; what I do care about is a sane and just world.
We'll continue to fight for that, thank you very much, while the OP continues to feel self-righteous.
You're complaining that the concept isn't "Generation 5993"--the point is that we all have all generations in us, but those of us who were in school when 9/11 happened have, as a group, a different perspective. Just because someone's a baby boomer doesn't mean they won't feel like Generation X every once in a while.
The major effect it has is as a self-fulfilling prophecy: if "Generation $CHAR"ers do have stuff in common, its because they've been told that they have, over and over again for their entire lives.
As I said in my other comment, the need to group ourselves in this way is a necessary social instinct. However much we have internalised neoliberal doctrine since the cold war, we are profoundly not just a country full of separate individuals, as this debate shows. You cannot have a country full of individuals, just as you cannot have a tribe full of individuals. We have to identify with each other or we will not survive. At the same time, we have to distinguish between each other or we will not prosper.
I am going to stop this rant here, because I am not an anthropologist, and I realise that I am in danger of looking like I am pretending to be one.
Because of the many different factors in someone's life (like socio-economic class, race, place of upbringing, parenting, genetics) these "generations" encompass many diverse experiences than can't accurately generalized.
"I don't know how they can take spaces away from us, I need to park near the office, people like me fought for things like car parking spaces, I bet you've never seen a strike, you're so spoiled and privileged and you've got no life experience, but damn it, I won't let this rest, it's our right to park where we want..."
And people think we have entitlement issues? I have to say, though, I'm twenty-six next month, and I never thought I'd ever have anyone rant about "young people like you" at me again. Flattering, huh?
I'm assuming that it will be similar when I'm in my 40's as well, thinking those 30-year-olds don't know nothin'.
It's a far cry from the attitude of a lot of people in the older generations, that the workplace and the economy somehow owes them something, like a job, like a car, like a big house, like a space in the parking lot with their name on it.
There are people of all ages and generations with a chip on their shoulder and false sense of entitlement, and then there are the people who recognise that no one owes them anything, unless they earn it.
(I guess I feel old because I'm twenty-six and about to emigrate to the U.S. and get married. That makes me feel like a big boy!)
At some point politicians will collectively be spending as much on political campaigns as we spend on funding our military. Ads for the superbowl will become a new holy festival (a la Yom Kippur) on a national secular level. Bodies of the dead who freeze outside (due to lack of room in shelters for the growing number of poor) in the new conservative-compatible modified global climate will be carted off in wheel barrows to neighborhood dump sites which eventually get taken to and burned in mass graves in New Jersey. Nobody notices the smell there.
Even though things are bad now, my feeling is the people of this nation will take a lot more punishment before pushing back and saying "NO MORE." It takes a bus full of kids getting hit by some asshole speeding to work for a stop sign to get installed. But I think we as a nation will need a much larger car to slam into us to make us finally put some national stop signs in place. I mean, shit, this is the first time in American history that we've had an economic collapse and no new regulation has resulted. The politicians on the right are demanding less regulation. People are so apathetic about preventing this in the future that they're allowing politicians to make it worse.
I don't know about you but i'm stocking up on canned food.
We should all be wearing a f%!#ng albatross around our necks in the real world, to symbolize the metaphorical albatross we all wear for killing the dreams we had 2 decades ago. Yay us.
We did not have the power. At that point it was in the hands of the boomers. I'm not someone to pass the buck but I consider the blame to be laid squarely on the shoulders of the boomers.
>We should all be wearing a f%!#ng albatross around our necks in the real world, to symbolize the metaphorical albatross we all wear for killing the dreams we had 2 decades ago. Yay us.
From my perspective, there was no idealism. That's what made us X'ers. I, as well as others, became totally disillusioned and apathetic to what society had to offer.
I disagree with music. There is great music being made though we have to search for it now as the Millenials are now dominating the scene with some of the worst pop music I've ever heard. Pretty soon there will be an awakening similar to 1992.
Ah, I always thought that was one inaccurate stereotype about X'ers. I didn't see that among most of my peers anyway. I got more of a "we live in a fucked up world, what are we going to do about it, or at least let's throw one fuck of a party" vibe, not a "we live in a fucked up world... oh well, fuck it" vibe. But maybe I'm just one of the older members of "Gen X" and have a skewed perspective. I, for example, never associated with grunge music, flannel shirts, or thought of myself as stereo-typically lazy, apathetic and unmotivated.
> There is great music being made though we have to search for it now
Yeah, but that's arguably true of any time period. Even the 90's churned out some good music if you looked past the grunge phenomenon at the beginning, the hip-hop phase in the middle, the pop-country era, and the rap-rock stuff at the end.
> Pretty soon there will be an awakening similar to 1992.
I have mixed feelings about the changes in the music scene in the early 90's. If you're at all referring to the emergence of grunge and "alternative", then I hope it never awakens again. ;-) That said, the metal of the 80's had gotten to popular and too commercial and being "killed" by grunge / alternative was the best thing that could have happened to metal, IMO.
>I got more of a "we live in a fucked up world, what are we going to do about it, or at least let's throw one fuck of a party" vibe, not a "we live in a fucked up world... oh well, fuck it" vibe.
I've always attributed the former to the 60s movement and the latter to Generation X.
>I have mixed feelings about the changes in the music scene in the early 90's. If you're at all referring to the emergence of grunge and "alternative", then I hope it never awakens again.
I hate the labels of grunge and such. It was about when good music dominated the consciousness and overcame 80s pop music (the lousy kind) and hair band rock. There are some bands who were considered metal and their legacy continues to survive, such as Metallica. I am glad to be rid of the Motley Crues of the world.
LOL... Motley Crue are my favorite band. Guess we're not going to align to closely on the music preference thing. :-)
That said, some of the stuff billed as "metal" by the very early 1990's (Steelheart, Nelson, etc.) was either just plain bad music, or - at best - decent pop music, but definitely not metal. Metal went back underground after the grunge/alt revolution, and that serves me fine. If you dig deep, there was a lot of great metal music made during the 90's... you just didn't (mostly) hear it on the radio or hear anybody else talking about it... which is the way things should be, as far as I can tell.
Anyway, the fact that I was, and remain, a metal-head is probably one major way in which I never fit the typical Gen-X mold. Not sure what that means, but, hey... whatever.
Now, about that party...
That being said we aren't done yet either. Just as there was a temporary recovery between mid-1980 and mid-1981 we've technically been out of recession for 16 months and things aren't look great for the future.
"More revenue solves all known problems", so presumably without a magical market that you can depend upon to increase your money faster than 1% a year, problems may be harder to solve.
I think for the most part these Generation ___ binnings are arbitrary, but there's something to be said about how the Baby Boomers generation has shaped the U.S. since the 60s and will for decades to come as they retire and put a strain on the social security and healthcare systems.
Economically, the Bush years weren't the worst. It has kept going into Obama and he hasn't done himself any favors by not attacking the problem. The energy on health care was a waste (no real input cost reduction) and the jobs bill has some pain in the butt flaws (yes, I read both - still wondering about some of the rule making).
Look back at Nixon/Ford/Carter for some truly epic problems with government (particularly the Presidency and I mean economically not the scandal). Wage and price controls are very scary. Mostly we are more inline with 1920-30s and we don't have WWII to pull us out and change the landscape.
We need to deal with the problems and unpaid liabilities that have accumulated by the Baby Boomers era. We also got to stop people from thinking a home is an investment. It isn't. In these times, its an anchor around your neck. ND has 15,000 open jobs in the oil fields alone. If your mobile, these are high paying and many are not physical labor. Heck, the McDonald's is paying $15/hour.
Of course, there are some things that hit me in the right spot. I still remember when I first learned to play Dwarf Fortress, when I read Chinese Takeout over a weekend. They're just rare.
At the same time, I sometimes think this discontent comes not from any kind of true hatred, but instead a longing for the ideal, or at least serious advancement toward it. It seems like our society is horribly slow to advance, and often that feels due to the size and control of older generations. (And my contemporaries who've bought into things as they are.)
Eventually I decided that was the point of the book, you weren't supposed to like them. I'm still not sure though.
If anyone could enlighten me to what on earth the point of that book was, then I'd be appreciative. I guess it could be simply a portrait of a certain type of person at a certain time in history, but it doesn't seem to say anything about them. Maybe that was the point, Coupland was trying to show that these people were utterly irrelevant and pointless? As I say, enlighten me.
Maybe I was just in a particularly philistinic mood when I read it. Thinking about it, my dislike for it may stem from the fact that myself and my friends are in an extremely comparable situation to the characters economically and with respect to our relationship to society (except my friends cant even get mcjobs), yet we take almost the opposite attitude to life. I recognise their problems, but am appalled by their solutions.
(For reference, I'm in my twenties.)
I'm trying hard not to come off as acerbic, but maybe it's because you've taken two pieces of fiction and tried to cast them on an entire generation? I never read Coupland's book, but the characters from Reality Bites reminded me of exactly zero people I knew.
a) "Waah, life sucks, I can't get everything I want", and
b) "This is somehow a problem unique to my generation"
both of which are universal thoughts held by the more introspective and less thoughtful members of each generation.
I've never actually seen Reality Bites -- too early for me. But I've seen "Fight Club". Wow, has that movie aged badly.
"We have no great war, no great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives." Awww freaking diddums, Mr Durden. We have four wars and a depression, wanna swap?
Right now, Generation X just wants a beer and to be left alone. It just
wants to sit here quietly and think for a minute. Can you just do that,
okay? It knows that you are so very special and so very numerous, but
can you just leave it alone? Just for a little bit?I can't think of a worse sentiment than to want to take some time and relax. But hey, here's a plus: maybe I'm younger than I thought.
I guess I always saw it as a result of unhappiness, and expected that unhappiness to eventually manifest into anger and action, rather than just a self-righteous bitterness.
It would probably go something like "Oh, rubbish."
I would argue that "X" hasn't ended. I was born in 1983 and I don't feel much of a generational separation between myself (1983) and people 10 years older. But I think there's a huge separation between people born in 1945 vs. '55, and also '55 vs. '65. This came into the clear at my wedding, when I could sense "generational sameness" in conversations among people of radically different ages (from 3 to 84). I feel like I'm "the same age" as people who are 23 (18's different, but that's because of inexperience) or 38, but age 55 and 65 are (generationally speaking) very different, even now.
My favorite shows are Mad Men and Breaking Bad. It's best to watch them both. They're eros and thanatos, the bookends of the American Era.
I think the "X" distinction is about coming of age in what I call Tidal Crisis, which started around 1970 and never ended. Things aren't getting worse-- on average, taking a global perspective, even the 2000s was a great decade-- but progress is uneven and separations are becoming vast. It's a national morale crisis that threatens (IMO) the existence of the U.S. as a cohesive entity. We have pockets of underemployment and clusters of overemployment, and I don't need to say anything about the rich-poor gap that's now tearing the country apart. That's the backdrop for X. But there's also an internal component, which is about having the courage and passion to do the right thing anyway, in spite of a damaged environment. This is why Gen X produced great artists and also (I think) why so many of them are great parents.
You can't be serious. Most of the Xers and (especially) later didn't work their asses off. They worked at the grocery store in high school, not to help support their families, but to pay for gas in vehicles that they didn't really need that their parents bought them. We're two spoiled generations.
> I would argue that "X" hasn't ended. I was born in 1983 and I don't feel much of a generational separation between myself (1983) and people 10 years older. But I think there's a huge separation between people born in 1945 vs. '55, and also '55 vs. '65. This came into the clear at my wedding, when I could sense "generational sameness" in conversations among people of radically different ages (from 3 to 84). I feel like I'm "the same age" as people who are 23 (18's different, but that's because of inexperience) or 38, but age 55 and 65 are (generationally speaking) very different, even now.
That's because you're in the middle of that age range. When you're around 30, someone 10 years older isn't really in a drastically different place in life. They work jobs, they have kids at home, they live in fairly nice houses (they might even still be paying student loans). Day to day there's very little different. Ditto for 23-year-olds. They are out of college and working a job, a few of them are having kids. They're at an earlier level of career development, but not by that much. You were there very recently.
On the other hand, you look at 18-year-olds and they seem stupid, because they are (so were we at that age). And they're just starting college. You can't really relate to that any more. You look at 50-year-olds, and they've got kids in college. And they're managers at work now. And the age gap is large enough that it doesn't disappear into the background. But there is no real generational divide. It's a continuum. Sure, you feel like you can relate to 23-year-olds and 40-year-olds. You could date someone in either of those age buckets and it's not really weird. The 40-year-old probably feels a lot more "generational divide" talking to a 23-year-old than you do. The 40-year-old could be the parent of the 23-year-old.
From Wikipedia:
>>Generation X, commonly abbreviated to Gen X, is the generation born after the Western post–World War II baby boom ended.[1] While there is no universally agreed upon time frame,[2] the term generally includes people born in the 1960s through the late '70s.