For a long time now, especially with the election, I've been hearing about the effects of millennials and boomers on the political landscape - but pretty much no one was talking about gen x.
Right now they would run the age range of 35 to 50, a pretty politically active age range, and have a sharp anti-establishment personality.
I'm really curious about how their generational cohort effected recent elections but haven't really found any writing on the subject. Anyone have any articles or experiences to share?
Several of us are Generation X. Some of us are even conscious of the fact that we're generation X. A few of us can even opine on what Generation X is, was and shall be - and when we squint just right and purse our lips we can even do it from a position of "we're not necessarily better than you, just older." If you'd like to see where most of this bullshit comes from, it's Strauss-Howe Generational Theory which is basically history-as-Kabbalah. Strauss and Howe called us "thirteeners" about two weeks before Douglas Coupland called us "Generation X." Strauss and Howe, by the way, are the ones who saddled you with "millennial." The paradigms within are amusing and about as true as most horoscopes; S&H figure there have been six "saeculums" in the history of the US (which they trace back to like 1500 or some shit) and they've only been wrong twice. Those two points being the two most recent. So take it with a salt lick. But also keep in mind that people who should know better follow these idiots like a thirsty mule. Here's the thing: There are lots of Boomers. There are lots of Millennials. There were comparatively few Silents; they gave birth to comparatively few GenX. And, as is appropriate, the Boomers heaped massive piles of scorn upon Generation X until we invented the Internet, took the Nasdaq to 5,000 and in the space of a few short years shifted the Boomers from "masters of the universe" to "aging demographic that will bankrupt Social Security." Boomers got rich buying GenX stocks; GenX transformed their workplace, their entertainment and their culture into something unrecognizable. Let's say you were born in '58. Here it is, '93 and you're 35 years old. You rent VHS from Blockbuster, have a home and a work phone, watch HBO and Cinemax (maybe), and type on a computer that probably doesn't have a GUI. Sales are announced in the newspaper, which you read every morning, and all shopping centers around the Mall. You and all your friends listen to the same music because you hear it on the radio or see it on MTV and TV is a place of actors and variety shows. Now it's 2003. You're 45 years old. You get red Netflix envelopes in the mail, have at least a RAZR (and possibly a Blackberry or Windows phone), rarely watch television and type on a computer that is literally connected to the Universe. You buy everything from Amazon, music has balkanized into a million subgenres nobody knows because of Napster, you've been through American Idol, Big Brother, The Real World, The Amazing Race and even The Joe Schmo Show and fucking Steve Jobs is trying to convince you to put all your vinyl on this fucking thing. And if you were born in '58, that shit mostly happened to you. And if you were born in '88, that shit was the lay of the fucking land that you grew up with and it's second fucking nature. And it was mostly built by Generation X. Obviously, this is a generalization. Steve Jobs? Boomer. Bill Gates? Boomer. Generation X didn't invent computers, Generation X made them ubiquitous and changed the economy to reflect that. So the Boomer journalists tend to be on one side of that divide, not eager to talk about how out of touch they are with the people who actually control the economy now. Millennial journalists live in a world created largely by GenX and didn't much interact with the folx that weren't their parents' age but also weren't theirs. And Generation X has never really rallied around our identity at all. I mean, we got Reality Bites, we got Singles, we got the ouvre of John Hughes. But half of our childhood was claimed by Boomers and half of our adulthood has been claimed by Millennials so once the dotcom boom and bust shut boomers up forever, the press has been blissfully disinterested in us as a generation. My perspective, anyway.
Goddamnit. It's late and I have studying to do tomorrow (today), but it's the weekend and I already read and liked the first link when it was posted... Now that I've read 3/4 of them, this question is sort of tangential. Hipsters on Foodstamps. Great article, even through to the end which makes me scroll back to the top: Perhaps the amount of time I've been awake is wearing on my ability to pull this all together, but the conclusion here is supported by... well, college educated hipsters relying food stamps? As an example of a B.A.'s lack of utility? A B.A. as a gateway to a woman's relationship being ridiculous? I must be missing a lot, since the case I'm reading is "everything you can get at a college, you can find elsewhere" (B.A. representing certification of what 'you can get'). Hell, if this is all true what am I even doing in college. Going to try and sleep on this one. More than likely going to come back and add an edit if I gain any clarity pre-maturely.In other words, the choice to major in English was predicated on information she received from multiple sources like schools and TV-- sources I will collectively call the Matrix-- that every generation does better than the last, that there was a safety net of sorts, a bailout at the end, that future happiness was inevitable, and so we return to economics: the general name for that safety net is credit. America was the land of the minimum monthly payment. And if this analogy isn't clear enough for you, let me reverse it: the ability of the economy to offer English as a major required a massive subsidy to make you feel like $20k/yr was the same as free. If you had to pay it up front, you'd either be an engineer or $80k richer. That subsidy is now worthless, not because the money doesn't exist but because the bailout at the end, e.g the four options I suggested were operational 1977-1999 which guaranteed the payments would be made, won't help.
Fact: college is a waste, but we haven't yet hit that point in society where we can bypass it. So we have to pass through another generation of massive college debt. How to pull in the suckers in? Answer: these articles. By getting you to say, "these hipsters should be able to get jobs because they are college graduates!" you are saying, "college is worth something." It isn't. But by directing your hate towards hipsters, you are protecting the system against change.
Two things about TLP: 1) He's bipolar and only wrote this stuff when he was manic (my guess). 2) He uses the lots-of-words sleight of hand in order to substitute one argument for another. Here, he's using two definitions of "worthless" interchangeably: On the one hand, college is "worthless" because that degree won't help you get a job. On the other hand, college is "worthless" because it's life experience that really teaches you what you need to know, yadda yadda. To the former, any college degree is better than no college degree in the majority of fields you might care to go into. To the latter, life experience and college are not mutually exclusive fields. Here's the real issue: Francis Fukuyama wrote a book in 1992 called The End Of History and the Last Man. The idea was, well, communism lost which meant there wasn't anything more to talk about. From here on out it'd be nothing but champagne, caviar and free market capitalism. Which obviously lasted not quite until Serbia. We look back now and mock. Boomers, though? Grew up in what we're now calling The Golden Age of Capitalism. Shit was never going to stop getting better. The future was The Jetsons. Your kids would live better than you, theirs would live better than them. From a Boomer perspective, mom'n'dad lived through the depression, they grew up in Levittowns, pensions were de rigeur and mom'n'dad had the phattest retirement the world had ever seen and the idea that the future wasn't so bright was anathema. Particularly when it was revealed by those annoying kids that weren't yours but were in the way of yours. Slackers. Malcontents. "Generation X."
I was going to say there's a weird dynamic in my head where, on one side, the Xers are these "fuck you" anti-establishment punks and on the other side they are these "fuck you, pay me" pro business Gordon Gecko's. I can't say that because as I was typing I realized they followed the basic common denominator "fuck you". Also, side note, I hate it when people complain about their generation being worse off than the one before it on a magic light box that connects them through time and space to near infinite knowledge.
I talked a lot of smack up there about Strauss & Howe but I'm glad I read it. They make the point that every Western generation that follows yours is full of fuck you anti-establishment punks (static establishment cultures such as the Ottoman Empire or Confucian China excepted) and their "generational theory" makes an attempt at explaining the shape and color of their anti-establishment punkitude. They make some broad, sweeping and non-falsifiable claims but they also point out that if you rebel against your parents you're going to end up assuming your grandparents' values. The Chinese Zodiac is about as empirically defensible, with a length of 12 years. I guess the basis of that is the orbital period of Jupiter (who knew?) while Strauss and Howe pin the "saeculum" at 80 years because "that's the average lifetime of a person." NVM that "the average lifetime of a person"... well...
I read the fourth turning in college, but I'll have to take another look at it. Though the idea of every generation resembling their parents and rebelling against the gen before is really interesting. The first wave of the "homeland" generation is turning 16 and it'll be interesting to see how they emulate xers and rebel against millennials.
More specifically: rebelling against their parents and emulating their grandparents. So they should be rebelling against GenX and emulating the Silent Generation. Although I dunno. That's my kid, me, and my parents. And none of us are as obnoxious and lame as the 'boomers.
When the GenX brand was coined, it originally didn't include me and my generation. I guess it does now. (1968) As they say, history is written by the victors, and it sure as fuck wasn't us. So I never identified with all the GenX "slacker" shit. The whole Linklater thing was for the snivelly little shits who went to private schools and complained that mom and dad only gave them a BMW when they wanted a Porsche. They wore the "slacker" badge proudly, while living off their trust funds. The rest of us watched the world go to shit as the law schools filled up suddenly and the world was overrun with bored unemployed lawyers trying to find people to sue, so they could support their coke habits. There was a time in my life when you could get in a fight at a bar, bloody each other's noses, and then buy each other a beer and laugh about it. Now everyone has a lawyer on speed dial for every offense, perceived and real. My generation couldn't go to college because we wanted to work with personal computers, but the schools were still teaching Fortran and AS/400. So we went out and invented shit, and sold it for a couple of bucks (to someone with a better lawyer), and now we are your middle managers and VPs, and a lot of us don't have the degrees we claim to have. Wanna know what it was like? Get copies of Mondo 2000, the first three years of Wired, cruise the rec._____ section of Usenet. Read Gibson's Neuromancer. Read Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message" and "Understanding Media". He was wrong, but what is important is that we thought he was right at the time. He was our god. (And no "slacker GenXer" will know who he is.) Watch Repo Man and Paris, Texas and Buckaroo Banzai and Blue Velvet and Hellraiser and the Hitchhiker. Done with the nostalgia now. Just don't ever call me "GenX" again, if you wanna live to see the next day. ;-)
I've been punched in the nose enough to wonder if this is a "get off my lawn" statement. It's interesting to hear about how proud Xers (or your nebulous non-generation) are of being the creators of things, especially the internet. I wasn't aware that was a theme, but it seems so strong.There was a time in my life when you could get in a fight at a bar, bloody each other's noses, and then buy each other a beer and laugh about it. Now everyone has a lawyer on speed dial for every offense, perceived and real.
Good question, and I wondered if it was a "get off my lawn" statement when I wrote it. But it isn't. It's a pride in that my generation took personal responsibility for our actions. (I can't speak to other generations, since I am not one of them,) If we fucked up, we owned it, and dealt with the consequences. Slipped on the ice? Well, I shoulda been more careful/worn the right shoes, etc. Crashed into someone else's car? Alright, my bad. I can't blame the manufacturer for "unintended acceleration". If the car accelerated, I shoulda grabbed the key and turned it off. Etc. There is an instant inclination now to look around and see who we can blame for our failures, because no matter how stupid it sounds, there's always a lawyer around with no shame who is willing to take the case. Prior to the explosion of lawyers in the late 1980's, you'd come to a lawyer with a stupid case, and he'd say, "This is stupid. Get out of my office." Now he says, "Ya know, I think I can find a loophole and get you some settlement money." I realize this sounds like a "get off my lawn" argument, but there are all kinds of articles like this one from the LA Times during the early 1990's about the glut of lawyers entering the profession and the explosion of frivolous tort cases. All those lawyers needed to validate their existence, so they made up reasons by taking stupid cases.
RU Sirius has been very slowly uploading stuff to the Internet Archive. No Mondo yet, but a few issues of Reality Hackers.Get copies of Mondo 2000
Nobody ever gave a shit about my generation, it seems. I'm on the very old-end of this range. I was the last high school class that had shop class. The last to have a World History requirement. The last to have mechanical typing class as a part of the graduating requirements (they removed the typing classes and offered computers as an elective the year after I graduated). I am also in the generation of men now most likely to kill themselves. Not sure what that adds to the conversation, but fuck 2016, right? Speaking of silent generations, not a single vet from Korea ever became President. Carter was post Korea and he was closest. W was technically a VietNam vet although he was never over there. Us X'ers are not the first glossed over generation, won't be the last, and we will end up a footnote in a history book somewhere long after we are all dead. The Millennials will even be the last people alive from the 1900's next century so we don't even get that. Will be interesting to see who we put up to be President or if the US goes straight to the "Y" and Millennial generations.
I have no idea how old you are... I had shop class and had to take World History, but I'm too young to have ever even used a typewriter. Hell, I'm not sure I've ever seen a mechanical typewriter in real life. I was the last high school class that had shop class. The last to have a World History requirement. The last to have mechanical typing class as a part of the graduating requirements (they removed the typing classes and offered computers as an elective the year after I graduated).
Shop class. Wood Shop. Auto Shop. Civics. World History. Social Studies. Typing Class. Computer Class. Lab classes where things actually exploded and people got burned with toxic substances. Shit, Music Class is history now, too. Now kids are so dopey that can't even tell real news from fake news or advertisements. Dammit. My rocking chair is broken again. Guess I'll order a new one on my smartphone from Amazon.... :-)
Are those classes actually not offered anymore in schools you know of ? In my high school the auto shop was connected to the wood shop which was connected to the computer lab. We had a house building program and civics is a requirement. Shit in grade 8 this one girl started a fire in our science lab, and in grade 10 some guy almost burned down the auto shop. The tech hall ( where me and mine hung out ) stunk for weeks. That surprises me but it also surprised KB to hear that I actually had a a full hand drafting course when I studied to be an Architectural Technician before I ever touched AutoCAD so maybe schools just different here.
They apparently are not a part of the core curriculum any more, but the more well-funded school districts do offer them as electives for kids who are not going to college: “Those students not “tracked” for college; therefore we will program them into a shop class”.