Sandwiched between 80 million baby boomers and 78 million millenials, Generation X — roughly defined as anyone born between 1965 and 1980 — has just 46 million members, making it a dark-horse demographic “condemned by numbers alone to nicheville,” as Gordinier puts it in the book. “I don’t really understand the tyranny of the boomer moment,” Gordinier says. “Great, you had a party in Haight-Ashbury in 1967, I’m thrilled for you. Can we hear about the flappers in the 1920s instead? How about the Great Depression? There’s other times in history that are interesting.”
Gordinier is no more entranced with today’s teens and twenty-somethings: “They just love stuff. They love celebrities. They love technology. They love brand names. . . . They’re happy to do whatever advertising tells them to do. So what if they can’t manage to read anything longer than an instant message?” ^
We have, as marketing history would tag them, the Jazz Generation, the Greatest Generation, the Boomers, and now, the Forgotten Generation. These are, respectively, the great-grandparents of Generation X, the grandparents of Generation X, the parents of Generation X, and Generation Xers themselves.
I think we have to look at the span of generations influencing one another.
WWI was a horror for all involved. Europeans saw it as fratricide; Americans saw it as the ultimate example of the pointlessness of modern wars. People had to shift gears from “the war to end all wars” to “it was pointless” in ten minutes of conversation, and it turned their hair white. They never got over it.
The generation after them hoped to avoid the same horrors, but was so busy with the hangover of WWI, called by some The Great Depression (and what was so great about it?) that it rejoiced in the chance to redeem itself through modern warfare. We hear about how great these people were without getting the message that they were basically on a turkey shoot against a ferocious but tiny enemy. Few historians were amazed that the bad guys didn’t win WWII.
Of course, with all that Greatest Generation hoopla floating around, the generation after them had to prove itself somehow. Their war was so obviously pointless they became selfless, pacifistic altruists who were in private greedy hedonists. We hear about how great the hippies were, how pure, and now they’re all bankers who don’t regret all that free sex, free drugs, free ride from a Greatest Generation that couldn’t stop tooting its own horn.
I have another term for Generation X: the shellshocked generation. This whole load of horrors I’ve described came down on our shoulders and we couldn’t find anyone to trust. Generation X became slackers because they didn’t trust American culture, or its counterculture, or even each other. We wanted to get the heck out of Dodge as quickly as possible, and if that meant camping out in a garage apartment eating Ramen for a decade or so, we were cool with that, at least until we turn 37 and “get responsible.”
Current generations inherit from these last four generations. Good luck to them. Gordimer to my mind takes a funny but unkind look at these people. Just like some slackers turn out to be heroes, maybe some IM-ers will turn out OK too.