geektionary: July 2005 Archives

We’ve been called a lot of things, some of them not very nice. Baby busters. Slackers. The mainstream corporate media in the early 1990s missed the satire of Douglas Coupland’s definitive Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture and cast us as "flannel-wearing, alienated, overeducated, underachieving slackers with body piercing, who drank franchise-store coffee and had to work at McJobs" (or so Wikipedia points out). Of course, the people in charge of the mainstream corporate media at the time were our elders, Silents and Boomers who seemed not to care about trying to understand us -- disparaging us was more fun.

So who are Generation Xers, anyway? I prefer the definition authors William Strauss and Neil Howe developed for their fascinating work delineating the cyclical nature of history, in which they call the generation deemed mysteriously X (as in "inexplicable" or "unknown") the somewhat less cryptic -- but still numerically ominous -- 13th Generation... that is, the thirteenth generation of Americans:

The 13th Generation (Nomad, born 1961-1981) survived a "hurried" childhood of divorce, latchkeys, open classrooms, devil-child movies, and a shift from G to R ratings. They came of age curtailing the earlier rise in youth crime and fall in test scores -- yet heard themselves denounced as so wild and stupid as to put The Nation At Risk. As young adults, maneuvering through a sexual battlescape of AIDS and blighted courtship rituals -- they date and marry cautiously. In jobs, they embrace risk and prefer free agency over loyal corporatism. From grunge to hip-hop, their splintery culture reveals a hardened edge. Politically, they lean toward pragmatism and nonaffiliation, and would rather volunteer than vote. Widely criticized as "Xers" or "slackers," they inhabit a Reality Bites economy of declining young-adult living standards.

(That’s from Strauss and Howe’s Web site, The Fourth Turning, an offshot of their book of the same name. I also highly recommend their previous book, Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069.)

It’s not a particularly flattering profile, but it feels like me. It feels like us. Not that all those Bad Things had to happen to all of us -- we aren’t all children of divorce; we weren’t all individually denounced as wild and stupid -- but the tenor of the times when we were little kids, for instance, gave us all that hardened edge that now influences, as an example, how we react to the increasingly crappy economy.

I like us, though, us Xers. I think we’re cool and interesting people. I like our cynicism and our pragmatism, our irony and our sarcasm. I like how we’re independent and self-reliant. I wouldn’t have us any other way.

But of course, that’s because I’m a pragmatic Xer.