A bit of a pop-sociology article to see what people think – the thesis being that there is now no difference between Gen X and Y. Everyone’s hip but 40 year olds can afford to be ultra hip! Does anyone else my age (32) find themselves using “like” in lots of sentences lately?
Let’s start with a question. A few questions, actually: When did it become normal for your average 35-year-old New Yorker to (a) walk around with an iPod plugged into his ears at all times, listening to the latest from Bloc Party; (b) regularly buy his clothes at Urban Outfitters; (c) take her toddler to a Mommy’s Happy Hour at a Brooklyn bar; (d) stay out till 4 A.M. because he just can’t miss the latest New Pornographers show, because who knows when Neko Case will decide to stop touring with them, and everyone knows she’s the heart of the band; (e) spend $250 on a pair of jeans that are artfully shredded to look like they just fell through a wheat thresher and are designed, eventually, to artfully fall totally apart; (f) decide that Sufjan Stevens is the perfect music to play for her 2-year-old, because, let’s face it, 2-year-olds have lousy taste in music, and we will not listen to the Wiggles in this house; (g) wear sneakers as a fashion statement; (h) wear the same vintage New Balance sneakers that he wore on his first day of school in the seventh grade as a fashion statement; (i) wear said sneakers to the office; (j) quit the office job because—you know what?—screw the office and screw jockeying for that promotion to VP, because isn’t promotion just another word for “slavery�?; (k) and besides, now that she’s a freelancer, working on her own projects, on her own terms, it’s that much easier to kick off in the middle of the week for a quick snowboarding trip to Sugarbush, because she’s got to have some balance, right? And she can write it off, too, because who knows? She might bump into Spike Jonze on the slopes; (l) wear a Misfits T-shirt; (m) make his 2-year-old wear a Misfits T-shirt; (n) never shave; (o) take pride in never shaving; (p) take pride in never shaving while spending $200 on a bedhead haircut and $600 on a messenger bag, because, seriously, only his grandfather or some frat-boy Wall Street flunky still carries a briefcase; or (q) all of the above?
NB: As with all generational stereotypes, grups are based on a subsection of the middle-class… Just clarifyin…
I’m outing myself as a grup.
A few years ago, we used to call ourselves “hip mid-youth”… 30 somethings is totally 80s speak!
Did you need to out yourself, Mark
Of course, I’m one too – if I’m insufficiently young enough…
I like, almost never use it!
That there is now no difference between Gen’s X and Y – and all the baggage that comes with it – is a pretty pathetic way of recycling a certain Xer mass-optimism from the mid-late 90s.
Unlike the much-despised (boomer) “yuppies� of the 80s, who were simply conventional young establishment/rich pigs only standing out because of their decade’s more generalised excesses – their 90s’ ~23 – 35 y.o. (Xer) cognates were, and remain, an ambiguous grouping. And, by focusing on the mid-late 90s only, I’m generously allowing Xers to simply ditch the whole slacker/grunge (except for lit fic)/Nirvana identity thing of the early 90s, for present purposes.
So what is/was the mid-late 90s Xer yuppie-cognate construed as? Conspicuous consumption is naturally part of the mix – but in a radical break from their 80s equivalents, post-slackers seem to get financially rewarded in direct proportion to the (i) insecurity and (ii) absence of hours of their work. Funny, huh?
Mark Davis, in “Gangland�, was a minor (= well-intentioned but naïve) offender in this respect – bright-eyed 20-somethings, willing to work and live on the smell of a pressed olive-oily rag, were going to take over the lumbering boomer-saurs of the corporate world. And anyone remember the dotcom-era phrase “e-lancing�?
The current decade’s “grup� is thus an even more ludicrous/impossible figure. Freelancing in employment by highly-educated people is a real enough phenomenon since the mid-90s, but to correlate it with apparently-unlimited discretionary income is so rankly dumb that it can only be someone’s weird propaganda.
The bottom line is that such affluent freelancing *may* be a possible lifestyle for some GenYers (= today’s 20-somethings). But it needs to be spelt out that such a happy conjunction is only possible through parental (= boomer) money. Otherwise, there is indeed a serious generation gap between Yers and Xers, one that tilts around turning 30. Twenty-, but not 30-somethings (or older) can generally assume a fair amount of parental support/indulgence, both because of their relative yoof (and therefore future promise), and because that their parents are almost certainly boomers (only some Xer parents are boomers).
So sorry to be telling you the bad news, all (?) you 30-something grups (aka indulged kids of rich boomers) out there – but if you really do have it all (and apparently no mortgage, to boot) today, then you’re overdue for a cold, hard shock of financial reality.
“40 year olds can afford to be ultra hip�. Yep, two decades of renting and insecure employment (at best) apparently result in a serendipitous mid-life payola – in which boomers (and not simply one’s parents, mind) hand over the titles to their investment properties and the PINs to their bank-accounts. Yeah, right.
This is just an anecdotal generalisation, but to me, the 20-somethings (Y-ers) of today seem to have a brattish confidence and slightly more conservative, monetarian feel than I remember my generation (X-ers) having at the same age. But perhaps that’s just the confidence of youth, when anything still seems possible. Also, more of them seem to be married in their 20s than I remember my generation being, but that could be a reflection of whom I mix with these days (lawyers rather than postgrad students). The hallmark of being an X-er to me is a sense of Cobain-ish ‘never mind’ apathy/diffidence and a sense of never being allowed to ‘grow up’, to take up an authoritative position, (so why bother) etc.
Aren’t the Y-ers rather than X-ers meant to be the children of boomers? (Xers are the children of stringsavers.) Which could account for Y-ers’ confidence…tho i’ve also seen the data that says there’s no substantive difference btwn X and Y, and that Gen X are bigger spenders than BBers…
Astrology columns, anyone?
Whenever I see the years set out for Generation X and Generation Y, people who were born around my year of birth seem to be left in the middle. I often hope that this means that no one will be targetting us with their carefully crafted marketing plans. The thing is that I always feel as though these categories are more about how people can sell things to us than anything else…
Plus, I can’t afford expensive jeans and so I’m jealous of all of you grups.
I’m in the same boat as you Cristy. And I’ve noticed that rather than both generations trying to claim me, they both seem to be trying to make the other side take me
Hah @ Jason. And what Cristy said.
I hate this stuff with a passion. The mere name “Hugh McKay” makes me want to vomit.
I never NEVER see myself (or parents if we’re talking boomers) represented even slightly in any of these social “anaylsis.” Go away, all of you. There may be the semblance of a real issue in that story but its all just so much cut and paste newspaperisms.
I read a story once on these lines and found I was too young for Gen X but too old for Gen Y and thats the way I like it.
Amanda can’t get no satisfaction …
I don’t know if I am Gen X or Y or whatever. One thing I have noticed about the ‘younger generation’ (late teens early 20s) is their apparent conservatism. Uni campuses are just not the same…
I’m Gen Y and I can’t say I’m anything like what has been described. I get the impression that there must be people twice my age who are also twice as hip and contemporary as I am. I’m not too concerned though…
ah, but there is one big difference. The Y’s would be watching Arcade Fire on their video IPods
What gen is that Samuel Gordon Stuart kid?
And RH…what gen is he? Imagine being a Marketing Person, and having to market to the RH generation.
Laura, SGS is a Y.
And marketing to RH should be fairly easy. Just smear some totty in brulee.
(and for the fiscally challenged, I recommend the new Lindt Brulee Choco.)
I too fall in between gen X and Y and how I’ve come to loathe those labels! As if what the wealthy buy can somehow explain the philosophy (if there is one) of any given generation! As if the wealthy haven’t always had the best fashion, the best toys, and of course in a culture as skewered toward youth as ours those things are going to look like “youth” obsessions, when the truth is the same as always – the fashions and playthings of those wealthy enough to afford them.
That said, maybe there is an attempt by some in these generations to find a new way of doing things, to be more flexible in outlook and that probably comes directly from the fact that people can no longer expect to have a job for life or a relationship for life, and that necessarily demands that people don’t box themselves, or their attitudes, or ideas, or even fashions, and become as other generations did, “fixed” by the mid-20’s into the grown up people they would always be.
As my fellow boomer Bonnie Raitt might say, it’s something to talk about.
or as Ani di Franco sings
“cuz take away our playstations
and we are a third world nation”
Thank you Miss Laura. You could sell me anything.
And I could pay it off.
Compound interest.
Always.
I’m in the Gen X age group and none of that stuff fits. I know late 30’s / early 40’s who do fit that mould. They just seem like wannabe’s who never grew up. Good luck to them. I’m happy being who I am but I just ge tthe impression they aren’t happy with who they are always having to find obscure t-shirts and edgy hair cuts and keep up with the latest club music. On the occaisonal Bucks night whne I might end up in a club I am so thankful that I don’t do that sh&t any more.
Picked up a case of very drinkable 2002 Shiraz at Clairault last weekend. Should have bought some of the Cullens Merlot, too.
Those marketing crunts think they’ve got everybody’s number.
But really there’s only two classes of people in the world: Those who claim they can classify anybody and those who claim no one can classify them.
Ah, thanks for putting that Ani song in my head, Cal.
By the way, the post is at least half a pisstake – as indicated by the note to it.
Still, there are grups, I have no doubt.
But I think generally generational generalisations suffer from being based on narrow segments, and from being made for marketing purposes, and usually anecdotal rather than evidence-based.
To the 30-ish, just (?) Jason Soon and to those (also aged around 30, I’m guessing) who don’t know whether they’re Yers/Arthur or Xers/Martha – it simply doesn’t matter, yet.
I agree with Jason that surmising pop-psychology conclusions from the mouths/wallets/etc of 20-somethings might as well be filed under astrology.
But this doesn’t mean that generational contrasting is a data-less field. I assume that Jason would not consider it “astrology� to compare a data-snapshot of a born-1961, 40 year-old with a born-1964, 40 year-old. I’ve summarised some of this sort of data here:
http://paulwatson.blogspot.com/2006/02/ten-ways-in-which-ive-got-nothing-in.html
Otherwise, as I’ve suggested, if you’re late-20s or 30-ish just, you’ve still got a few quality years to make or break yourself – so get to it, and we’ll see in due course what the data of c. 2015 has you pinned for/by/under.
I thought “like” was supposed to be a Queensland thing, wasn’t it, like?
I didn’t know that, Brian. I thought it was a teen thing.
Brian B. can be often be accidently cool.