As a tech-friendly Gen Xer I still had to reach adolescence before I touched on-line communications via dial-up BBS. I had to wait until my early 20s to hit the Internet via a grad school account.
I look at myself as sort of an early-stage immigrant to the world of digital networking, where many of my fellow Xers arrived years later and you were born into it.
The dotcom boom was the economic saving grace for Xers like myself who were comfortable with tech. That technology-driven eight-year extension to the postwar economic anomaly allowed some of us to enjoy the dregs of the wine that Boomers took for granted.
The 1990s were amazing. Suddenly all these formerly unemployable or underemployed Gen X slackers were the only ones who could feed the startups’ need for employees comfortable with the tech. I went right from a journalism career and liberal arts grad degree into project management and within a few years was a CTO for a small startup. Forget the actual techies with CS degrees: artists, writers, actors, really any Gen X creative types who knew how to get online and could do basic HTML and Photoshop were making upper-middle-class salaries without all the standard corporate BS and were regularly turning away job offers.
Then the bubble burst in April of 2000, followed in turn by Prince Bush and then 9/11 and it was all over. But a lot of Xers emerged with solid CV entries that got them long-term tech jobs, and some of the lucky ones came away with enough money from sales of options or equity that they could continue to maintain a middle-class lifestyle just as it was being pushed out of reach for most Americans.
This. It is basically a tossup. Either save money not owning a car and paying insurance and then pay out the ass for rent for a place downtown or close to it where public transit actually works worth a damn or you can walk/bike or move further out where MAYBE you can find more reasonable rent but then pretty much need to own a car to get back and forth either because the public transit simply does not exist or it adds an exorbitant amount of time to your commute. This is EXACTLY the situation here where I live. Otherwise I’d love to nix my $350/mo car payment (for a reliable non-beater vehicle that I don’t have to worry about breaking down on a semi-regular basis and needing repairs which, shocker again, would have to be done by an outside mechanic anyway at increased cost because most apartment complexes forbid doing any car repairs on their property) and the $100/mo in insurance.
