Most of the people I know who were born in the early '80s may not have been texting in their tweens (did we even have “tweens” back then? I think that was invented in the Noughties), but goddamn they can text fast. Actually, with the advent of smartphones, most of those kids probably look with disdain at the generation who don’t know how to text with a key pad.
Telegraph tickers are still faster…
Same here. I´m also actively trying to use as little online networking as possible.
One factor in the “not wanting to grow up” issue has to be that the economic conditions are just not there anymore for everyone to get a well paying job and start a family in their mid 20s. Im almost 33 now and together with my wife we earn more than a living wage but we´ll never get remotely wealthy from it or be able to buy an apartment (we´d never take out a loan). I know that I could have easily earned enough to do these things in my field at my age if I was ten years older or so. We also don´t have children because it would cut into our budget too much if only one of us were able to work and we wouldn´t want children if we´re not going to be there for them.
At the same time I can see the people I´m working for, people that have started out about the same as me, leading relatively luxurious lifestyles that they enjoy because there was way more money to be made in our field 20 years ago and they unsurprisingly don´t care about sharing what they have with the younger generation. My boss complains about the company not being profitable enough to give me a raise, yet just spent a month on holidays cruising the carribbean with his family, which he does twice a year and his three kids go to expensive private schools.
It´s also his generation that has fucked up the economy and brought about the wealth distribution inequality we have right now. And the way I see it, I´m relatively well off myself compared to a lot of people ten years younger than me.
In short: Old people complaining about millenials “not growing up” (even if I barely fit into that group) really need to fuck off.
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When I was a teen, Generation X was Billy Idol’s (roundly reviled for being inauthentic punk) band.
Excuse me, I have to resume lawn-guarding duties now.
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Have they not come up with a new silly term for the current “generation”? They’re going to have to stop calling them generations soon.
I’m right at the old end of the “millenials” I think, and if I’d had a kid at 18, they’d be 18, and I could be getting all excited about the approaching birth of a grandchild. Two generations in a “generation”, three if the makers of stupid labels for generations don’t get cracking…
That’s where the definition has currently landed, largely thanks to Doug Coupland’s book. However the first time that I ever heard the term was in 1982, when it was regularly used to denote a slightly earlier demographic as well - the idea being that we were “generation X” since there was no good current label for us, as we’d missed out on the Hippie thing and had little to no media presence.
I’ve always found it to be quite ironic that the label ended up slipping off of us, to include a more marketable younger crowd, and that we got lumped back in with the hippies again.
But all that being said I work with tons of gen Y and even millenials and I find them to be an excellent bunch. Not worried about them at all.
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Let’s call them generation selfie.
It’s trendy AND an insult, a double slam dunk.
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The entire idea of generations and generalizations about people a certain age is all marketing crap.
@ Nylund: Gen X welcomes you.
I’d rather have been a digital pioneer than a digital native, anyway.
As for this idea that people stop ranting about a “generation” when they get old enough to buy houses and participate in government, that strikes me as obvious to the point of pointless. I think it’s more interesting to talk about a way that a generation is defined once it gets old enough to define itself. For Gen X it was all sloth and grunge, with a bleak future of joblessness and the first generation that was going to make less than their parents. Until, of course, the generation actually entered the work force and a bunch of Gen Xers decided that they would make the Internet a thing. Nobody gave Gen X much of a thought after that because it wasn’t about the generation it was about what people in the generation were doing.
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Apologies in advance. I can’t help but comment about this as it touches on a pet peeve of mine.
Gen X got its designation because it was counted as the 10th generation in America. Roman numeral 10. The first 9 were numbered as well. So I get a bit frustrated when people use Gen X in the same conversation as Gen Y or Millennial.
Second, each generation was counted as 30 years. Gen X was said to be 1965 to 1995.
At least this is what I understood it to be when I learned the terminology in the 80’s. There’s plenty of evidence out there to support all sorts of definitions of names and time frames (and a couple different origins of the name). But they all agree on one thing: Gen X does not include 1961.
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Isn’t this true of all generations?
We all know that our generation got things basically right (the way God intended from creation), certainly our grandparents didn’t. And tragically, our grandchildren don’t.
For any generation’s value of “we”, past, present, and future.
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I’m totally over Millenials. Can we bitch some more about those damned not-retiring Boomers? And can they please stop trying to blame people who were, at the oldest, 15 years old when Reagan became president for electing Reagan president? Why didn’t our grandparents teach our parents that projection is always wrong?
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There are several factors that go into the lack of interest in independence between the ages of 16-22 (late highschool through college). One is a lack of income, because jobs that are willing to hire teens are less common than they used to be. Financial independence is quite important to overall independence, and it’s tough to get that as a teen. And even if there were more jobs available, teens have less free time than ever, because schools have increased the amount of homework expected to ludicrous levels. Good luck finding time for a 20-hour-a-week job when you already have 4-hours a night worth of homework.
Technology also plays a factor. Remember that a big drive for independence is socialization. It used to be that the only way to see your friends and get away from your parents was to hop in a car. Nowadays you can call and text your friends to your heart’s content, lowering the importance of achieving independence in that respect.
It’s also important to keep in mind that educational expectations are on the rise. A bachelor’s degree today is what a highschool degree was to previous the baby boomers, or a middle school degree was for the “Greatest Generation.” Going to college no longer makes you stand out, having a Master’s or PhD does. If adulthood starts with your first major career employment, that’s been backed off from 18 years old to about 25, just because of expectations from the economy.
Birth control obviously figures in as well. We’ve had enough generations between the advent of cheap birth control and today that it’s ingrained in our social conscious that sex does not equal children. For those people who are driven by sex, becoming an adult meant satisfying those urges, but satisfying those urges meant taking on the responsibilities of a family. Nowadays, with birth control pills and condoms readily available, you can be sexually active with no strings attached. It’d be hard to wait for adulthood to start at 25, if that meant you had to be celibate until then, but that’s simply not the case anymore.
On a positive note, there are probably fewer awful parents now for kids to escape from. Hitting your kids is not considered a reasonable parenting strategy anymore, screaming at your kids is known to be detrimental. Parents are simply better than they used to be. That removes the biggest impetus for gaining independence, getting away from the misery of life with your parents. If your kids aren’t scrabbling to get out of your house, it’s probably because you’ve succeeded in making your house a good and nurturing home for your children.
Kids of today live in an entirely different reality than previous generations, and (unsurprisingly) they’ve adapted to it.
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Which is funny…have you ever read John Lyndon’s “autobiography”?
Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs
I found it great fun, but at the core it revolves around the Sex Pistols and the two bands closest to them in the scene…Generation X and Siouxsie and the Banshees.
Honestly, I’m one of those parents that likes their kid so much she can move in with me. In fact, since ever since My Big Fat Greek Wedding came out my daughter and I have had a plan for her to move in next door to me when she is an adult. So I totally get all of that!! But I still want to push her a little to not think so much about herself as an appendage to her parents, but more of her own person.
I’m vaguely interested in the generational-label thing. I call people in my narrow range (I was born in '79, and this seems to apply to anyone born between around '77 and '82 or so) “Li’l Xies” - think “Little Archies”, the “kid sisters/brothers” of the Generation Xers. We don’t consider ourselves Millennials, though others do, because we remember very well a time before the internet and all that. We were the last to write out our homework longhand, etc. When “Reality Bites” came out, it seemed way more profound and important to us than it did to the actual generation it was lampooning portraying.
Slate tried to dub us “Generation Catalano”, but I never watched that show, and when it was on, the only people I knew who DID watch it were Baby Boomers.
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The definition of “baby boomer” is demographic, which you can see manifestly in population pyramids for the US after the mid 20th century. Hippies, flower children, marketing segments, etc. came after the population boom.
Obama is patently part of the baby boomer generation. Sorry you missed out on SDS, flower children and the like. 
I’m sure she is her own person, she probably just doesn’t feel like she has to distance herself from you to prove it. Take that as a compliment.
The generation of men is as the generation of leaves. The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber burgeons with leaves again when spring returns. So one generation of men will grow while another departs. (Iliad 6:146-150)
IMHO, the kids growing up now who have always had easy access to the world of information available online is going to end up distinct from the Millennials, for whatever use these labels are in the first place.
Basically: the Google generation. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens to kids when ignorance can be dispelled so easily.
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