Apart from the whole concept being silly, there’s a reason how things were framed.
Generation X, the book that articulated the lifestyle, was written by Douglas Coupland (born 1961) and came out in 1991. It clearly depicts people who have left college a while ago and donb’t know where they’re going.
The reason for this is thet they’re squeezed in between the boomers and the kids of the boomers. They were too young to participate in the hippie/leftist/protest march/draft dodging crazy years of the late 60’s and early 70’s. At the same time, they were borb to an equally small generation of parents and didn’t get the benefits the kids of the boomers got.
To be eligible, one has to be too young to have been drafted for Vietnam, as with the lost generation missing out on WWI, the gen x missed out Vietnam. This puts on frame at 1957.
The second frame comes from being born to a boomer. The boomers started having kids late 60’s and early 70’s. Thjis put the lower end of the age span on kids born around '72-'75, but realy at '70.
5.Meaning that the youngest Gen-xers are 34 and some are pushing 50.
Ever since Coupland put out the book, people have been trying to label themself Gen-x, whether they belong there or not. I guess it’s attractive to some to assume a group identity with people who’re obviously outside the mainstream, but not total drop outs.
I doubt that they’ve read the book, which is more lamenting for these people than enything else.
So to Gen-Xers everywhere, grow the fuck up. There’s no use whinning about getting the short end of the stick, which is really what Gen-X is about.
Oh, and I share birthyear with Coupland. So there.
Gaspode, you’re obviously railing against something, but I can’t figure out what it is. Are you irritated with people are incorrectly calling themselves Gen-Xers when they were born at the wrong time? Are you irritated with the whole concept of Gen-X? Is it just the whining that’s bothering you?
I was also born in 1961, along Gaspode. Coupland, George Clooney, and Henry Rollins. I’m not much into demographic labels, but I do see that folks my age, technically the tail end of the Boomers, never really fit in with either of the two large cohorts a decade apart from us in each direction. The Boomer experience–Vietnam, the Beatles, civil rights–belongs to my my mother’s generation (b. 1943), not mine. But I was also too grown up for raves, smart drinks, the Real World, and the rest of the 90s youth culture.
As far as I know, the term Gen x comes from Coupland’s book but is not used the way he meant it or to apply to him. It is probably because when it was first picked up by the media it was used by people who had not read the book and did not care too much about the details. Douglas Coupland is very old. I am pretty sure he does not identify himself as Gen X since that term was co-opted. I know that in the 90s he was cranky with people about it.
I am born in 1971, my parents born in 1940. They were not boomers. They thought the Beatles were a gimmick that appealed to dumb preteens, like a boy band, and they always told me hippie was short for hippocrite. I was born after Vietnam.
The book was published in 1991 and I doubt that it took into account the possibility of women able to give birth in their fifties. But in my parent’s birth era, it wasn’t unusual for women to have children well into their forties. Both of my grandmothers were in their forties when my parents were born and my paternal grandfather was 61 when my father was born! I think that the book speculates that it has more to do with the time period into which you were born than the generation that your parents came from.
The book describes the generation following Generation X as “The Millennial Generation” and suggests that the approximate cut-off date was to have been somewhere just beyond the year 2000.
(I can’t help but wonder if some will draw the line at pre-9/11 and post-9/11.) If the theory of cycles hold true, this generation will have more in common with “The Silent Generation” – the ones that came directly after “the G.I. Generation.” I don’t know much about the Silent Generation except that they didn’t seem to terrorize their parents as much as the next generation did!
And congratulations! I’m about to become a mother too. (I’m adopting at the age of 61. Don’t worry. She’s my step-daughter and not much trouble at all. )
I don’t want to leave anyone with the impression that the book Generations is carved in stone as the only answer. It’s just the one that seems the most far-reaching in its outlook and seems to me to be well-reasoned.
All of them I guess. First, I think that lumping together people because of their birtyear is about as stupid as patriotism - we don’t chose were or when we are born. I get along fine with people born in the late 40’s and people born in the early 80’s, because we have things in common. There are many people my age I don’t get along with.
I’m also tired about hearing people my age complain that they’re not getting ahead in life, because the boomers are in the way and set the agenda.
With that out of the way, I do think there arfe generational shifts, but they don’t follow decades, and when we now look back at the “Victorian” era, we’re lumping together parents and kids who, knowing how people are, probably perceived a generational gap we simply don’t see. I think the dividing lines are there and in a hundred years, when people write our histroy, I think a clear line will be the media generation and those before that. I’m not up to date about media consumption, but I think that the average in most “western” countries are around 6-7 hours a day. This is so vastly different as compared to people born before 1950. I can’t remember a life without tv, because it was always there, i.e. instant media consumption. Depending on where you live, If you were born before 1950, entertainment meant going out. Listening to radio was part of life but not in the same way that tv saturates our lives and have been doing since the early to mid 50’s.
Some people will say that the Internet is such a dividing line, but I dont think so. It’s just media consumption in another way. More than the net, I think a computer in every home (or the majority of homes) will be regarded as revolutionary, in the same way that a tv in every home was, but it’s still just another aspect of the same thing. I don’t think anyone is even pretending anymore that they’re getting a computer to ballance the checkbook. It’s an entertainment machine.
Zoe mentioned 9/11, which at first I perceived as very geocentric, but at second thought, maybe not so. It depends on where the US will head. Some fear a theocracy. I don’t think that will happen, but I’m not ruling out a possibility. If that happens, the US will implode and this will result in a serious change in the global power ballance.
Clearly, 9/11 has already affected the whole world. The economy went down the drains, the war in Iraq, the hostility by many of the US allies towards the US. The EU can’t beat up the US yet, but ti’s the world’s largest consumer market and money, proverbially, talks. Maybe 9/11 will be a dividing line and maybe not. Clearly it’s so for many Americans, but we’ve yet to see what it means on a global scale.
Gen-X and gen-y is really stupid. In a hundred years, we will all be part of “the Media Generation”, being the first generation to let media and entertainment dominate our lives.
Still, I get partly annoyed and partly bemused when some “white suburban street punk” born in 1988 says he’s part of generation X. Dude, you don’t have a clue. Oh, and mohawks, orange hair and a leather jacket with an anarchy A and Dead Kennedys in white paint is so 1977. Find your own gimmick, will you. [fee waybill] I was a punk before you were a punk[/fw]
I’ve always been under the impression that generational differences were defined less by popular culture and more by demography and social conditions. For example, the “Silent Generation” were defined by the misfortune of having been young adults between the World Wars (more specifically, the 1930s), so the social conditions of the time meant they got no chance to be young and silly. Similarly, the Baby-boomers got all the luck, in that huge numbers of their fellow young people and post-WWII prosperity enabled them to spend their teens and twenties in One Long Party. Economic prosperity defined the early 20th century in the U.K and America; thus, that narrow generation of young adults born 1890s-1900s were able to experience the Roaring Twenties. And so on. I really don’t think that any such sufficiently intense forces separate people born from say 1960 to 1990, so Gen X and Gen Y are not really different from each other in such a distinct way as, say, someone born in 1935 would be different from someone born in 1946.
I haven’t read Coupland’s book, though I fall in the time frame you described for Gen X. I understand the beginning of your time frame, lack of having boomer parents, but I’m not sure I follow the second part. IOW, if a defining part of a generation is lack of boomer parents, then the second part doesn’t seem to fit. I’m not disputing your time frame, since in a lot of ways, it fits for me and my observations better than other descriptions of who fits into Generation X.
I wasn’t all that clear - dividing line 1 is 1957, dividing line 2 is when gen-x ends, and that is when the boomers start having kids. So counting from 1945 and adding 20-25 years, I’d say that if you’re born around 1970, it’s borderline and depends on when your parents were born. From 1975 and on, there’s no chance in hell that you’re a baby boomer - you were 16 when Coupland’s book came out.
That make it clearer?
If the term “generation” is to mean anything more than simply “people born during a specific range of years”, a generation’s identity has to involve more than just birth years.
Going by birth years alone, I’m at best at the very tail end of Gen X, and by some definitions a few years into Gen Y or the Millennials or whatever they’re calling it. Yet I’m happy to co-opt the Gen X identity, since my personal pop culture clock seems to have stopped sometime in mid-1994. Heck, I’m still wearing the same corduroy jacket I got for my birthday that year. (You remember the style. Looks like the one Eddie Vedder has on in the video for “Jeremy”.)
However, in college it became clear to me that many people of exactly my same age didn’t necessarily remember or care about the same things I did. Those just two or three years younger were apparently all too young to have been aware at the time of things that made a big impression on me, ranging from the Tiananmen Square massacre to Kurt Cobain’s death. So I think people born in the same or almost the same year can be of different generations in the cultural sense even if they are in the same age group.
If we are to divide people into these groups and give it some cultural significance beyond simply being of the same age group, the division is going to have to be based on something a little fuzzier than birth year. At the same time, it makes no sense to consider someone born in 1985 a Boomer just because they really love the Beatles.
Were I the one determining what defined a generational group, I’d try to come up with some major historic and cultural events to help figure out where people belong. For instance, I’d suggest that anyone old enough to have served in the Vietnam War isn’t an X-er, and anyone too young to remember the Cold War isn’t either. The former could be based strictly on birth year, but the later has some flexibility within a certain age range.
Oh, a note on the term “Generation X”:
The current usage of the term stems from Coupland’s novel, but he didn’t coin the phrase. Billy Idol has a band in the '70s of the same name, and they were named after a novel published in 1964. I believe, although I’m not certain, that book was about the Mods – but in any event it almost certainly wasn’t about any group we’d now consider Gen X.
Man, be glad you fellas have a generaiton identity. I’m 23 (born 81) and I’m (thankfully, actually) not even a part of G-Y. I’m stuckj in the no-man’s land between all those tiny peeps just now getting into colege and those giants who made all the fortunes and blew them all over again during the heady 90’s.
Me too. I was born in '82, which is supposed to make me Gen Y, I believe. But I have a brother who was born in '76 and who was a big influence growing up. Like Lamia above, most pop culture stuff I remember was from… oh about 1996 and back. I’m sort of aware of bands etc until about 2000, but if I look at the music charts, I’ve maybe even heard of 2 out of the top 10 bands/artists.
I feel like I’m a touch too young to be in Gen X, but then I feel I’m too old to be Gen Y (My cousins are Gen Y and I can’t stand those bastards ;)*). And since my brother and my aunt were big influences for me (my aunt was born in '64, so she was the way cool aunt for me growing up and I idolized her), I seem to remember a lot more of the 80s than even people born the same year I was. I feel as if I am trapped in a generational no-man’s-land. It doesn’t bother me all that much, but every so often…
Oh, and it messes things up even more when you find out that I grew up watching Nick at Nite, so to me, sitcoms/dramas are Dick Van Dyke, the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Dobie Gillis, My Three Sons, Car 54 Where Are You?, Patty Duke, etc.
[sub]I kid, I kid. But I don’t really feel anything in common with them and frequently feel lost when they talk about clothes and music and whatnot.
I wouldn’t say that at all - that you have more in common with x rather than y.
There are a ton of y’s out there that love 80’s stuff. What you have in common with them and not us is that they like the stuff, whereas we experienced it, you know?
It’s one thing to think new wave is cool, it’s another to remember buying the latest from Gary Numan from Sound Warehouse.
I mean, I like a lot of things from the 30’s: the furniture, the architecture, the music, etc. I wouldn’t begin to suggest that I have lots in common with my grandfather-in-law!
It’s one of those things: you were there or you weren’t!
zweisamkeit:
This one sentence made me laugh:
“I grew up watching Nick at Nite”
Yeah, if you grew up watching that channel, you are too young to be an x!
