No, you are misreading. Xers are the coolest for all eternity.
There does seem to be an irresponsibility that peaked in kids in the late 70s, and kids (late teens, young adults) have gotten less edgier. Perhaps because its hard to shock your “I did coke and had sex with three guys and had four piercings and a tattoo” mother with anything that won’t kill you or mutilate you for life. The issue may not be kids are uncool, but their parents are so jaded that probably can’t even reach the shock bar. Tattoos - done to death. Piercings - been there. Music about sex and killing cops - yawn - so 1980s. Wild sex - that’s 70s. Drugs - yeah, the street drugs now aren’t even glamorous like they were back when - they just fuck you up.
(As a parent, not really disappointed if my kids grow up in a world where piercings and tattoos, wild sex and drugs are something their PARENTS did, and therefore fundamentally uncool).
Fortunately, these boring kids will grow up and raise a next generation who will be able to shock them with their loud rock n roll.
Why get married early if the divorce rate is so high? An expensive wedding, plus a difficult divorce and the struggles of dealing with single parenting are pretty good reasons to delay marriage until you are ready.
“Careers” don’t exist anymore. Who gets a job at 25, works for 40 years, and retires with a sweet pension plan nowadays? No one. Job security is not a guarantee like it was in the “good old days.” Settling in to a career means you will get passed on as technology and the economy whiz by.
As for buying a house, remember that the housing market committed suicide this past decade? Buying a house used to be a profitable long term investment, but selling a home today doesn’t come with a payoff. Foreclosures and volatile interest rates probably scare most youth into the relative safety of the alternatives
If “kids these days” aren’t doing things like the older generations used to do, maybe its because society already changed, and they are merely adapting to their surroundings. I think we should praise them for that instead of pining for nostalgic traditions that don’t make sense anymore.
I don’t see how it can be a bad thing if people wait until later in life to get married or have children when you’re more likely to be emotionally and financially stable later. I also think if you’re in a stable long-term relationship, it doesn’t matter if you’re married or not. There’s definitely a debate going on right now about whether homebuying is a good idea. You know what the housing market is like these days.
I’ll give you something the kids all do to be individuals, that anyone over 30 thinks is ridiculous and lame: the faux hawk. FFS it’s a dumber, more pathetic hairstyle than a mullet, and I didn’t think anything could be dumber or more pathetic than a mullet, let alone hit bottom on both aspects.
Maybe our way of being noncomformist, individual, and rebelling against your generation is by conforming to societal norms, thereby bucking the trend of rebellion by proxy of rebelling against rebellion. head asplode
I don’t think career means what you think it means.
People with careers move around. Did in the past, too. When I was a kid, my Dad switched jobs (but not careers) and had a hard time getting into the better firms. Why? He’d spend almost fifteen years with the same firm before he switched - to these guys, that was a sign of a guy that was content and not hungry. He’d been promoted with his firm (twice). This was 1977. By the way, he left because by 1982 they’d laid off most of his friends.
My grandfather had the same job all his life - but it was a job, not a career. He worked the line in a beer bottling plant.
On the other hand, the firm I work for now has a lot of people who have been their 30+ years. It still does happen, if you fall into the right job with the right company. But the combination of occupation+firm = job, not necessarily career.
The divorce rate was high already in the 70s. Didn’t stop people in the 80s and 90s from getting married and trying to do better than their own parents. And the housing market has crashed before as well (badly in the early 80s).
Rebellious in the same way Ryan Seacrest, David Beckham and Blink 182 are rebellious.
Fair enough. One of the main reasons Gen Y and Gen X types have been taking longer to settle into the trappings of “adult” life is due to economic and social uncertainty. Jobs require much more education than they did 30 years ago so many people don’t really even beging their full time careers until after grad school in their mid to late 20s.
There also isn’t as much of a need to “settle down” right away. You don’t need a wife to get laid. You can live in an appartment in a hip trendy neighborhood in cities like New York or Boston or Chicago with lots of bars and restaurants and other single people instead of locking into a big house in the suburbs for the next 30 years.
Who do you think will be your hiring managers?
You like it because it’s comfortible.
If no one knows about it, nothing will change. Then it’s just a bunch of kids stroking each other’s ego on the internet.
Do you even have any “movements”? What issues are important to people under 30 these days? My generation didn’t really have any. We were “anti-movement”.
I remember a comic, Dennis Miller maybe, saying that the next generation will have to come up with something that’ll offend the generation that grew up with the Beastie Boys. Sounds quaint today. And then came Marilyn Manson. Oy.
This is hilarious. Hint: if you think that getting married, settling into a career, and buying a house are the signs of coolness in youth, you have never been cool.
Honestly I’ve been noticing a lot of rebellion taking the form of junior political activism these days. My little bro, the high school teacher, tells a LOT of stories about kids getting grounded in his rural county for protesting against teaching intelligent design and for legalizing gay marriage.
Interestingly I’ve also seen affected politeness and conservatism in style being something kids do to rebel among my (mostly liberal) buddies with kids. This doesn’t often translate to political conservatism, granted, but they’re more likely to yell “get a room” at the publicly making-out couple than cheer them on.
Yeah, I started to add in my original post that about the only thing kids could do now to rebel was to start wearing ties and become Republicans…but even to me that just didn’t sound right.
Heh, the example that comes to mind: My brother does not friend students on his facebook, because he isn’t stupid. Some of his fellow teachers and their spouses ARE friended. He made a post in support of gay marriage the other week, and a co-worker’s wife started ranting about how unChristian it was to support gay marriage rights. I brought up a few polite responses regarding translation issues in Paul’s letters and some of the gospels, and to put it bluntly she flipped out and went full-on Phelps. The upshot was that her son came into my brother’s class the next morning saying he’d been grounded due to the discussion, and it turns out it was because the lady had shown it to him with the express purpose of A) discrediting my bro and B) getting his affirmation of support, and was dismayed highly when he (after making sure she wanted him to speak his mind) said he thought my arguments were sound. Given the obvious faux pas of sharing a teacher’s facebook argument with his student…
I don’t think it’s conservatism that’s the reaction, in other words–I wouldn’t be surprised, though, to find that at least some of the upcoming generation is rebelling with more politeness and understanding than anything else. Not that we don’t have ample evidence from the talking heads that regardless of viewpoint the Boomers and Xers (guilty as charged, btw) are some of the more bombastic and rude folks out there.
Hmmm…generational rudeness. That’s something I haven’t thought of before. It would be great if the rude and vulgar behavior of the last couple generations was characteristic of those generations only and that in the future people will return to more civil modes of behavior.
This is almost comically obtuse given that in the first 3 months of this year multiple countries have either openly rebelled or literally overthrown their despotic government due to what everyone agrees is, at least partially, because of social media on the Internet.
Here’s hoping. I’ve met some really bitchy Boomers and it always warms my heart to see an X/Yer with facial piercings, green hair, 80 tattoos and a flaming skull on his/her shirt be completely polite.
Face it, young adults are just nicer and this is one rebellion I love my generation for.
You know, you’re right. As I think back on my interactions with young, punky-looking kids (young adults actually) these days, they have almost always been friendly and polite. I’m glad this has brought it to my attention, I really hadn’t parsed it out like this before.
Depends on what you consider rude. I seldom have X/Y or Baby Boomers texting when I’m having a conversation with them. They OFTEN don’t answer their cell phones during conversations - those I think are pretty polite things, but the generation coming of age right now is used to instant communication and “multitasking” - their attention is not necessarily centered on the person they are currently dealing with.
How many people in the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s etc. were ever authentically part of the beatnik/hippie/punk/etc. subcultures that’ve come to define those decades? From what I can tell, it’s normal for a youth moment to have had a small core of true believers that shocked the mainstream, followed by a much larger group of Johnny-come-latelies that showed up to smoke some weed and frighten their parents, then immediately sell out. I’ve known quite a few pretty damn authentic hippies, the kind who live nomadically or in anarchist communes, and I know they are plagued by ‘blissaninnies’ who show up to festivals to get high and wear tie-dye and play at being hippies for a weekend. Something similar happens to punks and goths, who have a lot of hangers-on who are in it purely for the fashion and care little or nothing for the ideals or politics of the movement.
As for people my age and younger – the ‘green’ movement is pretty popular, and I know several people who are working on living off-the-grid. Yes, some parts of NYC are absolutely swarming with hipsters. But most people I know my age are friendly, bright, and studious people working hard to find our place in this world and still hold onto some of our personal values. Y’know, like most young adults since time began.
Given the obvious faux pas of sharing a teacher’s facebook argument with his student…