Gen X : Depressed, Disposable, and Denied. But We See and Do Things Others Can’t.
It’s official — Gen X has finally gotten to number one. A recent study by the American Psychological Association found we are the most stressed generation, even surpassing those pesky Millennials everyone likes to talk about. Everyone’s dealing with divisive politics and our ongoing murder-suicide with the environment, what pushed us over the top?
We’ve always been the ignored middle-child between the Boomers and Millennials. We’re used to being ignored. But something’s changed. We’re being erased. Sometimes more than metaphorically. CBS symbolized it best, dropping us from an on-air graphic. Hello? 50 million of us here.
Our pop culture history is also disappearing. Boomers have their classic analog film and music masters stored in temperature and humidity controlled bunkers. Millennials have every photo they’ve ever taken sitting somewhere in the cloud — and as you know nothing is ever deleted from the internet. Our stuff is increasingly buried in landfills on VHS and BetaMax tapes, Cassettes and CDs. And on the rare occasion we find a “classic” on YouTube, it’s always low-res 640x480 because it was shot on video. There will be no remastered or restored releases. We recorded our lives on the “democratized” inferior technology given to us. And soon, a lot of it will be gone.
We’re also being erased at work. Due to longer life-expectancies, Boomers are waiting longer to retire, so there’s no job to get promoted into. And when they finally do retire, we’re being skipped over for Millennials who’ve demanded promotions since they were interns and cost half our salaries. Our “good soldier” corporate loyalties are often betrayed in the interest of cost-savings. 78 million Boomers. 83 million Millennials. 160 million of them vs. 50 million of us. We’re being squeezed from both sides (see these Forbes and Harvard Business Review articles). No wonder we’re stressed.
But this short-sightedness ignores our super power…
Paraphrasing one of our generation’s greatest comedians, Mitch Hedberg,
“We know butter is way better than margarine…
we can see through the bullshit.”
We became latch-key kids when our mothers went off to work. We were forced to figure out things on our own, a lot of which would be considered child abuse today. But none of us felt richer, better off, or more stable. It was just what had to be done to maintain the quietly disintegrating status quo.
Our entire lives, we were sold hollow promises, lies and half-truths. We watched every “New & Improved” product come through our homes. They never improved anything. The only thing new was the “New & Improved” sticker on the bottle. We shut down New Coke in a heartbeat. Who wants a Coke that tastes more like Pepsi? Yet, Boomers still wonder why we’re so cynical.
Nowhere is our cynicism more earned than with technology. Our prime years encompass a period from no-such-thing-as-a-personal-computer until today. We rolled with it. Built a lot of it. We see through the grandiose predictions of every new technology with laser precision, because we’ve experienced so many of their failings. If there’s one core Gen X life experience, that’s it.
The computer revolution was supposed to bring an explosion of productivity and opportunity. So much that we’d only be working 3-hour days. Uh, how many hours did you work last week? Despite wages rising six fold in the 40 years before the computer revolution, they’ve remained effectively flat in the 40 years since.
Desktop publishing was supposed to create the “paperless office”. Yet, the records management industry that manages and stores all the paper we’re creating is going to top $168 Billion in 2020.
Despite all of that, our latch-key days taught us we can figure it all out. We hear the pontifications, cut through the bullshit, then get to work on what’s actually there. The web boom was us. We built that. And it was pretty cool, until a few Millennials invented “Social” as a clever disguise for surveillance capitalism and its accompanying algorithms bringing down democracies as we speak.
So, when the Boomer boss hires a 26-year-old because he (and it’s almost always a “he”) thinks the kid can manage technological change better than the 50-year-old who’s been doing it their entire life, the rage rises to the top. In terms of real change, that 26-year-old hasn’t seen much change. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, the cloud, and the iPhone have been around since that kid was in high-school. Amazon’s been around since they were learning to form complete sentences. Sure, they’re “natives,” but how will they react when things actually change?
A random decade of Gen X went from floppy disks to hard drives to removable drives (remember SyQuest?) to corporate servers to the internet. Whatever, bring it, we’ll figure it out.
We’re trapped between the technological cluelessness of Boomers and the dangerous Techno-Utopianism of Millennials. Because we’re starting to look more like them, Boomers assume we’re as clueless about this “tech stuff” as they are. We’re not. And because we don’t buy into every new shiny object that comes along, Millennials think of us at Luddites. We’re not.
But since you mention it, Luddites were a cynical group of skilled textile workers in 19th century England who worried technology would replace their highly-skilled craft with low-quality factory drudgery.
Guess what? They were right.
