Today, it is ‘Generation Y’ that is making waves. ‘Y’ stands for ‘Why?’, in other words for a generation that asks about the whys and wherefores. Or it may simply refer to the generation after ‘Generation X’, meaning those born between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1980s, who were the first to make the acquaintance of McJobs and accept precariousness as a life prospect.1 Between the Generation X of the 1990s and the Generation Y of the 2010s, the world has changed fundamentally. It has been a long time since a generation was courted as eagerly as today’s cohort of university graduates and first-jobbers in their mid- to late twenties. The reason for this is the glaring discrepancy between the birth rate and the number of vacancies. In Germany, the rate of employment has been increasing for some time, reaching around 43 million in 2017, the highest point since reunification. Despite widespread predictions about general deregulation, permanent full-time employment is rising, more older people are in work and the number of attractive jobs in the knowledge-based and specialized service-sector industries is increasing. The problem is that there are fewer people of employment age. Germany’s Federal Employment Agency calculates that, if the rate of employment remains constant and if immigration is not factored in, the available workforce will fall from its current number of 45 million to 32.5 million in 2025, a loss of around 6.5 million.2 There is a shortage of manpower for skilled labour, professional service-sector employment and highly qualified research and development positions. Under such circumstances, every halfway qualified and apparently suitable person counts. At least in Germany.
Ten years ago, a senior consultant conducting interviews for the position of a junior physician would have been able to invite a small handful of the best candidates from a pile of applications, and then have been able to grill each one about why they were qualified for the job. Now, the same consultant has to put up with two young women and a young man asking her what training opportunities and funding programmes the hospital can offer. And if she doesn’t show some flexibility on the question of night shifts and overtime, she finds herself after the interviews left without a definite commitment.
‘Work–life balance’ is at the top of the agenda for these young people. The job must offer interesting challenges that allow them to develop, the hierarchy must be flat so that teamwork can thrive, working hours must be flexible so that the compatibility of work and family is more than just wishful thinking, and the boss must regard herself as a coach who injects the team with the necessary spirit. In a word: ‘We won’t let ourselves become slaves at work, but if we are convinced by something, then we’ll give it our all.’3
For the first, post-war generation to emerge from the rubble, the motto was ‘live in order to work’. For the generation that grew up during the economic miracle, it was ‘work in order to live’. For the ascendant Generation Y, work and life are no longer dissociable. For them, it goes without saying that they can live while they work and work while they live.4 This means being respected in the workplace but also that their employer understands that the job doesn’t mean everything to them, and that the principle of individual support that they are used to from school continues in their professional lives.
Not surprisingly, this generation is given the VIP treatment by a thriving generational research sector.5 They are stylized as ‘secret revolutionaries’ who, with creative pragmatism, digital know-how, parental support and ego-tactics learned at an early age, are rupturing the relationship between the generations. Not by complaining, dropping out or rebelling but, ever so softly, by cultivating and asserting a style of enhanced selfefficacy. Unspectacularly, they are changing the world through the silent performance of a ‘psycho-economy’6 of improvisation and flexibility, whose flipside is disillusionment and indifference. Eulogies to them contain a note of wariness, lest these twenty-somethings succeed in pulling the wool over one’s eyes: ‘In their inconspicuous way, they are subverting traditions that seemed eternal, subtly evading what was supposed to be inevitable, quietly annulling laws society considered irrevocable.’7
No wonder, then, that this attitude is not universally loved. In any organization, be it a hospital, a mid-sized auto-parts supplier or a publishing house, different generations of employees converge. The management level still includes members of the post-war generation born in the mid-1950s, whose parents lived through the war and genocide, and whose elder siblings believed in peace and love. Then come the baby boomers born between 1956 and 1965, the trainers-wearing managers and middle-managers who reached adulthood during the oil crisis, punk and the Berlin Wall, who have either come out on top or have been passed over in the permanent competition for positions. They are followed by Generation X, today’s forty-somethings who discovered hedonism and MTV in the ‘roaring nineties’ (Joseph Stiglitz) and who saw their chance in the ‘creative destruction’ of capitalism, but who frequently backed the wrong horse. And then come the Ys, who can score points as ‘digital natives’ and who attempt the biographical balancing act of living, learning, working, loving and caring.
The mood of the moment is negotiated between these generational mood-tendencies. This negotiation takes place between the three types famously identified by Karl Mannheim: a leading, a diverted, and a suppressed type of generation.8 Who is in charge and who is the bearer of hope, whose attitude to life no longer fits and who can still find a mooring, who can change course elegantly, despite their opinions and experiences?
Not surprisingly, there is little love lost between Generation X, with its painful experience of life’s randomness, and Generation Y, which adapted to life’s randomness from the outset. It makes a big difference to your mood if you end up where you never wanted to be – or, when making decisions about jobs, commitments and life, you keep your options open, so as to turn accident into opportunity. Many 40-year-olds today think they know what’s at stake. Many 20-year-olds saw school and higher education as nothing more than a game that, at the risk of being thought a swot, you could only win through cunning and calculation. Generation Y thinks Generation Xers are whingers, while Generation X thinks Generation Y is arrogant and bratty.
A baby-boomer couple born in 1964 lacks the energy even to worry about the concerns of a first-jobber born in 1984. They are completely preoccupied with helping their oldest child revise for A-level maths and keeping the younger one away from the binge drinkers. At work, they are about to make their final step up the career ladder, while married life has also seen better days. They both find it annoying to have to deal with this new generation, whose brazen demands basically capitalize on their demographic advantage. The baby boomers find it hard to take the Ys seriously – while the Ys think the baby boomers are hopeless workaholics, except for perhaps their parents and their friends.
Of all the generations, those born around 1954 are without a doubt the most politically influential. Angela Merkel and many others in leadership circles in Europe were born in 1954. Now in their early sixties, they have entered the celebrity phase of their careers. The first generation to follow the heroes of 1968, they are characterized by a watchful, reserved and measured style. They don’t boast about their life experience but lead by example, drawing attention to things and pointing out omissions. They come from an intermediate position of after and before: after the ’68ers, whom they observed close up during the formative phase of the ’68ers’ biographies as teachers in schools and universities; and before the onslaught of the baby boomers, who were fed up with the ‘limits of growth’ and embraced the carefree and unencumbered 1980s. As the rearguard of the ’68ers, they are reflective and affirmative, and as the vanguard of the baby boomers, they are still marked by the feeling that everything can go wrong.
Being sandwiched like this prompts the ’54 generation to read more closely, to question more precisely and to judge more impartially. Helping them to do so were ‘joyful thinkers’ like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Paul Feyerabend. These gave them a sense of how revolutions often rest on illusions, but also of how the status quo can lead astray. In both insights, they are the children of the post-war era: in their anthropological scepticism towards political enthusiasm; and their insurmountable awareness of the ‘total collapse’.
Today, the prevalent mood between the generations is determined by the adoption of Generation Y by the ’54 generation. Bridging the biographical gap of around thirty years is a similar style of reticence, fear of over-identification, and a pragmatic approach to problem solving. Too much heat and everything burns. They prefer to let things happen rather than commit too quickly to things that end up slowing them down. The more options you have, the fewer the restrictions.
They accept the uncertainty of the world. The risks that individuals are expected to bear are balanced by the protections which one is entitled to from society. Neither generation sees a contradiction between individual responsibility and public support. The same goes for the supposed antithesis between private and public ownership. Not everyone needs their own car, but that doesn’t rule out owning one’s own home. Both generations expose themselves on social media to test how far self-perception and others’ perceptions of them need reconciling, however only to better protect the personal proprium of the self. Connecting the last post-war generation with the first generation of neoliberalism is the mood of a life lived in compromise.
A silent game of mutual transferences lends this relationship, which excludes the intermediate generations, a peculiarly intimate mood. The elders recognize their image in the younger generation, seeing a reflection of their own fears and longings: above all, the fear of ending up alone, expressed through the ‘life technique’9 of noncommitment and the habit of distancing themselves from everything that is too demanding and too challenging, of avoiding embarrassment come what may. The fear of failing at something in particular, at a certain point, become the fear of having done everything wrong. Then, obsession with self-optimization merely camouflages existential crisis.10 The ’54ers view the ’84ers as a difficult generation, but also as a generation in difficulty.11
The younger generation, who recognize in the older generation their own life technique, develop an aversion to repeating the established pattern. Their annoyance at having to endorse the pragmatism of the older generation can turn into a search for a lifestyle that is not just pragmatic.
For the generations that have been excluded, this intergenerational symbiosis of mood is somewhat suspect. The baby-boomers born around 1960 don’t care too much and merely hope that these post-war melancholics will soon hand over the reins. Using state-of-the-art management techniques with special emphasis on staff diversity, they hope that they will then be able to motivate Generation Y to work harder and identify with the job more. However, the 40-year-olds of Generation X can barely conceal their jealousy of this generational ‘pairing’, as it is referred to in Wilfred R. Bion’s psychoanalytical group-therapy.12 They see it as an emotional coalition based on a false stabilization, one that refuses to acknowledge what else is happening in the world. For example, in Silicon Valley, a fierce race is under way to develop the ‘disruptive’ technologies of an industrial revolution that is proceeding exponentially, digitally and combinatorially. Much of what Germany, with its export-driven high-productivity economy, manufactures in the way of machine tools and industrial plants will soon be able to be made more cheaply, more quickly and more precisely elsewhere.13 Engineers and entrepreneurs in the newly industrialized countries are waiting eagerly to supply the global market with all sorts of new products. In Europe, meanwhile, an intergenerational dream-team is musing about a brave new world of equal opportunities, paternity leave, same-sex marriage and tax breaks for families.
Karl Mannheim offers reassurance from the distant past, together with some fundamental insights. In his lecture held at the Sociology Congress in Zurich in 1928, entitled ‘Competition as a cultural phenomenon’, he pointed out that:
There are periods in modern history during which a representative generation becomes free to achieve a synthesis. Such generations take a fresh approach in that they are able to envisage from the higher platform of a synthesis those alternatives and antagonisms which their fathers had interpreted in a dogmatic, absolute sense. Then, if there are existential problems not yet ripe for a solution, such a generation will experience them in entirely different contexts; the old antagonisms, however, become less sharp, and it will be possible to find a point, so to speak, farther back, from which partisan positions can be seen as merely partial and relative, and thus transcended.14