THE SECOND most entertaining thing demographers get to do is to name generations, and one of the most controversial is to put dates to them. It might also be true that being exact in this respect is more of an interesting exercise than a game of true importance. A year or two years one way or the other is not going to affect most of the generalizations made about generations (which, by the way, is the first most entertaining thing demographers get to do).
Thus we can say with as much uncertainty as certainty that those of Generation X, the post-Boomer generation, were born exactly somewhere between 1960 and the late 1970s, or thereabouts. That settled, we can also say that there are some 80 million or so Gen Xers in America.
By generational standards Gen X is large, second only to the Boomers, and all that can be said about it has been said many times before. It’s a generation that never fought a major war. It enjoyed free, quality public education. Children of the Boomers, we publicly questioned, even dared to protest for and against, Big Things that Count: war, the environment, atomic weapons, health care, and poverty, among other “sustainability” issues.
But unlike some of our hippy-dippy parents, we turned the great “what is the world coming to” question into the navel-gazing art of a very personal “existential preoccupation,” leading to an all-encompassing, almost permanent state of social, financial, and sexual angst.
Middle- and upper-class kids of this generation experienced something novel that would shape our futures: mothers working full-time outside the home. Nothing novel for lower-income kids but entirely so for the rest. We were “latchkey kids,” with all the social and economic implication that went with it.
Perhaps because of this, we seemed to become independent more quickly than kids in earlier generations. Independence before the Internet led us to be more autodidactic. More than just learning things, we also learned to lead, or at least learned that we could lead if we chose to do so. In some respects, this was great. But it had some down sides, as we are also known as the “I can do it all / take care of it all myself” generation, when clearly, there are many things we can’t manage to do ourselves.
This sentiment, along with an unspoken sense of entitlement, an ethos that we could be whatever we wanted to be, had a great effect on how we shaped our lives. It didn’t help that divorce became common. For the first time in history, parents were fallible, unreliable. Our inclination to respect authority declined, as independence was either forced or gained earlier in life than ever.
More money coming into Gen X families assuaged our angst but also created lifestyle expectations we carried into adulthood, expectations we struggle to meet and continue to measure against the success of Mom and Dad. Freudian silly, but a material benchmark nonetheless.
Being highly educated only added fuel to the fires of our career and material expectations. We wanted to be something different, bigger, bolder, better. Our leadership and creativity shook the very foundations of entertainment, technology, and business. One after another, MTV, cable television, and the Internet dramatically expanded our exposure to people, events, and ideas beyond our immediate local experience. From a two- to a four-dimensional existence, Black and Latino music opened our eyes to the deeply rooted cultural experiences of others living in the midst, of a white dominated culture, and in the vast world around us. We found out that we were myopic, a discovery that scared some and excited others. National Geographic TV, travel shows, business programs, cable news … the world was our ever-expanding oyster, personally and commercially.
Small and large business models changed almost yearly, as single-send fax machines morphed into automated multi-destination faxes, email, group email, the Internet, and then the eCloud. Who can forget the anxiously hopeful mating call of the fax machine lost in the crackling emptiness of … then the miraculous beep, beep …. How life-altering was that?
Gen Xers grew up in the post-integration era. Exposed to diverse cultural experiences, we are somewhat more accepting of diversity, even embracing it. We didn’t drive the civil rights movement, but we were first on the integrated public school buses. Inter-racial barriers were breaking down as we matured, even as many remain to cast shadows on how we treat each other to this day.
We grew to have a generational mistrust of organizations and politicians, questioning once inviolate institutions. A generation of cynics, we saw public and private institutions and their leaders as a mass of incompetent and conspiratorial asses. Nixon’s Watergate, Three Mile Island, Bhopal, the Iranian hostage crisis, Iran–Contra, and the Clinton–Lewinsky debacles are the Post-it notes of our lived history.
Curiously, and unlike the Boomers before us, the media struggled to define Gen X, portraying us (as Time magazine did) as unfocused twenty- somethings, the Friends generation, self-involved and aimless but fun — this in a time when HIV affected over one million Americans and many millions more in other countries. According to the annals of the day, we were apathetic “slackers” who simply didn’t want to become adults. Bleak, cynical, and disaffected, we faced crazy-fast change in technology, medicine, cultural openness, recessions, and the splintering of “family values.”
How soon we confuse the stuff of change with the condition of youth. In 1997, Time reconsidered Gen X. Instead of layabouts, we became the Astoundingly Accomplishment Generation. We founded unimaginable technology start-ups and small businesses, while exponentially expanding scientific horizons in genetics and biotech. We created new forms of art, music, and literature. Our optimism finally surfaced and the once-deplored Generation X became the “Great Generation.” We braved traumatic social and economic soul searching, and through hard work and optimism reversed our dismal reputation.
Gen X is now known as strongly individualistic, independent, and skeptical of authority, with dash of antiestablishment spicing. Self-starting, self-sufficient, pragmatic, results-driven, but still — ultimately, and perhaps surprisingly to ourselves — quite conventional. Mortgage, kids, corporate job.
Gen X changed the way the world operated but unfortunately without substantially altering the overall balance of negative social and environmental impacts. We see how we want the world to be, but we just can’t get past ourselves and our attachments to make the necessary lifestyle changes.
Many Gen Xers do want a sustainable world but are not sure how to go about doing it in our lives, despite our incredible capacity to create, invent, and change. Like a colleague of mine once told me, “I go to Home Depot to get one or two things I need and end up buying half the store — environment, locally owned stores, and workers’ rights in China be damned.” And he is a professor for sustainable development!
We Gen Xers have made many major contributions to sustainability nonetheless, ones not recognized often enough. We were the first generation to question the value of time, and, unlike generations before us, developed a vague feeling that too much work, too much chasing money for material advancement, did not a healthy and sustainable life make. New agey lifestyle vogue resulted, but we have still largely failed to change our ways, to the detriment of the planet.
Many of us Gen Xers remember Black Monday, or November 19, 1987, the day the New York Stock Exchange Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 508 points or 22.6% (this compared to the much slower March 2008 to February 2009 38% meltdown). Soon after, in the early 1990s, just as Gen Xers were hitting the workforce, a dark eight-month-long recession struck. Eight years later, the Dot.com Boom burst as a precursor to another eight-month recession, just as Gen Xers were buying our first homes, starting to save, and beginning families. And when our thoughts finally began to look forward, Bam! The Great Recession of 2008.
Generation X has been hit by multiple, traumatizing economic disasters. Skeptical about the stability of our economic futures, we were also treated to a buffet of corporate malfeasance (see, you don’t get tired of that word, do you!!) from the folks that gave us the Savings and Loans Crisis in the 1980s, Nike and child labor in the 1990s, the lying and cheating of Enron and MCI/WorldCom at the turn of the century, and myriad other bad things done by companies that salted our economic cynicism with great douses of distrust.
While Gen Xers have largely realized our dreams of surpassing our Boomer parents’ lifestyles, many suffered years of low incomes. This had a big impact on household formation and savings rates. Many of us lived together in group houses. (That’s how my wife and I saved for our first home — thanks Darrell, Patrick, and Duncan!)
It took a while for us to get on our feet. But we did, and by 2005 the average Gen Xer had finally surpassed the average Boomer income level. This is the lesser point to recognize. For us, as for our Boomers predecessors, growing material affluence was the norm, more so than for any other past generation.
There have been many explanations for our supposed economic savvy. Among them is job mobility. Freer from convention and highly creative, Gen Xers were first criticized for our lack of career focus and a perceived crass disloyalty to our employers. Turns out, we were merely creating a new labor mobility model that turned to be good for (some) workers and the economy in general, as we started doing more of what we loved.
Gen Xers also pioneered lifestyle advances in work, from flexible work arrangements to in-house child care, continuing education, personal health, addressing overwork, and adult-care responsibilities. Women become more assertive, and while they quite unfairly earn less than men to this day, have still accumulated great wealth along the way. Indeed, women emerged in the 1990s as a client category for investment advisers. Many believe that the economic advance of Gen X is less a result of our inherent qualities than simply having more women in the workforce.7
So many people spend their health gaining wealth, and then have to spend their wealth to regain their health.
— Jackie Mason
Despite our work ethic and inheritances from Boomer parents, our vision of a life of balance and creativity driven by careers of passion has largely and sadly fizzled in execution. Today we work just as hard, maybe harder than our parents
It cannot help that we have material expectations beyond that of any other generation, even possibly that of Millennials. While we are decent at saving, we likely haven’t saved enough to maintain our desired lifestyle into retirement, yet this is the goal of almost all Gen Xers.
Gen X is a big bold generation that really has changed the world. Our expectations are high, and we worked hard only to consume too much, with great personal and sustainability opportunity costs. Traumatized by a stream of great big Bad Economic Events, plus our loose spending habits, our investment portfolios are not what they might have been, and certainly need help, both to match our retirement and savings needs and our hopes for a more sustainable future for our kids and grandkids.
• Gen Xers questioned conventional lifestyle but have largely lived a more amped-up work and consumption life than our Boomer parents.
• While not as plugged into change, Gen Xers were responsible for introducing massive cultural, technological, and business transformation, ushering in a period of incredible wealth creation.
• Gen Xers have lived through many Big Events political and social; they know climate change but remain recyclers at heart.
• Along with Boomers, Gen Xers stand to influence a great deal of SRI.