Before You Fall For This “OK Boomer” Nonsense, Read This
Let me ask you information-age savvy Millennials a real stumper: When was the last time you heard a Generation Xer complain? About ANYTHING?
Well, it’s about time you did. I’ve spent my whole life hearing from both Boomers and Millennials, while like a typical Gen Xer I’ve kept my head down and quietly stayed in my lane.
Because I’m a Gen-Xer and I’ll swear on my tattered Breakfast Club ticket stub that I never heard about a generation war until Millennials came along. Before that, generations were just one more arbitrary method of sorting demographics, useful to marketing executives and the occasional political survey, but otherwise unremarkable. I’ll put that up front, even though I’m about to talk about generations as if they meant something: Generations are nothing but what Papa Kurt Vonnegut dismissed as a granfalloon, a word we could stand to bring back for the label-happy modern media.
And I quote from that Wikipedia page because you probably skipped the important part:
“The granfalloon technique is a method of persuasion in which individuals are encouraged to identify with a particular granfalloon or social group. The pressure to identify with a group is meant as a method of securing the individual’s loyalty and commitment through adoption of the group’s symbols, rituals, and beliefs”
– that’s what the media is doing to you right now, all of you, and you’re falling for it. Next come the Boomer-free products marketed for Millennials. They’ve been pulling this crap for years. You can tell it’s made up because no two media outlets ever peg the same age brackets twice. So to clear this up, I’m talking to the birth-year range of 1979-1991, the group that really seems to stick to the center of what most people identify as stereotypical Millennial behavior.
But second, I’m talking to everybody younger than Generation X: You’re not the first generation to get dumped on.
You’re also not the first generation to suffer a bad economy, disadvantaged class structure, a polluted world, wars, strife, jokes at your expense, rainy days, chipped nails, or burnt toast. Generation Z (hint: If you were too young to remember 9/11 or recall it only in fuzzy frames, you’re Gen Z) seems less prone to fall for this artificial astroturf campaign.
Now walk up to your nearest Baby Boomer and ask them to explain the following quote: “never trust anyone over thirty.” See, Millennials, you’re not even the first to spit back.
Meet Generation X : We Existed!
My generation was the one referred to as “slackers,” being painted as indolent shift-abouts who drifted through life. As it panned out, nothing could be further from the truth, but we cheerfully went to go see the Richard Linklater film to hear the case objectively anyway. We never “OK Boomer”ed it, nor did we ever grace any of the other flak we received with a response, which is how all other generations but Millennials handle the usual razzing about being young.
Much more damaging was the phrase “latchkey kid.” That cut to the bone, because it wasn’t meant as derogatory, but merely a statement of pity, and yet not enough pity to do something about it. The Wikipedia article is too generous: The parents weren’t absent because they were “away at work.”
Generation X’s parents were absent because we were raised in the “Me Decade” by the crappier end of the Boomers (the last of which actually have a name, Generation Jones – I told you this was all granfalloons!). In a decade that worshiped Narcissism instead of being properly repulsed by it, our parents were too busy getting divorced, having affairs, tooting coke, and hooking up at swinger parties to notice they had children.
Which is how Generation X “went through its all-important, formative years as one of the least parented, least nurtured generations in U.S. history.”
No, really, they had to put PSAs on TV:
“Hey dumbass! You have kids to be responsible for – where are they?” They had to play that on TV stations to jolt aware the parents of us latchkeys, while we latchkeys were usually upstairs studying a stack of library books to make up for the college education we could see we wouldn’t get, acting more grown-up than they ever did.
You’re also not the first generation to get stuck with the proverbial bill for your parent’s parties. The Sexual Revolution of the ’70s gave us the AIDS epidemic just in time for us to hit puberty. The ’50s-’70s unbridled greed gave us the recession ’70s, the Reaganomics ’80s, and the boom-and-bust ’90s right when we were hitting the job market.
We Were “Adulting” Before We Were Adults
Generation X, when it gets noticed at all now, actually gets heaped with praise as undeserved as the “slacker” label was then. But, to be fair, all that neglect actually paid off in a unique way: We became a generation of independent people. Self-sufficient, self-starters, the Adult In The Room even when we were the youngest ones present.
Out of all that, Generation X went on to invent grunge, overpriced coffee, and the eCommerce end of the Internet you’re reading now. The majority of entrepreneurs and freelancers (waving toodle-oo from my laptop in my cozy home office) are Generation X. We count among our ranks all the garage start-up billionaires, founders or major contributors to lots of tech companies I need not name-drop.
Why did generation X do that?
No, this is important, stop and think what’s different.
We were handed the same lousy opportunity that Millennials whine and whine and whine and whine about every day day day, and we just said “Looks like the world is broken and stupid – we’d better help ourselves!” The first presidential administration we remembered was Nixon, and the first existential threat we were aware of was the Cold War. We had ample clues that the world was not under competent control. We simply forged our own path.
We’re still doing that now. What Boomers called “slacker” behavior was actually a cautious and methodical strategy of not tying ourselves to any one career for very long, because God knows those careers would dump us in a heartbeat in the infamous lay-off ’90s. We knew the jobs we saw today would be gone in five years. We knew better than to waste eight years on a degree that the job market couldn’t support.
Millennials Threw Themselves Away
In advance, let me clarify two things:
(1) I specify the age range inclusive of the ’80s as most stereotypical of the worst Millennial traits. I understand there’s exceptions to everything. It’s just that that particular age bracket seems to be the nastiest people to deal with. The ’80s-babies just give the impression that every last one of them is a spree shooter ready to blow. Death threats and doxing is how they say good morning. There is no such thing as a sense of humor with them. Nor is there any such thing as a slight too trivial to declare jihad over.
(2) I’m not saying it’s anybody’s fault. That particular age bracket hit voting age right around 9/11, the Bush administration, the Iraq / Afghanistan wars, several stock market crashes, the anthrax attacks, and finished with the Great Recession and a housing market crash, a litany of national disasters in the space of six years. That there is a generation with PTSD, that is.
But even then, EVERY generation has had problems happening on its watch. I just got through listing some of Generation X’s woes. We had conflicts too. Why didn’t we react like that?
See this? We never did this.
We Gen-Xers have dealt with Baby Boomers for exactly twice the time Millennials have, while not at all throwing half a Millennial fit about it.
I’ll cop to this much though: A lot of the buckets of crap heaped on Millennials isn’t coming from Baby Boomers. It’s coming from us Generation Xers, to whom you have given the advantage of stealth because you can’t tell us apart.
But seriously, we’ve been standing by watching this train wreck, and we’ve all been baffled at what you’re crying about. We Generation Xers cached all the tools you’d need on the web for you. You were set up to be the best-informed generation. You could all launch websites and blog and start your own businesses just like we did.
Don’t complain about the job market – instead, be the boss you see lacking in the world!
What, could you not see Uber and cryptocurrency coming?
Did you not think behemoths like Facebook and Amazon would step in to eat the lunch you left on the table?
Did you think after the desktop computer there was nothing left to invent? Did you not notice the Linux operating system we pasted all over the Internet to teach you how to be self-sufficient, doers and thinkers, free of corporate chains?
Did you not vote? “…political apathy among young people is arguably a predictor for low voter turnout.” You sure know how to vote when it’s about your pot.
Did you head into the climate change crisis full-tilt without noticing all the emergency exit routes we left for you? We’ve had solar-powered cars since 1987. You have Greta. She’s got her heart in the right place, don’t get me wrong. But at the end of the day, her solution is still “yell at other people to do something.”
“Yelling At Other People To Do Something” Is Not A Survival Strategy
Really, TBH, maybe latchkey kids is the kind of thing we need more of in the future. When we were latchkey kids, we had nobody to yell at. So we just got hungry enough to learn how to make our own grilled cheese sandwiches.
Generation X has a sort of blind spot now, because our self-starter nature is so ingrained deep in our bones that we’re shocked when other people don’t have it. Now that we’ve raised Generation Z, we can see where it makes a difference.
We can also see the difference in Generation Millennial, because culture at the time over-corrected from being neglectful to being TOO nurturing, to the point that Millennials became the “trophy generation” raised by “helicopter parents.”
I’m told in the latest granfalloon reports that when Generation X raised Generation Z, we were the “stealth bomber parents.” We didn’t hover like helicopters, you see, instead we kept a distance and monitored the situation, only flying in to rescue the kid when they were about to meet bone-breaking disasters.
We’ll see how that worked out for them. I can say this much, I was never a prouder human being than the time that I checked up on my kid (no TV PSA was required) and discovered her at her computer Googling for things she wanted to know without asking anybody!
Instead of calling me “elitist” for saying she should learn things!
Try this, Millennials – no wait, EVERYBODY try this! Repeat with me the Generation X prayer:
There are no generations. I am my own generation. I am CEO and Employee of the Month of my own corporation. I am my own religion. I am president and voting block of my own government. I am my own nation. I am the only solution to every problem that the world is ever going to see. I will not waste my time waiting for somebody else to solve my problems. I will just quietly solve my corner of the world and let others learn from my example.
Try it! Your life will improve!
Oh, wait a minute, I’m saying you must do this one thing in order to get this other result, which makes me… let’s see…
* spinning the wheel of Millennial-invented insults *
…a “gatekeeper”! Oh, I miss that one, it was so hilarious!
