1st July 2021. Generations | Experiments
30 years of Generation X; mixing oil and water
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A frankly rambling column by Douglas Coupland in The Guardian reminds me that it is 30 years since his book Generation X came out and gave a name to the post boomer generation.
This isn’t the place to reflect on whether the construct of generations is useful or not. There are plenty of people who say not. My own view is that they are a useful construct, as long as you use them as a guide and not a map; they obviously get blurred at the inter-generational edges. Coupland himself says it might just be a function of technology and the economy:
Today, I wonder how much of what we call a generation is simply a matter of any given temporal cohort’s tech exposure during their pre-pubescent neural wiring – plus exposure to global financial cycles.
I’m not sure that this goes far enough. Because it misses out different values. We’re going through a long transition in social values, according to Ronald Inglehart, from ‘modern’ to ‘post-materialist’. The former is associated with authority, hierarchy, conformity—which worked well in an affluent society dominated by industrial conglomerates. The latter is more aout autonomy and creativity.
Each generation since then has had a different mix of these values, but one of the reasons the boomers have been such a dangerous generation for everyone else is that their individualism and interest in the status conferred by wealth has come wrapped in denim and rock music. (The Rolling Stones are the perfect symbol for this generation.)
And the fact is that Generation X was different from the Boomers, and in a way that the previous generations found frightening. It’s hard to remember the moral panic about this from the early 1990s, but it was extreme. Time published an article in 1990 that caught the tone of this panic well:
They have trouble making decisions. They would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder. They have few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own. They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial. They hate yuppies, hippies and druggies. They postpone marriage because they dread divorce. They sneer at Range Rovers, Rolexes and red suspenders. What they hold dear are family life, local activism, national parks, penny loafers and mountain bikes. They possess only a hazy sense of their own identity but a monumental preoccupation with all the problems the preceding generation will leave for them to fix.
From the Rolling Stones to Nirvana, maybe.
One of the mysteries about the Millennial generation that followed them was why workplaces changed so quickly to accommodate them—when as a generation they were still, at most, in their early 30s, and had no real influence in the workplace.
I did some research into this for a client a couple of years ago (pdf) and found that in many ways the values of Generation X managers about balancing their lives were at least as strong as those of Millennials (in some cases stronger), and as the Millennials arrived in work in reasonable numbers, they were mostly working for Generation X managers. My hypothesis was that these managers used the upwards pressure of the new cohort to make the changes they’d have liked to see when they first came into work.
What’s changed since then?—Coupland asks, in one of the few lucid bits of his Guardian article:
Three decades since Generation X came out, what’s changed? Well, millennials are getting old now. There’s even a microdemographic term for those born in the early 80s: “geriatric millennials”. These days, pop anthropology has moved on to scrutinising the mysteries of Generation Z, while Gen Z is now old enough to pick fights with Gen Y. The things that become emblematic of a tribe are often unwitting. For X, it was the flannel shirt. For Y, it was avocado toast. For Z, it is despising avocado toast and skinny jeans.
I was alerted to this gorgeous Twitter thread, posted by the materials scientist Caleb Meredith, by Nature’s daily briefing newsletter. It shows lots of short films of dissolving oil droplets. The sheer multiplicity of the patterns is fascinating, and I could say more about the nature of emergence if I had to. But really: just enjoy.
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