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Gen X, Adulthood, and the New Victorians
Jul. 12th, 2007 10:52 pmSo you’re walking down the street some afternoon and you see someone pushing a stroller with a baby in it. The babies all blend (because, let’s face it, they usually do) but something strikes you as kind of odd about the woman. You ponder for a minute; she’s not especially old or young, ugly or pretty, and then it hits you—she’s a completely average female between the median ages of 28 and 35! And she has a kid! OH MY GOD!
Okay, I’ll turn the sarcasm off (well, this is me, so it’s not so much “off” as “toned down a notch”), but really, aren’t articles like this one from The New York Observer kind of inane? Yes, Generation X is now officially old enough to move out of the basement and do grown up things like marry and breed, and gasp, know what a 401K is.
Remember how Ethan Hawke’s character in Before Sunsettalked about his little daughter? That was the official cue that the Slacker era was ending. Seriously.
There’s nothing that special going on here. People grow up and a lot of them have kids and therefore find their pop culture time reduced to Disney videos and whatever they remember to put on their Netflix queue. Of the rest, well, some of them have flashy lives involving sexcapades and misadventures with videos appearing on the Internet, and they can be envied or laughed at in equal measure. But for most folks it’s eight hour (or more) days and paying bills and really just getting by.
There are a number of pop/economics (“pop-economics” looks like it should be more correct, except it also looks like it has more to do with Freakanomics than anything else) books coming out talking about how the current generation is the most debt-ridden, overworked one in history (or at least the history we care to remember, so, effectively, “history” here means “since 1950”). The most recent tome in this vein is Daniel Brook’s The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America. It makes the underused argument that Gen X/Yers aren’t apathetic or lazy—they’ve just got too much other stuff to do rather than go to war protests and the like (and this is true--I had just enough time to make a “Frodo Failed—Bush Got the Ring” t-shirt in undergrad, back in the lackadaisical days when I could sleep in ‘til 9am!) which makes a refreshing change from all the “shame on you, shame!” flak we’ve received in the past, oh, fifteen years now?
So yes, we really would like to be out with fancy drinks and getting our rocks off, but the world intrudes. Maybe when we retire, preferably before 70 is possible.
Okay, I’ll turn the sarcasm off (well, this is me, so it’s not so much “off” as “toned down a notch”), but really, aren’t articles like this one from The New York Observer kind of inane? Yes, Generation X is now officially old enough to move out of the basement and do grown up things like marry and breed, and gasp, know what a 401K is.
Remember how Ethan Hawke’s character in Before Sunsettalked about his little daughter? That was the official cue that the Slacker era was ending. Seriously.
There’s nothing that special going on here. People grow up and a lot of them have kids and therefore find their pop culture time reduced to Disney videos and whatever they remember to put on their Netflix queue. Of the rest, well, some of them have flashy lives involving sexcapades and misadventures with videos appearing on the Internet, and they can be envied or laughed at in equal measure. But for most folks it’s eight hour (or more) days and paying bills and really just getting by.
There are a number of pop/economics (“pop-economics” looks like it should be more correct, except it also looks like it has more to do with Freakanomics than anything else) books coming out talking about how the current generation is the most debt-ridden, overworked one in history (or at least the history we care to remember, so, effectively, “history” here means “since 1950”). The most recent tome in this vein is Daniel Brook’s The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America. It makes the underused argument that Gen X/Yers aren’t apathetic or lazy—they’ve just got too much other stuff to do rather than go to war protests and the like (and this is true--I had just enough time to make a “Frodo Failed—Bush Got the Ring” t-shirt in undergrad, back in the lackadaisical days when I could sleep in ‘til 9am!) which makes a refreshing change from all the “shame on you, shame!” flak we’ve received in the past, oh, fifteen years now?
So yes, we really would like to be out with fancy drinks and getting our rocks off, but the world intrudes. Maybe when we retire, preferably before 70 is possible.
