At first I was a little annoyed, but then I had to smile at just how emblematic of Generation X the article really is. Screwed over by their parents, depressed, substance-addicted, and hopeless, but not one single hint of any effort or plan to change things. Generation X is the generation of ennui at the ruination of the world. Millenials and Gen Z might just be pissed off enough to do something about it.
We tried to change things I faced down 15 cops with loaded shotguns to protest Gulf War 1. I'm not depressed or substance addicted and I started doing web development in 1995 and continue to work as an a self taught engineer even though I'm pushing 50.
Eh, Generation X created the internet. Tesla/SpaceX, Amazon, Google, Paypal, Netflix, Ebay, Square/Twitter, and Signal were all founded by members of Gen X. Gen X made San Francisco a tech hub. Gen X created Linux as well as *BSD. Gen X invented Java, Javascript, Python, and Ruby. Gen X created the PEV revolution.
And Y-Combinator, together with hacker news. Thank Gen X for that.
Gen X never had the numbers to do anything substantial. Millenial's population total crossed the Boomers in 2019. Gen X will not do the same until 2028. From 2019 forward, governmental power will be exercised by Millenials. Gen X will never have an era of ascendancy, our lot is to simply figure out how to be satisfied where ever we find ourselves.
I feel like that should be obvious. But generations do have some commonalities based on the societal changes at the time, and that is what this "generations" talk is all about.
As a Gen Xer, I feel like the defining characteristic of my generation was parental divorce. It was really the first generation whose mothers entered the workforce in droves, and due to a widespread societal change of the roles and possibilities of women, this caused a ton of marital strife and divorce (in no way putting a judgment on this, it's just what happened).
My parents did not divorce, but my mom did work full time since I was in kindergarten, and we were pretty much all on our own until late in the evening, at a time before cell phones where parents could easily contact us.
Thus, this "shmuck" may not speak for me, but I see where he's coming from.
I don't even know what the fuck generation I am, when I was a kid they called me Gen X but then I got retconned to Gen Y and now who knows. When I started highschool mobile phones and the internet weren't a thing and when I started university they were ubiquitous, that should date me closely enough.
Why aint anyone blaming the "Me Generation" for the current crap?
The kids who were really invested in the difference between Disco and KISS and AC/DC; and have yet to forge any closer connection to reality even though they're the people in charge of shit now?
The folks writing paeans to the Quaalude and taking full advantage of the modern pharmacopeia to make sure those pesky pains of reailty biting them dont actually affect their groove.
Whilst funny, speaking as a GenXer myself, we got a raw deal, but not nearly as bad as the subsequent generations. Many of whom seem a lot more switched on than we ever were. We just kind of treated what was happening as inevitable. Millennials know that this was a policy enacted by people with names and addresses.
Maybe in an abstract post-GenX got a raw-er deal, but I've gone from being the kid no one will listen to the old no one will listen to pretty quickly. I work in a more traditional company and the 70 year olds want to leave things to the 30-40 year olds, not the bitter 40-50 year olds who never amounted to anything while the Boomers held on as long as possible.
I've had a couple Gen X'er friends tell me the generation is collectively stuck in the past. Are there any plausible theories why that might be? Was it a lack of meaning in the general narrative that made growing old too painful for many to face or something?
I don't want to read another glamorous blog post about how well someone tried--without hearing about what could have been done differently and what will be done differently next time.
The difficult thing for "the kids nowadays" to understand about GenX is the fact that we grew up under the threat of nuclear annihilation. It seems a bit absurd now, but there were times in the 70s and early 80s where it seemed like the grown-ups were going to destroy us all. This led a lot of us to develop nihilistic attitudes to life - it's difficult to take things too seriously when you'll probably die in a nuclear holocaust anyway.
But when the cold war suddenly ended, Gen X was left a bit adrift with its nihilism. You can still hear echoes of those fearful days in everything that Gen X does and says to this day.
"Right now, Generation X just wants a beer and to be left alone."
That is the problem. It should take over the reins now. Gen X has the problem that it was educated by ex-hippies with massive egos and personalities, who later sold out the West to China.
Gen X has major confidence issues and should get rid of them. It is under a two-pronged attack from the last boomers and woke millenials. Well, fight!
The problem was that we grew up in a time when the dreams died and we were having to deal with the tailwind of the post war growth boom. The protest movements of the 60's and 70's delivered nothing, the state-ist, interventionist keynesian economics produced low growth, high inflation, high interest rates, high unemployement. The right wingers Thatcher and Reagan, cleaned up the mess. Making money was the only truth to us, education and career were all important. The university protestors that preceeded us did nothing achieved nothing, and sold out anyway. Ultimately ideology is a pile of shit, and we dont want to waste our time with them. Technology and money were our gods. Of the two I fear millenials more, they grew up in a stable world without high inflation and economic stagnation, they want to invite the socialist tiger into their house but they dont know what the consequences will be. Their attitude to freedom is unnerving. They're dragging the world back into the age of the victorians.
There is a concept in/around civil engineering I've heard referred to as the 3 generation rule, though the only place search engines seem to turn it up is Ken Burnside's formulation on Atomic Rockets, which specifically applies it to space stations.
>The Three Generation Rule of Space Colonies states that space colonies have an average life-span of three generations until the life-support and other technical system decay to a point where the colony cannot sustain life. As Rick Robinson puts it "the degree of social discipline needed for a space habitat to survive indefinitely is beyond the capability of "normal" human societies. The human tendency to favor short-term expediency. will, over time, make the habitat ecosystem more and more precarious." See the link for more details.
Here's the thing, that didn't come out of nowhere. There're actually earlier references I've stumbled across from various veins of engineer or policymaker with regards to how difficult it is to get funding for proper maintenance of civil engineering projects.
The meme formulation of hard times, strong people, yada yada, is a glib restatement of a rule that to me seems to be at the very heart of information theory:
If you ain't lived it, you don't get it. I can tell you stories til I am blue in the face, but until people [start dropping dead from cholera in the streets], [get trapped in elevators due to widespread power failure], [start suffocating in the mal-maintained subway tunnels], [having their homes blow up because of long deferred natural gas pipe maintenance], you will not give me the resources to get done what needs to get done.
To generation n-1 it's theory, generation n-2, they paid for it in blood, to generation n, it's the crazy ramblings of old people and the world don't work that way anymore grampa.
Except it do. And it will continue to. This the cycle continues. Even the creation of an ennui consumed generation is predicted in the sense that a generation sees the problems, but isn't in touch with history enough to figure out how far to roll back thinking to safely start retraversing a new path.
You either get an extremely luck person who stumbled on it randomly, or you get hard times when the next demagogue wrecking ball's shit and everyone has to figure out how to pick up the pieces.
> to generation n, ... the world don't work that way anymore
...and that's where we get back to tech. Younger techies tend to act as though none of the hard-won knowledge about how to store/move/act on data, how to write robust software, etc. applies any more. The fact is that some does and some doesn't. Time after time after time, things that we once knew about (for example) network congestion or storage failure modes are ignored or forgotten because "the world don't work that way anymore" then come back to the fore very suddenly and painfully because yes it does. A large part of the reason I retired is that I got tired of over-promoted kids ignoring warnings about things I had lived through once and could see coming again. "I told you so" is no substitute for being allowed to contribute in the first place.
P.S. I'm not a Boomer; I'm very early GenX, and way more attuned to those experiences/attitudes.
I always felt, generationally, that I'm in a weird spot, somewhere between a Millennial and a Gen Xer.
I caught the end of Gen X, so I get some of the gripe, but I've always been a technology native, so in that regard I'm closer to a Millennial in life experience.
Many people in tech are a bit like this, perhaps ahead of their time because they caught the wave earlier.
I'm reminded of an SNL gameshow sketch. Boomers vs Millenials with Generation X being the gameshow host. When the Boomers and Millenials were arguing, Gen X sat back going, "Meh. Not my problem."
With Millenials having kids, being married, etc now, I don't think Boomers can continue being the boogeyman holding us down. It might be time to actually start fixing things.
The average politician in the house/senate/congress is a boomer.
I agree that the solution is for millennials to get more politically active. But the cards are sort of stacked against us. We have less money over all than prior generations which means any representative we want is likely going to be outspent by older representatives (for not being whiny or whatever).
On top of that, the political landscape has changed somewhat significantly. What changed is we have computers to draw congressional maps that remove political competition. There are few "swing" districts in the US and that has a lot to do with computer aided gerrymandering. That sort of system makes it easier for an old fart to stay in power for far too long, because they've picked constituency that won't remove them from office for bad behavior.
Of course, the only solution is to be less apathetic than the boomers and gen xers. To vote in very large numbers that are hard to ignore. That, however, is a hard thing to pull off. It's hard to convince people that their vote matters and will make a difference or that participation matters.
I'm just happy to be sitting quietly on the sidelines while the Millennials and Boomers fight it out. We'll be boomers soon enough though, it's a label that's gotten completely detached from the year of your birth.
I am feeling old enough to miss the "good old day". Even as I sit here typing message on a social forum, I can't help but feel that the internet has been a net negative. We weren't as unhappy as the current generation seems. Among other factors, I think its because we weren't constantly bombarded with the message that we should be unhappy.
No I think that's unlikely. The boomer label isn't simply old, a large part of it is viewing the world from a life spent in times of extreme economic growth.
[+] [-] causi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shams93|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BbzzbB|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsj_hn|4 years ago|reply
And Y-Combinator, together with hacker news. Thank Gen X for that.
[+] [-] rabboRubble|4 years ago|reply
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/28/millennials...
[+] [-] omgJustTest|4 years ago|reply
Should the entire system change on a dime because of someone's writing? No.
Should the writing be rejected because they complained? No.
Survival bias is so strong, there are more billionaires than ever and the system is strongly favoring them because they lobby it to be so.
Complaining is the first step in problem resolution, to yourself or to your peers or on a blog post.
[+] [-] taneq|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mmstgshj|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|4 years ago|reply
I feel like that should be obvious. But generations do have some commonalities based on the societal changes at the time, and that is what this "generations" talk is all about.
As a Gen Xer, I feel like the defining characteristic of my generation was parental divorce. It was really the first generation whose mothers entered the workforce in droves, and due to a widespread societal change of the roles and possibilities of women, this caused a ton of marital strife and divorce (in no way putting a judgment on this, it's just what happened).
My parents did not divorce, but my mom did work full time since I was in kindergarten, and we were pretty much all on our own until late in the evening, at a time before cell phones where parents could easily contact us.
Thus, this "shmuck" may not speak for me, but I see where he's coming from.
[+] [-] taneq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psyc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffwask|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] h2odragon|4 years ago|reply
The kids who were really invested in the difference between Disco and KISS and AC/DC; and have yet to forge any closer connection to reality even though they're the people in charge of shit now?
The folks writing paeans to the Quaalude and taking full advantage of the modern pharmacopeia to make sure those pesky pains of reailty biting them dont actually affect their groove.
Them bastards are to blame, yeah thats it.
[+] [-] moomin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panzagl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phone8675309|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SuoDuanDao|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] genghisjahn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juancn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karmakaze|4 years ago|reply
> only awarded for victories, not participation.
I don't want to read another glamorous blog post about how well someone tried--without hearing about what could have been done differently and what will be done differently next time.
[+] [-] asebold|4 years ago|reply
Tired of people trying to pit us against each other because we're in different stages of life.
[+] [-] ziggus|4 years ago|reply
But when the cold war suddenly ended, Gen X was left a bit adrift with its nihilism. You can still hear echoes of those fearful days in everything that Gen X does and says to this day.
[+] [-] ekianjo|4 years ago|reply
Absurd? As if, did the ballistic missiles suddenly disappear? It's only absurd if you lack imagination.
[+] [-] trqax|4 years ago|reply
That is the problem. It should take over the reins now. Gen X has the problem that it was educated by ex-hippies with massive egos and personalities, who later sold out the West to China.
Gen X has major confidence issues and should get rid of them. It is under a two-pronged attack from the last boomers and woke millenials. Well, fight!
[+] [-] drumhead|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] john-doe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] salawat|4 years ago|reply
>The Three Generation Rule of Space Colonies states that space colonies have an average life-span of three generations until the life-support and other technical system decay to a point where the colony cannot sustain life. As Rick Robinson puts it "the degree of social discipline needed for a space habitat to survive indefinitely is beyond the capability of "normal" human societies. The human tendency to favor short-term expediency. will, over time, make the habitat ecosystem more and more precarious." See the link for more details.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/glossary.php
Here's the thing, that didn't come out of nowhere. There're actually earlier references I've stumbled across from various veins of engineer or policymaker with regards to how difficult it is to get funding for proper maintenance of civil engineering projects.
The meme formulation of hard times, strong people, yada yada, is a glib restatement of a rule that to me seems to be at the very heart of information theory:
If you ain't lived it, you don't get it. I can tell you stories til I am blue in the face, but until people [start dropping dead from cholera in the streets], [get trapped in elevators due to widespread power failure], [start suffocating in the mal-maintained subway tunnels], [having their homes blow up because of long deferred natural gas pipe maintenance], you will not give me the resources to get done what needs to get done.
To generation n-1 it's theory, generation n-2, they paid for it in blood, to generation n, it's the crazy ramblings of old people and the world don't work that way anymore grampa.
Except it do. And it will continue to. This the cycle continues. Even the creation of an ennui consumed generation is predicted in the sense that a generation sees the problems, but isn't in touch with history enough to figure out how far to roll back thinking to safely start retraversing a new path.
You either get an extremely luck person who stumbled on it randomly, or you get hard times when the next demagogue wrecking ball's shit and everyone has to figure out how to pick up the pieces.
[+] [-] notacoward|4 years ago|reply
...and that's where we get back to tech. Younger techies tend to act as though none of the hard-won knowledge about how to store/move/act on data, how to write robust software, etc. applies any more. The fact is that some does and some doesn't. Time after time after time, things that we once knew about (for example) network congestion or storage failure modes are ignored or forgotten because "the world don't work that way anymore" then come back to the fore very suddenly and painfully because yes it does. A large part of the reason I retired is that I got tired of over-promoted kids ignoring warnings about things I had lived through once and could see coming again. "I told you so" is no substitute for being allowed to contribute in the first place.
P.S. I'm not a Boomer; I'm very early GenX, and way more attuned to those experiences/attitudes.
[+] [-] juancn|4 years ago|reply
I caught the end of Gen X, so I get some of the gripe, but I've always been a technology native, so in that regard I'm closer to a Millennial in life experience.
Many people in tech are a bit like this, perhaps ahead of their time because they caught the wave earlier.
[+] [-] throw0101a|4 years ago|reply
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials
[+] [-] Steltek|4 years ago|reply
With Millenials having kids, being married, etc now, I don't think Boomers can continue being the boogeyman holding us down. It might be time to actually start fixing things.
[+] [-] cogman10|4 years ago|reply
I agree that the solution is for millennials to get more politically active. But the cards are sort of stacked against us. We have less money over all than prior generations which means any representative we want is likely going to be outspent by older representatives (for not being whiny or whatever).
On top of that, the political landscape has changed somewhat significantly. What changed is we have computers to draw congressional maps that remove political competition. There are few "swing" districts in the US and that has a lot to do with computer aided gerrymandering. That sort of system makes it easier for an old fart to stay in power for far too long, because they've picked constituency that won't remove them from office for bad behavior.
Of course, the only solution is to be less apathetic than the boomers and gen xers. To vote in very large numbers that are hard to ignore. That, however, is a hard thing to pull off. It's hard to convince people that their vote matters and will make a difference or that participation matters.
[+] [-] spywaregorilla|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sparks1970|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peanut_worm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmugan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshmarinacci|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nineplay|4 years ago|reply
I am feeling old enough to miss the "good old day". Even as I sit here typing message on a social forum, I can't help but feel that the internet has been a net negative. We weren't as unhappy as the current generation seems. Among other factors, I think its because we weren't constantly bombarded with the message that we should be unhappy.
[+] [-] spywaregorilla|4 years ago|reply