Generation X Rising Adulthood

America's college class of 1983 came with a new label, the first official welcome of their coming-of-age generation. Around the time of their graduation, the U.S. Office of Education published A Nation at Risk, describing the nation's student population as "a rising tide of mediocrity" whose learning "will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents." This diatribe became the first in a flurry of reports, studies, and books (keynoted by Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind) that castigated America's new youth as mindless, soulless, and dumb. In their caustic What Do Seventeen-Year-Olds Know? Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn answered: not much. Grading youths in twenty-nine subjects, they dished out twenty F's, eight D's and one C minus.¹⁶

Through the 1980s, recent graduates heard older writers and columnists call them a "nowhere generation," a "tired generation," a "generation of animals," a "high-expectation, low-sweat generation," and "an army of Bart Simpsons, armed and possibly dangerous." Russell Baker decried their "herky-jerky brain" and "indifference to practically everything on the planet that is interesting, infuriating, maddening, exhilarating, fascinating, amusing, and nutty." Youth-targeting films (Breakfast Club, St. Elmo's Fire, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Fast Times at Ridgmont High) scripted adolescents to confirm these elder judgments. In Pump Up the Volume, Christian Slater's Hard Harry dismissed his peers as a "Why Bother Generation." As novelist David Leavitt has observed, "Mine is a generation perfectly willing to admit its contemptible qualities."¹⁷

In the early 1990s, as Wayne and Garth chanted "We're not worthy!" and Beck sang "I'm a loser, baby," America's twentysomethings begrudgingly settled on the label Generation X. Like so much of the new youth culture, this term was a pop derivative: Somebody wrote a book about 1960s-era British mod teenagers, Billy Idol named his band for the book, the term became a Canadian youth cachet, and along came Doug Coupland's defining title. After the 1992 film Malcolm X landed X logo merchandise on black kids' caps and shirts, Southern white kids began wearing T-shirts to match ("You wear your X and I'll wear mine"). Soon the letter was everywhere.¹⁸

Seizing the new generational discovery, a barrage of media began portraying everything X as frenetic and garbagy. In their own lyrics and manuscripts, young people maintained the facade of self-denigration they had already learned in childhood--with a touch of ironic malice. "Our generation is probably the worst since the Protestant Reformation," said a college graduate in Metropolitan. When Subaru showed an ersatz grunger selling supposedly punk rock cars, the ads failed. Asked to buy a car decked out in their own culture, young people refused. "Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?" sang the theme song of Cops. "Bad boys! Bad boys! Bad as I Wanna Be, Dennis Rodman chimed in.

"Nobody's really got it figured out just yet," Alanis Morissette sang in her album Jagged Little Pill, and indeed, many of her peers resisted any effort to define their generation. They often regarded their own circles of friends as too diverse to be thought of in collective terms. To them, X stood for nothing, or everything, or (as Kurt Cobain sang) "oh well, whatever, never mind." Compared with any other generation born in the Twentieth Century, theirs was less cohesive, its experiences wider, its ethnicity more polyglot, and its culture more splintery. Yet all this was central to their collective persona. From music to politics to academics to income, these young adults defined themselves by sheer divergence, a generation less knowable for its core than by its bits and pieces.

As the 1990s progressed, young adults asserted more control over their own image. The generational TV shows took X from the glitzy Beverly Hills 90210 to the atomized Melrose Place to the ersatz community of Friends, whose cast resembled the people who watched those other shows. Many of the story lines depicted youths as noncommital, unattached, brazen about sex and work, obsessed with trivial things, and isolated from the worlds of older people or children. In film, young directors explored their peers' disjointed alienation (sex, lies, and videotape; Bodies, Rest, and Motion) and a life that seemed to lead nowhere (Slacker, Singles, Dazed and Confused) amid a culturally splintered world (Boyz 'n' the Hood, El Mariachi, Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.) full of exploitative sexuality (Kids, My Own Private Idaho) and remorseless violence (Natural Born Killers, Pulp Fiction, Menace II Society, Doom Generation). These films often had no beginnings or endings, or any "right" things to do, or older mentors who weren't cartoons, or any environment that wasn't what Robert Rodrigues called "spare and tough." What they did have was lots of drugs, alcohol, violence, moving around, boredom, meaningless sex, social chaos, and personal directionlessness.¹⁹

Older generations mostly avoided these movies, so their impression of X mainly arose through mainstream media (Newsweek, Fox's sports broadcasts) that aggressively pursued young-adult psychographics and, especially, through advertising. Marketers zeroed in on young adults less because they had spendable money--of all adult brackets, they had the least, per capita--than because they dominated the margins of product choice. Young adults had thin loyalties, what Coupland called "microallegiances." "With them, once the fizz is gone, that's it," said a Shearson-Lehman pump-sneakers analyst. As advertisers searched for the right fizz formula, shocked elders saw constant thirty-second snippets of hyperkinetic, inarticulate young body-worshipers trampling the Tetons in pursuit of raw pleasure. Young adults might buy the beer, but the image left a hangover.

"X got hypermarketed," declared Coupland in 1995. "And now I'm here to say that X is over." Generation Ecch! declared one parody, as polls showed only 10 percent of youth willing to embrace the letter label. From Coupland to Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, putative leaders of the youth culture declared no interest in speaking for anybody, except perhaps to share writer Jennifer Lynch's realization that "maybe I have nothing really to say." The whole X persona came to be perceived as such a mess that nobody wanted to identify with it, as if to cut all connection with a loser.

Often, talk of X degenerated into pretentious putdowns by a Boomer-dominated media bent on confirming the superior authenticity of their own Awakening-era youth. The 1994 Woodstock revival produced much Boomer talk about how much nobler and less commercial the original had been. In return, the bombast of middle-aged narcissists provoked a ripe target for this younger generation of survivors. "Boomers are finally growing up," said Kate Fillion, "and we don't hold it against them that they forced so many of us to beat them to it." To have heard many Generation Xers tell it, following Boomers into youth was like entering a theme park after a mob had trashed the place and some distant CEO had turned every idea into a commercial logo.

Make love not war
Sounds so absurd to me

To get a fix on Generation X's young adulthood, focus on their place in history and how different they were at this age from the generation that nurtured them: the Silent. Where Silent youth had felt the need to break free from a gravitational conformism, Generation Xers felt the need to ground themselves out of a centrifugal chaos. The Silent had been America's least immigrant generation and yearned for more diversity; Generation Xers were the Twentieth Century's most immigrant generation and yearned for more common ground. Where the Silent had inhabited the most uniform youth culture in living memory, Generation Xers dwelt in the most diverse minicultures.²⁰

Where the Silent had been the youngest-marrying generation in U.S. history, with low rates of premarital sex, abortion, and venereal disease, Generation X was the oldest-marrying, with the highest-ever rates of teen sex, abortion, and venereal disease (including AIDS). Where the Silent's worst high school discipline problems had been gum chewing and cutting in line, the image of the troubled Generation Xers was Kids, in which the adult world was invisible amid a numbing youth search for violence and drugs and sex and money. Where the Silent had had an annual young-adult arrest rate of 13 per 1,000, the Generation X arrest rate was 117 per 1,000. One Generation X student in six knew somebody who had been shot.

Where Silent youths had come of age believing in sweet sentimentality, as kids who (sang Elvis) "just want to be your teddy bear," Generation Xers came of age believing in rock-hard reality, as kids who (wrote Bret Easton Ellis) wanted to be "unambiguous winners . . . Tom Cruise characters." Where the young Silent had wanted a Heartbreak Hotel, Generation Xers wanted rather have been Top Gun.

"How could such wonderful parents as ourselves have produced such awful children?" asked William Raspberry. Try this: Where the Silent had been children of a Crisis who had come of age in a High, Generation Xers were children of an Awakening who came of age in an Unraveling.

Where the Silent had grown up just when a hungry society wanted to invest, Generation Xers grew up just when satiated society wanted to cash out. Where the Silent had come of age in an era when individualism was discouraged but economic success guaranteed, Generation Xers came of age when individualism was celebrated but economic success was up for grabs. Where the young Silent had climbed the corporate ladder and flocked to Washington to staff the New Frontier and Great Society, twice as many Generation Xers said they would rather own their own businesses than be corporate CEOs, and four times as many would rather be entrepreneurs than hold a top job in government. With the Silent, prosperity and institutional stability had gradually exceeded expectations, allowing them to turn their focus to affect and detail. With Generation Xers, the opposite happened, and expectations were betrayed. Where the Silent had come of age with How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Generation Xers had the stark declinism of Rent, riveting them on the bottom lines of life.²¹

Generational economics has borne this out. Unraveling-era Generation Xers, males especially, were hit with a one-generation depression. From 1973 to 1992, the real median income for young-adult males fell by 28 percent, more than it had for the entire nation from peak to trough of the Great Depression. (During those same two decades in which youth incomes were plunging, real median income for seniors rose by 26 percent.) In 1969, the median earnings of full-time working men under age twenty-five was 74 percent of the median for all older full-time men; since 1986, that figure has never risen above 55 percent. In the Awakening, only 8 percent of young employed household heads lived in poverty; at the end of the 1990s 18 percent did.²²

Notwithstanding this harsh youth economy, the image of Beverly Hills 90210-style wealth (cars, TVs, CD players, leather logo jackets) wrapped itself tightly around Generation X. Yet what sociologist Jerald Bachman called "premature affluence" did more harm than good: It accustomed youths to parentally subsidized luxuries they could not possibly afford on their own, and it persuaded older generations that if some young people were not doing well, they had only themselves to blame. "The poor stay poor, the rich get rich," sang Concrete Blonde. "That's how it goes, everybody knows."²³

For a generation that struggled so much in economic and public life, fatalism was a survival skill, comforting those who were not doing so well. They applied it to wall off each fragment of life--work, family, friends, culture, fun--from the rest and thereby contain any damage from spreading. Unlike Boomers, Generation Xers could not spare the energy to be "together" people, linking every act to a core self. Instead, they tended to be modular people, dealing with each situation on its own terms. Nowhere was fatalism more rampant than in Generation X views on crime. The Unraveling's youth crime rate ebbed below its Awakening-era (Boomer) peak, but the public tolerated it far less. Where the Boomers had been the most alibied and excused criminal generation in U.S. history, Generation Xers became the most incarcerated. Roughly one-third of all Generation X black males are either in prison, on probation, or under court supervision. Today's convicts are perceived as incorrigible, deserving not of rehabilitation but of pure punishment--from butt-caning to merciless execution. Yet of all Unraveling-era generations, Generation Xers are the toughest on criminals. If you're guilty and get caught, so the thinking goes, don't complain about what's coming to you.²⁴

Taking risks came naturally to what was far and away America's most active generation of gamblers. As online sports bettors, lottery-ticket regulars, and avid bar bingo players, Generation Xers filled the age brackets that are now (but were not previously) most at risk to compulsive gambling. Lacking any guarantee that slow-but-steady, follow-the-rules, and trust-in-the-future behavior would ever pay off, Generation Xers tended to view the world as run by lottery markets in which a person either landed the big win or went nowhere. They constructed a flimsy ethos of self-determination in which being rich or poor had less to do with virtue than with timing, salesmanship, and luck. What people got was simply what they got and was not necessarily related to what they might or might not have deserved.²⁵

Their dating and mating reflected much the same quest for risk amid decline, for modularity amid chaos, for doing what worked amid constant elder judgments about right and wrong. Where the young Silent had looked at sex as euphoric, marriage as romantic, and feminism as a thrilling breakthrough, Generation Xers looked at sex as dangerous, marriage as what a St. Elmo's Fire character called "all financial," and gender equality as a necessary survival tool in a world of wrecked courtship rituals, splintered families, and unreliable husbands. As older feminists debated what Deanna Rexe called "problems of affluence and success, rather than serious ones," their Generation X successors were more concerned about immediate self-defense (against AIDS, date rape, and street crime) and longer-term self-defense (against potential spouses who might be unreliable providers or abandon their families).

As the youngest-copulating and oldest-marrying generation ever recorded, Generation Xers maneuvered through an unusually long span of sexually active singlehood, with the threat of AIDS ever lingering in the background. They were always the physical center of the abortion debate--first as the surviving fetuses of the most aborted generation in U.S. history, later as the pregnant unmarried woman faced with the "choice" of what to do. Small wonder Generation Xers had such split feelings about the Consciousness Revolution. They fantasized about how the 1960s and 1970s supposedly had offered Boomers easy sex without consequence, while resenting the lasting damage done by an era in which they now realized they were the babies adults were trying so much not to have.

The children of Generation X are either the civic-minded Millennial Generation or the artistic New Adaptive Generation, who will tend to be nurtured in an overprotective way.

A similar alertness to the hard truths--and anxiety about danger--formed the Generation X view of race. They came of age in an Unraveling era that allowed institutions, but not individuals, to discriminate on the basis of race, exactly the opposite of what the Silent had encountered in the High. To the young Silent, affirmative action in schooling, college, and job selection had been a goal of conscience. They hadn't confronted it themselves, but later on declared it fitting and just for their children to do so. To many Generation Xers, racial quotas were just another game in a larger institutional casino: They liked it if helped them, but not if it didn't. At best, Generation Xers defended quotas as a sort of blood law. "Two wrongs don't make it right," said Sister Souljah, "but it damn sure makes it even."

Though often accused of rising racism and hate crimes, including many of the mid-1990s bombings of black churches, Generation Xers were by any measure the least racist of today's generations. Certainly none other in U.S. history were as amenable to working for, voting for, living next to, dating, marrying, or adopting people of other races. America's black-white marriages quadrupled over the span of just one generation. Yet the Generation Xers' greater colorblindedness didn't necessarily bring them together as a generation. Their real diversity problem was less racial or ethnic than economic and familial: Young black professionals fared almost as well as white peers, while uneducated Generation X blacks did worse than one or two generations before. Nearly half of all young black males in the inner city did not hold full-time jobs.²⁶

Political surveys showed Generation Xers as somewhat more conservative, considerably less liberal, and far more independent than older generations were at that time or at like age. "In a dramatic shift," wrote James Glassman, "young people now constitute the majority of Republicans, while Democrats have become the party of the old." Never knowing anything except institutional decline, Generation Xers were deeply skeptical about grand policy visions they assumed would somehow only add to America's fiscal debt and social chaos. From criminal justice to tort law, from public schools to the federal bureaucracy, government was viewed by many Generation Xers as a morass that was far too complex, far too tied to special interests, and far too enmeshed in ideology to get simple things done. Having grown up in an era of rising political cynicism, Ian Williams noted how they were "moving beyond cynicism to apathy." As MTV aired Like We Care in a fruitless effort to show that Tabitha Soren's peers somehow did, millions reached voting age as what that network called the "Unplugged"--total nonparticipants in public life. For many, non-voting became an acceptable social choice.²⁷

More than three Xers in four did not trust government to look after their basic interests. As they saw it, other people got the benefits, while they paid the bills. In California, thanks to Proposition 13, young new homeowners could pay several times as much in property taxes as their elder neighbors with identical (but "grandfathered") homes. In Virginia, a 30-year-old couple with a $30,000 annual income and a $100,000 house paid more than $8,000 in major local, state, and federal taxes, while the typical 65-year-old couple with the same income and house paid nothing at all. Nearly every major Unraveling-era policy proposal on taxes, health care, and Social Security proposed transferring money from youth to elders. And Xers were even less inclined than Boomers to believe that paying now would benefit them later, when they grow old in their own turn. A Third Millennium survey found that more Xers believed in UFOs than in Social Security lasting until they retired. Thus arose the downward spiral of Xer civic interest: They tuned out, so they didn't vote, so their interests were trampled, so they tuned out, and on it went.²⁸

Many Xers preferred to express their community spirit less by voting than by hands-on volunteering. They believed that society was changed not by presidential orders or Million Man Marches, but by the day-to-day acts of ordinary people. When Xers picked up a newspaper (which they did a third less than the Silent had, at like age), many skipped the national news for the local and personal. When asked if they looked at their world as "a global village" and not just as the town where they lived, only 38 percent of Americans under age thirty said they strongly agreed, versus 54 percent of those age forty-five and over. The Generation X youth voluntarism came less through big institutional philanthropies than through small local charities that had no crusading figureheads or profiteering middlemen. More than older generations, Xers believed in doing small acts of kindness as individuals, without caring if anybody applauded or even noticed. The president of MIT likened their civic attitude to that of the Lone Ranger: Do a good deed, leave a silver bullet, and move on.²⁹

His "Great Goal" for the Twenty-first Century, says Wayne's World's Mike Myers, is "to have fun rather than not to have fun." His generation will, but only by continuing to wall off the money problems and elder criticisms.

Economics will continue to tell the Xer story. By the early Twenty-first Century, young-adult incomes will be lower, their poverty rate higher, and their safety nets skimpier than was true for Boomers in the early 1980s--confirming Generation X as the only U.S. generation (aside from the Gilded) ever to suffer a lifelong economic slide. Many will be kicked off welfare. Others will buffer their downward mobility by working multiple jobs, living in multiple-income households, or moving in with their parents.

An Unraveling that began unfriendly to entry-level job seekers will close unfriendly to promotion seekers. From professional partnerships to store manager positions, Xers will find their paths blocked by institutions that aren't expanding and by older generations who aren't leaving. This is already the first generation born in the Twentieth Century to be less certifiably professional than its predecessors. By the Oh-Ohs, many forty-year-olds will remain permanent temps, no-benefit contractors, second-tier careerists, and lesser-paid replacements. Since the Awakening, young adults have shown by far the greatest rise in income inequality (while elderly incomes have actually become more equal). The share of young workers with benefit cushions--health insurance, unemployment compensation, pension plans, collective bargaining--has fallen (while the public and private cushions for the elderly have grown substantially more generous).³⁰

Into the Oh-Ohs, the Xer reputation will be no better than now. Whatever thirty-to-fortyish people do will be criticized by elders--not just for failing to meet the prior standard, but also for being a bad influence on children. This generation will personify what America will dislike about the widening gap between haves and have-nots. Its failures will be perceived as deserved, its successes less so. High-flying youths will be condemned as economic predators and appropriate targets of luxury taxation, while low-lifers will be assailed as incorrigible and unworthy of public aid. By the end of the Unraveling, the American social category with the greatest reputation for virtue will be the one to which relatively few young adults will belong: the middle class.

The Xer high-risk mind-set will come under attack as a national affliction. High-stakes entrepreneurs will be busy arbitraging deals and acquiring U.S. assets for foreign interests. They will be making markets more fluid, leveraging more risk, establishing more distance and anonymity in the links between debtors and their creditors, and flooding the world with American pop culture. In cyberspace, they will be hacking, spamming, code breaking, and tax evading. For all this, they will come under heavy criticism, prompting urgent new calls for government regulation.

At the same time, what the Wall Street Journal calls "high-tech nomads" will be the fungible workers of the Unraveling's globalized economy. They will barnstorm the marketplace, exploring its every cranny, seeking every edge, exploiting every point of advantage. They will talk about jobs rather than careers, emphasizing what can get totally done by the end of the day rather than potentially done later in life. Where the Silent had believed in the building blocks of success and inhabited a corporate world of stable pay and benefits, Xers will believe in the quick strike and inhabit an economy of erratic pay, no benefits, and little loyalty. Where young Silent workers had let others negotiate for them, Xers will strike their own deals, stressing near-term incentives like piece work or commissions. Where the typical Silent had expected to stay with a first employer for decades, the typical Xer will expect a rapid turnover of employers and work situations.³¹

The Xer low-sweat, task-efficient work style will be extremely good for U.S. profitability--one enterprise at a time. Economists have long said this sort of worker is what an ever-changing global economy needs, but once America acquires a whole generation of them, older managers won't be so pleased. The perceived problem won't be whether Xers work enough, which they will, but rather their distance from corporate culture. Young workers will follow the contract: When it's time to work, they will focus; but when it's quitting time, they will disengage. Ersatz social arrangements (often a platoon of friends) will provide them with the life-support functions for which their parents had once looked to employers.

Many Xers will skip the institutional economy entirely and go it alone or with friends, outpacing and underpricing older rivals, playing crafty high-tech games with and against elder-built systems. What Saren Sakurai calls "countercommerce" will steal markets from big corporate rivals, undermine rule-encrusted state enterprises (mail, education, security), and mount gray-market challenges to credentialed professions (law, insurance, finance). Whenever governments privatize or big companies restructure, Xers will benefit. In the military, Xer officers will flaunt a spartanlike warrior ethos. On campus, their laconic libertarianism will clash with the voluble liberalism of aging tenured professors.³²

By the Oh-Ohs, fortyish novelists, filmmakers, and pop stars will be pushing every niche, every extravagance, every Xtreme sport, every technology, every shock (sex, violence, profanity, apathy, self-mutilation) to the maximum, prompting Boomer calls for boycotts and censorship. As young-adult attendance sags at national parks, historic sites, museums, and classical concerts, a clear demarcation will exist between the Xer fun culture and the Boomer "classic" alternative. Sports and celebrity entertainments will acquire a brassy quality, more akin to gladiatorial than civic ritual. Athletes and entertainers will raise sports and media to new heights of commercial glitz. Star salaries will skyrocket ever higher, but journeymen will lose ground. Their individual exploits will be applauded, their team spirit condemned. Fan loyalties will weaken, as parents urge children to look elsewhere for role models. Eventually, the Xer youth culture will come to feel, like Kurt Cobain before his suicide, "bored and old."

Near the end of the Unraveling, Xers will start tiring of all the motion and options. Feeling less Generation X than generation exhausted, they will want to reverse their life direction.

Their attitude toward risk will change. Those who are doing well will reveal a young-fogey siege mentality that discourages further risk taking. High-achieving married Xers will push family life toward a pragmatic form of social conservatism. Restoring the single-earner home will be a male priority; restoring the reliability of marriage will be a feminist priority. Late-born Xers will start marrying and having babies younger, partly to avoid the risks of serial sex and harassment at work, but also to get a head start on saving and homeowning. By the end of the Unraveling, the median age at first marriage will be lower than it is today.³³

In time, even Xers without good jobs will take comfort in their toeholds on the American Dream. On the whole, they will appreciate the worth and precariousness of whatever good fortune they have achieved and will fear how far they could fall if they ever lost it. Many will scrupulously avoid risk in their personal lives, even if they still have no choice but to keep taking long shots in their work lives. They will become intensely frugal, loyal to kin, faithful to spouses, and protective of children. They will not take a close and supportive family for granted; building one will be an achievement in which they will take great pride. "Been there, done that" will be their parental attitude toward sex, whose dangers they will be determined to shield from children. As Xers cordon off their self-contained lives, older critics will find fault with the home life that will strike some as too much family and not enough values. Modular-minded young parents will go out in the evening and enjoy Quentin Tarantino films, and then come home and tuck toddlers snugly into bed, much to the amazed disapproval of older people.

By the Oh-Ohs, Xers will comfortably inhabit a world of unprecedented diversity. Few will share the High-era view that race in America is simply a problem of black versus white. Asian and Hispanic Americans will make Xer race issues a more multivariate equation. As those ethnicities catapult into the cultural mainstream, they will be greeted with demands for a clampdown on immigration. A small but significant share of young adults (including whites) will gravitate toward organizations touting racial and ethnic separatism. From poverty to crime to making families work again, Xers will redefine old civil rights issues into problems independent of race. Many will come to associate the phrase civil rights with elder ministers, teachers, and bureaucrats whom they won't want meddling in their lives. Their goal will be to stop all the racial game-playing, and they will be skeptical that the solution is simply to get everybody to understand one another.

As more Xers form families, they will finally start voting in respectable numbers. By 1998, they will comprise America's largest potential generational voting bloc and, by the end of the Unraveling, the largest actual bloc. Once they discover the voting booth, their prior partisan detachment will work to their advantage. Come the Oh-Ohs, Xers will occupy the critical margins of politics, capable of deciding who wins and loses. They will apply their "Pop and Politics" Internet skills for the benefit of candidates who avoid hype, who do what it takes to get a job done, and who promise not to make their problems worse.

The first prominent Xer politicians will detach positions from principles, simplify the complex, and strip issue debates to their fundamentals. To their mind-set, no program will be untouchable, no promise inviolable, no budget incapable of balance. They will propose bold new remedies to crack down on the Unraveling era's most elusive targets, from trial lawyers to wealthy seniors to corporations at the public trough. Among their first political goals will be to eliminate no-fault divorce and racial quotas. Their no-nonsense pragmatism will be criticized--by the Silent as uninformed, by the Boomers as unprincipled. Few of their proposals will be enacted--not yet, anyway.

As the Unraveling nears an end, the public image of a worn-out era will fuse with the image of a worn-out and unraveled generation. By the mid Oh-Ohs, the Generation X persona will be thrown into relief not just by very different older generations but also, now, by a very different younger generation. As always, Xers will handle it with a shrug before going ahead and doing what they must, knowing that, as a generation, they are not getting anything except older. As these forty-year-olds buy and collect pop culture junk from the 1970s, their childhood anchor-decade, they will sense the irony of their situation.

Whatever their elders may think of them, America's Generation X will be around for the usual duration. "They are our children, and we should love them," says Mario Cuomo, "but even if we don't love them, we need them, because they are our future."³⁴

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This page was last modified on 09/11/2025 10:30:57