worst generation

my generation does have unprecedented student debt tho - see: limbo thread which is just too bleak for me to even read

life in the early 1990s wasn't a bowl of cherries, either. the whole "generation slacker" thing came up b/c b/w 1990-1993 there weren't any fucking jobs either!

Can we all just agree that nobody in any of the generations knows shit about dick?

I see you've visited the gay thread

jjjusten otm - and that stupid president suffered from Alzheimer's and was a former movie actor.

The time is ripe for Generation Banaka

Lost Generation: 1883-1900
Greatest Generation: 1901-1924
Silent Generation: 1925-1945
Boomers: 1946-1964
Gen X: 1965-~1970's
Gen Y: late ~1970's-2000
Generation Text: 2000-???

This whole notion of generations having specific start and end dates is so bonkers - as if someone born in 1965 has more in common with someone born 13 years later than 1 year earlier by dint of belonging to some predefined generation. The only legit defining generational marker in this list would be 1945 which is a clear delineation between eras, corresponding with the end of the second world war. But there's nothing that changed in the late 1970s that warrants a generational divide from those born before or after. Even the baby boom didn't end apruptly - indeed I've seen the end date for baby boomers listed as either 1965 or 1964.

And then there's those annoying monikers. The "lost generation" gave us air travel, affordable cars, and radio stations. The "greatest generation" certainly deserves credit for saving humanity from nazis and imperialists, but (in the US anyway) this same generation wouldn't let black people go to decent schools or live in some housing developments, relegated women to submissive roles, and imprisoned innocent US citizens for almost four years because their ancestors were Japanese.

And is text messaging really the defining characteristic of the current millenium? I recently read about this message being sent electronically: "WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH U?". An agitated teenager tapping away on an iPhone? No, a young wireless operator from 1912 responding to a distress call from the Titanic. Some things don't change as much as we'd like to think....

living at home w/ parents under or unemployed and facing a world that looks very bleak.

Wonder if we should look at ppl who were teenagers during rather good economic decades vs those who weren't.

every generation experiences recessions but you were in the workforce during one of our nation's biggest booms and we are looking for jobs in the midst of our second-biggest (or possibly biggest) depression.

where's iatee? this is his favorite topic. <shines iatee-symbol on metropolitan nightsky>

The "greatest generation" certainly deserves credit for saving humanity from nazis and imperialists

Wouldn't nazis and imperialists be members of the greatest generation?

yes, we had very gratifying jobs in retail and shitty corporate offices where we got paid shit and had a gazillion roommates.

I mean the thing about the boomers, esp the first ones, is that except for '57, most of their lives up until their late, late 20's was one of constant growth.

<spray paints over mordys skytracker, looks around nervously>

Wrt suspicion of marketing, gen x in the 90s seemed like the first time the powers today be were caught off guard since the 60s. But yeah,.said powers figured it out fast, but still,.concurrent wIth the rise of the internet, the system has pretty much been breaking apart since then.

i dunno. there's apparently a ninja turtle reboot directed by michael bay going on so i'd say the marketing machine is as healthy as ever.

plus the mighty transformers franchise (which started off when gen x-ers were still in school!) is still going strong.

xp to contenderizer i think that Gen X is second only to boomers in terms of self-mythologization and i'm trying to point out how those myths are even present in this conversation. possibly bc of things like economic collapse, 9/11, two wars in the middle east, the housing bubble, massive unemployment, moving back home with parents bc we can't afford rent, gen Y is much more realistic than you and much more skeptical of this kind of mythology. this is itself a kind of self-mythologizing, but maybe it shows u what i'm responding to here.

― Mordy, Wednesday, May 2, 2012 1:35 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

like it's so nice that you listened to punk music and watched clerks and wore ratty clothing and were really resisting the machine, man. a lot of my generation is living at home w/ parents under or unemployed and facing a world that looks very bleak. xxxp

― Mordy, Wednesday, May 2, 2012 1:37 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i figure any kind of generational self-description is basically mythological. people vary a lot, and our views on this stuff say more about us and our cultural positioning than they do about the objective state of the nation during a 20 year period, obviously.

but the unwillingness to self-describe is no more noble than an interest in it. many of us gen exors like to pretend that we were & are resistant to joining and branding, but a lot of us wound up "resisting" in similar ways and were quite happy to brand ourselves as "resistors" (something that marketers happily seized upon).

maybe in gen y there's a more sophisticated resistance to this kind of self mythologizing at work, i dunno, but there's nothing wrong with trying to accurately capture the shared mythology of a group. mythology is culture, after all, and these generational distinctions are more about culture than anything else.

the ability to pontificate about the alleged specialness of one's generation is eternal, apparently and alas.

which generation has the worst mommy blogs or the equivalent?

Xpost there is no way those transformers movies are driven by gen x nostalgia any more than the smurfs. They were retrofitted for kids today, not grown kids from then.

Mr Veg is very possessive of the Gen X tag - he def is in the 1975 cutoff camp. And he does adhere to a certain mythologization which is really kind of...I dunno, isolating when it's told back to you, like anyone who comes after doesn't matter etc but maybe that's just my own selfesteem issues lol

But the thing he really hammers on about is Gen X creating a lot of the technology, something to do with the boomers being given SO much and spendin all their time whining about not being able to do anything and Gen X had enough of the whining and took any adversity they faced as a challenge to replace it with something, better?

I'm kind of pulling all of this out of my ass because it's been a while since I got Mr Veg drunk enough to give me the full spiel - I used to be able to recite it from memory, haha.

mommy blogs are a pox on humanity from the get-go and regardless of what generation their creators belong to!!

also whoever posted the Mike & The Mechanics lyric way up thread has now ruined me for every sentence ITT that starts with 'every generation'...I just start singing that terrible song

The time is ripe for Generation Banaka

― Banaka™ (banaka), Wednesday, May 2, 2012 1:40 PM (12 minutes ago)

agreed

which generation has the worst mommy blogs or the equivalent?

― sarahell, Wednesday, May 2, 2012 1:52 PM (1 minute ago)

Mormons

historically didn't generations last much longer because things didn't change fast enough to have much of a discrepancy, so like people born at the beginning and end of the hundred years war were into the same spongebob or whatever they had? I guess they had the same plague to bond over?

Mr Veg is very possessive of the Gen X tag - he def is in the 1975 cutoff camp.

i thought the cutoff from x to y was generally thought to be abt 81/82

quentin tarantino films also probably had something to do w/ gen-x specialness ... though that certainly didn't get rid of boring middlebrow Oscar-bait films.

for a long time, i think it was:

Boomers - 1946 - 1960
Gen X - 1961 - 1975
Gen Y - 1976-1990

Pretty sure Generation Piers Plowman were all up in everyone's face about it

historically didn't generations last much longer because things didn't change fast enough to have much of a discrepancy, so like people born at the beginning and end of the hundred years war were into the same spongebob or whatever they had? I guess they had the same plague to bond over?

i think there's some wisdom here ... if someone finds and peruses this thread a hundred years from now, such person will probably think we're pissing and moaning about petty shit and small differences.

let's go back to Generation Explorer! All aboard for uranus etc

You first

like it's so nice that you listened to punk music and watched clerks and wore ratty clothing and were really resisting the machine, man. a lot of my generation is living at home w/ parents under or unemployed and facing a world that looks very bleak. xxxp

― Mordy, Wednesday, May 2, 2012 1:37 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this comes of as kind of comically snotty and dim, no offense. for one thing, i'm not particularly proud of the gen x myths i've described. i think quite of few of them were shortsighted, hypocritical or just plain silly. they were just the ideas & ideals that were "in the air" during the lost and golden heyday of grunge. and i don't think i've ever claimed to have had it particularly rough...

Something weird about someone in the alleged gen x slot being only ten circa the early 90s. Which is why I lean toward the mid to late 70s cut off.

Btw, tangential,.but I always figured Jim DeRogatis'S bitterness stemmed from technically being a lame boomer rather than a cool gen xer.

the whole "raised entirely on internet" thing is lot less meaningful than older ppl seem to think too.

If you don't mind my asking, zachlyon, what makes you sure of this, considering that you were five years old when the WWW first became freely available to the public and only started high school after high-speed fully-graphic Internet was completely pervasive in our culture? As far as I can tell, you don't have much pre-Internet experience to compare. I'm just old enough to remember the pre-Internet world - when I was not be able to access JUST ABOUT ANY PIECE OF INFORMATION I WANT AT ANY TIME or to communicate nearly instantly with anyone anywhere as long as they have a hookup - and it seems pretty fundamentally different to me.

"if someone finds and peruses this thread a hundred years from now, such person will probably think we're pissing and moaning about petty shit and small differences."
i kinda meant the opposite, though -- culture is changing rapidly enough now that we can probably start ID'ing generational differences on a yearly scale rather than decades. like people will self-classify according to which iphone release they were born under, then later on which firmware updates.

I was surprised how many of my eighth grade students didn't know how to use the internet, and think the internet is facebook on their phone.
Also they don't teach kids typing in my district, which is insane.

Gen X - 1961 - 1975
Gen Y - 1976-1990

wikipedia (i know) has gen x running "from the early 1960s through the early 1980s, usually no later than 1981 or 1982". they seem to have a fair amount of support for this, but i don't really know.

yeah I was shown the interwebs in my first year of college (1994)n and I was like "what do you mean 'you can find anything'?" I knew one website, Addicted To Noise, and that was the only site I visited for like, 3 months because I was like the little old lady afraid that if I ventured out into the webs I would fall off the edge of the world or something. My brain could not grasp it at all.

re: typing, the only thing that keeps me from bragging about being from generation cursive is those show-offy bastards from generation calligraphy.

second year of uni, so 1995, not 1994

Something weird about someone in the alleged gen x slot being only ten circa the early 90s. Which is why I lean toward the mid to late 70s cut off.

see, i don't feel that way at all. someone who was born in 1981 and was 16 in 1997 seems as much a product of "my generation" as i am (30 in 1997). the only difference is that they grew up in the stuff that characterized my coming of age, so, if anything, they're more "of it" than i am. then again, it's all arbitrary, so...

http://i43.tower.com/images/mm106475837/ugly-organ-cursive-cd-cover-art.jpg

this is nothing to brag about

I recall first serious use of www in 93 or so. Mosaic? I know it was a big deal that we had email and stuff at school,.albeit nothing really to use it for but newsgroups.

Btw, I was born in 75, and always felt like I was on the slightly young side of gen x.

If you grew up with THE ELCTRIC COMPANY you're gen x, which means gen x'ers exclusively had access to U.S. tv programs.

yeah idk an early 80s cutoff makes a lot of sense to me - really a fair amount of gen x def in reality is a strange attachment/nostalgia for early 90s culture, which means anyone who was a teen to twentysomething in that time period is going to fit.

I remember quite vividly receiving an electronic mail account as a college freshman in '92 but told that its campus use was restricted to one lab in one building and wondering "who the hell would I write a letter to?"

*and I wondered