worst generation

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

I was using email & usenet in 94...those were easier to adjust to, for some reason, I think bcs at uni they were only accessible on unix terminals so it didn't *look* so hitech, the way Netscape on a Windows computer did.

i guess what i am thinking is that if you spent any of your supposed formative years of adulthood (ie junior high through college) in the period between 1991-1995, you are prob gen x

I quit telling people about how I liked to troll the Prodigy message boards at age 12, because invariably they never heard of the Prodigy internet service, and it made me sound like a precocious twat.

http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/0/3848/112236-107326-generation-x_super.JPG

never forget

I was born in 75 and definitely consider myself gen x though also on the young side.

During college in the 90s, we had access to email and the internet, but I just couldn't really grasp what the big deal was. It didn't really click in my head until around 2000 when I was working with computers full time.

oh man I remember when the original Mosaic browser started going around, I felt like I was staring at a magical new porn delivery service

alt.music.pearl-jam

"this used to be my playground" ;_;