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As GenX myself, I can identify with some of what was spoken of here, but I also have the self awareness that what GenX is now facing is essentially what Millennials have been facing for their entire time since entering the workforce 17 or 18 years ago.
I didn’t read the Generation X book until maybe mid to late 90s, but some of the stuff really hit home, especially thing about lessness. Also, in Microserfs I think it is he had a part where one of the characters’ dads was sitting in his car after getting canned from IBM after decades of work - that really hit close to home, since my own father went through something very analogous to that.
Some of the comments on DU are pretty poignant, I think.
I honestly wonder once there is a closer inspection, it might turn out that Gen Y and Gen Z might actually fare better in some ways - it certainly seems they are going to get a massive wealth transfer. When I entered the market, it was during a recession. Things were okay for a bit in the mid to late 90s, but I was facing a lot of age discrimination aimed at people that were younger. I start digging out of debt and almost bought a new car and then didn’t (thankfully), then the dot-com bubble started to burst and 9/11 hit and things were fucked for years in IT. I made way less than I did before and went through multiple layoffs. Just when things are getting sorta stable again, along comes the real-estate crash and causes more layoffs…IT/engineering has always been boom and bust though, and so it’s hardly something relegated to any one generation, I guess. And now, with the ageism on the other end of the equation, there is pressure trying to people in my age bracket out of a job…which is really fucking ironic when people bitch about how “no one wants to work”.
Yeah, if people - and by that, I mean corporations - only value workers between a very narrow range of ages - say, 30-40, ideally with no kids and no responsibilities outside of work of any kind, and everyone else gets kind of the side-eye, can you blame people that start looking for ways to get out of the rat race “early” (meaning, in their 40s or 50s) or can you blame the very young for getting tired of being side-lined in a different way until they are “experienced” (but not too experienced as to demand too much money).
It’d be nice if our culture would stop with wanting only a very narrow range of ages when it comes to work. I get that you want people with some experience, but often those are set very arbitrarily as gate-keeping, and then, on the other side of it, the culture is trying to push people out that are “too old”…a whole lot of people actually do want to work, and into a very late age in fact but ageism is still not only politically correct, but actively sanctioned by the culture.
I think there is a bit of a difference.
Millennials have had to deal with a near constant shitty job market, constantly having to do more for less.
What they’re describing for Gen X is that a part of the economy has completely disappeared at a time when they should be high earners. The combination of lower cost digital media and an international labor pool means entire professions and trades have been wiped out.
I think there is a bit of a difference.
There is, but while the timing is different, the results are now the same.
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Millennials entered the workforce during the Great Recession so they didn’t get to expereince a strong job market for their skills and have been playing catch up ever since and had everything stacked against them yielding few positive results.
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GenX entered the workforce and was able to leverage their skills while growing them only to see the job market for their skills decline or evaporate altogether.
Both groups are now currently struggling to find a sustainable livelihood especially with a path to a safe and secure retirement.
GenX entered the workforce and was able to leverage their skills while growing them only to see the job market for their skills decline or evaporate altogether.
Depending on when they started, they may have been entering during the early 90s recession, one that had the hilariously named “jobless recovery”. Which is really shitty when you are looking for one…I was lucky, I was “only” looking for a work study job at the time, or random odd jobs while I finished up school. Things still seemed pretty soft when I graduated though, and people were offering barely-subsistence wages when I finally landed a job.
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I think this article is mostly focusing on only the creative class, but…Gen X has been struggling for most of their careers, to be honest. I think others are looking at it with rose-colored glasses. I entered the work force coming off the early 90s recession, and the economy has been several booms, then big busts, since. ALL of us had to live through that. I know of some Gen Xers - some with kids of their own, even - that had to move back in with their parents after the dot-com bust went boom. People with CS degrees.
We - Gen X - watched as boomers got kicked right in the balls during the 80s downsizing/rightsizing/offshoring/outsourcing and we - those that were paying attention anyway - knew even before entering the workforce, that any kind of employee-employer cultural contract of being loyal and paying your dues and being taken care of and retiring with a gold watch were long, long over. If the boomers weren’t going to have that (and they definitely were not), no way in hell anyone else after is going to, either.
Knowing that gave a lot of us a very, very cynical and frankly, in many cases, almost nihilist view toward work and our future…and the short period of time where those in our generation made an impact, it was usually pretty dark type of impression. Movies like Office Space made for a lighter take on this, but it was also extremely dark when you think about it, and…very true as to the kind of desperate existence that people - supposedly privileged, educated, white collar types - were eking out. That’s not even getting into the Fight Club type of thing…
oh yeah. older you are the better prospects you have and the younger the worse. we can all see that. Heck even late boomers are down vs early ones. Silent generation you have things sucking when you were a kid but from there everything pretty much got better. Boomers never saw it bad till the very end of life. So they traded bad times between young kid and old age. Xers got to see and experience good times when young and experience the slow decline in early adulthood. millenials got a glimpse of the good times but never really got much of a taste and grew up when the decline was slow but the fast decline was their adulthood. Im concerned Z and beyond don’t even have a perspective of better times and fall for it can only be so good for the average person.
Boomers never saw it bad till the very end of life.
I don’t know, if you watch things like Network, you’ll see places where I’m not so sure. The more I watch older movies and read, I get the sense things were not rosy for every boomer. The 70s sounded like they sucked balls for quite a few people, in fact. Stagflation? Fuck that noise.
The US economy in the 70s was famously bleak.
economies were more cyclical then though and there we were at the height of social safety nets. In addition there was progress in societal things (civil liberties) and efficiency gains were reflected in pay. I mean what we have today is just nuts. The 2008 drop pretty much went down to the 2000 one as far as low point and outside of the market it has not been good at all except ironically for a blip around covid. 25 years is justs a nuts timespan. The great depression and ww2 were just a few years. During that time even just after the housing crash the prices were not as affordable as they were back then and honestly housing is such a major part of everyones life that it just dwarfs any other economic thing in a persons life with maybe health insurance being a competitor. I mean times were tough and yeah in some cases the mom had to pick up a job but it is nothing like the everyday reality of the last quarter decade.
All I know is my safety net wasn’t much. If I went long enough being laid off, I might have had to move my family back into my parent’s house. My wife had a teaching position during some of my layoffs, but didn’t cover a whole lot more than her college loans.
Thankfully both of us kind of have the almost stereotypical Gen X attitude about the economy and the view that most all of those safety nets were long gone before we started and so we try to live well within our means and then some - pensions, unions, health care, etc…that was rugpulled even on a lot of boomers, possibly some in the Silent Generation, too. Outsourcing, downsizing, offshoring, privatization - all that was well under way as a galaxybrained idea of the money masters way back in the 80s when we were still in elementary school, so we had few delusions about some kind of 1950s style living…we also both have hazy memories of things being really bad in the 1970s and stories from grandparents about their very hazy memories of the Great Depression.
If my wife and/or me lived like some choose to live - buying way more house/renting upscale apartment than you can really sustain if you even miss one month of work, buying new cars every so many years, etc…things would be a lot more worrisome through all these downturns. It’s bad enough as is without heaps and heaps of high-interest debt weighing on you.
Even though in my view, I think SS, Medicare and Medicaid should not be fucked with, we both plan on not necessarily getting any of it because all along, plenty of politicians keep threatening to take it away.
I don’t think things are much better for Gen Y or Gen Z. They may, collectively, get huge amounts of inheritance passed down to them, and I recently read that Gen Y is now further ahead than previous generations, also collectively. But it seems a great deal of trust has been eroded in our institutions, in the notion of getting ahead and getting a fair deal, etc…I was hoping Gen X and Gen Y might reinvigorate the notion of B corps and co-ops, especially in the mid-00s, early teens. I don’t think that really panned out.
definately not better for millenials or gen Z. At least I would not trade forward but I would totally trade backward on my birthdate. Inheritance is great if your rich enough but for the average person it might be a slight help like downpayment on a house but is not going to help you get through day to day. If anything its a sucking away of any middle class generational wealth they managed to obtain. For many there is no inheritance option or what little there is cannot cover costs. Completely agree on co-ops and B corps.
I think the script has flipped for Gen Y, at least collectively. It’s possible they may be the richest generation in history, depending on the wealth transfer…
https://fortune.com/2024/10/21/millennials-outperforming-baby-boomers-gen-x-assets-earnings/
Im suuuuppppeeerrr skeptical about fortune as a source but I can’t read that as I don’t have a subscription. I have seen the economy and I would not have wanted to start later. If anything my do over thing would have been to not to go to school so much and start earning sooner.
TL;DR: billionaire class screwing the next in line.
Does the NYT spell that out?
Reader, they do not.
screwing the next in line.
Honestly, I feel like this understates it. They’re destroying creative communities and obliterating the knowledge of artistic techniques that were passed through those communities because those techniques aren’t deemed to have any market value, which leads us all into a world filled with generic and boring songs and stories being built from widely used materials and perspectives and pushed through generic structures. They’re effectively setting fire to the library of books that haven’t been written yet.
You’re not wrong.
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Most jobs are fake and society would be fine if they didn’t exist.
If the only jobs we did were to maintain the needs of the people who make up our society we could all retire before 40 or even 30 for the hard workers.
Capitalism is a scam and we’re wasting our lives and the future of our species on the wants of like 3,000 nepo babies.
Back in the 50s they claimed automation would lead to 20 hour work weeks and that our biggest problem would be filling our free time.
They didn’t account for people making up bullshit jobs and both political parties making “MOAR JOBS” the only thing they agree on.
Yeah, when you read transhumanist/futurist type of stuff and try to square that with a whole lot of people still operating with a linear mindset that think the next 10 years will be just like the last 10, it’s quite a bit of cultural cognitive dissonance. I think a lot of this will have to be reconciled one way or another.
I’m assuming America will choose the stupidest way possible, like electing a dipshit such as donvict who cannot even handle the old system very well. And forget about getting leadership thinking about a way to transition to a post-scarcity economy that doesn’t involve just transferring ALL the wealth to people like convict and fElon while they think about how to “downsize” all of the “useless eaters”.
If I could have one ask of advances in technology and things like age extension, etc…is that somehow, someway, developments in getting massive intellect AS WELL AS wisdom and morality acceleration in humans come online to go with it. Otherwise, we are just talking about apes with nukes, if there is no wisdom, morality and intellect to go with it… I’ve watched as the Internet became available to all and hoped it would make us all smarter and more media savvy; instead it’s helped to give rise to things like the alt-right and putting the convicted felon into office. Also, now more than ever, people seem to be proudly clinging onto the notion of being anti-intellectuals.
So…I have my doubts.
