Generation X

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Generation X generally consists of persons born in the 1960s and 1970s, although the exact dates of birth defining this age demographic are highly debated. As a phrase, the term was coined as the title of a 1964 pulp novel, and was picked up as the name of a punk rock band featuring the young Billy Idol. It was later popularised by Douglas Coupland in his book Generation X: Tales For An Accelerated Culture, who took it from a sociological text by Paul Fussell. It was after the publication of Coupland's book that the term began to be used as a name for the generation by the media, who introduced Generation X as merely a group of flannel-wearing, alienated, undereducated slackers with body piercing who drank Starbucks coffee and had to work at McJobs.

Contents

Beginnings

The generation was traditionally known as the "Baby Busters" to contrast it with the Baby Boom generation of 1946-1964. It also traditionally began in 1965, based solely upon the steep fall in birth rate in that year. "Baby Busters" was, in fact, the only name to be used for this generation before Coupland's book came out.

But since many notable people who are normally thought of as clearly Gen-X, such as Courtney Love, Janeane Garofalo and Eddie Vedder, were born in 1964 or earlier, this year is often preferred as the beginning of Generation X.

Also influential in the change was the book Generations, by William Strauss and Neil Howe. The authors called this generation the "13th Generation" in the book because this generation is the thirteenth to know the flag of the United States (counting back to the peers of Benjamin Franklin) and set its birth years at 1961 to 1981.

This generation is divided into two discrete groups, the Baby Busters, and the Post-Busters. Jonathan Pontell begins the generation at 1966, placing 1965 as part of Generation Jones. In Europe, the generation is often known as Generation E, or simply known as the Nineties Generation, along the lines of such other European generation names as "Generation of 1968" and "Generation of 1914". In France, the term G鮩ration Bof is in use, with "bof" being a French word for "Whatever", the defining Gen-X saying. In Iran, they are called the "Burnt Generation."

This generation's parents are the Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation. Generation X's typical grandparents are the G.I. Generation. Generation X's children will be or have been born in the 1990s and the following few decades, including Generation Y and the following generation. Assuming generations have a 22-year average length, this means Generation X's children will be born from 1982 to 2025. Its typical grandchildren will be born from 2026 to about 2048. (What is meant by typical is that a generation's grandchildren will be born at a bell-curve rate and those years are the top of the bell curve.)

Themes

Generation X consists of far fewer people than the baby boom generation and has had correspondingly less impact on popular culture, but came into its own during the late 1980s and early 1990s. A fashion for grunge music exemplified by the band Nirvana expressed the frustrations of a generation forever doomed to live in the shadow of its elders and their inheritors. As is common in generational shifts, Gen-X thinking has significant overtones of cynicism against things held dear to the previous generation.

In general, Gen-X'ers feel that Baby boomers and their parents have an unquestioning acceptance of institutions of authority, such as government or the church, and a desire for seemingly unlimited expansion of building, corporate control, marketing and development in the suburbs and exurbs. To a Gen-X'er growing up in the US, it is all a baby boomer world: Boomers, and their elders, brought us the era of conglomerate corporations and corrupt American administrations; they hold all the positions of control and traditional achievement, and since they are living longer, they hold on to them longer.

The Boomers therefore seem to hold all of the keys to their corporate world, and their children, Gen-X'ers and Gen-Y'ers, are brought into it as a means to even more expansion, consumption and greed, as customers, but only the Gen-X'ers challenge it. To be Gen-X is to resist the power and authority of the elders and their institutions, but to also want to participate and create new connections, to make the world a better place. Many GenX'ers become small business people, artists, musicians, or writers, and tend to favour a much smaller scale of expansion and American power, generally. The inheritors of the Boomer's culture are those of Generation Y, who do not seem to possess the resistance Gen-X thinking produced against power and control. Thus, Gen-X'ers represent another Lost Generation.

Thus, Generation X'ers are generally proud not to be "Boomers", and actively rebel against the idealism advocated in the 1960s. Some would also argue that it is not merely the idealism of the 1960s which Generation Xers are rejecting, but a deeper cynicism: Boomer 'idealism', inevitably doomed in its gratuitous naïveté, quickly gave way to an era unequivocally focused on commercial and industrial progress; a period which incubated many of the problems facing the Boomer and following generations. Boomers fantasize about how the 1960s and 1970s offered easy sex without consequence, while overlooking the lasting damage done in that era. Gen-X'ers now realize they were, in many cases, the babies Boomer adults were trying to avoid.


Outlook

Yet, others born during Generation X reject these labels, as they see few unifying events and attitudes connecting them together, and point to social class, geography, and other factors having far more influence than chronology. The fuzzy boundaries of Generations X and Generation Y, and the lack of defining events, give some credence to their argument. However, this underwrites the very problem central to a definition of "Generation X", alluded to in the title itself, namely a crisis of identity. The problem may be that Gen-X'ers lack a core. While Boomers could not escape their generational center, X'ers struggle to find one. Generation X is the most immigrant generation born in the twentieth century.

Generation X has survived a hurried childhood of divorce, latchkeys, open classrooms, devil-child movies, growth of cable television, and a shift from G to R ratings. They came of age curtailing the earlier rise in youth crime and fall in SAT test scores - yet only heard of themselves denounced, described as wild and stupid, enough to put The Nation At Risk. As young adults, maneuvering through a sexual barricade of AIDS and blighted courtship rituals, they date and marry cautiously, if at all. In jobs, they embrace risk and prefer free agency to loyal corporatism. Politically, they lean toward pragmatism and non-affiliation and would rather volunteer than vote. Widely criticized, they inhabit a Reality Bites economy of declining young-adult living standards. Such a decline is also a realistic choice, in a world of over-consumption, pricing bubbles, and endless, nationalistic greed.

Members of Generation X

Some celebrities and other well-known individuals born 1961 through 1981 include:

Cultural endowments

Generation X's cultural endowments have included the following:

See also


References

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