Every other day I read something about how my generation is the most self-centered and superficial, like, ever. The youngs are easy scapegoats for our cultural problems (or “quirks” if you’re PC like that). They always have been, and I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say they probably always will be. So how is it every generation seems to forget that as soon as they turn 30?
I’ve been kind of ruminating for the past week on this Radar piece by Robert Lanham (author of the Hipster Handbook) waiting for some self-hating epiphany. But.. nope!
Lanham’s thesis is basically that Generation X had it really hard and everyone was really mean to them, and that Generation Y (by his definition, anyone born between 1982 and 2002) comparatively gets away with cultural murder.
Sure, Generation X survived AIDS, Reagan, the Cold War, Tipper Gore, and A Flock of Seagulls, but those adversities, suggest Strauss and Howe, pale in comparison to what Millennials face today. Consider the stress of having to juggle a 30-hour work week while simultaneously maintaining Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr accounts. It’s enough to make your head spin! And maybe the Millennials never faced Hitler’s forces on the beaches of Normandy, but had they been around in 1944 (and had the technology existed), you can bet they would have blogged about it.
Yeah, so would the Gen-Xers, considering they were the ones who started blogging in the first place. There seems to be a dark, plaid-flannel cloud of bitterness over Lanham’s half-assed arguments. Yes, TIME published a nasty article about Generation X in the 90s that probably hurt a lot of teenaged feelings. But they pulled the same thing fifteen years later with “Twixters,” the January 2005 cover story about twentysomethings balking at traditional rites of passage. It’s not Generation Y, Generation X or even just Americans — it’s a huge cultural shift in developed nations from Japan to Italy.
Gen-X heralded that shift; Gen-Y is only picking up where they left off. And no, Lanham, it ain’t always pretty. Our public image, thanks to the availability of candid photos online, is way douchier than Gen-X’s ever was (see above), plus we’re all unemployed and debt-ridden from college. It’s only fitting that we’d waste all our time on the Web sites that Gen-Xers created for us. I guess my question is, what do you expect from a generation of kids who learned what a blowjob was from Bill Clinton’s televised impeachment hearings and who only have hazy memories pre-GWB (who you jerks elected by the way, thx)?
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Roommates.com felt the lengthening arm of the law this week when the 9th circuit