Talk:Generation X
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We know what is going on today with young people because we experience it, see it on the street and at the raves and on TV. And we can read alot about what happened with young people in the sixties or seventies. The Gen-X Wiki article only seems to say that Gen-Xers are anti idealistic and then talks about some of the social influences and events during their childhoods. But it does not say anything much about attitudes common among them about race, environment, poverty, war and such. Are those only topics that "idealists" think about (so, therefore, GenXers don't care about them at all)? Its almost like the article is style instead of information. But thats not what an encyclopedia is supposed to offer.
- None of the above is really productive towards the work on this article, so I don't see why it was added. It's all POV and not actual info on the generation; there's plenty of Gen Xers who don't share this person's opinions. In fact, most of it sounds like conservative opinions, which are not shared by those of us Gen Xers who are liberals. -- LGagnon
As a boomer ('53), I feel fortunate to have raised my college-aged kids to conform to neither boomer nor Gen-X ideals - respecting the values of those who came before them, conscious of the ideals which mobilized a generation before their time, educated yet unpretentious, not needing material things to be happy, loving even those who hate them, appreciating classical, blues, jazz, be-bop, hip-hop, classical rock, country, and all the rest, sure enough of themselves and eager enough to contribute to society that they have no time to find fault with or poke fun at traditions and values whose time has passed, but whose lessons live on. AyeSpy
"My child the emperor" - didn't Steinbeck call this a disease and name it paedosis?
Also an early GenXer ('69), but raised by a Dad and Grandparents who still remembered the Depression and WW2 and taught me values gleaned from those occurrences. My GenX friends call me a BoomXer. Why are stuck on these labels? --Invictus
(moved from the non-talk page): Some have also suggested, though with questionable basis, that the Generation Xers are more like the World War II generation that preceeded the baby boomers. The WWII generation was one of confidence in the value of tradition and strongly-held cultural mores, which seldom questioned whether their society was on the right path. The formula rebellion of stereotypical Gen-Xers is anathema to such thinking.
I'm 1966 myself. It's interesting to note that while the original meaning of "Generation X" had to do with being a "slacker" or something like that, later research showed that Generation X was a highly motivated and entrpreneurial generation. I remember reading Coupland's initial descriptions and the subsequent media love affair with the term and being puzzled because it seemed so remote from my life or the lives of my friends.
I personally think that there is a good reason to doubt the validity of assuming a consistency among people born in a particular time period, except perhaps with regard to some fairly superficial pop culture stuff. I had a Six Million Dollar man action figure. So what? :-) --Jimbo Wales
It is said that Generation X follows the Baby Boomer generation, however I think that there must have been an intervening generation, too early to be GenX, but too late to be Baby Boomers. The "lost tribe of the seventies?" I wouldn't know how to characterize them. They'd have experienced Disco, ABBA, the 8-track tape, Watergate, and the Energy Crisis.
Here is how I come to this conclusion. A generation of time is a 30 year period, however when speaking of a generation as a collection of people, I think we refer to a people born in a 15 year window. For example, GenX'ers are born in, roughly, the 1967-1982 time frame, and GenY in 1983-1998 period. The Baby Boom would have been in 1937-1952, and this mystery generation in 1953-1966.
What do you think? Is this mystery generation just Baby Boomers in disguise? Or were they proto-GenX'ers? Or do they deserve a generation name of their own? Is 15 years between definable generations right, or is it better to stick to 30 year intervals? -- BryceHarrington
- Calm down everyone! The End of Eternity memorably satirises generational chauvinism by drawing together people from different centuries in a parallel world outside time. A character from an future ice age inveighs against his home-when being described as underpopulated instead of sensibly populated.
- I have some sympathy with the contributor above born in 1953 as that year has always seemed to me to be a cusp between early boomers and late boomers. Tony Blair was born that year which may account for some of his appeal. In my experience, those born too late to be boomers but too early to be Gen-X are usually called the yuppie generation. They are people who grew up during the 1970s. Since the 1960s lasted until the fall of Saigon (May 1 1975) and the 1980s began with the election of Margaret Thatcher (May 4 1979) we are rather a small cohort :-) -- Alan Peakall 17:25 Dec 3, 2002 (UTC)
Personally, whilst the Baby Boomers really were a quite recognisable group because of the population bump, without such a demographic phenomenon subsequent "generations" really are hard to differentiate. As somebody born in 1976, what am I? Am I a "cynical Gen-Xer"? A net-obsessed, label crazy Gen-Y? Both? Neither? --Robert Merkel
Robert, consider yourself lucky to not have had rehashed 1960s hippie and 1970s disco culture assault you during your formative years.
The length of a generation is more like 22 years, 1976 is definitely within the birth years of Generation X, and there is no intervening generation between the Boom and X. -- Gpietsch 15:16 Oct 7, 2002 (UTC)
I know I've read this somewhere before; I recognize the style as William Strauss and Neil Howe but I can't pinpoint which of their books it came from. This is almost assurredly a copyright violation though. If it's not a word-for-word copy of one of their book chapters, it takes very large portions of it verbatim. Dave Farquhar
A few notes that mostly apply to all of the "generation" articles:
- The person above who said only Baby Boomers are part of a clearly defined generation is correct. Is there any rational and logical argument that other generations described as such are anything more people born between randomly chosen years?
- Do they apply only to the US? If so, it should be made explicit in the first sentence.
- Grunge music became popular in the early 1990s. The oldest Xers were 25 in 1990. While Cobain and Eddie Vedder et al may have been living up to the description of Generation X before that, the vast majority of Xers grew up listening to Def Leppard, A Flock of Seagulls and Guns n Roses. Does this description apply to black people? If so, I suppose the black equivalent of Nevermind is The Chronic or Straight Outta Compton? It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back? The Great Adventures of Slick Rick? These are fundamentally different from the ethos of grunge music. None of the 80s or early 90s hip hop artists condemned, explicitly or implicitly, 1960s radicalism. Public Enemy, Grandmaster Flash et al were actually pretty activist, and then gangsta rap popped up with the earliest examples of bling-bling -- very different from grunge's anti-fashion. What about women? Tori Amos and Tracy Chapman are Xers, right? None of this really makes much sense. In country music, Garth Brooks, Dwight Yoakam and Clint Black rose to prominence -- once again, absurdly different from grunge.
- The paragraph beginning "other people born" is ridiculous. The fact that there is no Generation X identity is used as support for there being a Generation X identity? The very problem central to Generation X is that the years chosen are entirely random. I was born in 1981, but stayed in kindergarten for two years -- hence, almost all of my high school friends were born in 1982 and are not Xers. This would come as a great shock to them, I imagine. Yet people who graduated from high school in 1983 and were probably listening to Quiet Riot are part of Generation X? The people that bought "We Are the World" are Generation X?
- Where does the list of cultural endowments come from? If I had to come up with a list of cultural endowments made by Americans born from 65 to 81, it would have been totally different. "Planet Rock", Appetite for Destruction, The Breakfast Club (maybe, how old is Hughes? The actors were the right ages, but does that count? Ally Sheedy's character is Xer, and maybe Bender but three out of five seem totally out-of-place, as does Sheedy's ending conversion -- does it count?)
- I do think Generation X needs an article because it is a real term, but it should be contextualized as a fictional construct unless someone can point out something that Xers actually have in common (and please, not a lack of having anything in common). Do people born from 65 to 81 have any similarities? The article implies that they do, but concrete examples are few and far between. The following characteristics are given:
- A rejection of 60s idealism and activism -- doesn't apply to old school hip hop, Pearl Jam, female singer-songwriters or the honky tonk revival
- A rejection of consumerism -- most Xers grew up during the late seventies and eighties, hardly a time when consumerism was on the wane.
- The they fantasize sentence about Baby Boomers and sex -- has no meaning that I can discern
- What the hell is a generational core, and why am I looking for one? Or does that only apply to immigrant Xers? Or am I not really an Xer because I identify with people born in 82, making me a member of whatever fictionally constructed generation comes next?
- Generation X survived a hurried childhood of divorce, latchkeys, open classrooms, devil-child movies, and a shift from G to R ratings. -- at the very least, some facts would be nice, about the rate of divorce, latchkey kids... Once again, however, this is purely arbitrary -- why not spotlight cocaine use, increased attempts at censorship of music, sex ed, the rise of obesity and Brat Pack movies?
- The Reality Bites reference in the last sentence is ludicrous and pointless. I haven't seen the movie, don't know what it means and don't really care. In any case, that came out some years after Xers hit adulthood. Does it still count?
- I could write just as accurate a description as this article, and make it seem true and such, about people born from 1974 to 1986 or any other pair of randomly chosen years.
- The generations previous to the Boomers are even more fictional in my mind than this one, but the same basic ideas apply. Silent Generation: Dick Cheney and John Erlichman "fell under the trance of their free-spirited next-juniors, the Boomers"? People born 1925 to 1942 were civil rights activists, huh? All? Most? Proof? Missionary Generation: Harding and FDR are part of the same generation? I'm no presidential historian, but that seems strange.
Reading over my comments, they seems confusing and meandering, with little information. But then, so does the article in question. Tuf-Kat
How about the movie Fight Club? It seems to speak to the GenX description, if the description has any value that is. Chuck Palahniuk 1961, Jim Uhls 1961, David Fincher 1962, Brad Pitt 1963, Helena Bonham Carter 1966, Edward Norton 1969, The dust brothers 1970/1971.
Fussell, Strauss and Howe base the dates on math rather than culture. Anyone alive during the JFK assassination should not be listed as a gen-xer. The baby boom ended in 1964, so gen-x started in 1964. Kingturtle 21:57 16 May 2003 (UTC)
Could someone please de-Strauss and Howe this entry and also set Generation X in the global context where it belongs to -- it surely isn't an USA-only phenomenon. -- till we *) 20:52 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Can we move Alanis and Shania into celebrities list? What's all this with keeping Canadians out of the main list? Wiwaxia 22:01, 13 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Britney Spears a Gen-Xer? I think not - surely, Britney doesn't have that Gen-X style - not grungy enough, eh? Dzof 8 November 2003
- Well, at least it would work for Luke Helder, Dylan Klebold, Amy Lee or some other 1981 celebrities. Of course, Reese Witherspoon doesn't seem to fit the Gen-X mold either, and she was born in 1975. On the other hand, Avril Lavigne is more plausible a fit than Britney and she was born in 1984. The whole 1961-1981 range is stupid -- the reason they built the list on these dates and left out everyone born 1982 and later is that the person who started this article based it on Strauss and Howe, who use 1961-1981 as the boundaries for their "Thirteenth Generation", roughly equivalent to Generation X. A "Generation Y" that includes people born in the eighties and in the late seventies would work better for these people. Wiwaxia 19:09, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Can I have a question here...
- Who(are there any real job?) divide people in generation(by the year they were born)?
- Why generation X ends in 1977?
- And to which Cultural Endowments "American Pie" movie is in?
I've always heard that "Generation X" referred to the tenth generation of people born in the United States. I've not read any of the early uses of it, though -- can anybody confirm this, or is this just a retcon?
Am I alone in thinking that this whole concept is just lazy-minded, posturing tripe? The first and most obvious thing that struck me when reading this article was that "Generation X" can not be said to exist on any even vaguely scientific grounds. The idea that all the people in the world born between two (quite arbitrary) dates share universal, very specific traits should only be dealt with in an encyclopedia like this as the crank theory that it most blatantly is. How is it that when all the Aboriginal tribespeople, American McDonnalds cashiers, Icelandic fishermen, Somalian prostitutes, Siberian sheep farmers, English aristocrats, Peruvian cattle dealers, and hundreds of millions more born within a certain time period are tossed wholesale by a complacent American journalist into a non-existent pigeonhole for the sake of a soundbite, anyone outside his profession takes him at all seriously?
This article comes from totally the wrong angle - the phenomenon is a media creation and nothing more. The huge flaw of the article is that it takes the concept far too seriously - if “Generation X” (which means nothing without the inverted commas) merits discussion at all, it should only be in terms of where the phrase come from, who thought it up, why they thought it up, who used it, who identified themselves with it, what effect the existence of such a concept may or may not have had on certain specific cultural groups, etc., always citing sources.
The article is full of patently subjective, un-researched, ill-conceived items of nonsense posing as fact. These three quotes (I could have used many more) can only be applied to individuals, not cultural groups:
- - "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."
- - "Generation X has survived a hurried childhood of divorce, latchkeys, space shuttle explosions"
- - "As young adults... they date and marry cautiously"
This leaves me suspecting that the writer is writing about himself or about his immediate circle of friends, and projecting these very personal issues onto a vast and complicated world he’s never seen. The following is also nonsense:
- - "In Europe, the generation is often known as Generation E, or simply known as the Nineties Generation... In France, the term Génération 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."
These phrases are not widely used in any of the places mentioned. If they have been used at all, it should be stated by who and when, and demonstrated that this is more than just their way of refering to the US media phenomenon under discussion (as apposed to a cultural phenomenon identified with by those populations as a whole). Further nonsense:
- - Assuming generations have a 22-year average length, this means Generation X's children will be born from 1982 to 2004. Its typical grandchildren will be born from 2005 to about 2027. (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.)
This a plain error (I'm often suspicious of people who throw the term "bell curve" around) - human fertility as a timeline does not follow a normal distribution, and even if it did, a span of twelve years could not be said to form the "top of the curve".
All in all, this article needs a thorough working-over. But probably a demolition team will do a more satisfying job than a cosmetologist. User:Palefire 21/9/04
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Classic Quote from article
- They [GenXers] fantasize about how the 1960s and 1970s supposedly offered Boomers easy sex without consequence while resenting the lasting damage done by an era in which they now realize they were the babies adults were trying so much not to have."
LOL - yeah, the lasting damage of birth control on an entire generation is terrible. Who writes this stuff?
Major Date Problem
If the earliest date ascribed to the beginning of Generation X is 1961, and we assume a generation length of 22 years, that places the end of Generation X in 1983, not 1981. If Gen X began in 1965, that puts the end of Gen X in at 1987. So assuming a 22-year generation means that anyone born between '83 and '87 could still be considered Generation X. Assuming a 20-year generation places this between '81 and '85. 'Generation Y' is said to begin (rather ambiguously) in "the 80's".
Now I take extreme exception to this. I was born in 1983 and am a very proud member of Generation X, and you'll notice there is far less of a cultural generation gap between those born in the early 80's and those born in the late 70's than there is between those born in the early 80's and those born in the late 80's.
I truly doubt there's many who were born in the 1980's who wouldn't be insulted by the label 'Generation Y' or 'Millennial'. '65 through '85 is a good date-range for Generation X, '61 through '83 slightly less so considering few would characterize people born in the early sixties as 'Generation X', but still acceptable as a compromise. Classifying those born prior to 1985 as 'Generation Y' is a denegrading insult to millions of Generation Xers born between '81 and '84. --Corvun 06:53, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Well, I was born in 1983 and I've NEVER EVER felt like I was Generation X. I specifically remember when I was in junior high, 7th or 8th grade, hearing the term and not liking it, what it stood for, and being annoyed because I knew that it didn't describe me or my friends. Again, in high school, I would hear Generation X and think, "aren't those people in their 30s now?" while I listened to my NSync c.d.s. lol. In addition, it wasn't because of a technological divide-- computers, the internet, and cell phones had nothing to do with why I never felt Generation X. It just seemed and still does to be so over and old-and I'm sure people born in 2004 will think the same of Generation Y (btw the name sucks) considering I'm 20 years older then them--I guess they'll be Generation Z. lol. So just because YOU are a very proud member of generation X, does not mean the vast majority of us are. I think the well-documented end date of 1981 proves this.
Article is too America-centric
Article keeps on making reference to the USA as if the Generation X syndrome didn't exist in other western countries. For example, "In their book Generations William Strauss and Neil Howe called this generation the "13th Generation" because the tag, like this generation, is a little Halloweenish, and it 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 kind of stuff only applies to one country. I'm a Generation Xer, and don't relate to that kind of thing at all.
List of generation xers
is quite long - would it be suitable for another article?
Are we going to list all of them?
List of Cultural Achievements
I suggest omitting the List of Cultural Achievements for the following reasons:
1. The existence of Generation X is questionable 2. The date-range is also debatable (e.g. 1945+ / teens in the 1965-1989). This means its difficult to know if any particular artist is a Generation Xer. 3. Whether to regard any particular item as a "cultural achievement" is POV.
I gotta agree with this. The whole list seems like and extremaly arbitrary pop culture list. It should be removed.
This Is A Useless Debate
Wow, it's so great to be born in 1963, and thus be automatically classified a baby boomer! I have great memories of participating in the whole "Summer Of Love" thing... when I was five. And oh, how that whole Vietnam War bugged me... it's a great thing it ended three years before I was old enough to get a drivers license.
I keenly remember the arguments I had with my brother who was born in 1965 and is thus a "Gen X-er:" "Turn down that Kiss/Rush/Black Sabbath crap! I'm trying to get my peace-and-love thing going with my Jefferson Airplane albums! And for God's sake, will someone please get me a hit of acid? I don't care if you think nine years old is too young to board the yellow submarine!"
"And impeach Nixon, whoever he is!"
Can we all just knock this crap off?
The "generational debate" was invented for one reason: To catagorize the buying population into "identifiable" classes to which trinket salesmen can market their crap. A few years back, some genius from a marketing group pigeonholed me at the mall and asked me to take a survey on a new modern rock station that had just hit the airwaves. The entire conversation went like this:
"We're looking to interview listeners between the ages of 18-33." "I just turned 34 last month." "Oh well, never mind."
Do yourself a favor and stop wasting any more brain cells on this debate. Like what you want to like, and reject as useless anything that doesn't suit you. And if anyone tries to tell you what your tastes ought to be based on what particular year or star sign you were born under, do yourself and mankind a favor and kick him in the shins.
Just make sure you're young enough to run away from the cops.