Gen-x meet your gen-y competition. This is the group that thinks it's going to come in and change the world.
Now granted, every group thinks it is the one that is going to come in and change the world and they soon learn the realities of life and they settle down.
The difference this time is that the upcoming group has the baby boomers as parents. Everything the gen-y crowd does is treated like it is the most special thing ever. The workforce is filling up with people that 'won' a trophy for just showing up. I will admit I am going to enjoy watching this group become disillusioned as time goes on.
This article is of the best gen-x pieces I've seen. Go on over a take a read. It's three pages long. I'll pull pieces for you here but you owe it to yourself to go read the entire piece.
First, a note on the picture:
Like many illustrious individuals before him who inadvertently stumbled into Internet stardom, Kevin Colvin became an overnight Internet celebrity by doing something stupid. In case you missed his five minutes of "fame," here's the story in a nutshell. A twentysomething intern, Kevin secured a job at Boston's Anglo Irish Bank. Using the guise of a family emergency, Kevin decided to take a day off and thus sent the following e-mail to his bosses, Paul and Jill:
Paul/Jill,
I just wanted to let you know that I will not be able to come into work tomorrow. Something came up at home and I had to go to New York this morning for the next couple of days. I apologize for the delayed notice.
Kind regards,
Kevin
Kevin's boss, Paul Davis, apparently decided to do a little a bit of detective work and found an incriminating photo of Kevin on Facebook. He discovered that Kevin wasn't in New York attending to an unexpected family crisis, but at a Halloween party in Worcester, Massachusetts.
And this is the clincher: In the picture, Kevin is dressed as Tinker Bell, decked out in a green ballet dress that looks like it was stolen from the wardrobe closet of an elementary school performance of Swan Lake. There's glitter and blue makeup enveloping his eyes. He's holding a gold, star-tipped wand in one hand and a can of Busch Light in the other. There are wings. In short, Kevin looks so high I wouldn't be surprised if he actually used those glittery, Day-Glo wings to fly away like a hummingbird after the picture was snapped.
Mr. Davis' response was swift and, well, perfect. Attaching Kevin's incriminating photo to an e-mail and BCCing the entire company, he responded:
Kevin,
Thanks for letting us know—hope everything is ok in New York. (cool wand)
Cheers,
PCD
I'm sorry I missed that one when it went around. That is just too funny.
It is no surprise though. Gen-y had everything photographed from their birth to their graduation. Then their baby boomer parents made everyone look at the pictures / videos no matter what. They were oh-so-proud of these kids. Well, they are bigger (not grown up) and look out.
That's why the time has come for Generation X to unite. We need to call bullshit on these naive, self-important crybabies trying to rob us of what is rightly our own. Remember how the Baby Boomers all turned into self-serving, narcissistic assholes who deified Michael Douglas in the '80s? The time has come for us to turn into assholes, too, minus the Michael Douglas part.
My generation must follow the lead of heroes like Anglo Irish Bank's Paul Davis and clear the air of the Millennial's generational fairy dust. Sure, the Millennials think they're magic, but the time has come for Generation X to band together proudly and proclaim on high: "COOL WAND!"
Yeah Kevin. Cool Wand!
Maybe we don't have to bad together. It seems like all gen-x'ers think this way. I've never read a member of gen-x stand up and say, "Hey. Give that boomer a chance." or, "Hey. These gen-y kids really know what they are doing."
I haven't read that anywhere.
What I am reading is that we have to learn to work with these kids. How we need to adapt the workplace to fit their needs. I'll give you two words: Fuck That!
Now the boomers are teaming up with the younger generation in a new campaign to further render us obsolete. Where a Gen Xer was likely to get a tongue-lashing for borrowing a stapler from his/her boomer boss, the Millennials are finding boomers to be loving mentors, eager to show them the ropes. After all, the kids who are now coming of age and entering the workplace are, well, their babies. Boomers were doting parents from the get-go, and now, as they're beginning to retire, they want to ensure that their children hold the keys to the throne. Even younger Gen Xers, who were in many cases also raised by boomers, are getting screwed. They have to sit back and watch their younger, Millennial siblings bask in a generational conspiracy of doting.
...
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.
And maybe would have posted a video to YouTube about it too.
We all remember the, "Don't taze me bro" footage. The gen-y's just sat around and watched one of the members get tazed. At least a gen-x crowd would have gotten up and started throwing chairs at the cops.
Or maybe this is it:
Outside of the office, the assault against Gen X was even worse. GrossBookSistah accused us of being "too detached to form caring relationships." And instead of praising us for sneering at "Range Rovers, Rolexes, and red suspenders," GrossBookSistah emphasized how marketers were "confounded" by a "generation so rootless and noncommittal," transforming our frugality and anticommercialism into cheapness.
The boomer's animosity seems particularly misplaced when you consider that Gen X's values mirrored those of the antiestablishment hippies. One iconic example is our trademark wariness of commercialism. We were the no-logo generation, famously skeptical of marketers who tried to pigeonhole us. We created independent rock and ostracized artists who "sold out" for capital gain.
Today, when a hip band allows Outback Steakhouse to co-opt one of their most beloved songs, Millennials don't call it selling out. It's a cogent business decision. To Millennials, it's perfectly acceptable to transform the lyric "Let's pretend we don't exist / Let's pretend we're in Antarctica" into the jingle "Let's go Outback tonight / Life will still be there tomorrow." (Et tu, Of Montreal.)
We are the people that baby boomers wanted to be.
Let that sink in for a moment. Don't knee jerk on it. Stew for a minute.
We do not respond to advertising. We are frugal. We value our family. We have tight close relationships. Our divorce rate is lower and we give more to charity. We won't work 50 - 60 hours a week unless we are immediately rewarded for it. We don't kiss ass and will change jobs before we will kowtow and grovel to the boss.
We are living the life that they originally valued. We never sold out. We didn't become a bunch of posers.
I once saw Michael Douglas on, "Inside the Actor's Studio". They asked him about the movie, "Wall Street". He said he had people come up to him and tell him that movie was the reason they became a stock broker. He replied, to these baby boomers, that Gordon Gekko was the villain. A point that seemed lost on the baby boomers.
You need to read the rest of the article yourself. There is to much good stuff in it to put it all here. I would have to post the entire thing.
Go read it. I'll still be here when you get back.
OK. One more quote:
Still, it's never been sexy to be a Gen Xer. And that's the problem. Maybe we're responsible for the Spin Doctors (x-er: but we did bring you Greenday and The Offspring), but if you cut through the bullshit, you'll see that we're not merely sexy. We're fucking hot:
We were the first bloggers. We created rap music. Silicon Valley. McSweeney's. Indie rock.
And we are the Internet generation. We founded Google. Wikipedia. DailyKos. Gawker. Meet-Up. MySpace. Ebay. YouTube.We're not slackers. We are Tiger Woods, Snoop Dogg, Parker Posey, Tina Fey, Johnny Depp, Michael Jordan, Dr. Dre and Lance Armstrong, to name a few.
You've earned your retirement, boomers. So rest assured that your babies are in good hands as you go. As a member of the nowhere generation, now come of age, I'm proud to announce that our time has arrived. We may not be the next Greatest Generation, but we're pretty good at calling bullshit. So in the immortal words of Paul Davis: Cool wand.
Yeah. Cool Wand.
2 comments:
A generation, containing millions of people, will never have one single thing which defines everyone or on which everyone agrees. Nonetheless, people raised in a certain time share certain experiences. Kurt Cobain has meaning to me. On the other hand, my parents (Silent Generation) wouldn't even know the name.
In that vein, it's legitimate to make generalizations about generations, as unfair as they may be to individual members. Regarding Millenials, my fundamental difference with them is their pretentiousness, especially with regard to things they haven't experienced. The idea that some kid in their twenties is going to inform me about certain aspects of the 80s, when they were (largely) still in diapers, is absurd. I guess if you read it on Wikipedia, you're an expert. That sense of the world revolving around them is something that radically divides Generation X from Millenials - I could never imagine myself or anyone else my age having that type of conversation with an elder when I was twenty-something.
It also makes them suckers for advertising, as the article indicates. This is something they share with their Boomer parents. Related to that is the overconfidence many of them display in their own abilities. Of all the traits which their parents encouraged in them, this is likely to be the most damning in the long term, because it closes them off to any learning about the past, or seeing things from another person’s perspective. There are so many skills which can’t easily be conveyed by writing – riding a horse; taping sheetrock; maintaining a garden; I could go on…While none of those skills may matter to a given individual, the world is much more like that – not easily quantified, not like a multiple choice test - than the neat, exact cyberworld many of them seem to live in.
Cool wand – that’s a keeper!
The differences in treatment are dead on. I'm a X, my brother is a Y(ner).
If I say something off color, I'm being an asshole, if he says the exact same thing 10 minutes later, it's "cute".
Oh, and his band sucks. But you'd think that band is going to change the music industry as we know it do to their awesomeness. But they suck, and my boomer parents will never damage his self esteem by telling him that his band sucks.
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