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.
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.
There is, but while the timing is different, the results are now the same.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is, but while the timing is different, the results are now the same.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.