“Generation X”, generation x, and millennials

People talk a lot about millennials as if they were some sort of brand new species, a wussy-feely generation faced with an unprecedentedly bad social lot: priced out of the housing market, doomed to the gig economy, their whole existence monetized for advertisers, and so on.

An obvious way to test whether this characterisation is apt is just to look at previous generations and see if this is so — is there something markedly different about millennials?

The generation prior to millennials are called generation x, and they are done so in homage to Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X. Thus a bit of low-hanging intellectual fruit is to check out that novel and see if its characters are markedly different from millennials as characterised in the popular press.

You might be forgiven for thinking that they would be markedly different. After all, wasn’t the 90s a time of emotional stuntedness and disaffection typified, say, by Nirvana, the smiling nihilism of Seinfeld, the angst of Fight Club? And wasn’t it a time of unprecedented economic growth (4% per annum during Clinton’s years)? One might be forgiven for thinking that generation x was disaffected but prosperous, and thus opposite to millennials who are affectionate but broke.

That would a mistake, though. If you look at Generation X, the supposedly voice of a generation text, you’ll see that its young people were just as emotionally open and economically alienated as the young people today, and moreover — and less surprisingly — exhibited the same mistrust towards the megabrands that wove into their lives as facebook and uber weave into milennials’.

I’ll make this point basically just by presenting a bunch of quotes from Generation X, centred around the three topics of economic alienation, mistrust of brands, and emotional openness.

The book is about three friends, Andy (who narrates), Dag, and Claire, who live in Palm Springs, a town where rich people ‘come to buy back their youth’ (Generation X, Abacus, 1991, p12 — all subsequent references are to this) where the protagonist’s dogs, on the second page, get their snouts in a bag of fat removed by liposuction, where ‘gray hair gobble[]s up the jewels and perfumes’ (p11) at one of the protagonists’ work, and where there is ‘no weather…. also no middle class’ (p12). There is just the affluent and those whom they serve.

They work ‘McJobs’, that is ‘low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector’ (p6). They realise they’re getting screwed over. Andy’s friends’ smiles

are the same as the smiles worn by people who have been good-naturedly fleeced, but fleeced nonetheless, in public >and on a New York sidewalk by card-sharks, and who are unable because of social convention to show their anger, who >don’t want to look like poor sports (p8)

Why are they getting screwed over? In part because of the luckily successful older generation. When Dag storms out of his job he rants:

Do you really think we enjoy hearing about your brand-new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our grimy little show boxes and we’re pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You’d last about ten minutes if you were my age[]…I have to endure pinheads like you rusting about me for the rest of my life, always grabbing the best piece of cake first and then putting a barbed-wire fence around the rest. (p26)

This could be spoken of today by a young deliveroo driver to their parasite landlord or a Mail reading Brexiteer: generation x are economically millennial (or vice-versa), unhappy at the unfair advantages of the previous generation.

Today we rightly dislike amazon, uber, facebook, the lifestyle brands that enrich few while impoverishing many (allowing that impoverishment can be political or social, in the case of facebook and its misused data). Generation X found a similar enemy in consumerism, which is railed against at many times in the book.

Here’s another scene of job storming out, only this time it’s Andy quitting. He says:

God, Margaret. You really have to wonder why we even bother to get up in the morning. I mean, really: Why work? Simply to buy more stuff? What makes us deserve the ice cream and running shoes and wool Italian suits we have? I see all of us trying so hard to acquire so much stuff but I can’t help but feel that we didn’t merit it. (p28)

Some more of the same:

You mean to tell me we can drive all the way here from L.A. and see maybe ten thousand square miles of shopping malls, and you don’t have maybe the weentsiest inkling that something, somewhere, has gone very very cuckoo? (p69)

And:

Otis got to thinking: Hey! these aren’t houses at all — these are malls in disguise’…Otis developed the shopping mall correlation: kitchens became the Food Fair; living rooms the Fun center; the bathroom the Water Park. Otis said to himself, ‘God, what goes through the minds who people who live in these things — are they shopping?’ (p80)

Updating the references to, say, ‘personal brands’, to talk of how is twitter dot com still free?, and to the supposed freedom the gig economy offers and these complaints — if not their exact tone and phrasing, which perhaps reads a bit on the nose today — could come from the mouth of a young person today, almost 30 years after the book was written. Generation x are as cynical of branding and business as millennials.

The third thing is feeling. Andy loves his friends and they love him, uncomplicatedly. They’re there for each other. They aren’t the nihilists that would later pop up in Seinfeld. It’s harder to pull quotes here because it’s more of a spirit which suffuses the book: the characters find peace from their shitty McJobs by spending time together and telling stories. The ending of part two, though, is representative:

These creatures here in this room with me — these are the creatures I love and who love me. Together I feel like we are a strange and forbidden garden — I feel so happy I could die. If I could have it thus, I would like this moment to continue forever.

Such genuine affection and concern, arguably, is of a piece with supportive twitter threads and the friend-protecting desire to not permit, in the face of a world overpopulated with them, dumb-ass provocateurs to speak at your university. Generation x are emotionally millennial.

So the generation x portrayed in Generation X are economically displaced, suspicious of brands, and yet emotionally open and supportive … which sounds like a very good description of millennials to me, and suggests that those people who say there’s something unique about the current generation should do their cultural history a bit better.

You might be somewhat unimpressed. This is just one book: no matter what it says, we still have the more cynical, ironic, echt-90s stuff to come in grunge and The Simpsons and the other things I mentioned above. Fair enough: it is just one book. But it’s instructive that such a seminal book is so different to what one might expect, and it’s also helpful, I think, in showing that certain features of contemporary life aren’t the result — as one taking an ahistorical perspective might be tempted to think — of certain early noughties exogenous shocks (the internet, the 08 crash) but are rather continuous with life before the millennium. Realising that you might be more willing to realise that our current situation is a deeply baked-in result, not an accidental feature, of the politico-economic order since Reagan and Thatcher, and more desirous to change that order.

(originally posted on medium.com, 24th July 2018)