Back in the early 1990s, a features reporter for The Seattle Times searched out alienated young people who could speak about the travails of those belonging to a newly minted cohort: Generation X.
The piece, headlined “Closed-door generation: Grads in their 20s frustrated about their prospects,” began with a 23-year-old University of Washington alumnus describing his disillusionment “as the rejection letters pile up and the options dwindle.
“It seems like we’re the generation that’s fallen through the cracks,” said the guy, who had recently begun working in the collection department of a local bank. “We’re not hippies and we’re not yuppies. We’re the quiet generation that recycles. We’re faced with a difficult situation.”
Who was this crybaby?
That would be me.
I was the kickoff anecdote in an article about disaffected youth that appeared in this newspaper on Jan. 10, 1992.
Grievance was central to the founding identity of Generation X. Perhaps for good reason. At the time, the job market for post-grads sucked. Buying a house seemed functionally impossible. Throw in the likelihood of nuclear Armageddon and cynical malaise became the default posture of the day.
“Generation X: Tales of an Accelerated Culture,” the Douglas Coupland novel that applied the term representing those born from 1965 to 1980, turns 35 this year. The oldest members of the generation are fast approaching retirement. Some have already arrived. (After all, this was the group who defined the term “slacker”).
So, how did things turn out? How can the passage of time provide us with some well-seasoned perspective, minus the nostalgia?
Because here’s the thing. While we were so busy complaining and defining ourselves, Gen X began its adulthood at one of the sunniest times in living history. More on that later.
First, let’s step into the Way Back Machine.
During the 1990-91 recession, workers 25 years old and younger absorbed nearly all the job losses, according to a study by Children’s Defense Fund and Northeastern University.
Times were tough on those in their 20s.
Coupland’s work, published in 1991, was a story about three friends hanging around Palm Springs, Calif. The Canadian writer was genius at coining words and phrases that captured the economic angst and stuck in the popular vernacular (Coupland’s publisher did not respond to interview requests).
McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector.
Veal-fattening pen: Small cramped office workstations built of fabric-covered disassembled wall partitions and inhabited by junior staff members. Named after the small pre-slaughter cubicles used by the cattle industry.
Gen X may have pioneered the exodus from plush offices to veal-fattening pens, but there was money to be made nonetheless.
The U.S. Census Bureau reveals that Generation X quietly climbed to the top of the income ladder. Households aged 45 to 54, a prime Gen X demographic, boast the highest median income at $161,800, surpassing all other age groups.
A stock market index of the 500 largest publicly traded companies increased 332% from January 1990 to an all-time peak in March 2000, marking a massive bull market driven by the 1990s tech boom.
Called “America’s neglected middle child,” Gen X accounts for just 19% of the U.S. population. But it has done pretty well real estate-wise, notwithstanding the grim prognostications laid out in Coupland’s book and the collective wisdom of the early 1990s.
“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 own grimy little shoe boxes and we’re pushing thirty?” exclaimed one of Coupland’s characters. “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?”
Not only is Gen X’s current homeownership rate second only to boomers overall, but research by the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, shows that, back in the day, an average Gen Xer in their late 20s was much more likely to own a home than a Millennial (born between 1981-1996) or Generation Z (1997-2012) of the same age.
Another angle to Gen X’s angst went beyond the economic. It was existential.
If you turned 18 during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, chances are the threat of nuclear annihilation crept somewhere into your consciousness. The 1983 television movie “The Day After” about a full-scale nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was watched by more than 100 million viewers, making it one of the highest-rated television films in U.S. history.
Coupland’s book ends with the main character fearfully watching a mushroom cloud gather in the desert sky only to realize it was smoke from routine crop burning.
But, in retrospect, the 1990s were the high water mark for optimism and global promise.
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. On the day after Christmas 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist and the red hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time. It was like the world had turned upside down. Or, perhaps more correctly, had finally turned right-side up.
A General Electric television advertisement in 1990 summed up the vibe. Showcasing a new partnership with a Hungarian company to manufacture light bulbs, the ad was a metaphor for the brightness suddenly illuminating all of Eastern Europe. “It’s like a dream,” said one of the actresses above stirring music and scenes of lights stringing across Budapest. “A beautiful dream.”
Today, such confidence seems as outdated as flannel shirts and fingerless wool gloves.
But that didn’t stop Gen X from lamenting its lot in life.
Another cringe worthy passage from the 1992 Seattle Times story:
“Because the generation will always follow the baby boom generation, the situation is not likely to improve, Fryer said.
‘By the time we’re 30 or 40 we’ll have to pay for the Social Security taxes for the yuppies,’ he said. ‘I don’t see it getting better 10 or 20 years down the line.’”
Oh, shut up, will you?
Perhaps all this is a lesson for Generation Z.
Despite the emergence of endless wildfires, the imminent takeover of the job market by resource-hogging supercomputers, housing costs that exceed miserly payroll increases and the general demise of reading, democracy and common decency, there is hope.
Because if this new generation of young people follows the trajectory of Gen X, it ought to consider itself very lucky indeed.
