IN THE WAR BETWEEN MILLENNIALS AND BABY BOOMERS,WE HAVE FORGOTTEN ABOUT THE WORK-HARD PLAY-HARD GENERATION X
Generation X has the benefit of possessing the best characteristics of both with none of the downsides...
Don’t you know there’s a war on? It’s being fought right now, all around us, between the baby boomers and the millennials.
Opinions differ as to the exact parameters that define each group of combatants, but the boomers are generally thought to have been born between 1946 (the results of the post-war baby boom, when people were so happy to be alive after six years of conflict that they jumped, en masse, into the sack) and the early 1960s. The millennials, on the other hand, take their name from the fact they came of age at the turn of the new century, so are usually defined as being born in 1982 or later.
The boomers don’t like the millennials because they think the younger generation are feckless, whiny snowflakes who are scared of hard graft and obsessed by status, more interested in posting a selfie to social media than doing anything useful.
The millennials, on the other hand, see the moomers as a rapacious generation that’s pretty much ruined everything for them. They’re living too long, taxpayers’ money is gushing into looking after them. They’ve kept house prices high, meaning young people can’t afford to buy. Workplace pensions are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Boomers are, by and large, Brexiteers and Trumpers. They remember when Britain was great, and think coming out of Europe will be a doddle. They want to make America great all over again.
If you fall into either of those camps, you’ll doubtless have strong opinions. If you don’t, then come and join me on the sidelines as the two sides limber up for the mother of all battles. I’ve got popcorn, it’ll be fun. And who are we, if we’re not boomers or millennials? Why, we’re Generation X of course. And when the slapping and fighting is all done and dusted, we’re going to save the world.
Using the above, admittedly inexact, measure, Generation X-ers were born from roughly the mid-Sixties to the start of the Eighties. We didn’t even get a name until Douglas Coupland wrote a novel about us in 1991, and for a long time people thought Generation X meant we were nihilistic slackers who would never amount to much. But, oh, we’ve come of age now. We’re mainly in our forties and fifties, and this is our time.
Generation X has the benefit of possessing the best characteristics of both the boomers and the millennials, and none of the downsides. We know how to work hard and we know how to play hard. Generation X-ers are very industrious. Boomers don’t understand the internet and millennials were raised on it. Generation X created it. We stripped off and dove into the glittering waters of this brand new thing, and made it what it is today. We had a dot com boom (and a couple of busts), we took those progressive late-boomers Bill Gates and Steve Jobs under our wing and showed them what we could do with their stuff. We walked around with phones the size of rucksacks and sent the first halting text-messages. We knuckled down and worked hard and now we write books and make TV and direct movies, we get up early to go to work, we come out in the middle of the night to fix your burst pipe.
