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"This little gem of a book offers sage advice..."
Too Young to Retire,
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June 4, 2006X marks the lost generationSqueezed between his baby boomer parents and the fameaholic younger set, Tom Cox, 31, says generation X will outshine them both in the long runIt is 15 years since the publication of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, the novel that encapsulated the spirit of the disassociated, dreamy age group who followed in the wake of the baby boomers. The thing about 15-year periods is that they tend to be good lengths of time to process cultural movements and phases. A decade often isn’t quite enough, but a decade and a half nearly always is. A person can frequently get away with not ageing noticeably in 10 years, but rarely in 15.Similarly, the personality of a decade cannot be bagged and tagged right at its close. We probably did not truly understand what the phrase “very 1980s” meant until 1995, and the 1960s did not really properly come to a close until 1975. Going by this logic, and taking generation X’s Year Zero as 1991 — the year of Nirvana’s Nevermind and Richard Linklater’s Slacker — we should know exactly what generation X means by now. If not, we should at least have seen two or three nostalgic television clip-shows devoted to it, with comedians that you know only from other television clip-shows saying stuff like, “Plaid shirts — what was all that about?” Instead, you hear very little about it. What happened to generation X? How did it get forgotten? Was it our disaffected slacker attitude that doomed us to a footnote in modern cultural history or are we just too damn nice to really stand up and be noticed? Whatever the cause, being a generation X-er these days can feel like being squeezed on a sofa between two overweight, attention-seeking relatives, one older, one younger. Now largely in our thirties, we should rule the world, and some of us do, but we tend to do it quietly. Meanwhile, barely a day goes by without an image in a newspaper or on television of a baby boomer speeding off somewhere on a Harley-Davidson, spending our inheritance, logging on to www.2young2retire.com or boasting they are having the best sex of their life. And while the generation below us, generation Y, might not be quite so abundant, we feel very aware of them and what a good time they’re having, too. How could we not, when they are so damn sure of themselves and savvy and loud? We, meanwhile, are stranded in no man’s land, outnumbered and outgunned. The question of what exactly constitutes a generation X-er is hard to pinpoint — perhaps harder now than ever. Some of us wore deely boppers in the mid-1980s; some of us took ecstasy a bit later; some of us wore Doc Martens and check shirts. Some of us listened to Wham! and Duran Duran as kids (this, of course, was long before we knew we were generation X-ers), and Smashing Pumpkins and the Lemonheads as young adults. We’re defined by the fact that we were not very defined in the first place. read more: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2209627_1,00.html Home |
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