Posted on 11/21/2006 9:37:10 AM PST by shrinkermd
In 1991, Douglas Coupland wrote the best-selling novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularizing the term, well, Generation X. Gen Xers are roughly defined as those born between 1965 and 1980. At the time of Mr. Coupland’s breakthrough, they were in their early 20’s, fresh out of college, hanging onto the bottom rung of the company ladder. Now, 15 years later, they are in their late 30’s or early 40’s, more likely to be buying up market share than using dad’s gas card at the mini-mart....
...Generation X” has come to mean more than just a specific group of post-boomers, more even than a marketing demographic—people who will go see Last Days one evening and drop $5 on a pumpkin-spice latte the next morning. It has also come to serve as a marketing model, in this post–Reality Bites world, for how all young Americans should live out their 20’s. Now we are all Generation X.
According to OnPoint Marketing and Promotions (whose clients include Ford, Microsoft and Pepsi), Gen Xers are 50 million strong, make up 17 percent of the population and spend $125 billion on consumer goods each year. Whereas Mr. Coupland’s characters removed themselves from families, schools and potential career paths to tend bar and dwell in bungalows in Palm Springs, grown-up Gen Xers retreat into gated communities, planned developments and luxury loft condominiums. They used to be obsessed with other people’s money; now, they obsess over their own.
(Excerpt) Read more at observer.com ...
How can that be, when the Boomers STILL haven't become adults?
Would that be just the men that fought in Vietnam or the Bill Clinton and George W Bush that didn't, or all of them, Patriotic1?
Indeed.... My mom turned into one of those and left me and pa when I was 12--that happened to a helluva lot of us 'Gen-Xers'.
That's the root of a lot of my antipathy towards them:
The same rotten women who spun my mom up and got her to leave her family 'to find herself' are now crapping on me for being in the Army. The same ponytailed wierdos that my mom left my Korean-vet dad for are now my bosses who call me 'slacker'.
And I'll be paying for their retirement because they were too busy spending the divorce settlements on fun!
God Damn them. Damn them to hell: My experience is by no means unique....
You, of course, are excepted from these anti-boomer diatribes. I've always enjoyed your posts--especially the first-hand ones about the WTO riots in Seattle....
yep.
... and thank you Dave Ramsey for teaching us what our parents forgot! :-)
But more likely, they will run most companies into the ground before then. Or at least, most American companies. Then it's time to be bought out by a foreign firm or simply shut the doors. Parle Voux Frances? Sprechen Sie Deutch? LOL ....
Ni hui shuo zhong wen ma?
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