Oh, sorry, I misread your first sentence there. Yes, appropriately, then. I read it as him influencing people to stop talking about decades and start talking about generations.
I don’t know if that really started in the 2000s, though? Maybe it really got adopted by a lot more people, I don’t know.
I seem to remember seeing lots and lots spilled ink where self-identified boomers were wringing their hands over what to do about Gen X and their aimlessness (before the Gen X thing was really firmed up, we were called baby busters, slacker generation, twentynothings, MTV generation and probably some other names I cannot remember now. I like Gen X a lot more and the book is actually quite good, even though I think it better describes Generation Jones as filtered through a Canadian than my age group. ).
I remember seeing Gen X writing things about how they had a bleak future (many of us entering the workforce during a recession), that the contract between employee and employer was broken in the 80s, that Gen X was not going to collect Social Security after the boomers took it all, that the idea of working 50 years for a company and being repaid with that loyalty with a good pension and gold watch at the end of it was long over when we were still kids, etc.
This seemed to quickly shift to hearing/reading more Gen Y moaning about the boomers and boomers complaining about Gen Y, probably because both groups having larger numbers than Gen X.
So maybe that’s what Adam was pointing out - that it wasn’t so much only the chattering classes and marketers adopting these positions, it was also much of the people themselves…I definitely feel that of almost any “generation” that boomers were probably one of the first that were so studied and so regimented and probably had a lot of commonalities that were formative, at least early in life. I seem to remember Timothy Leary - who was of an older generation, but hugely popular with boomers and he learned to cater to them, I think - commenting on that to some extent. He might have even mentioned the Dr. Spock thing.
Oh, sorry, I misread your first sentence there. Yes, appropriately, then. I read it as him influencing people to stop talking about decades and start talking about generations.
I don’t know if that really started in the 2000s, though? Maybe it really got adopted by a lot more people, I don’t know.
I seem to remember seeing lots and lots spilled ink where self-identified boomers were wringing their hands over what to do about Gen X and their aimlessness (before the Gen X thing was really firmed up, we were called baby busters, slacker generation, twentynothings, MTV generation and probably some other names I cannot remember now. I like Gen X a lot more and the book is actually quite good, even though I think it better describes Generation Jones as filtered through a Canadian than my age group. ).
I remember seeing Gen X writing things about how they had a bleak future (many of us entering the workforce during a recession), that the contract between employee and employer was broken in the 80s, that Gen X was not going to collect Social Security after the boomers took it all, that the idea of working 50 years for a company and being repaid with that loyalty with a good pension and gold watch at the end of it was long over when we were still kids, etc.
This seemed to quickly shift to hearing/reading more Gen Y moaning about the boomers and boomers complaining about Gen Y, probably because both groups having larger numbers than Gen X.
So maybe that’s what Adam was pointing out - that it wasn’t so much only the chattering classes and marketers adopting these positions, it was also much of the people themselves…I definitely feel that of almost any “generation” that boomers were probably one of the first that were so studied and so regimented and probably had a lot of commonalities that were formative, at least early in life. I seem to remember Timothy Leary - who was of an older generation, but hugely popular with boomers and he learned to cater to them, I think - commenting on that to some extent. He might have even mentioned the Dr. Spock thing.