Not Even Not Zen 426: Biomythography - Note 137: On Generation X, Part IV

Generation X, Part IV

I'm surprised to find so many factors making differences between generations. Understanding them may be a futile pursuit, as my instincts inclined me to believe before I began. Assembling a list of differences, though, highlights how much has changed in America. 

Some of the items in this list are worth books of their own but my reasons for including them are generally cut to a paragraph each. I'm trying to put these elements in roughly chronological order, too. That means I haven't even mentioned the Internet so far. I think I could get to it this time.

31. First, We Were Baby Busters

One day when I was around ten, I reported to work at my childless neighbors, the Vances. I had agreed to do gardening assistance Vance at the rate of one dollar per hour. A magazine, possibly Scientific American, had come out with an issue that declared the end of the Baby Boom generation. It charted birth rates in the United States since World War II. Virginia Vance had been reading the article. She had it in her hand when she answered the door. She flipped open the pages, creased the back, and showed me the chart.

"You're a Baby Buster," she said.

“What’s that?” I hadn’t even broken anything yet.

“It’s what they’re calling you.”

She explained. During World War II, childbirth rates fell. Then men returned from their deployments, couples met and married, and they started families. Birth rates climbed from around 20 per thousand people in 1945 to around 25 per thousand in 1955. Now they had declined to 19 per thousand. I had been born in the decline. Hence, my generation was assigned the name Baby Busters.

Years later, as newspapers and magazines backed away from the term Baby Busters and flailed around for another term like "MTV Generation," "Computer Generation," "Slackers," or "Grunge Generation" the whole concept came to feel fabricated, like something media companies just made up. Only the media seemed to care about it. When they seemed to settle, eventually, on "Generation X," their choice felt like they'd given up. Going with "X" was admitting, essentially, they couldn't think of a name. 

There isn’t one thing that defines Generation X. That’s probably the reason for the naming problem. Instead, as generations do, we endured a collection of changes.

32. We Hung Out at the Mall

After American city downtowns started dying, malls sprang up in their place. Obviously, Generation X couldn't hang out at the soda fountain on Main Street. We could meet at the record store in the mall, though. So we did. The mall was our downtown. 

This aspect of life seems almost embarrassing because meeting spaces don’t seem important. But they are. Malls were not just retail markets. Even now, when a commercial construction firm designs a mall (a rare event these days), they spend time considering how people will meet and relax within the spaces. The point of the designers is to encourage purchases at the shops but that means they want to create a general friendliness for the area. People being social is a societal interest; but it's also a commercial one, especially in America.

33. The Sun Stopped Being Everyone’s Best Friend

As we were growing up, we knew folks who practically worshipped the sun. Maybe we were those folks. 

People tried to tan. They slathered on baby oil. If they lived in the north, they wanted better vitamin D. There were state-sponsored vitamin D health campaigns. For two decades, we nuzzled up to the sunlight. Then the news about the ozone hole came in. We had already started getting unexpected burns. Sunscreen had started to appear on store shelves. 

We found out what chlorofluorocarbons were. We educated ourselves on ozone. It was a strange idea to most of us that we needed to protect ourselves from the sun. What about our vitamin D? 

The ozone layer is partially repaired now, or so atmospheric scientists say, but it likely will never be fixed completely.

34. Enshittification Picked Up Its Pace

This trend has gone by other names. In the 1950s, construction companies learned to use sub-standard materials. If you look at the attic of a 1920s house in Maryland you'll see six by six cedar joists and beams. Cedar resists rot and it's strong. It's stronger than necessary, in fact. A house builder doesn't want a house to last a hundred years; they need it to last a few years past the sale. Ideally, the building shouldn't fall down in an earthquake, as well. 

American companies modeled their businesses on corner-cutting during manufacturing and planned obsolescence. Appliances should break in a few years; that's the basic model. Printer cartridges follow the model. Blenders, too. Washing machines. Plus, companies bought into cutting quality along with costs. We deregulated airlines to make flights cheaper and worse - as bad as people could tolerate. Commercials increased their bite of our time. By the 2000s, commercial breaks that were once 8-10 minutes per hour expanded to 15-20 minutes. Food ingredients cheapened, led by fast food chains. Meat quality decreased. Fillers increased. Shrinkflation began. 

Social media shifted from chronological feeds showing what you wanted to see into engagement-maximizing algorithms prioritizing outrage and ads. Software companies shifted from selling software their customers owned into mandatory subscriptions that removed features from cheaper tiers and forced continuous payments for the functionality we all once purchased outright.

35. Unions Faded Away

As we were growing up, American companies moved manufacturing overseas. The move had supply chain repercussions affecting the shape of the world economy. The first consequence was a crippling of American unions.

Unions fought for living wages and basic benefits like healthcare. As their negotiating leverage diminished, Generation X saw the loss of small tokens of workplace respect, usually enshrined in office conditions. Jobs stopped keeping bank schedules and started demanding more free overtime. Workers lost paid lunch hours, then lost paid lunch half-hours, and finally lost smoke breaks. In some cases, the Boomer generation of workers kept their benefits while excluding Generation X and later hires.

We lost our pensions. In fact, we lost the idea of pensions. Companies moved pension funds into stock-based retirement funds. Corporations went from giving some loyalty and expecting strict loyalty in return to saying aloud, “anyone who believes in loyalty is a sucker.” We increased our productivity many times over without the rewards seen in previous generations.

36. Unmentionable Things Became Mentionable

I’m not sure when this took place. Somehow, we transitioned from not talking about poop, pee, sex, medical procedures, death, or the reasoning behind adult decisions (“because I told you”) and we started - this seems entirely due to us making a series of conscious decisions- talking about them. 

We mentioned the unmentionable. We said the word “cancer.” I’m not sure if all the extra talk is good. American Indian men saw talking too much as a sign of thoughtlessness. That view is part of the stoic tradition, too. We had something nice going in our culture with honorable deeds being done quietly and good behavior being taken for granted. We decided to speak more anyway, to make things clear for people who missed nonverbal signals or pretended to miss them. Maybe we will find a balance that gets the advantages of clarity with the comfort of appropriate silence. We don’t seem to be finished with this yet, if such things are ever finished. 

37. We Lost Some Repair Skills 

Every generation loses some. We probably haven’t had good plasterers in this country since the invention of sheet rock. This time we lost abilities related to the wires and tubes in electronics.

The technological revolution brought on by solid state electronics generated devices that were harder to fix. When transistors got carved into the wafers of computer chips, we lost the chance to repair circuits. With the logic of wires and tubes embedded in circuit boards, the best we could do is swap the boards. 

Nowadays with the Right to Repair, Maker Faire and other consumer-rights movements, we may be seeing a return to repair skills but, for a while, we had a generational failure to learn them. Our parents replaced diode tubes in the television. Their skills became irrelevant. Our uncles rewired the copper coil in radios. That trick doesn't apply to modern radios. Maybe even radios no longer apply. We swapped computer components for a while, as a way of repair, but we no longer do even that, very much. 

38. We Made Personal Computers, BBSes, FidoNet, and Internet

Transistors allowed computers to scale down from the size of ENIAC room-fillers to mainframes, then to minicomputers, and eventually to microcomputers, which we usually call personal computers, laptops, desktops, or phones. 

Boomers started the personal computer revolution but Generation X got heavily involved around the time bulletin board systems (BBSes) came around. We played on FidoNet (an early form of cross-country communication by telephone lines), and next the Internet (Usenet, FTP, and Telnet at first but soon the World Wide Web).

The timing of these things meant boomers controlled the underlying infrastructure but Generation X technicians provided the new Internet based services. It’s hard to describe how much this changed daily life; and maybe it’s not necessary. Although this group of technologies defined our generation in many respects, the revolution didn't come during our formative years. We didn't grow up with the Internet. Some of us created it. The rest of it eased into it. 

We all renewed contact with some people who we lost track of after college, high school, or earlier, because we'd made a world where lifelong contact is possible without living in the same small village. 

39. We Were the Last Generation of Newspaper Readers

We grew up with news segregated into topics and accompanied by the Sunday funnies. Sometimes we read articles six pages long. Sometimes they revealed how an aspect of society, say, the children’s court system, worked. 

The publishers and editors were gatekeepers. They affected our basic expectations of the world. But there were laws protecting the diversity of views and ensuring news competition. Our court system violated those principles of competition. Now the presence of monopolies in the market has helped create the sameness of, and the click-bait nature of, the materials we read. 

40. We Were the Last Generation Dependent on Libraries

Libraries are still around. They still assist with research and still act as community meeting spaces. Two of my local town groups meet in the closest library to us. Nevertheless, we've endured amazing differences since the times when libraries hit their peak, maybe in the 1930s. Now we have reference information available through our phones. We've got fairly definitive answers available to us essentially at all times.

We no longer have to rely on the hazy memory of our relatives. We don't have to suspect our uncle just made up an answer. We can ask our phones and find out, well, darn, he was right this time. But look, he was wrong about the previous six things he said. 

In our formative years, sometimes we waited decades for the same revelation.
 

Not Even Not Zen 425: Biomythography - Note 136: On Generation X, Part III

Generation X, Part III

21. Gambling was illegal

"It's just immoral," was a phrase I heard a lot, growing up, about gambling. Legislatures had made nearly every form of gambling illegal because it was so obviously bad. Casinos, for instance, were designed to take money and give nothing in return. Of course they were against the law. Was your neighbor running a lottery? Well, it had ridiculous odds of hundreds to one, so it was also made illegal. Poker games with buddies? Well, playing for chips was okay but you couldn't play for money. That was the moral stance.

Horse racing? Well, it was legal. The inconsistency made adults frown. The stock market? It was also legalized and also frowned upon. Remember the Great Depression? Betting on stocks was immoral even when it was legal, and its immorality had consequences. After the stock crash of 1973, I heard many people say betting on stocks should be illegal.

The proponents of gambling said the moralists were simply being 'puritan,' that a little gambling fun never hurt anyone, and anyway the stock market was doing well again. New Hampshire started a lottery based on horse racing (to make everyone feel nothing much was changing, I suppose). Other states followed, many of them giving even worse odds and with no ties to horse racing. The state governments didn't offer odds of merely hundreds to one but thousands or millions to one. They promised more money for programs people wanted (like senior living homes and neighborhood schools) and the result was what our friends called 'math taxes' - that is, fees imposed on people who couldn't do math and hence played those lotteries.

22. Underage Drinking Started Getting Enforced

In the generations previous to ours, drinking while underage was normal. During Generation X, police started to enforce the laws more. A social movement against liquor got revitalized by Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD), which won quick success and received a parody movement in opposition, Drunks Against Mad Mothers (DAMM). But MADD was not kidding. Their members had lost children to something they felt was preventable. They kept at it. They succeeded in, among other things, raising the drinking age.

As a result, some members of Generation X could drink legally at 18, some at 20, and some at 21. Some folks (like me) got grandfathered in by our home state. Some did not. One of my college friends turned legal at 18, then illegal, then legal at 20, then illegal, then legal again at 21. People had to stop framing the issue in terms of morality because the community morals were so inconsistent. Instead, they discussed drunk driving and road safety. Those issues seemed to win the debate.

Enforcement lagged behind the laws, though, I was able to buy beer and wine when I was 15 years old. No one asked me for identification. By the time I was twenty every place asked for ID.

To be fair, lots of people had been driving drunk, many more than I usually see mentioned. There seems to be some revisionism going on. In a discussion nowadays, a person or two may reluctantly concede that folks drove drunk back when Generation X was growing up. If you ask for specifics, though, hardly anyone admits to driving drunk themselves.

23. Women's Liberation Hit During our Formative Years

I'm going to start off with an achievement that never gets mentioned: mental freedom. Women gained the ability to realize they were not broken or psychopathic. People seem too embarrassed to mention it. In retrospect, it seems too unbelievable to discuss, as well.

In 1973, Trident Press published a book called My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday. At the time, the medical profession treated female sexual fantasies as a sickness. Women could be involuntarily committed to treatment if they admitted to having them. After the fantasies were compiled systematically for discussion, though, psychologists started to back off their preconception of them as abnormal.

My Secret Garden gets sneered at even now. But the book was groundbreaking. It contributed to broader 1970s conversations about female sexuality and helped destigmatize women's sexual thoughts and desires. A lot of people apparently don't count that as any kind of freedom. I disagree because I consider it vital to have real freedom of mind.

More conventionally, our generation got the benefit of sex discrimination getting banned in education. We grew up with girls and boys getting equal(ish) opportunities to take classes and play sports. We benefited from the legalization of abortion, too, and increased access to contraception, which gave women control over their bodies. (These also led to a huge reduction in violent crime starting about fifteen years later.) We had the Equal Pay Act. In 1974, we got the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which enabled women to obtain credit cards and loans without a male co-signer. In 1978, we got the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which made it illegal to fire or discriminate against pregnant workers. We got the first battered women's shelters and the first treatment of domestic violence as a systemic issue, not just as a personal one. In short, the United States changed in fundamental ways. Generation X was the first to grow up with the changes.

24. We Were the First Generation Encouraged to Incur Debt

In previous generations, people often didn't carry any debts - because they couldn't.

Loans weren't available to most people except as layaway programs in department stores. Many women couldn't acquire debts at all in their own name. People of color faced similar challenges. Poor white men with the wrong types of job couldn't get loans. On top of everything else that restricted credit, many religions opposed interest charges as usury. When banks eased credit guidance and raised credit card rates, those churches initially tried to shut down MasterCard and Visa. They seem awfully quiet about usury nowadays.

I got my first credit card at J.C. Penny, a store card, when I was fifteen. I had a job, so I was eligible. I got a free plastic cup and pitcher set with my application, too. Two years later, I got my first government-backed loan for college. The terms of my college loans came at a reasonable discount compared to modern loans. When a typical mortgage interest rate was 17%, I paid 8% for college because the government guaranteed it for me. Now, when the mortgage rate is 4%, a student loan is still 8% and that's no longer a good deal.

25. We Had Student Smoking Sections

It's amazing how openly the country surrendered on the subject of child health. Tobacco companies had been fighting for decades to keep people smoking despite the consistent negative results of science research on lung cancer. They had been winning the public battle, too. Of course, we have similar fights going on today over microplastics, pesticides, glyphosates, PFAs, and more. The companies responsible will win for a long time. I don't know if we'll have the equivalent of student smoking sections in public schools on any of those issues, though.

I'm not even certain how official our student smoking sections were. I've never read a book of school rules. What I know is we had outdoor areas the teachers told us were for "only students to smoke." I bought cigarettes so I could go hang out there, where the hardcore smokers, some of them pretty girls, talked endlessly about how terrible a habit it was.

26. We Had Leaded Gasoline

This is a contender for crime of the century, even in a century filled with crime.

In 1921, an engineer for General Motors named Thomas Midgley discovered a compound called “tetraethyl lead” that stopped car engines from shuddering. Midgley led a conglomerate, the Ethyl Corporation, to make leaded gasoline. Cars and generators used his new formula, which caused catastrophic damage to the environment. As one of the effects, our nation saw a widespread cognitive decline. Childhood lead exposure impaired the development of our brains. We got an increase in cardiovascular disease and kidney failures from the lead. Higher exposures gave us elevated rates of psychiatric issues, including depression, anxiety, and neuroticism. In the 1970s, after legal wrangling, we started phasing out leaded gasoline in the United States. In 1996, we banned it outright.

The results of the toxic lead are persistent. It lingers in the atmosphere, so we still breathe it. It's in our dust, soil, and water and it always will be there. We will always be dumber and more neurotic than previous generations. We will always pay higher health care costs due to the lead.

27. We Carried Pocket Knives

At the age of ten, I was, at last, allowed to carry. I had won a Boy Scout pocket knife in a contest. It had a can opener, a blade, a corkscrew (so useful for ten year olds!), an awl, a second blade, and a flathead screwdriver. I carried it everywhere I could for the summer. No marshmallow stick was safe from whittling.

The tool knives were emblematic of a level of trust and responsibility. We absorbed the cultural rules: don't pull it out in a fistfight because it's more honorable to lose the fistfight; no threatening anyone; don't whittle toward your body; don't complain when you whittle toward yourself and get cut; don't unscrew the door jamb just to screw it back in; do unscrew the outlet plate to impress your friend but then, for heaven's sake, put it back.

We had BB guns. We had air pellet guns. We had rolls of gunpowder caps. We had fireworks. We had chemistry sets. Some older teens had hunting guns in their room. A lot of these things went to school. It didn't matter, usually. Because we were trusted.

28. Life Expectancy Was 20 Years Less Than Most of Us Got

“Men live to sixty two,” my science teacher told me in fourth grade. “Women get to sixty-seven. But of course those are only averages.”

“Why do women live longer than men?” I complained.

“I think no one knows.”

In fact the life expectancy calculations kept growing as we aged. Now we have life expectancies of 76 for men and 81 for women. We know more about what those numbers mean, too. We understand the averages are not only a measure of improved cancer treatments (remission for 20 years instead of none) but all other health improvements. We know that testosterone looks implicated in men dying a little earlier. Still, our generation grew up with the expectation that half of us would be dead by now. And it's not as bad as that. Our lingering in this world affects Social Security calculations. It affects decisions about retirement, bucket lists, healthcare, hospice care, and spiritual life in general.

Gen X has more chronic illnesses (like hypertension and diabetes) than the Boomers; we are currently the sandwich generation caring for parents and children both; and we suffer unexpected financial strain from the caring, too.

29. Unions Faded

As we were growing up, American companies moved manufacturing jobs overseas. The move had supply chain consequences affecting the shape of the world economy. The first consequence, though, was a crippling of American unions.

Unions fought for living wages and basic benefits like healthcare. As their negotiating leverage diminished, Generation X saw the loss of small tokens of workplace respect, usually enshrined in better office conditions. Jobs stopped keeping bank schedules. Workers lost paid lunch hours, then lost paid lunch half-hours, and finally lost smoke breaks. In some cases, the Boomer generation of workers kept the benefits while excluding Generation X and other, later hires.

We lost our pensions. In fact, we lost the idea of pensions. Companies moved pension funds into stock-based retirement funds. Corporations went from giving some loyalty and expecting strict loyalty in return to saying aloud, “anyone who believes in loyalty is a sucker.” We increased our productivity many times over but without the rewards seen in previous generations.

30. Healthcare Turned from a Non-Profit Service to a Profit-Making One

One of the worst consequences of this transition was complexity. I know it doesn't get mentioned often but the difficulty of figuring out what your insurance will cover while you're ill or dying is not trivial. Yes, the current system results in huge overhead costs, the largest in the world. It produces weird gaps in insurance coverage. Our system prizes efficiency in service delivery (not billing) over effectiveness. However, what we want most while ill is an effective treatment. But I think complexity is a real killer, sometimes literally.

Lack of transparency is perhaps the next-worst thing. We don't get to read Consumer Reports about the success rates of hospitals, surgeons, specialists, or nursing units. We don't know where the value is for our money and therefore we can't really make cost competition or quality improvements happen.

On the plus side, the American system results in profitable hospitals and good pay for doctors. Those aren't insignificant things. A few countries around the world experience doctor shortages more or less constantly because they don't pay enough to keep them.