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.