Tag: Gen X

Closing Thought–20Nov19

The economic outlook for Gen Xers, those born between 1961-1981, will have a much bleaker future than us Boomers.

My daughter is a Gen Xer and I have watched her struggle with debt mostly from her college and I hate that I read that her future and retirement does not look well…..

In 1991 the demographers Neil Howe and William Strauss published their awkwardly-titled tome “13th Gen,” about Generation X—the Americans born between 1961 and 1981. If Xers had paid attention they would have committed suicide.

“Child poverty, employment, wages, home ownership, arrest records — in every category, this generation, the 13th since the American Revolution, is doing worse than the generation that came before,” New York Times book critic Andrew Leonard wrote at the time. “Indeed, for the first time since the Civil War, the authors of ‘13th Gen’ keep reminding us, young people are unlikely to surpass the affluence of their parents.”

Tellingly, the Times titled Leonard’s review “The Boomers’ Babies” as though their relationship to The Only Generation That Mattered at the time was their status as offspring. Which, equally tellingly, was incorrect. Most Xers’ parents belong to the Silent Generation that came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, not the Boom.

Gen X Faces a Bleak, Impoverished Old Age

I hate that she may be in dire straits in her senior years…I just hope that I do not have some debilitating disease and I can leave her a little something to help her  and her family out in their declining years.

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

How Did The Slacker Generation Produce These?

Another Saturday and another weekend begins….

My daughter is what some call Generation X or what others call the Slacker Generation…..recently with the deaths in Florida the students have become activists and have been protesting for better gun laws…..but the question has come out…how did a generation of slackers produce these children dedicated to protest?

Read an article that has tackled this question……

I, for one, welcome our new teenage overlords. Over the past six weeks — since the February 14 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida — the generation born in the 2000s has stepped up in new and extraordinary ways. They’ve participated in town halls, they’ve staged walkouts, they’ve marched and they’ve presented action plans for positive, sensible change. If, like me, you’re lucky enough to have teenagers in your life, the passion and and integrity of these adolescent leaders comes as no great surprise. The only real mystery is how the generation that was literally called “slacker” managed to become the parents of these badasses.

The prevailing image of my Gen-X peers is of mumbly, flannel-wearing whatevers. Our cultural influence appears limited to Smashing Pumpkins and the anguished early seasons of “The Real World.” We associate boomers with student protest. We associate millennials with innovation. We associate our own youth with zines and Chanel Vamp. And then we look at our own kids and are dazzled at how motivated they are in their energy and their ability to mobilize.

https://www.salon.com/2018/03/27/how-did-the-slacker-generation-get-these-activist-kids/

As an activist from days gone by…I am proud to see these children stepping up and demanding that society do something about all the deaths, especially deaths of children.

Grand kids of radicals….apparently radicalism is like male pattern baldness….it skips a generation.