My generation

[BiBunny]

I was born in 1983, the very beginning on Gen Y. There's nothing I can write about that everyone else hasn't already lived through, LOL.

They say Gen Y goes from 1982 to 1995. I have to say, I don't feel any sort of connection to those born much later than '86-'87ish. It's not just the age gap, either.

I think the difference is the older Gen Y'ers are old enough to remember the prosperity of the 90s. We thought, I guess, that it would last forever because it was all we ever knew. It was understood that you finished high school, went to college (if you could), and would basically be set for life when you finished.

Then came 9-11. I was 17 years old when it happened, sitting in my 12th grade physics class. A couple of boys who were in the same grade, but not that particular class, came to our classroom and told us to turn on the TV. For some reason, we actually listened to them, and there it was. Both towers had been hit, but had not yet fallen. I think the Pentagon had been hit, but Flight 93 hadn't been located yet.

We watched the footage on TV all day. Some people came and got their kids out of school, but I remember thinking how stupid that was. We were in a tiny little map dot in rural Alabama. Nobody was going to be crashing planes into us.

When I first heard about it, they had grounded all the planes, but not all of them were accounted for. Some of the news anchors suggested that Chicago might be another destination of the terrorists. I was terrified until all the planes in US airspace were accounted for because my father, an OTR truck driver, was in Chicago that day.

We had our break, and almost everyone was talking about it. I was hanging out with one of my "friends," who turned out not to be such a friend later, and all she could talk about was how she and her ex-boyfriend might be getting back together. I wanted to grab her by her hair and slam her face over and over against the brick wall of the outside of the school. How could anybody be so stupid, so vapid when any idiot should be able to realize that everything we'd ever known was about to change?

Once I found out my father was ok, I started to worry about my young male friends. I knew we'd go to war, once we figured out who to start shooting at. Would they be drafted? Would they volunteer to go, only to never be seen again?

I was right, too. Since that day, life for my generation was never the same again. Gone was the boundless optimism of the 90s, replaced by fears of terrorists, men being shipped off to fight and die in a pointless war, the economy being run in the ground, and thousands of college graduates unemployed or underemployed.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. This is not what they sold us. But we believed it, and now we'll most likely never return to the same sort of environment we grew up in. The younger people of this generation don't know what that was like.

You're supposed to lose your illusions and your innocence on your own, not have them stolen from you by events outside your control.

 

[Keroin]

I was born in 1983, the very beginning on Gen Y. There's nothing I can write about that everyone else hasn't already lived through, LOL.

<snip>

It wasn't supposed to be this way. This is not what they sold us. But we believed it, and now we'll most likely never return to the same sort of environment we grew up in. The younger people of this generation don't know what that was like.

You're supposed to lose your illusions and your innocence on your own, not have them stolen from you by events outside your control.

Thanks BB, I was really hoping to hear from some of Gen Y.

I think every generation gets their innocence robbed by forces beyond their control. Some more than others, perhaps, but I think that's just part of life.

I can't speak for all Gen X-ers but I know that I felt really let down after the "fall of communism". We'd been hyped up to believe that once the evil commies saw the light, that all would be well. The Berlin Wall coming down is a big memory for me and I cheered it as the beginning of a brave new world - as I'm sure many others did.

Except it wasn't.

Capitalism didn't solve Eastern Europe's problems, the world is no safer today than it was then, we all just found new enemies to hate.

But as an American teenager, yes, I'm sure 9/11 must have fundamentally changed how you saw the world.

I'm curious how your generation sees the future. Do you feel hopeful? Or not?

 

[BiBunny]

Thanks BB, I was really hoping to hear from some of Gen Y.

I think every generation gets their innocence robbed by forces beyond their control. Some more than others, perhaps, but I think that's just part of life.

I can't speak for all Gen X-ers but I know that I felt really let down after the "fall of communism". We'd been hyped up to believe that once the evil commies saw the light, that all would be well. The Berlin Wall coming down is a big memory for me and I cheered it as the beginning of a brave new world - as I'm sure many others did.

Except it wasn't.

Capitalism didn't solve Eastern Europe's problems, the world is no safer today than it was then, we all just found new enemies to hate.

But as an American teenager, yes, I'm sure 9/11 must have fundamentally changed how you saw the world.

I'm curious how your generation sees the future. Do you feel hopeful? Or not?

Me personally? Not particularly. At least not for the foreseeable future, that is. Most of the people I know who are around my age feel the same way, but I certainly can't speak for everyone.

 

[graceanne]

And the date-ly coincidences keep on coming! I was married the year you were born, gracie. It was a good year.

I'm sure it was, but I think 1978 was better. After all, I happened in 1978.

 

[FloggingMolly]

Chalk me up for '83 as well. I was thinking earlier about our change in government here, and how half my life (certainly the stuff I really remember) was under Labour. I guess ts just another change that reminds me that I'm really not a kid anymore, I helped to make this change happen.

 

[00Syd]

What defines my generation? The internet.

Pretty much everything we could ever want is at our fingertips, and has been since childhood. No shit we feel more entitled than the last couple of generations. I'm pretty scared to see what becomes of the generation under me. iPhones from the cradle to the grave.

And for those curious, I was born in '89.

 

[JMaxwell69]

What defines my generation? The internet.

Pretty much everything we could ever want is at our fingertips, and has been since childhood. No shit we feel more entitled than the last couple of generations. I'm pretty scared to see what becomes of the generation under me. iPhones from the cradle to the grave.

And for those curious, I was born in '89.

Cradle yes, by the time they reach their grave they will have a technology that makes the iPhone look like cracking rocks together to start fire.

Or society will have collapsed into a post-Apocalyptic distopia.

 

[00Syd]

Oh yeah - I lost my virginity with a rubber. I had entire relationships, monogamous, with rubbers. Condoms are simply part of my sexual lexicon - very specific to people born exactly the same time as me. We're also the annoying little prigs who are absolutely wringing our hands and *begging* the rest of them to maybe not bareback, just because there are meds that keep you alive.

Ditto. Lost my virginity with a condom, and the vast majority of my sexual encounters have been wrapped. Totally normal part of sex for me. And I'm also a big, loud, annoying advocate. Don't think Gen X and Gen Y are that different in this respect, at least not in my experience.

 

[00Syd]

Cradle yes, by the time they reach their grave they will have a technology that makes the iPhone look like cracking rocks together to start fire.

Or society will have collapsed into a post-Apocalyptic distopia.

Well, yes. I thought the future's (totally a million times more advanced and insane) equivalent iPhone was implied in my response.

 

[eastern sun]

I was born in 1960 and into a very repressive religion that mostly kept me from knowing of world events. I knew nothing about the drugs, free sex, racial conflicts, domestic protests, and very little about Vietnam. That is, until my parents had their own conflicts. For a while, they split up from each other and the church.

I was like a kid who had lived in a black and white world that was really simple, now being allowed to look at colors and complexity. I loved being more of the world. I've never looked back.

It makes me sad that I missed free love, drugs and protests. I'm angry about racial conflicts and Vietnam. Still, I've never felt prejudiced. So I guess some shielding might have helped me in some ways.

I was born in 1961 in Berkeley California. And watched the counter-culture with its drugs, free love, free speech and anti-war movements from the frontlines. I was terribly disappointed in the 70's as disco and cocaine and even Saturday Night Live morphed the earlier revolution into a commercial success. The whole thing imploded just as I came of age.

Then the 80's hit, and Ronald Reagan - who had sent the National Guard out to quell the Berkeley riots - was elected President. I was deeply, scandalously appalled, as I watched greed and crack decimate the American culture that was supposed to be such a shining light on the hill.

No one even seemed to blink when the Iran-Contra hearings suggested that our President's administration had sold the cocaine that devestated the inner cities and fed a correctional system that now rivaled South Africa's in it's heyday, in order to fund its covert war against land reform in Central America.

I'm such a conspiracy theorist (nursed in my childhood days in Berkeley's radical politics), my first thought was that 9/11 was a ploy to divert our attention from the Enron investigation and its deepening links to the White House. And I was here. Watching the second plane hit. And the towers fall. You see, New York City never had W's back.

I'd almost given up on my generation. I thought we were the ones who fell asleep in the midst of all this noise. And I considered myself one of the day-dreamers, who'd dropped the ball in the throes of becoming a mother, a home-owner, a middle-class urban statistic.

And then Obama was elected. He's exactly my age.

 

[ThorkelGriersen]

I'm at the bottom of DVS's chart. Kids born in the '30's were the loneliest generation. Things were so bad people would do anything to keep from having kids. When I graduated from high school there were 48 people in my class. Five years later there were 600 and the town really hadn't changed at all.

I actually remember Pearl Harbor. My earliest years were consumed with news from North Africa and the Pacific. There were almost no men around. I had an older step-brother fighting in N Africa against Rommel's Panzer corp. Most of my cousins and uncles were all over the world. My mother worked in a shell plant. She received the defective shells that the inspectors rejected. They were loaded into a large steel cylinder and a safe like door was screwed shut and a detonator switch exploded them. After an interval the door was opened and the debris removed.

My father had a bad heart and worked at a foundry that made things like ship propeller blades -- they were unbelievable large. In the early forties we were nowhere near Europe -- the only thing standing in the way of The Third Reich was the USSR, so no one said any bad things about the Russians. Later -- during the Berlin Airlift -- people began to talk about the Russians as if they were daemons. I couldn't understand they so quickly went from being really good friends to devils. Of course, in the late thirties and early forties many people thought that if we won the war it might be a good thing for the US to become a communist country. Capitalism didn't too many defenders in those days.

Of course, when it came to the real devils, their handiwork was on full display in the later 40's. I remember following all the developments of the Nuremberg War Crimes trials and there were the horrible pictures of the gas chamber, the ovens, and the open pit mass graves. Plus, piles of bodies that looked like skeletons with skin.

Yeah, I guess you could say that we figured if we were alive and had something to eat, we could make it for another day. Not a happy time.

 

[caela]

What defines my generation? The internet.

Pretty much everything we could ever want is at our fingertips, and has been since childhood. No shit we feel more entitled than the last couple of generations. I'm pretty scared to see what becomes of the generation under me. iPhones from the cradle to the grave.

And for those curious, I was born in '89.

Just a comment on the children thing. Your generation is starting to have children of it's own now and my daughter will grow up with them, being only 19 months as I type. How entitled this new generation will feel will depend in large part simply on how much their parents recognize and either agree with, or don't, their own sense of entitlement.

I personally was raised to believe that you earn what you have and plan to instill that value in my daughter. There won't be any cell phones just handed to her. When she gets one it'll come with responsibilities attached to it, chores to be done, perhaps a job to help pay for it, and I'll reserve the right to take the thing away in a heartbeat as long as I am the one paying for it. If that makes me mean...so be it.

Right now times are hard for a lot of people so you have a lot of folks living at home longer and pooling family money together for the good of everyone but even before the economy tanked you were seeing a lot of younger people living at home longer and longer...and parents asking nothing of them! I think that adds to the sense of entitlement that people talk about.

I was born in '79 and mine was one of the first generations where it was socially acceptable, or at least not highly stigmatized, to be from a broken home. It was the kids in my HS whose parents were together that were the oddities, not those of us who played "weekend warrior" (or whatever your particular arrangement was) out at Dad's. We had so many parents trying to overcompensate, trying to be buddy-buddy, that I think a lot of those parents forgot they were supposed to be raising us...and that added to the sense of entitlement as well.

I think every generation gets sold some sort of bill of goods or another and has to "come of age" and realize that that is all it is. A fantasy of an ideal, not reality. 9/11 did it for a lot of people, the current economy is doing it for more, having friends and family dying in foreign deserts is doing it for others.

I don't really want to think about what it'll be that steals my daughters innocence and makes her realize the fantasy has to give way to reality.

 

[wicked woman]

Great thread Keroin.


I’m just enough younger than Yank to call him an old man.


It’s interesting to hear the perspective of my generation from Americans. I’m aware of all of your history but I’ll admit I viewed it from the comfort of Canada. I recall each of the assassinations – particularly JFK. My personal experience with the Viet Nam war was from having a university professor who was a draft dodger, and sympathizing with him.


I think the greatest impacts on my life, as a woman, were the feminist movement and the invention of the birth control pill. My sexuality emerged at the same time as the sexual revolution, when thanks to the birth control pill I didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant. I can’t imagine how women before me lived without being able to control their fertility. I don’t know how, but I wasn’t affected by the earlier ‘sex is bad’ or ‘sex is only for marriage’ but jumped right into sex was good, healthy, and lots of fun. I could enjoy my sexual awakening without worrying about either getting pregnant (and possibly having to raise a child) or getting AIDs (and possibly dying because I made a bad choice). It was a wonderful time.


Even though I was a child in the 50s, I was lucky to have parents that didn’t differentiate expectations between my brother and myself. It was always assumed that I’d go to university and that I could be anything that I wanted to be. I don’t ever recall my parents asking me when I was going to get married or have children (and in that order too). My parents were years ahead of their peers though. It’s one of the things that I’ve thanked my parents for many times. Luckily society caught up with them thanks to the feminist movement or else I’d never have been able to have the career that I do...and it was difficult enough to be a woman in my profession when there were so few of us. Without the ability to have this career, I wouldn’t have been able to support my family after I was divorced.

 

[FurryFury]

Fury, I have to quote this because it is pretty much me, except for being born in 1969 and that I was in this closed environment until I turned 18 and could leave.

I was taught, and truly beleived until I lived on my own, that Russia was at the door and that Democrats were trying to turn our country communist. That Christians in the US were dieing for thier faith because our country had forgotten Jesus. All kinds of wierd shit like that.

I feel like an outsider when I hear people talk about the "defining moments" of a generation, etc. For me, my defining moments were when I was 18 and learned quickly that the world was not what I thought it was.

Oh yeah, I know what you mean for sure.

Funny story, a bf took me to see the "beetles" movie. I was like, HUH? I didn't know who they were at all. LOL. Shocked the shit out of my bf at the time.

 

[FurryFury]

Pretty wow stuff Eastern Sun!

I was born in 1961 in Berkeley California. And watched the counter-culture with its drugs, free love, free speech and anti-war movements from the frontlines. I was terribly disappointed in the 70's as disco and cocaine and even Saturday Night Live morphed the earlier revolution into a commercial success. The whole thing imploded just as I came of age.

Then the 80's hit, and Ronald Reagan - who had sent the National Guard out to quell the Berkeley riots - was elected President. I was deeply, scandalously appalled, as I watched greed and crack decimate the American culture that was supposed to be such a shining light on the hill.

No one even seemed to blink when the Iran-Contra hearings suggested that our President's administration had sold the cocaine that devestated the inner cities and fed a correctional system that now rivaled South Africa's in it's heyday, in order to fund its covert war against land reform in Central America.

I'm such a conspiracy theorist (nursed in my childhood days in Berkeley's radical politics), my first thought was that 9/11 was a ploy to divert our attention from the Enron investigation and its deepening links to the White House. And I was here. Watching the second plane hit. And the towers fall. You see, New York City never had W's back.

I'd almost given up on my generation. I thought we were the ones who fell asleep in the midst of all this noise. And I considered myself one of the day-dreamers, who'd dropped the ball in the throes of becoming a mother, a home-owner, a middle-class urban statistic.

And then Obama was elected. He's exactly my age.

 

[midwestyankee]

Great thread Keroin.


<snip>

Even though I was a child in the 50s, I was lucky to have parents that didn’t differentiate expectations between my brother and myself. It was always assumed that I’d go to university and that I could be anything that I wanted to be. I don’t ever recall my parents asking me when I was going to get married or have children (and in that order too). My parents were years ahead of their peers though. It’s one of the things that I’ve thanked my parents for many times. Luckily society caught up with them thanks to the feminist movement or else I’d never have been able to have the career that I do...and it was difficult enough to be a woman in my profession when there were so few of us. Without the ability to have this career, I wouldn’t have been able to support my family after I was divorced.

Thanks for the view from north of the border, WW. I've often wondered what we look like from the outside.

 

[Soumis]

'86 chiming in.

I think 00Syd nailed it with the internet. There's been a computer in the house and classes full of them at school for as long as I can remember. We were making web pages in grade school and using aim when our teachers weren't paying enough attention. I posted on my first message board at the age of 10. Owned my own computer a year later. I use my iphone as often as my actual computer now. It's often more convenient than waiting for windows.

I was in 10th grade English when the attacks of 9/11 happened. I remember the teachers turning on the televisions and us spending the rest of the day glued to the news. There was a deep seated fear that I'd never felt before. Much of my family lives or works in NYC and we waited anxiously to hear from them. There was a girl in my class who's Dad was in NYC on business and died. It felt too close to home even in Dallas, TX.

I read an interesting article a few months ago; I wish I could remember which magazine it was in, maybe Vanity Fair? The article discussed the difference in work ethics between generation x and y. It wasn't all negative. Yes, our generation doesn't have the perceived patience of gen x, but that means we're less tolerant of bs and wasted time. Our familiarity with technology makes us more efficient. We have more respect for the environment and are less likely to place work priorities over life ones, for better or for worse. It did sound pretty spot on, the good and the bad, but it resonated with me as it relates to my employment.

I'm 24, have two degrees, have already worked in two separate fields, neither of which did my parents approve of. They didn't approve because I'm, "selling myself short." I've deliberately chosen fields that allow me plenty of "me" time, that allow me to put as little or as much time in as I want. I'm going back for a grad degree within the next year, not because I want more responsibility at work, I plan on keeping my same job, but because I want to know more. I'm a home owner and my only two saving goals are travel and retirement. I make it out of the country at least 1-2 times a year, with one of those times always being across the Atlantic. I'm thinking about leaving my current job, of one year, because I feel like I'm not appreciated by my employers.

Entitled? Maybe, but I deliberately picked a field where employment is easy to come by. Employers still look for me, not the other way around. I know I'm an asset.

Lazy? Definitely not, but my parents think so. They think a lack of ambition makes me lazy. I just rate my life priorities higher than my work ones. I have no desire to be the boss of anyone but myself.

Long term goals? Stay at home mom and published. Yep, just trying to feed that lazy image my parents have of me. Between them I saw three divorces though, so I know where this desire of mine for stable home life stems from.

I think watching our parents work their asses off for something that they didn't find fulfillment in makes us less driven in our work ethic, but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing.

 

[BiBunny]

I think after watching our parents work their asses off for something that they didn't find fulfillment in makes us less driven in our work ethic, but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing.

I'll buy that.

 

[wicked woman]

Thanks for the view from north of the border, WW. I've often wondered what we look like from the outside.

I'm Canadian. We're known as peacekeepers. I'm also a mother and I'll be damned if I'll voluntarily give up my sons to the miliary to possibly die because some head honcho thought they were indispensible. But I appreciate and empathize with family's whose men and women go to war.

I think we're also a bit hypocritical that we thought we were better than the Americans over issues like segregation, when we were probably as racist, just knew not to be so obvious about it.

 

[Soumis]

with few exceptions

And 100% of my daily news comes from my iphone NYT app, the Daily Show, and Colbert.

 

[Keroin]

Wow, thanks everyone for your honesty and insight. I have enjoyed this thread more than any other I've ever started. (And I've started many...eek)

for everyone.

 

[00Syd]

I think watching our parents work their asses off for something that they didn't find fulfillment in makes us less driven in our work ethic, but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing.

That seems to fit. Watching my mother suffer the effects of 30 years in an industry that does absolutely nothing for her but ruin her health, mental and physical, certainly isn't doing much for my excitement to jump into the workforce. I'm busy pursuing a degree in a craft that's practically impossible to turn into a career, with full knowledge that the degree won't help me break into the industry even a little bit. And whatever. I'm not going to become a doctor or a lawyer, and may very well end up as a starving artist, but whatever.

 

[YourCaptor]

You were closer to being a boomer than you think. The actual birth years of the post WW II baby boom were between 1946 and 1964.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f0/U.S.BirthRate.1909.2003.png/800px-U.S.BirthRate.1909.2003.png

Wait a minute, that does not look right, at all.

I don't care enough to do the math, but this does not look like it would result in the greater then exponential population growth that we are seeing.

am I missing something here?

 

[Lizzie_Borden]

No shit we feel more entitled than the last couple of generations. I'm pretty scared to see what becomes of the generation under me. iPhones from the cradle to the grave.

You know, it's not the children of the generation's fault.

It's the parents.

It's the OTT PCness these days. I truly think it has gone too far.

Argh.

 

[Bandit58]

I was born in New Zealand in 1958. We lived in a rural area (small village) so much of the '60s free love stuff passed me by, although I do remember having a love for '60s psychedelic rock music without understanding most of the drug references

New Zealand at the time was about 20 years behind the rest of the world - its distance was a shelter (and still is sometimes I think, having spent the last 6 years in Sydney Australia).

We didn't get TV until 1967 (I think) but I do remember seeing images of the Vietnam war....one of a little girl running down the road with napalm burns all over her was particularly horrifying.

Our family of just my brother and me was small by baby boomer standards. Most families I knew had 4 or more children, and the Maori families up the road a minimum of 7 or 8, so we always had plenty of playmates.

My teen years were early to mid 70s. Lots of girls in my class were having sex, but I remained a virgin until age 18. I went on the pill before I even did anything. I have taken it for most of my adult life, except for breaks to have my two children and after I got my tubes tied. I'm now on HRT.

I was never promiscuous. I had one sexual partner who I married in 1978. He turned out to be emotionally abusive, selfish and immature. In my area divorce was almost unheard of. You got married and you stayed married, no matter what. 23 years I lasted.....oh I can imagine the gossip that flew around even in 2002 My mother asked me how I could leave such a "good man"....if only she knew....

I loved glam rock and punk (both English and American - The Ramones are one of my favourite bands). I hated disco with a passion. Even now I'd rather listen to rock or metal than anything else

I always felt like I didn't fit.... Now Sir and I are together I'm now sure where I fit