If you were playing a word association game, whenever you’d hear, “Generation X,” the word, “slackers,” would likely follow.
Ah, but not any more.
According to a new study, Gen-Xers — those 84 million Americans between 30 and 50 — aren’t the detached, aloof, melancholic bunch we’ve been labeled as. We’re actually technologically savvy, active, balanced and — get this — happy.
In “The Generation X Report,” a research report from the University of Michigan’s Longitudinal Study of American Youth, this generation — born between 1961 and 1981 — are defying the stereotypes.
For example, Generation X devotes more hours to work than average and pursues continuing education, compared to all U.S. adults. A whopping 86 percent are employed and devote at least 40 hours a week to work. And half of all Gen-Xers have completed a post-secondary degree.
That myth that we’re hopelessly single and pessimistic about marriage? Turns out a higher percentage of Gen-Xers stay married than Baby Boomers — I know! — two-thirds are married and 71 percent reported having children in their homes. The vast majority — 83 percent – say finding the right person to marry and having a happy family life is very important.
And my misunderstood generation isn’t made up of existential isolationists. After all, we are the “Friends” generation. We are social, networked and active in our communities. Two-thirds are happy with their jobs. And on a scale of 1 to 10, the median happiness score was 8. (Read more at CNN.com)
Yeah, but I knew this.
I knew were weren’t slackers.
We were part of the Yuppie movement. We’re creative in very deceptive ways. We are part of the generation that founded, defined and evolved the Internet. We used email first. We pirated movies. We traded music online illegally.
We weren’t a bunch of slackers. We just dressed like it.
6 Comments
Gen Xer’s indeed got a bad rap. And the things you cite bear this out. However, the tech savvy of my generation were using e-mail when we invented it 🙂 We used Microsoft net meeting in the 1990’s to chat with people in far away places. Some us began developing apps for phones in the late 90’s. And a few of us worked on the equipment that central offices used to switch digital (cellular primarily in the beginning) traffic and the equipment that married the old analog world with the digital. We sat in engineering labs and discussed CDMA versus TDMA. Basically this would be Verizon versus ATT nowadays. But the most fun we had, not, was writing our first software on punch card machines in FORTRAN. Ah those were the days when ‘cloud computing’ was 10-20 years old. Such is the genius of marketing! The ‘cloud’ is a client server model made popular in the days of the IBM mainframe. Anyway, back to GenX. Most people in this generation were allowed to live the life those of us the prior generation wanted to live. Not so much pressure to marry so you take your time, no hurry to get rich, better to be happy. Each generation discovers new things, pushes things more toward where they should be. A freer life…. it was and is what we all wanted to have. It keeps life interesting. Now if we could just get rid of the folks from the generation I like to call Generation Greedy that think that anyone over 40 should retire people from my generation will be happy because truth be told… alot of us still work pretty damn hard and we are pretty good at what we do. Otherwise we’d all still be using land lines.
Gen Xer’s !!!
Yay !! We’re not slackers !!!
Now it’s our turn to stereotype other groups
Gen Y and Z ?? Bunch of entitled jerks and whiners who text, and yak on cell phones during movies, trash and bully others via social media, read crap like Twilight and enable non-celebrities like Kim Kardashian to have a career, and think any show on WE and Disney Channel is the greatest thing in the whole world.
Cat,
I’m one of those late boomers born in ’58, so from my less radical perspective, aren’t your genX & later gens–like best friends with your parents? I loved my parents, but I don’t believe they were so involved with our organized activities upbringing. Was this the case with you?
are we slackers and by whose definition? pulling my best Herman Cain, I have no facts to support this, but, with a gun to my head, I have to believe that we do work less hard (by pure blood, sweat and tears definition) than the generation before us. that doesn’t mean we’re producing less or wasting time more, though. think of the advances in technology that make our jobs easier. filing can be done with a few mouse clicks rather than by lugging huge paper files over to the file room. reports and reviews can be done on work processing software and forwarded by email rather than typewriter and interoffice mail. Where you used to have to print a single copy and forward ten times for signature approval, you can now type an electronic copy and forward to all stakeholders in a single email blast.
the counter data presented isn’t so illuminating to me, either. we’re 30-50…of course we’re putting in more hours than most people. we’re at the rising/middle management stage of our careers, for the most part. those are the ones who always put in the hours.
here’s where the definition thing comes into play, though. I’m guessing (again, no data), that we’re making life-work balance choices that tilt more heavily to life and less to work. I know that I’ve turned down numerous job offers to work at more prestigious or lucrative positions because it would adversely affect my time with my family (or severely limit the amount of time I could spend chasing fish around the pacific). while I don’t begrudge the generation that raised us (ftr, my parents always made time for family so it’s not a personal observation) the effort that they put in to provide for us, I think we, collectively and somewhat unconsciously chose to have a better work-life balance (can you tell I work in a corporate environment? how’s that for a buzz-word).
and I haven’t even gotten into the societal forces that made our generation, almost simultaneously, create grunge music and “making it rain”
Hey Cat … what? … I am a slacker? … ok, while that maybe true … I was and still remain productively lazy and driven by uninspired motivation … I may not have looked good doing it, but I got things done … when I felt like it … eventually …
… I think our generation’s greatest attributes … is our sense of responsibility and respect for others … maybe to a fault … but I’m glad there’s a lot of us Gen X’ers out there …
Gen Xers are definitely not slackers ven if we want to be. At some point, we had to get to work and I think we do our work really, really well. I think we are happy for the most part because we’re a lot better at life-work balance than other generations (though I could use a little less of the latter.)
We were lucky enough to grow up with the first attempts at a lot of technology so we grew up with a lot of cool tools but can fall back to the old fashioned ways if we need to. I remember how great pong and my Commodore 64 were and remember life before the microwave, answering machine, and internet. That makes us less threatening to the older folks and so we’re the bridge between generations. A lot of my Xer friends are successful because they can work with all kinds of people.
It’s good to see some folks are rethinking the contributions that Gen Xers can make to the world!!! It’s about time. Thanks for sharing, Cat!