Before the Millennials, There was Generation X

This article from 1999 focused on how the Boomers attempted to define the first generation to follow them, Generation X. Eventually they just moved on to the Millennials.

Odd how the Boomers, as a whole, seem to feel the need to downgrade the generations that came before them, as they did to the Greatest and Silent generations in the 60's, and those that came after them like Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z, from the 90's up until the present.

I wonder why a generation would feel the need to do this to those who came before and followed after them. Maybe they are projecting?

I think that the Boomers genuinely fear the size of the Millennial generation and the fact that they will be the first generation who can successfully define the Boomers for who they truly are as a generation. We Gen X'ers tried, we were just too small of a group to make it stick.

LA Times - Smashing the Gen X Stereotype

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It was the early 1990s and recent college grad Stephanie Brail was doing precisely what someone of her generation was supposed to be doing. Nothing.

Like many so-called Gen-Xers, the 80 million Americans born from 1961 to 1981, she was rudderless. The English and music major drifted for several years, working at a nonprofit here, writing a freelance piece there. In between, there was a lot of time in coffeehouses.

Eventually, she started to teach courses about computers, something she had used in one form or another since childhood. Soon people--particularly baby boomers less comfortable with the emerging technology--hired her to create Web pages. By 1996, she had established her own business, now known as Herspace Media Inc., a profitable and respected Web design firm in Venice.

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This wasn’t supposed to happen. Ever. Earlier this decade, Gen-Xers were supposed to be headed straight for Palookaville. They were supposed to enter a dismal economy with low-wage/low-benefit jobs or to find none at all. And if there were jobs, they were supposed to be too busy playing computer games, watching television or being alienated to earn a paycheck.

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Like most self-respecting generations, Gen-Xers blame their brooding, grungy, body-pierced image on the generation before--the baby boomers. Gen-Xers admit they had a hand in their own bad press, but say that the boomer-dominated media of the early ‘90s blew it way out of proportion.

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In keeping with these themes, Coupland’s book portrayed the generation as hopelessly bored and aimless. A few months later came Richard Linklater’s independent film called “Slackers,” which also portrayed the youths as bored and aimless. And finally, there was the Seattle grunge scene, where distorted music was performed by bored and aimless (but extremely wealthy) youths.

There seemed to be a pattern.

The early ‘90s media ran reams of condescending stories, television programs and films about the so-called slackers.

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“Boomers put [Gen-Xers] in a box. They thought all you had to do to understand them was to watch the movies ‘Clerks’ and ‘Slackers,’ ” said J. Walker Smith, a baby boomer and coauthor of “Rocking the Ages” (HarperBusiness, 1997), a report on generational marketing. “They were wrong.”

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