Is there no joy in simple exploration?

I agree and I'm a millennial. Everyone I grew up won't get a job, or can't hold one down for more than a few months. I'm like an exception out here. It weirds the older adults out.
ETA: My husband says I should've been part of gen x or something. XD

 

Yeah I get the same thing.

I was genuinely insulted when someone first called me a millennial because it just doesn't seem to be a useful thing to call me. I was born in 1987 but I have much more in common with my fiancee's mum and her aunt (I'm about 8 years younger than her aunt, about 15 younger than her mum) than with the useless, appalling 25ish year olds that most people think of as being millennials. I feel much more like I'm on the very young end of being a Gen Xer rather than being on the very old end of being a millennial. Even though I was born after a lot of it was created I have a cultural frame of reference that's very firmly rooted in the 80's and not the 90's or 00's.

I went to uni a few years late, so i was 21 and in classes with people who were 18 and it felt like I was closer to ten years older than them, like they just looked at me blankly when I talked about bands or movies or whatever. Fortunately that was before hipster became a real thing so I didn't have to live with that nonesense but seeing these stupid kids who seemed to think the world started in 2000 was just... Awful. Like I once met a guy at a party who didn't know what the Falklands War was and flatly disbelieved that the UK would ever go to war with Argentina. There was a reason why I was drunk a lot. I felt like I was dealing with literal children and they haven't even slightly grown up a decade later.

 

I agree that it's not necessarily a completely fair indictment, given that each generation is a product of the training of the generation before, but it's undeniable that the indictment is there, it's been filed and registered, and it is informing a lot of the current concerns and talking points that go into the creative process for most media. One day I - as a hapless representative of Gen-X - will likely get indicted for something to the tune of "Why didn't your generation do something about all this? What's the deal with all the orgiastic consumerism you guys bought into like a religion? OMG, you kvetched about the Boomers, but you weren't any better...."

I'm sure it's coming. Very sure.

And it will inform the zeitgeist of that future time.

 

I think this is optimistic. There are things--like the startling absence of commercials geared toward the Gen Xers, in comparison to boomers and millennials--that suggest your generation, in the eyes of the greater world, will largely be glossed over.

There's a reason you see "boomer," and "millennial" pop up all over the place, yet barely ever see Gen X.(Don't hate me (more?), Wrey, most of my personal heroes are Gen Xers).

As much as generational traitors like Xboxlover and Lostheplot like to trash Millennials, it is absolutely going to be them who will face the next big challenges of our world--climate change, automation, wealth disparity, universal healthcare and education, all things that are much more related than they may first appear. Though the solutions to these problems, I think, are already forming now, and that would be largely be in thanks to a large number of individuals who are probably predominantly Gen X.

 

I think they are too, but I don't kid myself that each generation eventually has to bear the brunt of resentment of those who come later. Just as it's not fair to paint to all of Boomeropolis in the same way, so to it will be unfair to paint Gen-X in a single color, but it will happen, when it's our turn to take the blame. And it will color the tone of the stories that get told (to return to the original OP). Where Gen-X and Millennials paint our shared parent generation as conniving, untrustworthy, and conspiratorial, my generation will get painted as apathetic, distracted, trivial and careless. The seeds are already there, though again I agree that the movements away from the issues we currently face are, in large part, being lead by people of my generation.

 

Last tangent, I swear.

Faces of The Generations

Boomer


Gen X


Millennial

 

Wow that was really well said, and I think there should be more exploration for its own sake.