Eventually, We Are All Microserfs

 

In exactly two weeks, we in the USA will go to the polls for the "mid-term elections." Which is to say, an election held in between presidential tilts - the middle of the current incumbent's term. There has always been something of a generational split in US politics, but (with the exception of the 1960s), never has one been so noisome is the current millennial versus baby boomer ruction.

I was recently on an airplane flying for business, and had a couple of hours to kill, so, flipping through the movies selection, I happened across a now nearly 30-year old film called Reality Bites. 

This movie, starring a young Ethan Hawke, Winona Rider, and Ben Stiller (who actually, it turns out, also directed) depicts the lives of a group of recent college graduates in Houston, Texas. The lot (Stiller aside) struggles with the move into "real" adulthood.

The release date was early in 1994, which makes the characters just about my age at the time. 

I thought of Reality Bites as I was reading the back and forth between millennials (themselves now moving into middle age) and their nemesis generation - which of course, are the baby boomers.

The whole fight skipped my generation, the Generation Xers.

One particular commenter snidely asked if baby boomers get "upset" because the national focus has moved from them onto millennials (again, hello from my cohort).  

I got to thinking - is this true? Is it actually the case that “boomers” (baby boomers) get upset when someone (presumably, not a baby boomer) when it’s pointed out that advertisers prefer the 25–54 demographic? 

My parents are baby boomers, as are their friends. More than one of my colleagues is as well.

I’ve not seen this happen, even once.

I am a sample size of one, and of course, it is not really anything more than the observations of one person.

I was born in 1970, which makes me solidly part of Generation X.

I watch the “OK boomer” versus the “snowflake millennial” civil war with a certain amount of bemusement.

I was 21 years old in 1991 when the writer Douglas Coupland published his book Generation X, which is where the name of my cohort comes from. A year later, he published a companion called Microserfs.

I am a mathematician; I was at graduate school when my sister, an English major in college at the time, and now an English teacher, sent copies to me to read. This was before Kindle or other e-readers, so we read actual, physical books in those days.

When Reality Bites was released, my cohort was the target of advertisers. Movies -  like Reality Bites - that played heavily on stereotypes were targeted at us. We were the new workers whom our elders were struggling to understand. We lived in our parents’ basements and were refusing to grow up. We had economic and social challenges, but the things that we decided were “cool” defined the culture.

You know what? I went to bed one night, and the next day, I was the focus of an article in the Wall Street Journal about what older workers were needing.

Here is the ugly truth: the world moves on. Your time is temporary. At some point, there will be a younger generation that is going to be the apple of Madison Avenue’s eye; it will also be the target of scorn for sociologists and writers at the Wall Street Journal.

I think that as much as baby boomers do get “upset,” and I think this is seriously overstated, it’s more to the reality that nobody likes to face the truth that your time on earth is going to end, and that life is going to go on even after you don’t.

Advertisers are just hip to this before the Angel of Death is.

Downfall of the Once Great

A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to stop over and visit my mother and family back east as I returned home from a business trip. Got me to thinking about a question I was asked a few years ago -

"What was the downfall of the 'popular' kid in your high school?"

I've now been out of high school for 34 years; my own son will be graduating in June next year. So this was -and remains - an interesting question

My own honest, lived experience is this: for almost all of us, life is not like it is portrayed in television or movies. There is no tragic downfall. The cool, arrogant jock almost never gets any sort of cosmic retribution. The neglected, quiet kid does not triumph. My life was not screen-written by John Hughes, as I suspect yours wasn't.

For the most part, life just….goes on.

I went to a pretty run-of-the-mill high school. It was good, but not outstanding academically. A kid two years ahead of me - Class of 1986 - was the first from my school to be accepted into Harvard in 16 years. The only student as far as I know ever accepted into Princeton was a Westinghouse Science winner. By comparison, my son's high school, a public school here in San Francisco, had three graduates last year accepted to Harvard, and two to Princeton.

Athletically, it was a suburban school of less than 1000 students, so most of the sports teams were mediocre to poor. We weren’t a wealthy community, and we were not one destined to be showcased in a “feel good” movie starring some pretty young white woman and edgy, urban black guy.

I am guessing that most of you could probably relate to this. 

Because of this, our “popular” kids were probably pretty unremarkable.

The most popular kid in my class was, unsurprisingly, a football player. Probably the best in our school, and so he was good. But he wasn’t good enough to get any sort of college scholarship.

The ‘cool group’ were largely made up of athletes who stood out among their peers but again, if the teams won as many games as they lost, it was a ‘good year.’

I graduated first in my class, so I guess I was in the ‘bookworm’ group. I had a small group of friends. Most of us looked at the in-group with some admixture of envy, jealousy, and if I am being perfectly, absolutely honest, a whiff of self-righteous disdain.

For those who ruled the roost, there was no “downfall” to speak of. 

They ran the school until June 1988. Some went off to college. Some went straight to work. The ‘cool guy jock’ joined the Navy. I went away to school back east (Dartmouth), and aside from visiting my parents and family for Christmas, went back only once - to attend a friend’s wedding. My father died 25 years ago; my mother sold our family home 10 years ago and moved back home to Canada. I doubt that I’ll ever return.

There was a television show on, maybe 25 years ago, called “The Wonder Years.” It focused on the adolescent life of a kid named Kevin Arnold, set on a street that looked for all intents and purposes exactly like the one I lived on as a little kid in Garden Grove, California. Garden Grove is a relentlessly middle-class suburb in Orange County, about an hour south of Los Angeles.

Kevin’s life was not terribly unfamiliar to me. Few remarkable things ever happened. In one of the episodes, the narrator (played, I think, by Daniel Stern) observed that, in junior high, who you are is dictated by who sits next to you at lunch.

(As an odd aside, when I was a grad student, I had Fred Savage (who played Kevin Arnold) as an undergrad in one of my sections at Stanford.)

In one episode, an odd girl with three pigtails befriends Kevin. Kevin was desperate always to move up to the cool lunch table, and was off-put by the oddball’s attempts to be friends. He shuns her, and by the end of the episode, she moves away. At the close of the show, in his epilogue Kevin remarks that "no-one remembers much about the kids you were so desperate to impress as a kid.”

The reality is that almost none of us is destined for any sort of conventional “greatness.” We are destined to live the more or less “average” life. There are some triumphs. There are some failures. I personally do not consider it a ‘downfall’ that the BMOC ended up in a typical, middle-class job.

Thanks to Facebook, I found out that the jock who sat at the top of the cool table, after a stint in the Navy, turned out as an adult to be a pretty solid, nice, and empathetic guy who spends his time when not working helping needy people. It’s not what I would have imagined from a guy who I thought I had pegged as a 16 year old with a cocky attitude and a big mouth.

What he does now impresses me a lot more than his exploits on the football field or in the halls of my high school.

John Lennon once said that life is what happens when you’re making plans. Jobs. Families. Bills. Kids. Weddings. Funerals.