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.
