Celebrate Youth

Thanks to an article by the cynical grumps over at The Baffler, I've been put on the trail of a new Generation X wrinkle. By the end of the 1990s, the occasional author was unafraid to stand on a table and bellow, "I'm Generation X ... and I'm proud!"

The downright delerious Meredith Bagby, author of Rational Exuberance: The Influence of Generation X on the New American Economy, represents a prime example. But she had help, particularly from a little thing known as the dot-com boom. You'll recall that I've theorized earlier that the GenX-as-slacker motif magically melted when the Internet-as-divinity meme poured down upon the land. Suddenly, the twentysomethings who allegedly had nowhere to go in life were staking their claim on the road to riches, becoming IPO millionaires (or so went the reasoning of journalists incapable of maintaining more than one oversimplified narrative).

Bagby, who embraces her Xness a bit too eagerly, is happy to make this point in a 1998 interview with Enterpreneur magazine:

Entrepreneur: As you say, the slacker image and other negative stereotypes have gotten a lot of play in the media. What -- if anything -- do you think the media have gotten right?

Bagby: We got really horrible press until about 1995, when they started doing articles on how this was the most entrepreneurial generation ever. That, I think, was right on. And to some extent, they got it right when they said we were apathetic about politics. As we get older and start to see how politics affects us, we're going to care more.

There's the magical year of 1995 yet again: The mark of demarcation that transformed a slacker generation into a shaker generation.

Another passage, perhaps more telling than intended, comes when Bagby observes that she is "constantly amazed that the slacker image is still maintained, because if you look at the statistics, we are working a lot more hours than our parents did at our age." What hangs unsaid, but we see with benefit of hindsight, was that young movers were working longer hours than their parents because there jobs were less secure and more based on trying to outhustle, outhustle, outlast everyone else. If the land hadn't been all caught up in the rapture of the Internet, perhaps we should have seen that the detonation of prior notions of job security and company loyalty was not necessarily a good thing. It reveals less a golden age than a gilded age, where all things are shinier than they actually are.

Whatever her motives, accurate observations or wrongful interpretations may be, Bagby has a noteworthy point of view. It may represent a promising idea for broadening the paper, if I can find such things in sufficient quantity and quality to influence the way we should be perceiving the birth and blossoming of Generation X.