Generations

I've always been interested to read about the differences faced by the different generations.

Thanks to the Carnivore's Cave blogroll, I found Incendiary Insight and a post about what the current generations face in the future.

For three years in college I worked at two different jobs, both in the ghetto, and you would not believe the types of people that walked in. And I come from an average, middle-class home. Now that I am out of college and working full-time (at a job for which my college degree is all but non-existent), I'm working nothing but Xers. Yes, I know that that generation had a sucky time working in fast-food, paper-routes, janitorial jobs, and the like, but the future is not as bleak for Millennials precisely because we are coming of age during the Crisis whereas the Xers did not. The Xers highest earning years are already upon them--this is as good as it's going to get for most of them, in other words--while the Millennials best earning years will be from 2030-2050, after the Crisis has been overcome. Xers never had either a spiritual awakening or a great war to go through that defined them, they had a period of turbulence and uncertainty, a wild ride filled to overflowing with decadence, wealth, and glamour. They've learned to survive, while Millennials will learn to overcome. Boomers learned to "change", which is why the buzzword of "change" during the 2008 election worked so swimmingly with the Obama campaign. Xers pride themselves on their realism, a trait they earned over decades of hard-scrabble living and national decline. As Tyler Durden from Fight Club said perfectly, "We're the middle children of history, boys. Our 'great war' is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives."