| OzProspect |
Reality Bites Gen X Myth by
Simon Castles
First appeared: The Age, Opinion
Section, April 22, 2002
At 31, I don't own property or shares. Or a car. I was unemployed for 18 months after graduating. For a time I thought the only work my honours degree was going to get me was casual shifts in the hospitality industry.
I take anti-depressants to help me with anxiety - though I remain anxious about the likelihood I will be unemployed again. Hence I hold on to the small amount of money I have saved, in readiness for the "inevitable". My second-rate tertiary education has left me with a large debt.
OK, I know what you're thinking. Boo-hoo, buddy, boo-bloody-hoo. And you're quite right, of course. No use complaining, no one listens, and all that. But I sense that the time has well and truly come for someone to reclaim the term Generation X for the malcontents and cynics among us. For the whingers like me, basically.
There has been an astonishing semantic shift in recent years that desperately needs redressing. Where once Generation X was associated with being disempowered, disengaged, slack and ironic, now - if the media is to be believed - it's all about being cyber savvy, independent and funky. Goodbye idle cynicism and introspection, hello stock options and the latte life.
Somewhere along the line - and the
Internet undoubtedly played a big role in all this - a myth took hold that
painted all Gen-Xers as go-get-'em freelance agents; as international bright
young things eschewing traditional working lives and corporate ladders
as they set about making their first million on a funky e-dream.
An article in Time magazine this month is headed "Gen-Xers aren't slackers after all". Among other things, the piece tells us that four out of five new enterprises are the work of Xers, and that most Gen-X women will accumulate 30 pairs of shoes before they save $30,000 for their retirement. (Despite my suspicions, this glam bit of reporting was not filed by Carrie Bradshaw, the fictional journalist from Sex and the City. I checked.)
Time magazine really goes in for this stuff. In fact, the magazine probably started it. A cover story from several years back was headlined "Great Xpectations" and ran with the tag "Slackers? Hardly. The so-called Generation X turns out to be full of go-getters who are just doing it - but their way".
And apparently we've been doing it our way ever since. A "snapshot" of Generation X in The Age this year presented a bunch of spunky young things at a successful new-media company in St Kilda. There they were - Brett, Ross, Jade and Steve - mixing a creative work environment with a great lifestyle blissfully free of mortgages and marriage. It read like an episode of The Secret Life of Us.
Meanwhile the Herald Sun says "Gen X future may lie in sipping latte", The Australian runs the headline "Gen X career women eschew flash, count cash", and the Daily Telegraph gleefully reports the tech stock bust by saying that "Generation X was left crying in its cappuccino".
Like most myths, the present one about Generation X serves a useful function. If you can portray young people as winners in the new century, as having nothing more to worry about than where to get a good coffee, it makes it that much easier to ignore the losers. But the losers are still there.
The new-economy jackpot might have thrown up its share of incredible success stories, but a jackpot is still a jackpot. We should not blind ourselves to the fact that, by and large, the negative consequences of two decades of extraordinary economic and social change have fallen particularly heavily on the shrugging shoulders of Generation X.
The facts tell the story. Between 1981 and 1996, according to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, the number of 25 to 34-year-olds in full-time employment dropped from 78 per cent to 60 per cent.
The average wealth of individuals in this group also dropped - by 14 per cent between 1986 and 1998, according to a study by the National Centre for Economic and Social Modelling. This, despite a boom in asset prices.
The number of 20-and 30-somethings seeking to buy a home dropped as well, from 49 per cent to 38 per cent in little over a decade. It is predicted many Gen-Xers will remain trapped in the private rental market forever. At the end of two decades of massive economic change, young people now face entering a job market in which the number of full-time positions available to them has fallen more than 50 per cent, apprenticeship placements have dropped about 45 per cent, and on-the-job training has been cut clear in half.
Add to this mix escalating higher-education fees, massive job insecurity, and a boom in "McJobs" (low-pay, no-future positions in the service sector) and it is a hardly surprising the CEDA report warns of one in five young people being at risk of "entrenched disadvantage".
True, I am unlikely to be one of them. I am blessed with the one thing that has prevented many Xers from going to the wall years ago - supportive, middle-class parents. A residue of anxiety and anger stays with me, nevertheless, just as it does for many people my age.
But I'm sure to most readers I just
come across as a whiner - as bratty, pessimistic and cynical. I can live
with that. It is closer to the truth, at least, than a myth that would
try to portray me as a savvy go-getter - as someone luxuriating in the
froth of another caffe latte.