It doesn’t seem so very long ago that I graduated from college, but last weekend, when I visited my alma mater, I could see that things had changed.
“Do these students look cleaner to you?” my friend Greg asked, during a stop at a popular student watering hole. “They seem really well put together.”
I studied the students. “Yes,” I said. “Something’s different.”
Right off the bat, I could see that the students dressed much better than I ever did. I spent four years wearing an old flannel shirt, a red fleece, a pair of jeans I washed about twice a semester and a Greek fisherman’s cap. I showered fairly regularly, but not everyone did, and in a recent e-mail a friend of mine lamented that he didn’t take more showers when he was in college. “That’s pretty gross, really,” he wrote. But at the time, this sort of behavior was commonplace. My roommate once stopped washing her hair, just to see what would happen. (“It got really greasy, and then it just kind of stayed at the same level of shininess.”)
But it wasn’t just the clothes, and the cleanliness. Overall, the students seemed savvier.
I was on campus to talk about journalism, and when one of the students told me that a talk by an editor from The Washington Post would be a “good networking opportunity,” I couldn’t believe my ears. I called a friend. “Did we even know what networking was when we were in college?” I asked. “I think we did,” my friend said. “But I don’t think we thought it applied to us.” When I mentioned how clean the students seemed, she said, “Well, we were there when that whole Grunge thing was going on.”
I’d forgotten about Grunge music, but at the time, I loved it. Pearl Jam, Nirvana, the Screaming Trees — these bands changed my life. They inspired me to wear old dirty clothes and sneer at the world. But what was Grunge all about, really? Was it just an attitude and an anti-fashion, or was there more to it? I’m not sure, but it’s clear that Grunge is no longer in vogue. These students were clean, and they didn’t sneer. They seemed like pleasant, upbeat people. Every time I talked to one of them, I found it vaguely disconcerting. Why aren’t you sneering at the world? I wanted to ask them.
I got some answers while sitting in on a journalism panel and listening to a middle-aged editor from a paper in Ohio talk about the state of the newspaper industry. He was optimistic, he said, about the Millennials — the generation of people born between 1980 and 2000, and who are enrolled in college right now. “I think what we’re seeing with the Millennials,” he said, “is a return to civic engagement, and a renewed interest in following the news.” Unlike those surly cynics from Generation X, who ruined everything.
I’d heard this sort of thing before. Once at a reunion, I attended the college president’s state-of-the-college address; she opened her speech by talking about how much things had improved since I graduated. “Five years ago, we were not where we wanted to be,” she said. “We had just admitted the worst class in the history of the college.” I turned to a friend. “Hey,” I said. “Isn’t that us?” And my high school class was spoken of in hushed tones — those dreaded kids from the class of 1994.
I know I’m biased, but my friends and I just don’t seem that bad.
As I wandered around campus, it was becoming increasingly clear that I came of age during a much different era, and that being a Gen Xer actually meant something. What it meant, I didn’t know, but surely it meant something other than Worst Group of People Ever. Curious, I got online.
I learned that I belong to a small, “reactive” generation, composed of people who were children during a spiritual awakening, and who tend to be viewed negatively by older people. I learned that there are 80 million baby boomers and 78 million millennials, but only 46 million Gen Xers, which, number-wise, puts us at a distinct disadvantage. I learned that we dislike authority, that we’re skeptical, and that we’re sick of the baby boomers getting all of the attention. In other words, we’re somewhat difficult.
Political cartoonist Ted Rall, author of a book about Generation X called “Return of the Latchkey Kids,” has written that Generation X is another Lost Generation. Reactive generations, he said, are “doomed to be ignored by everyone that matters — Hollywood, Madison Avenue and Washington.” Rall then mentioned the Millennials, and predicted that they would be the beneficiaries of a sort of “generational leapfrog,” where “the good things in American life” jump from the baby boomers to the Millennials, and skip the generation in between.
Eager to know more about these Millennials, I did another search, and came across an article by Claire Raines, author of a book called “Generations at Work.” “[The Millennials] are the hottest commodity on the job market since Rosie the Riveter,” she wrote. “They’re sociable, optimistic, talented, well-educated, collaborative, open-minded, influential, and achievement-oriented. They’ve always felt sought after, needed, indispensable.”
I groaned.
“These people sound irritating,” I said.
Sure, the Millennials are going to get all the high-paying jobs and rule the world, but I wouldn’t trade my Gen X membership for any of it. We Gen Xers are a grubby bunch of cynics, I guess, but you know, I kind of like it. And, besides, I don’t know any other way to be.
Foss Forward makes a weekly appearance in print, in The Gazette’s Saturday Lifestyles section.
