- submitted by avernon on 05/13/2009
Say It Loud, I'm Gen X And I'm Proud
By Amy Vernon
I was talking with a college classmate the other day and somehow we started discussing how we were damn proud to be card-carrying members of Generation X.
We were saddled with a bad rep from about the time we graduated from college, in the late 80s and early 90s. "Slackers," they called us. We graduated college and moved back home to live with the 'rents instead of looking for a job. We just wanted to play video games and sit on the sofa, and maybe get a minimum-wage job, if anything at all.
But you know what? I don't know anyone who fit that definition. Many of us graduated into a recession, where jobs were few and far between. No one, it seemed, was hiring, so we had to get creative. Some took internships. Some freelanced their way into jobs (me). Some went home temporarily to figure it out, sometimes taking a bartending job, sometimes not taking a job at all, but rather trying to make a go of it for themselves.
We were the latch-key kids. Every one of us either had divorced parents or lots of friends with divorced parents. When our parents didn't know what to do with us, they stuck us in therapy. Or in front of the TV. (Also why we're known as the MTV Generation and Prozac Nation.) We discovered a some point in our 20s that we were the first generation in, well, forever, to have a lower standard of living than our parents by the same age.
We were, basically, handed crap sandwiches and told to eat 'em and smile. We didn't. We tossed those sandwiches over our shoulders, realized no one was gonna help us get anywhere in life and scrounged up enough change to buy some Ramen. It may basically have been 1,000 percent of your RDA of sodium and air, but it tasted better 'cuz we bought it ourselves.
When I was still working for a major corporation, I used to hear everyone complaining about how their pensions were shrinking. I would laugh - out loud, actually - and tell them they were suckers for believing they'd have a pension. Everyone my age had figured out by the early 1990s that we were never going to get a pension. We never gave our loyalty to corporations because we saw we weren't going to get any in return. Kind of like friends with benefits - we collected a paycheck, did our jobs well and didn't doodle "Amy & Knight-Ridder" (anyone remember that company?) in hearts on our notebooks.
We were always comfortable with technology and the fact that it was so fast-changing because we were around for Pong then Atari and then Nintendo. I remember being sooooo jealous of a friend who got a Nintendo; she'd borne her jealousy well when I had an Atari before her. My parents, naturally, were not springing for the more expensive, more advanced model after shelling out whatever it was they did for the Atari. We did math games on glorified calculators masquerading as computers back in elementary school and by high school we had "introduction to computer" classes. We learned Basic and gleefully programmed our names to scroll across the black computer screens.
Now, as I look at my former classmates and other contemporaries, I see a slew of entrepreneurs. Internet startups, freelancers, small business owners. When The Man decides it's time for us to be laid off, we don't start looking for other jobs; we just take it as a sign that we should try something else. We came into this workforce during a recession, and after we all became management or achieved whatever heights, we got kicked out again, into another recession.
That's OK, I think this is our comfort zone.
After all, having been being underestimated all our lives has its advantages.
We were subjected to Cabbage Patch Dolls, Strawberry Shortcake and Smurfs during our childhood, for goodness sakes! And came out relatively unscarred, I might add. Well, there was all that Prozac.
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Amy Vernon is a contributing writer at Burbia and a regular blogger.
Amy grew up on Long Island and has lived in the Chicago, Miami, Phoenix and New York metropolitan areas at various points in her life. In other words, she's spent her entire life in the suburbs, except that summer she interned for The Courier-Journal in Kentucky, though the Louisville neighborhood she lived in seemed pretty dang suburban.
She has a bachelor of science in journalism (that's a B.S. in journalism, get it?) from Northwestern University and worked for newspapers as a reporter, editor and blogger for nearly 20 years before she was laid off in the great newspaper culling of 2008.
Amy now works from home as a freelance consultant and writer with her husband, a writer/actor/stay-at-home father who has taken on the additional role of office manager as she settles into her new life. Her older son, Rafael, loves zebras, giraffes and elephants, while the younger, Markus, is utterly obsessed with the "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" book and DVD.
Got all that? You can find Amy online waxing poetic about television -- particularly 24, Battlestar Galactica and Lost, not necessarily in that order -- at The TV Tyrant or follow her on Twitter @amyvernon...read more rants
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