Generation X
Three twenty-something young adults, working at low-paying, no-future jobs, tell one another modern tales of love and death.
Stats for nerds
8recommend
16mentions
15people
2009–2023years
50% recommend44% neutral6% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- >The Millennials were largely spared from the carnage because all but the last few years of them were beyond puberty when the phone-based childhood swept in.
Every generation thinks its suffering is unique and worse than those before it. Read Douglas Coupland's early 90s novels (Generation X and Microserfs) to see how Gen X fared in contrast to their parents. Watch Eden of the East to see how middle-Millenials struggled with the rising concept of the NEET (in Japan, the US, and western Europe alike) as our Gen X and Baby Boomer parents couldn't understand the difference in economic and life circumstances between being 23 in 1980 and being 23 in 2008.
Smartphones and social media are accelerating the decline, but there's evidence collected over the past ~60 years that points to a trend of diminishing quality of life. A great non-fiction economics-oriented book on the US version of this is The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War by Robert Gordon. (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691147727/th...)
- Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Generation X by Douglas Coupland
- Is it as good as Generation X ? Also I'd love Coupland to reiterate and do a 'Generation Z' about zoomers and digital natives.
- I don't know whether to laugh or cry for you. Being part of it was something. I took a greyhound to San Francisco in 97 and went through the yellowpages trying to find jobs. Lived in a scary as hell weekly bum hotel in the tenderloin and walked, in a suit, to the Hilton every day to make phone calls for interviews. I was 17. Called one company called "Sunset" or "Sunrise" productions, who needed a designer. Interviewed with them in SOMA; it was Bear Magazine/GBM and man, I walked out of there feeling like fresh meat. But it was almost $30k/year. Got hired for $28k/yr [at a "web startup"] as a junior designer instead - I didn't need that kind of therapy bill. Was treated like complete shit, made to work 12 hour days in competition with senior designers and the AD, while they complained about the webmonkey grunts next to me who I was trying to learn HTML from. In an office of "producers" and salespeople who were all getting ridiculous paychecks and buying late-model jeeps, the only smart ones were the ones who were brewing their own code and staying up late working on their own projects. The producers stayed up late playing WoW and avoiding their wives and babies. Hitting on the one female designer who loathed the place. It taught me never to work in an office again as long as I live.
Can't believe I didn't read either of those Douglas Coupland novels. "Generation X" was pretty seminal, though.
- Read Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, the original book that coined the term. It’s all about 20-somethings in the ‘90’s dropping out because the rewards seem so impossibly far out of reach that it’s not even worth trying. Also held the Boomers to blame.
- I just re-read "Microserfs" and "Generation X" by Douglas Coupland. I actually read both of these years ago when they first came out. I am amazed at how prescient they were. So many themes and ideas that I had buried away were right there on the printed page. Looking back over the past decade of my own life I can see that even though I wasn't aware of it, these books had a profound influence on my dreams/ideas/aspirations.
