Millennials and Gen X: A Plea for Meaningful Collaboration

As a member of the Jan Brady generation--a reference my peers will understand without any explanation--I want to make a plea to both Gen X and Millennials to please, please, please recognize how much we actually have in common and to try to figure out some strategies to work on priorities together.

Those things that make life difficult for the Millennials, and their pain is real, are the same things that make life difficult for Gen X, and our pain is real.  But in addition to any idealism of unity, Millennials need to work with Gen X because what happens to us will be directly causal in defining your future.  Very simply, as Gen X is hurtling towards old age, it is increasingly unlikely that we will ever be able to retire but will be facing a future in which we are without adequate healthcare in our dotage and will have to keep working, and staying in positions as long as we can, until we drop dead on the office floor. This is not good for you, for the generation after you, or for anyone else.  And the precedents set in the treatment of us will affect you…just like it has for everything else.

For this to work, there are a couple things that we really need to face.  Millennials, the dire situations you are facing are real.  The idea that you are the first generation to face them is not.  You are not the first American generation to do worse than your parents.  You are the second.  Most of Gen X could have told you that the American Dream is bullshit. There may be proportionally more Gen Xers to have escaped some of the fallout from the collapse of the Dream than the proportion of Millennials who have avoided it, but precedents are being set with us.  In a twistedly fortunate way, that means that if you will look at our experience, you will see some things as they play out a bit later in the lifespan and maybe can intervene before they affect you.  Even better, maybe we can prevent some terrible precedents from being set.  Many are about to be.

Now, my fellow GenXers…dudes, the fact that Millennials are screaming about their treatment doesn’t make them whiners, it just means they aren’t jaded….and there is no benefit to being jaded.  It is a glamour that masks as stoicism and disempowers us from making meaningful change. Being jaded is for suckers.  We could learn a bit from them about not accepting that which is unacceptable.  Besides, how well has that actually served us?  Not well.  Our fatalistic beliefs that we are destined to be screwed just help ensure it.   So, if you are ready to whinge about the Millennial in your office…stop it.  

So, a few ways in which we (Gen X) are like you (Millennials) and some of the issues maybe we can work on together.

1.    We were educated with crippling student loan debt that doesn’t go away, not even in bankruptcy.  At the time, there also were none of the protections around providing students with truly accurate information about placement figures, etc. and there were no forgiveness programs.  These initiatives are important.  Some have been enacted and are now threatened.  We need to defend them.  And we need to change how we structure the economics of our educational system.  As someone who is about to be 50 and is still paying, I can attest to the long-term damage that our current policies do. Not only is it a lot of money to pay back, but with the interest, that is a whole lot of money that is NOT going into investments for old age.  At my age, you can really start to see the true effect of this system.

2.    We entered the workforce at a terrible time when the economy crashed during the dot.com bust. There were not good regulations on the market, there was insane and rampant speculation, and the early economics of when we entered the labor market screwed us up.  Many of us graduated with a ton of debt and promises that we would get certain kinds of jobs and then they just weren’t there and we financially struggled.  At the same time, due to outsourcing and organizational flattening, all of the predicted retirements that were going to allow us to get professional jobs didn’t happen.  Many of us did not get our first “real” job until we were in our 30s.  This means that we lost a number of good earning years.  There are, of course, some who flourished, but we really started to see the split between the successful few and everybody else.  Unions were demolished by the time we came in.  Job protections were undermined.  A few lessons from that:

a.    Many of us did not have children because we weren’t financially secure enough until it was, frankly, too late to have children.  Biology is real.   You want kids then find a way and have them.  If you wait to be a mother in your 40’s, expect a rise of a number of things including your own autoimmune problems.  And then there is the sleep deprivation…

b.    We have absolutely no idea what it will look like when we are old when so many of us do not have children to keep an eye out for when bad things happen and we are incompetent.  You might want to be paying attention to what happens to us because it looks like many of you are headed in the same direction.  It is going to require new social forms.  There is no model. 

                                               i.     SIDE NOTE:  Long-term care insurance!  If you can get it, get it.  Don’t ever miss a payment.  We are now of an age in which we are watching and trying to help our parents…the Silent Generation.  Wow. That’s a whole thing, too.  Notes with that:

1.    Old people lose track of their bills.  They need help.  And insurance companies are very happy to allow old people’s policies to go lapse as soon as they are overdue for a split second because that saves them money.  They are horrible. You need to get on as a secondary ASAP when they show the first sign of not being totally on top of things and keep an eye on their bills!  This hasn't yet happened to me, but I am watching friends dealing with things.  KNOW THIS!

2.    OMG, the STUFF. They have so much stuff.  And it’s not like you have a lot of annual leave. Dealing with their living arrangements is a challenge. And then there is this cultural understanding that many of them have that they are going to give you all of this stuff for your inheritance, but most of us aren’t living like they are.  We can’t take it.  It just means that much more stuff to contend with.  Plus…I’m almost 50…it’s not like I don’t have a stand mixer if I need a mixer. It’s 30 years too late to give me household setting up stuff.  Have these conversations with both elders and, if you have them, children, early.  Purge your stuff.  Marie Kondo the crap out of your life and keep it from ever being like that.  Every one I know with elderly parents is stressed out by the overwhelm of their physical possessions.  

3.    Make sure that you have all of their paperwork, including anything that will keep a will from going to probate, that you have their advanced directives and your own, that you are on accounts so that you can deal with things without a will having to go to probate…all of that kind of thing.  Keep it organized.  Be ready in advance.  If you have to, you bloody well FORCE your parents to talk with you about this.  We need to get rid of the stigma around topics of death.  

                                              ii.     Nobody tells you about any of this.  We need to start talking about it and both demystifying it and sharing what we have learned.  Also, trying to get things in place for whoever will come after us, if anyone will.  It is a lot.

c.     Organizational flattening is a reality.  You aren’t going to make money by being promoted.  The idea of a competitive promotion track is bullshit.  It hasn’t happened for us, even if you do take on additional responsibilities.  It isn’t going to happen to you.  You are going to deal with salary compression throughout your career.  There is almost no difference between what you earn when you first enter and what your older colleagues are making.   The exception, of course, is if you make it into the robber baron class…but then you are responsible for being the problem, so screw that.  What we need to do is find ways to raise the whole, rather than focusing on individuals. The other message, here, is this. We (GenXers) aren’t really your competition. The difference between what you make and what we make with our years of experience is probably pretty minimal in most organizations.  

d.    Be afraid of any rhetoric that suggests that people should be let go, reorganized, sidelined, etc. based on a lack of technological expertise, lack of dynamism, being “resistant to change” or “stuck in the old ways.”  All of that is coded language for ageist bullshit, which combines with misogyny in particularly perilous ways.  It is a way to discipline labor and keep us compliant. Don’t buy into it, don’t participate in it, and know that some day, it will be aimed at you.  I am watching this happening right now and it is especially being aimed at keeping Gen X women out of power.  If you begin seeing creepy layoffs, you might want to oppose that precedent.  

3.    Right when many of us finally got on our feet financially and had been saving for retirement, it was 2008.  This screwed you up and made your entry into the work-world abysmal.  We lost what little bit of wealth and security we had managed to accumulate and, frankly, are unlikely to earn it back in time to retire. Again, a large part of it is robber barons gone wild, no regulation, all the badness we know.  We are mutually screwed by it.  A couple of lessons, though, from being a bit further along because there will probably be another crash since we haven’t done what is necessary to address the causes.

a.    Pensions are gone and our survival in old age is based on the market.  We need to freaking stabilize it.  We should be prioritizing predictability rather than trying to get wild profits.  Companies are incentivized to choose very short-term quarterly gains over long-term strategy, which creates more volatility.  What you really, really want in old age is to know you are going to have a place to live and can pay your bills.  We need to join together and tame the bad actors.  I think we need regulation and anti-trust enforcement.  I also wish I understood more about investments that I could control…like, should I invest in a local business?  I don’t know.  I don’t have that knowledge. It would be a good idea to try to understand it.

b.    Many, many of my peers lost everything in the housing crash in 2008.  We are always told that a home is an investment.  Not necessarily.  I am lucky in that I did not get sucked into some subprime bullshit that was being constantly marketed to me combined with warnings of how dire my old age would be if I didn’t do it.  Don’t ever buy more house than you can afford.  It will seriously fuck you over.  I admit to having anxiety about my old age because rent control is a joke and I doubt I will ever be able to own.  However, maybe our energy should go into real rent control.  People in Europe don’t have this fascination with owning property.  I just want predicable affordability.  Main lesson…be wary of all of the cultural bullshit telling you that you have to own a house and just be sure you can actually afford it.  It may make sense for you, but buy from knowledge.

c.     Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare.  We need to defend them.  I know that the robber barons want to take that money that we have put in and, as a member of the Jane Brady generation, many of us have always assumed that we won’t have any social safety net for us.  But the older I get, the more terrifying that reality is.  I am grateful for Obamacare, which is being undermined. The idea that you could lose your job for being sick, and then lose your health insurance, and then have everything that you have be a pre-existing condition…that is no joke.  I know you know that…but seeing it from the age of 50 and watching elderly parents, and having a brother with disabilities who needs assistance, it has a terror that it didn’t in my youth.  I am so grateful that my parents own their house, have a pension, and have health care.  That will not be the reality for either of our generations.

d.    What I can also say is that most of us didn’t start saving for retirement until we were in our thirties, because we couldn’t.  Yep…that does screw you up.  This isn’t a guilt/shame thing because…I couldn’t do it any sooner than I did. However, it is true that the sooner you can figure out how these systems work, the better.  If you have matching retirement and aren’t maxing it, do it immediately if you at all can.  Then, I think, trying to get any debt paid off that you can do it.  Credit card companies are specifically trying to screw you. If you can pay them off every month, do it, then hit the student loans. I know it might not be possible. I couldn’t live on what I brought in until I was in my mid-30’s…and I was living in a studio apartment.  But I started making a “war board” and tracking things.  It helped. 

4.    “Adulting.” One of the most telling comments I heard from a Millennial recently was when she told us that when Millennials say they are adulting its was because their parents never taught them the things we were taught, like sewing buttons.  Okay.  For the record.  No one taught us either.  Most of us were latch-key kids who often had to take care of younger siblings so, the language rubs us the wrong way because we were often carrying some pretty adult responsibilities when we were children.  The experience of being adultified children is a common generational trauma among Gen X and so references to “adulting” by people who are adults is, actually, the one thing that Millennials often say/do that makes me bristle.  However, being self-taught, the truth is we don’t always do a great job in some of those life skills either.  I know a ton of Gen X folks who really should be in better financial positions than they are in because we tend to have some pretty poor financial literacy.  That’s a big one.  So, although the language makes me cringe, the way in which there are important life skills are not being passed on and most of us have significant holes in our knowledge, that is an important truth. Perhaps we can create some structures that would allow us to do a better job of learning and sharing…such as creating “lunch and learns” in our work place in which people can share what they are good at.  Or finding ways to divide things up among your friend groups and teach each other? I am grateful to youtube.  I am trying to recover some of the life-skills surrounding repair in order to combat planned obsolescence and over-consumption. But I am hopeful that those who are parents will put more emphasis on sharing these important life skills.  And we should document and share. 

5.    Ubiquitous technology and organizations owning your freaking life.  We are totally in this one together.  If you don’t set some boundaries, you will end up socially isolated, working all the damn time, and numbing yourself out with tech or worse. I won’t pretend to have the answers to this.  I will say that we need to find them and that is a struggle for both of us.  I will also say that the guidance from earlier times doesn’t necessarily hold water.  What we need is a revolution in our culture.  These are preliminary, but some of my personal ideas about this.

a.    We are in an economy of attention.  Everyone is always trying to capture your attention.  Give it with discernment and make conscious decisions.  Whereas old advertising used to work because you didn’t want to switch off your channel, now the whole game is to make you click and keep reading. Humans are highly emotional, social creatures.  The easiest way to hack us is by making us outraged.  I want us to refuse to give into it.  I keep seeing this carried into all walks of being.  It is just the most recent social technology of control.  It also builds habits into our character that will bleed over and harm your relationships by encouraging you to make people disposable.  I oppose it.

b.    The people we work with are the people we spend the most time with.  Let’s actually work on making healthy, caring environments in the work place.  This is something that can work from the bottom up.  Let’s reclaim the human-ness of ourselves and make our workplaces responsive to more than just the bottom line.  Especially since I doubt we are going to be able to retire without massive economic change, let’s make our workplaces kind.

c.     Generally, we live in a world that is not good for humans.  We need to rest.  We need to unplug.  We need to spend quality time with each other.  We need to feel like our lives have meaning.  We need to create.  Actively choosing to live a life that embraces our humanity is one of the biggest acts of revolution we can claim.  Life is busy.  Create structures that build habits and feed your soul and the soul of others. Schedule regular crappy dinner parties, or going out to happy hours, etc.  Something.  Anything to keep you from being socially isolated.  Tell our tech overlords that we will not constantly check our phones when we are with people and put them away when we are with others.  

d.    I think we should build a culture that gives priority to experiences over accumulating stuff.  This goes against the models we learned.  But prioritize spending time with people, experiencing the world, doing something creative, being in nature, all sorts of things over accumulating stuff that you don’t need, likely can’t afford and that is killing the planet.  Part of Gen X’s conflict with earlier generations (we were called the slacker generation…which, like the slights against yours, is bullshit) is that we decided that we would rather take time off and travel than to pursue status.  Obviously, that was not universal, but I still think it is the right choice. Choose to invest in your soul, your relationships, and the planet.  Status through stuff is stupid.

6.    Growing up with divorced parents became common for Gen X and has remained so.  We need to think through our social structures. What many of us know is that it is better to have children raised in joint custody with loving parents than to have parents who are miserable remain together “for the kids.”  However, we still have not really figured out what our new social forms look like.  What is clear is: one person is not a support network; deep friendships are more stable than passion; people are mobile; many of us don’t have children and those who do are often overwhelmed.  We will need to come up with ways in which we are creating stable communities that cut across generations, but we don’t know what that will look like.  It would be good if we could work with you in experimenting and seeing what that might look like.  Regardless, we need to look at the various barriers to creating those kinds of communities and think through alternatives.

7.    The environment. Both our generations know that this has to be a high priority and it is incredibly complex.  Frankly, the generations older than us are likely to die off before they have to fully face the ramifications of all that we, as humans, have done.  We will need to clean up the mess and it won’t be pretty.  It will require a total remaking of our society and we will be blocked at every turn.  Individual action won’t be sufficient because of how we are embedded in systems. However, we probably could make significant differences if we work on a local level with local structures of power. 

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